Seriously, if your tinfoil hat isn't good and tight you'll need to tighten it before reading any further. Then tighten it some more, just to be safe. This is free-form musing that may or may not be associated in any way with events that may or may not be happening as we speak. Here's a thought. If, say, you were a member of some kind of shadowy global elite cabal that had a nefarious aim to reduce the global population, how might you go about doing it? You'd want to make sure you got rid of the right people - you know, the troublesome free thinkers who don't do as they are told - while also keeping as many people as possible who are quite happy to just follow directions without question. Perhaps what you'd do is massively hype a threat that isn't really much of a threat. Issue lots of orders for people to stay home and not do anything and see how the population divides into two groups. Group 1, the free thinkers, will openly debate and dispute the requirement to follow the orders. Group 2, the more compliant, will openly announce their intention to follow the orders. Both sides will insult the other. As they do so, you continue to hype the threat presented by this event to ever-sillier levels, issuing more and more orders that have less and less basis in actual science or actual data. In the process you encourage Group 1 to continue to ignore or push back against the orders, while Group 2 continues to comply. The next step is to do the exact same thing for something that really is dangerous. Group 2 will continue to follow orders and will be preserved while Group 1 will figure it's more of "the boy who cried wolf", get themselves exposed to the new danger, and die. You might have a few members of splinter groups, the ones who will go to ground and hide in their bunker somewhere with enough food to last a decade or more but the chances are there won't be very many of those. Hey presto, you can selectively get rid of the people who will cause your evil empire troubles as it tries to take root.
Then, you need to get people in group 2 to become the informants against those in group,1 that do not obey without question, take them aside for,their own good and the greater good of society, and re-educate them.
Group 2 members who are already of the opinion that Group 1 are unsufferably selfish probably don't need much persuading to rat on their fellow man. In the process they create a society that would make the Stasi proud.
Welcome to the latest emerging paradigm, where global and national events are increasingly understood in terms of complex, multi-faceted and interweaving conspiracies, some as old as history itself and founded on tried principles of social manipulation and ultimate world dominion. Sort of exciting, like the intriguing era of cold-war anxiety or the suspicious mind-set of the Trotsky age, or master plans as depicted in the Manchurian Candidate. I jest.
This will only happen to those members of group one who become lax or intellectually lazy. It's much easier to simply corrupt the upcoming generation. I think we all like to believe that people aren't that pliable, but I suspect the reality is that indoctrination is incredibly effective: we tend to simply accept the reality of our circumstances, and if nothing is too obviously wrong (and even then), breaking out of that status quo is so hard, and will take so long, that the damage will have already been done by the time anyone realises their error.
True. I've wondered since the start of all the silliness what the endgame is. If you lock everything down you need a clear set of objectively measurable criteria to meet to release the lockdown. So far all we have is the country that calls itself the land of liberty subjected to little more than the whims of state governors, who open and close things based on Following The Science even if the science doesn't support what they are trying to do and the data indicate that what they are doing is counterproductive. Of course if you can paint one group of people as simply rejecting science then you get to claim the intellectual high ground as well as the moral high ground because you're Protecting The People, even if what you're doing actually achieves the exact opposite. But if you make the right noises and do an appropriate amount of posturing people feel safe, even when they aren't actually any safer than they were before. And then anyone who does anything other than exactly what they are told is endangering themselves and, crucially, endangering everyone around them. The issue of indoctrination seems to work best if you slowly shift the rhetoric from something that arguably makes some sense and then gradually move the goalposts while providing enough distractions that the people don't notice what you're doing. At present it seems the Ministry Of Truth is in full swing.
And we would all be right to ask, 'what science'? 'what data'? But then, we'll be pointed to hospital admissions, and here is a dilemma of the UK government's own making, given its mistreatment of the NHS. But even then, is it worth a destroyed services sector, millions in newfound financial trouble, mass unemployment, rising taxes for decades, pension raids? It's not a trade I'd accept given how fatal the virus actually is. Of course. It's why people these days say 'gender' instead of 'sex', and that's just my personal favourite.
It's perfectly reasonable to ask "what science" but then the popular rhetoric is that anything other than what officials tell us is some kind of conspiracy theory and we should all just be good little serfs and Trust The Experts. I read that in New York restaurants are reckoned to be responsible for 1.4% of COVID cases, which means they are so dangerous they need to be shut down. That drives people into private gatherings, which are responsible for just shy of 75% of cases. My favorite brewpub invested in HEPA air filters, and those things don't look cheap. But the fuhrer ordered they close their dining rooms, so the groups that might have met in an environment where the air is filtered four times an hour have to shift their meeting to someone's living room where the air isn't filtered and it's more likely they'll pass a virus to each other. Because science. It's much like when tax cuts are suggested and the immediate response is to ask which hospitals and schools should be closed to pay for it, or how many police officers and nurses should be sacked or similar. Perish the thought we might do something really radical, like reduce salaries for politicians, or lay off some hangers-on and overpaid consultants or whatever else. We might even cut down on the number of "fact finding missions" where some minister or another flies (first class, obviously) to an exotic location with an army of hangers-on to Find Things Out. People in hospital beds are a problem when there are too many of them but it makes more sense to figure out what's putting them there than to just shut down everything in sight - that's more about Being Seen To Be Doing Something, even if the something that is being done isn't even a little bit useful. The virus is little more than an inconvenience for the overwhelming majority. That doesn't make it any less catastrophic for those who do end up in the ICU or dead because of it but then we don't shut down the roads because of the 30,000+ people who die or the 100,000+ who are injured on the roads every year. I can't help smirk at the number of web sites that took to using a capital letter when describing someone who used to be black but is now Black. I'm not sure what they are hoping to achieve - if they are hoping to do anything relating to "racial justice" (whatever that means today) it's hard to see how changing a b to a B changes anything. It reminds me of a quote I read attributed to a Native American who commented on the white liberal activities who "change our name but still treat us the same". I guess where it wasn't acceptable to leave black people as second-class citizens it doesn't matter if you do the same to Black people. Hm.... perhaps given the title of the thread we're both busy painting targets on our backs...[/QUOTE]
Depends on if MiniPlenty can still by enough cheap crap from China...I mean, Eurasia. Wait. Are they our ally or enemy this week?
MiniPlenty imports stockpiles of junk from EastAsia. This time next week we'll be at war with them and buying our junk from Eurasia.