patrick.net

One of the many disturbing aspects of this surreal period of viral suppression — indistinguishable from social repression — has been the media’s lockdown lockstep, especially the startlingly homogenized viewpoints espoused across the networks. ...

we’re never reminded that a high proportion of coronavirus ‘linked’ fatalities involving serious underlying health conditions might otherwise have been folded into expected annual mortality, or what poor-quality statistics governments are keeping (dying of vs with). In coverage of a pandemic vastly more lethal for the over-seventies, long news packages mostly mourn uncommon deaths amongst the young. ...

Broadcast media is caught up in a disaster movie... All that matters is the terrifying, relentless rise of total deaths. On a narrative level, any distraction from the plot of our nail-biting feature is the enemy: any information that might mitigate the building horror of a bravely unified nation, any guest who injects a sense of proportion, any interviewee who refuses to join the mass denunciation of ‘murderers’ failing to adhere fanatically to government restrictions. ... Contrarians risk accusations of treason. Government and the press are in league. Little wonder it’s become so challenging to locate dissenting voices anywhere.

The supine capitulation to a de facto police state in a country long regarded as a cradle of liberty has been one of the most depressing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. In a matter of days, busybodies are ratting on neighbors for going for a run twice; these people would have been pigs in shit in communist East Germany. The police taping-over of isolated park benches and harassment of sunbathers or sea-swimmers without a soul within 100ft have no basis in epidemiology. ...

Petrified by the prospect of looking callous while innocents continue to die, politicians are now trapped by their own propaganda. Now that the public are so attached to their incarceration, the mission of this beloved lockdown has been encouraged to creep. Originally we were to stay home to save the health service — to keep it from being overwhelmed and to provide it with time to expand capacity. Job done. Now we’re instead trying to stop spreading the virus — which it looks as if we’ll all get anyway — to save lives. But if we wait to lift these fascistic restrictions until fatalities return to zero, we will not have ‘inessential’ retail, theaters, businesses and factories for years — if ever. ...

We cannot install nationwide suffocation as the standard parliamentary response to any new illness.

We’ve little evidence that putting a plastic bag over a whole country is epidemiologically sound. So we will want proper professionals to extrapolate exactly what this bandwagoning hysteria accomplished aside from economic ruin.