Visiting TLH this AM, I came across the ever-estimable John Hilley’s latest piece, on the ‘pandemic’, with - amongst others - a response from Willem, putting up the Ivor Cummings video linked below.
My heavy-hearted conclusion from looking at the two pieces is that the excellent good old John has come down with a quite bad case of Terror Derangement Syndrome, reduced to shooting messengers to avoid the gist of their message, all couched in the slagging language that we’ve come to expect from the TDS-panicking sheep (in the sheep/goats dichotomy), a remnantary flock of whom are still clinging to the hulk, as we know. It’s deeply sobering to see so many late-middle-aged/early-elderly men so terrified by the thought of their own deaths - so I surmise - that they cave in to this sort of propaganda manipulation. Give me Ivor’s quiet, carefully-self-informed, goat-like, stampede-resistant rationality, any time! A real shame about the other, previously rather impressive commentators. Here’s John first:
PS: notice Ivor’s carefully-explored reasons to worry that the whole curfew/masking/distancing tarradiddle is actually setting us up for more, not less, mortalities in the coming Winter, because the ancient, evolved pattern of spreading infection - and thus naturally-acquired immunity - through the population during the Summer quiet time has been suppressed by these ill-considered responses.
It’s also true that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how the shambling-incompetence/sinister-crypto-fascism dichotomy has affected the situation. It’s obvious that chancers and axe-grinders have been leaping aboard the band-waggon to grab every advantage they can for their anti-democratic aims, built-in as such impulses are to such creeps. It’s equally obvious that responses by governments around the world have ranged from luckily-effective to frankly shambolic and completely ineffective. But it really doesn’t do to try to pretend that there is literally no propaganda-driven power-grab going on. That’s really too naive to be taken seriously. Especially considering that the powers-that-shouldn’t-be were already desperately well aware of the towering wave of economic chaos heading towards us, close to breaking now, and which had to be ridden somehow to preserve their WealthPowerStatus heaps. Covid proved a handy - if somewhat damp-squibby - excuse to do a solid bit of - as the UK Column crew insist - coup d’etat politicking, as a prudent preparation for controlling the plebs when the econo-shitstorm hits the fan.
The tentative conclusion has to be that both groping, sometimes inappropriate and blundering, improvisations against covid, AND wilful anti-democracy, anti-glasnost politicking are happening at the same time, as a result both of this novel virus and of the gathering economic storm, coinciding as they have.
As Dmitry Orlov might very well put it: “This is what collapse looks like!”
Or, analysis versus ad hom. Even Nafeez Ahmed’s at it.
The death rate has fallen strikingly since the April-June peaks. That data and the arguments need studying - not the people producing them!
Thanks for the video and your thoughts, RG.
Evvy_dense
(Formerly waltb)
A real shame about the other, previously rather impressive commentators. Here’s John first:
But to me you’ll always be my good Scots buddy Walter!