Not Believing in Elephants

I see that the nutters were out again on Saturday, gathering in Trafalgar Square to worship at the feet of the likes of David Icke.  Apparently, even Right Said Fred were there, supporting the pandemic deniers.  I don't what shocked me more: that they are Covid denying loonies or that they are still a thing.  They join various other has-been nineties pop icons like Noel Gallagher and Ian Brown in aligning themselves with the crackpots and contrarians.  As someone who always steadfastly resisted the alleged charms of Oasis and The Stone Roses, I'm actually glad that they've 'come out' now as the utter knobs I've always thought that they were.  Mind you, an equally disturbing development is that Jedward have emerged as the principle pop-world advocates of common sense.  The world, truly, has gone mad.  Of course, the crackpots would say that the madness lies with the rest of us accepting the existence of the current pandemic, when it is obviously just a conspiracy on the part of 'them' to oppress us, steal our data via things like track and trace apps and track us via microchips injected into our bodies under cover of vaccines.  The problem is that they don't seem to see the irony in the fact that they are spreading their message using technology which, itself, is incredibly intrusive.  Social media, like Facebook, is designed primarily to gather your personal data, while access to most of the wider web is controlled by corporate behemoths like Google which, likewise, are intent upon gathering your data and exploiting it for profit.  As others have pointed out, Ian Brown uses an iPhone to post his Tweets on the 'conspiracy' - a device manufactured by a company that not only seeks to capture your data, but whose business model - using cheap labour in China and elsewhere to manufacture goods sold for premium prices in Europe, Japan and the US - is fundamentally exploitative.  

So, if you are worried about having your data stolen as a result of the pandemic, you are too late.  We've already given it away to social media operators, our mobile phone services, web providers and countless other tech companies.  That's the irony: people spent years worrying about 'Big Brother' and state intrusion into their privacy when, in reality, it was private corporations who actually wanted all that data, for the purposes of profit rather than surveillance - and we gave it to them willingly.  If you are worried about being watched - you already are, by Google, Facebook, Apple etc.  Getting back to our specific loons - the ones in Trafalgar Square, that is - it seems that their main criteria for not believing in the existence of the pandemic is that they, personally, don't know anybody who has had Covid, let alone died of it.  Jesus!  I've never met anybody who has had beriberi, but I don't doubt that it is real, (although I have no bloody idea what the fuck it is).  Although, as it happens, I do know several people who had Covid-19, one seriously enough to be hospitalised. Thankfully, though, none of them died.  But this, apparently, is how we are now supposed to judge the veracity of anything - whether or not it actually lies within our own limited and very narrow personal experience.  This solipsism extends beyond Covid:  I've encountered a number of people who refuse to acknowledge that disproportionate use of force by US police against black people is real, because they've never, themselves, seen such instances.  The reliable testimony of others, fact-based evidence and scientific studies are no longer good enough.  

Now, I know that Aristotle refused to believe in the existence of elephants, as he'd never seen one himself and descriptions of them that he had heard sounded too ludicrous to be real.  But he lived in age where there were no photographs, film or video - the only representations of things you personally hadn't seen or experienced came, primarily, in the form of oral histories, paintings and sketches or sculptures - all of which included a fair amount of the artist's imagination and were themselves based on third, fourth or more, accounts.  Today, we have no such excuse.   But such a refusal to accepts facts, evidence and expert testimony lies at the heart of conspiracy theories, which are all about feeding the ego.  They are a way of saying that the facts don't conform to my personal views, so therefore I'm going to ignore them and substitute alternative facts not based upon evidence or drawing on the experiences of others.  Which is why these loons don't base their opposition to lock downs and other measures brought in by governments to combat Covid on actual facts or rational arguments, but instead upon their personal prejudices.  Which is dangerous.  So, what can we do about these crackpots and the threat they obviouly pose to public health, (not to mention rational thought)?  Well, as they aren't susceptible to reasoned argument, (they wouldn't be subscribing to conspiracy theories if they were), I think that we need to stop them from passing their obviously faulty genes on.  Personally, I favour running through the crowd at Trafalgar Square with a set of bolt cutters, castrating all the men.  I know tat won't solve the problem of the female loons passing on their genes, but it would be a start.  A radical and drastic solution, I know, but we're living in extraordinary times.  We have to act quickly and decisively.  Besides, bearing in mind that this mob is affiliated with the far right, then we'd only be doing to them what they'd like to do to many of us.  So, grab those bolt cutters now, in preparation for their next demonstration...