Nothing going on here – episode 8 – Doublethink

Nothing going on here – EPISODE 8

We have adopted government policies with a moral fervour that conflates un-skeptical compliance with civic duty. This means that when new information comes along that suggests we should start doing things differently, it becomes difficult, and even personally dangerous, to change our behaviour. Governments have become so invested in the Covid narrative that continues to repeat things that are simply not true and fall apart under even the most cursory analysis.

We are now deep into ‘double-think’ a term coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984. Double a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one’s own memories or sense of reality. Double-think is perpetuated by ‘double-speak’ – language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or even reverses the meaning of words. Writer Edward S. Herman describes double-speak as follows:

What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.

This is why a vaccine that has been proven to not do what it was meant to do – end the pandemic – and by all the evolving science seems to actually be making things worse – is still touted as the only solution.

As studies emerge revealing that in the most highly vaxxed countries, the virus numbers are actually higher than in those with very limited vaccine uptake as a recent study from Harvard no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.

We are told to get boosted as much as possible.

We were told that the vaccine would protect us from the virus, no it turns out it does not. We were told that the vaccine would stop the transmission of the virus and no it turns out it does not.

But we are told don’t ask questions just go get your booster.

We were told that the vaccine would protect people from hospitalization and now we see that the majority of those hospitalized with Covid are double jabbed.

And then we are told – go get your booster.

And now there is a new variant that the WHO has announced has killed a whopping 0 number of people and causes symptoms that are exactly the same as the common cold.. And yet the Guardian runs a story saying the ‘government experts’ are prediction up to 75000 people will be dead by April if – what for it, people don’t get their boosters.

So there’s this experimental vaccine that doesn’t protect you, doesn’t protect anyone else, doesn’t keep you out of hospital – and everyone should get it. In fact, it is their civic duty to get it. And if you don’t take it, we will take away your ability to live in normal society.

How can this be anything to do with the common good? Governments have hijacked the good intentions of people through fear-mongering and scapegoating.

More double think – the unvaccinated are the problem.

Now millions of people are going to find themselves suddenly among the numbers of the ‘unvaxxed’ if they don’t get their booster. What is more terrifying to people I wonder? The fear of getting Covid or the fear of becoming one of the untouchables?

More double think – vaccine immunity is better than natural immunity. This is not what the science is telling us. Natural immunity lasts for years, possibly a lifetime – vaccine immunity lasts 5 months, no 3 months. So what should we do? Go get your booster.

Children have no threat from Covid and there are clear safety signals that suggest the vaccine is dangerous to them and yet they should all also get vaccinated.

And the double think of all double thinks

The vaccinated can get and spread the virus. The problem is the unvaccinated. How has the failure of a medical intervention become the fault of the people who didn’t take it?

Because it is not about whether the vaccine works or not at this point. It is whether you subscribe to the social project or not, and the social project has become identified with taking the vaccine. It’s what the responsible people do. If you don’t take the vaccine, you are irresponsible and need to be punished and excluded from society.

What we need to understand now is that this is not about facts or reality. No amount of data or studies is going to convince the percentage of people who have become emotionally identified with the Covid narrative as an almost religious tenet. Because their conviction has nothing to do with science or logical or reality. It is the conviction of a zealot. A true believer. It doesn’t need to make sense. It needs only to inspire a sense of doing one’s part. However meaningless that might be.

Take your booster to be a good citizen. Boosters are now a social credit score. How many you have determines how good of a citizen you are. How eagerly you get it, how public you make it, how proudly you proclaim it.

Meanwhile the profits being made on the backs of these ‘good citizens’ is grotesque. New figures from the Peoples Vaccine Alliance reveal that the companies behind two of the most successful COVID-19 vaccines —Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna— are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute. But we are led to believe that this is all for common good.

The vaccines are safe, we are told and yet when a group of scientists asked the US federal government to share the data it relied upon in licensing Pfizer’s Covid19 vaccine via the Freedom of Information Act, they were told, sure – in 55 years. 2076. To be precise.

The vaccines are safe, we are told, and people skeptical of them are conspiracy theorists.

But in Pfizer’s own report on adverse events from their Covid19 vaccine from April 30th 2021, in a 3 month period up to February 2021, out of 42,096 recipients there were 11,361 people who had serious adverse events from which they had not recovered – the report it says ‘unrecovered’. That is 27% of the recipients had no recovery.

Fatal were 1,223 – this is in Pfizer’s own report that I’ll link to in the show notes. You can read it for yourself. 1,223 fatal. And governments have known about this since April.

Why were we not told about this? Why was this not made public?

Don’t ask questions. Just get your booster.

Well, I submit that un-skeptical compliance is the opposite of civic duty and that now it is the civic duty of us all to hold governments to account and demand answers to these questions and not allow ourselves to get fobbed off with double-think. Our moral obligation is challenge the single narrative. If our media won’t do it then it is down to us. Raise questions, keep speaking out. Don’t be afraid of the difficult conversation. It must be had. Because there is no one who is going to do it for us. We are it. We are the line between unquestioning compliance of policies that are putting everyone in danger and a sane, rational, science-based and yes, compassionate response.

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Nothing going on here – episode 7 – What happened?

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In this episode I take a step back and review some key events and developments in the last couple of years that brought me to the point of such grave concern for the direction we are heading as a society. 

Brought to you by Pfizer

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Coming up for air



PHOTO BY: Engin Akyurt



What were we hanging on to way down there?

Don’t know about you but I know, I’m coming up for air

I’m coming up to take a long breath, to let go of this uncomfortable bind

To seek the air that we all share, in the ocean blood that keeps us kind.

What were we getting in to way down there?

All that thrashing about.

In the cold, wet dark, we couldn’t light a spark

Don’t know about me but you know, you’re coming up for air.

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Lay waste



It’s not the answer to your prayers

It’s the remedy for your fears

It’s prison, not to put too fine a point on it

There are guards and wardens, but we erect the bars with them,
whistling while we work.

They glide among us, pretending to be something apart

But they are trapped with us just the same,
just trapped with room service
or with the dream of room service, or, perhaps even more luxuriant,
the chance to practice the
dark art of despise.

There are those elsewhere who manage the profits, and those who dance like funny ghouls on top that they horror and titter about in the papers.

But the ones between the ghouls and the riches, no one really sees.

Discrete as butlers,
they lay waste to the seeds of life.

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Nothing going on here – episode 6 – The kids

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In this episode I explore the push to vaccinate children with the Covid-19 vaccines and the scientific concerns around their safety, and ask, why are we not hearing this on mainstream media?

Public Service Announcement by Pfizer starring kids who are depicted as superheroes for participating in the vaccine trials. Watch here.

On October 29, the US Food & Drug Administration FDA authorized the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines in children 5 to 12 under the Emergency Use Authorization. The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is now recommending that everyone ages 5 and older get a COVID-19 vaccine.

In November, the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in the US, announced a phase 3 clinical trial of the Moderna vaccine in babies and toddlers ages 6 months to 4 years old.

And Pfizer plans to be vaccinating babies by the end of next summer.

In a parallel universe of medical science, evidence is mounting that the vaccines can be dangerous, especially for children, and many physicians and health care professionals as well as government health advisory groups (FDA in the US and JCVI in the UK) are calling for caution.

Why are so many credible  voices being ignored, dismissed and marginalized, even ridiculed?

And why the rush to vaccinate children, a population that medical scientists agree is at such low risk from Covid, and according to some of the best data we have, which is the studies coming out of Israel, kids are less likely to transmit the virus to others? Especially, in light of the potential risks involved to their long-term health.

The risk of children up to 17 years of age dying from Covid is only 1% according to the CDC’s own data and – again according to the CDC’s own data – the vast majority of these children had underlying medical; conditions, such as asthma, obesity, neurological / developmental disorders, and heart problems.

The risk of a child dying from the virus is 2 in a million according to the University College London.

The Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunization (JCVI) a scientific advisory body to the UK government warning. Read it here

Watch interview with public health policy expert, Dr. Scott Atlas here.

Watch interview with Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine platform used in the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines here.

Physicians Declaration at the Global Covid Summit.

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Nothing going on here – episode 5 – Satire

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Art by Emad Hajjaj politicalcartoons.com

The British Medical Journal has been doing some of the best, well, some of the only investigative medical journalism around the Covid 19 story. A November 2nd story by Paul Thacker details how a former Pfizer researcher is sounding the alert on serious issues with the Pfizer Covid vaccine trials. Read that story here:

What about medical misinformation being spread by the national health agencies? First, CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, who tweeted on November 5th.

Masks can help reduce your chance of COVID19 infection by more than 80%

No study was offered to back up this claim. The most reliable data we have is from a gold standard Bangladesh study published in Nature in September which showed a relative risk reduction from the use of surgical masks by 11% – so, she was only 69% off.

Not to be outdone, On the same day as CDC director’s misleading tweet, November 5th, across the pond in the UK, CEO of the National Health Service, Amanda Pritchard, made this statement on national television. “We’ve had 14 times the number of people with Covid19 than we had this time last year.”

On 5 November 2020 there were 10,994. That makes the current figure 1.6 times lower, not 14 times higher as Ms Pritchard claimed.

The NHS (National Health Service) has never had fourteen times the number of people in hospital with Covid than it did in November 2020 (which would be roughly 154,000 people).

Get the full facts here

In an online article of October 16th The Economist claimed that In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, 80-90% of those hospitalized with Covid are unvaccinated. It turns out that they were basing this figure on a report by COVID-19 Clinical Information Network (CO-CIN) that was presented to the government’s emergency scientific advisory body, SAGE, in September, with figures linked to earlier assessments.

According to the data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) the real percentage of hospitalized un-vacccinated patients at the time of the article was 35%. The Economist has since published a retraction after being taken to task by full fact.org – Read about this story here.

LEGAL BATTLES AGAINST VACCINE MANDATES:

IN SPAIN: A care workers dismissal for refusing to have a Covid injection was overturned in court in Bilbao Spain, El Mundo reported 3 November, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Read the story here. 

IN CANADA: Canadian National Railway workers are hitting back against the company’s vaccine mandate, sending their employer a letter threatening class action if it persists with the recently announced policy. Read here

UNITED STATES: A Federal Appeals Court in the US calls President Biden’s vaccine mandate “fatally flawed” and “staggeringly overbroad” arguing that the requirements likely exceed the authority of the federal government. The 5th circuit court of appeals said the mandates raise “serious constitutional concerns.” Read more here.

Access the British Institute of Human Rights guide to Covid 19 vaccines here.

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Nothing going on here – episode 4 – Grief

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Art by Svetlin Velinov

Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the British Medical Journal and Associate Professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, speaking at the Nov. 2 expert panel on US Federal Vaccine Mandates about the expanded definition of ‘vaccines’ that was made on January 26th 2021 in Merriam Webster’s dictionary to include the mRNA technologies. 

Watch Peter Doshi’s full presentation here.

Peter Doshi asks the question what if the Covid-19 vaccines were called ‘drugs’ instead of ‘vaccines’. But what if they were called ‘gene therapies’? Speaking at the World Health Summit 2021 Stefan Oelrich, member of the Board of Management of Bayer – one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical multinationals defines the mRNA technologies as exactly that – gene or cellular therapies. He then went on to say that if mRNA technologies had been presented to the public as ‘gene or cellular therapies’ instead of as ‘vaccines’ the vast majority of people would have refused to take them. Watch.

I was sent a video taken on a mobile phone that I find so disturbing, it is hard to put into words. It’s in French so asked my friend Yannick to translate it for me. To set the scene, the event took place at Ambroise Pare hospital in Belgium and was filmed by a patient with Covid. Slumped on the floor in the corridor against some plastic seats is a woman who is 8 months pregnant. She is also suffering from Covid and gestational diabetes, the kind that can sometimes develop during pregnancy. She is clearly exhausted. Both patients had been refused treatment because they were not vaccinated. The woman on the phone expresses her horror and disbelief at what she is seeing go down.

There are lots of doctors, lots of nurses that pass by, but nobody seems to notice. I went to ask the imbeciles at the emergency desk to help her but they say they can’t do anything because of the  protocol and they were just following orders. I asked them to at least give her a stretcher so she could like down properly, but no “We have no permission,” they said. This is the way it is now, do you understand what I’m telling you? This is the way it is. Period. So I denounce it. I am at the Ambroise Pare hospital. We are in Belgium. We are supposed to have good health care. I do not know what kind of world we are heading towards but frankly I am disgusted. I condemn Ambroise Pare. It is nauseating, disgraceful, there is no more humanity. I am absolutely shocked.

Personal Journal – As I see it – Grief

Contact: nothinggoingonhere1@protonmail.com

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Nothing going on here – episode 3 – Strange bedfellows

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In this episode I explore what happens when we find ourselves agreeing with the disagreeable and ahow identity politics is ruining critical discourse on the issues we face.

EPISODE 3 – STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Am I the only one who feels that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have sort of lost all sensible meaning these days? I’m obviously talking about left and right in a political context, I’m not suggesting that we don’t know our right hand from our left hand anymore. But who knows what the next casualty of truth will be in this upside down world.

I used to be able to say with a fair degree of confidence that I was ‘on the left’ of the political spectrum, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. Because the left end of the political spectrum seems to have become infiltrated by some rather dodgy characters with some – dare I say it – quite weird authoritarian leanings – very similar, in fact, to the authoritarian leanings of those on the far right. Go figure.

I think it’s helpful to stop thinking about left and right and start thinking about pro-authoritarian and anti-authoritarian. But if you do that, you’re going to discover some strange bedfellows.

I think I’m what’s now considered an ‘old school lefty’. I believe that government has a responsibility to protect the less fortunate. I’m for nationalized medicine and the welfare state. I’m pro unions. I’m for gay rights and protecting the environment. I’m very pro-immigration. I’m pro-choice. I’m a feminist, or at least a second-wave Germain Greer type feminist. I lived in the US for 25 years where I dutifully always voted Democrat, supported gun control, was against the death penalty and had all the good lefty credentials. I generally found myself a bit left of most of my friends. But things have changed.

Have you noticed that the left doesn’t talk about any of those things anymore really? They seem almost completely disinterested with protecting the rights of ordinary working people or bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. They rarely actually talk about social economics at all. Instead the left has descended into a seething quagmire of group think behaviour modification, name-calling, and virtue posturing otherwise known as – that lumbering bullying monster — identity politics.

So now I don’t really know what to call myself – centre left, perhaps? It sounds so awkward. My views haven’t actually changed that much, maybe mellowed a bit. But my political position has been rearranged largely without my consent. It’s like someone picked up the chair with me in it and moved me over to the Right side of the meeting hall. I still believe in all those things. But my views are now considered irrelevant to the cause of the New Left.

But it’s given me an opportunity. Because it seems to me that the Left and the Right have been kept apart. Almost as if on purpose. Like some giant Nanny reached down and said, “Now, now, you too, since you obviously can’t get along we’re going to separate you. We’ll give you your own TV news channels and some of you will have whole states to play in. We’re going to calve California down the middle – sorry the Left is going to get the beaches, they surf better than you do. The important thing is that you don’t talk to one another, but if you do talk to one another you have to do it in these public arenas that we’ll set up for you as long as you shout really loudly at one another and never agree on anything.

I never really knew anyone on the right, at least not consciously. I just assumed they were all a bit thick and kind of mean. That was until I stumbled into a Facebook group that was populated by mostly conservative women. I was a bit naïve. They were a bit mean, actually, and they had some funny ideas, but they were smart and they weren’t afraid of a real debate. They actually welcomed it. Contrast this to a lefty group I had been in that was filled with SJW’s. If someone said the wrong thing there everyone just started screaming at them and then kicked them out of the group. I was actually kicked out of the group for defending this girl who they’d decided was racist. Then I was apparently racist for defending her. She was clearly not racist, just a bit niaeve and inexperienced really, she’d taken some photos in India doing yoga poses against carved doorways. I actually have friends who’ve taken similar photos, but they were just luckier and less blonde. These people really wanted to destroy this girl. She was forced to take down her blog because of all the hate messages. The blood lust was disturbing. With the conservative ladies, at first I was like I’m out of here, your hairstyles are scaring me, you talk too much about religion, I decided to stick around because, although I detested Trump, I was curious. And I never saw anything racist there and I found them much more polite and considered than the SJW’s. I even engaged in a few debates with them. No one kicked me out of the group when I disagreed with them and they didn’t ignore me either or called me names.

I began to watch documentaries by people who talked to Trump supporters about why they supported Trump. What I saw was very different to the caricatures of Trump supporters we were being shown on late night talk shows. What amazed me the most was that in a number of regions, people were torn between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They couldn’t be further apart. What these people articulated was that what they wanted a radical change. As Michael Moore so eloquently put it, they wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail into the political system. They were voting for Trump, they were voting AGAINST a system that they believed had failed them.

And this is really coming to the point – that it’s the system itself that needs to change, and that the people who get elected – not just in America – are increasingly revealing themselves to be nothing but cuckoo clock plastic characters who pop out and wave and then retreat back inside the machine every four years or so. And it’s increasingly clear that the parties no longer represent the interests of the people. They represent the interests of the clock. We need to stop talking so much about the cuckoos and start talking instead about the clock.

What I’ve found in putting my toe in the Realm of the Right is that they’re not for the most part Neo-Nazis with deeply racist ideologies. Neo-nazis do exist, but they’re not the majority. The majority of people on the right are I believe just more socially conservative than I am – they’re more like my grandparents. Most of them have ideas that are more old-fashioned than outright dangerous. But what happens is that each group – the Left and the Right – seem to react off and feed off of one another and become more extreme than they would otherwise be. And isn’t that interesting. Because that keeps them from uniting on anything.

But sometimes the issue transcends this political divide. I found this working in the Tibet freedom movement. The Tibet movement was a real politically diverse bunch. The supporters on the right were motivated largely anti-communist sentiments. My fellow Tibet supporters and I were happy to have support from any side of the political aisle. The more the merrier, we thought. It didn’t mean that we had to agree on everything they stood for, but we could come together on this one issue. Adversity had made strange bedfellows as the old 17th century saying goes.

Today it’s difficult to engage in any serious discussion about the issue at all because identity politics has reduced every political issue to the IDENTITY of the person or group declaring it. This creates the preposterous situation where people are criticized for holding a particular position on an issue SIMPLY BECAUSE either the group that issue effects might get offended or BECAUSE people whom we’re not supposed to like – hold that view as well.This kind of thinking has infected the discourse to such a degree that today we are in the bizarre situation where even discussing something as serious early treatment for Covid to prevent severe illness and death is considered a right-wing topic. Because Donald Trump talked about hydroxycholoroquine then it must be abject nonsense and all the science supporting its use must be wrong. You can easily see how this kind of thinking very quickly becomes absurd. Trump says orange juice is the colour orange – hang on a minute, I’m seeing orange juice as orange. I must have turned into a Trump supporter over night. Where are my sunglasses, that’s better, now its sort of a murky brown. Phew, I almost agreed with something Trump said for a minute there.

Ivermectin, same thing. Few on the left can talk about it sensibly, simply because some people who don’t like the vaccines are promoting it. The discourse around Ivermectin from the left is hysterical nonsense. Some of it’s funny, the horse de-wormer meme – but it’s completely bonkers, there’s no critical thinking at all. They’ve just ignored all of the evidence that supports and taken a stand simply to make a political point. It’s like something out of the Simpsons. It would be funnier if people’s lives weren’t at stake. We don’t care if it helps people – we only care that people we don’t like like it. That’s why we don’t like it. And if you don’t like, you can lump it.

The same thing with discussion around vaccines and vaccine mandates. No one is allowed to question anything, if the science comes to the ‘wrong’ conclusions it’s tossed down the memory hole, and drug companies are now apparently the most trusted institutions on the planet. Well, thank God there are still scientists who continue to raise questions and doctors who continue to insist on treating their patients with whatever medications they find help them in their recovery, even though they are now threated with arrest and the loss of their licences because of the politicization.

So here we are. The media doesn’t really discuss issues any more on their own merits, they just talk about which groups or their representatives is advocating or denouncing them. Even freedom of speech is apparently a right-wing issue – how come the right wing are getting all the good issues? Someone asked me how I felt being in the company of Steve Bannon because I was defending free speech. I’m like, I don’t really hang out with Steve Bannon, and I’m not sure I want to hang out with you anymore either.

But now we’re in an actual pickle. Several pickles, in fact. There are huge issues that we face collectively, and the only way we can surmount them is collectively.

We’re now seeing mass movements organizing around the world – millions of people coming together against the draconian vaccine mandates and the health passes– regardless of what you feel about the vaccines themselves, since many of these people are already vaccinated. You wouldn’t agree with everything every one of these people believed, why should you – but that shouldn’t stop you from joining them to fight for a common cause.

I remember something going around on Facebook a year or so ago, a woman had written about an anti-lockdown demonstration in Berlin that had been attended by neo-Nazis. She said something to the effect that if you demonstrate alongside Nazis you are a Nazi. No. No. No. This is nonsense. I demonstrated against the Iraq War – there were some very strange bedfellows in that crowd, let me tell you, but in no way did I feel that because they were demonstrating against the same issue as me that this made me one of them. There were probably some jugglers in that crowd in Berlin too (they’re usually are jugglers in any crowd if you look hard enough) you could just as easily argue that the neo-Nazis became jugglers by marching alongside them. That’s a nice idea. I used to be a neo-Nazi but I have rejected those ideas and now I find that chucking these balls in the air brings me a sense of inner harmony and peace I never had before.

The demonstrations we’re seeing today against the health mandates include people from all parts of the political spectrum, from the left and the right. It’s not always being depicted that way on the mainstream news because they like to focus on the extreme elements but from what I’ve seen here in Europe the demonstrations are about 50/50 I would say. I don’t see neo-Nazis – I see ordinary people who’ve had enough – but this doesn’t mean they are no neo-Nazis in those demonstrations, they seem to like to infiltrate big demos, because well it’s hard to drum up interest in neo-Nazi caused I imagine these days. People have other things on their minds. I’m sure they like to polish off the swatikas and show off their new buzz cuts. Just give ‘em a wide berth. I imagine they’re used to it.

Don’t stop speaking out and acting in accordance with your Truth simply because someone you disagree with and even perhaps detest is in agreement with you. It’s a terrible reason for not standing up for something. The vast majority of people who are standing up are not extremists, they’re not radicals, they’re just people like you and me who’ve had enough.

The young care less about all this nit-picking – they’re just like – “This sucks. I’ve had enough!” That isn’t a left or right sentiment. When you’ve had enough, you’ll stand with others who’ve had enough too.

I differ with the centre right on many things. I don’t like guns, I don’t think abortion should be illegal. But one thing I know about the centre right is that they’re suspicious of Big Government. And now, so am I. And what they fear more than anything is government over-reach, and now so do I.

So, I’ve found myself in some rather odd company. It’s odd, but it’s definitely not the oddest thing going on. And maybe it’s not a bad thing. Because maybe it’s time to come together and find our common ground. Like the alliance of Men and Elves and Dwarves who came together to fight the forces of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Maybe if we come together to fight this thing together we’ll have a better chance of succeeding. We can always go back to screaming at each other later on.

Bon courage.

Watch the Hannah Arendt movie trailer here

Lawyer, Anna de Buisseret interviewed on Medical Freedom March, London, October 30 2021 about legal challenges against the health mandates. Watch here

LISTEN TO PREVIOUS EPISODES:

Episode 2Hypnosis

Episode 1Friendship

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Nothing going on here – episode 2 – Hypnosis

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Nothing going on here: the power of one in interesting times….

In this episode I explore the question, why does it seem that half the world is hypnotized right now? Could the answer be that we are experiencing “mass formation”, a phenomenon described Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. This phenomenon provides the social conditions for the emergence of authoritarian regimes and were originally articulated by holocaust survivor and political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Authoritarianism

You can watch an in-depth discussion with Prof. Desmet on Dan Astin-Gregory’s Youtube channel here.

Read more about Hannah Arendt here.

Listen to Nothing going on here – episode 1 – Friendship

TRANSCRIPT – EPISODE 2 – HYPNOSIS

EPISODE 2

I want to talk about Resilience – physical, psychological, cultural, social and metaphysical, which of course all interest. Today, I’ll be focusing on PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE in the form of getting better informed. Not more informed. We’re already overloaded with a vast quantity of information as it is. But finding sources that speak intelligently and thoughtfully about what is going on, that get us to ask questions and delve deeper – since the media seem to have pretty much abrogated their responsibility to question and present any alternative perspectives.

Today I want to look at what we can learn from social historians.

Have we travelled this path before in history? Are there precendents for this that we can learn from? Why does it seem like to some of us that half the world is hypnotized? What is going on here?

One source that has helped me to frame what is happening within a historical perspective is a man called Mattias Desmet who is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. I first heard about him through a Youtube channel of Dan Astin-Gregory, well worth checking out. The title of this discussion is: WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE STILL BUY INTO THE NARRATIVE?

So, Prof. Desmet speaks about how, like many of us, he looked at the statistics and noticed very early on that approach was not appropriate to the level of threat we were facing and that the mathematical modeling which suggested that we were heading towards a worst-case scenario – has continued to inform government policy around the situation even though it is quite clear that those models have not come to pass. So, the approach has not been adjusted to adapt to the reality of the situation and actually seems to be fueling itself from within to react in ever more draconian ways. What Desmet’s work suggests is that what is happening is less and less about public health and more and more about the enforcement of the policies themselves. But why would vast bodies of people go along with this?

To explain this Desmet talks about a social phenomenon called MASS FORMATION mass, as in a very large body of people and ‘formation’ as in a convergence of certain conditions that set the stage for authoritarian regimes to emerge. This is, according to Desmet, provided the underpinnings that allowed for the rising of the oppressive regimes that we saw in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and also (I would argue, in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Now before you say, “Hang on a minute, we’re not experiencing anything as extreme as that”, he’s not suggesting that we are – yet, anyway. We’re obviously not in the grotesque culmination of those authoritarian regimes, but that the conditions are clearly present for such a culmination to occur and that the emergence has already begun. So, we’re talking here about a developmental period – where authorities are flexing their muscles, and where people are sensing something is deeply wrong, that the direction things are headed in is troubling and finding themselves wanting to sound the alarm, to say you know we’d better slow down here. What we’re sensing is the erosion of individual autonomy that is leading to a loss of collective integrity in a process that I’ve come to call ‘authoritarian creep’. Because it is authoritarian and it’s creepy. But it also can appear to be happen very gradually, especially if we don’t pay attention. It can creep up on us.

So, what are these conditions that create this sort of mass hypnosis that provides the fuel for the engines of authoritarianism – this mass formation?

  1. People experiencing a lack of social bonds
  2. Lack of meaning and purpose in their lives
  3. Free floating anxiety that’s not connected to any mental representation, meaning that the anxiety is there but it’s sort of unclear what’s generating it, there’s no tiger in the room
  4. Free floating aggression and frustration.

Prof. Desmet talks about how he’d been teaching on ‘’mass formation” for several years at his university but that it took him several months before he realized that actually all 4 of those conditions had already been met in society, and that we are now well and truly in this state of “mass formation” and that the ruling power-base is already taking full advantage of this phenomenon in a way that we haven’t seen since the mid-20th century.

This is how the process develops:

Under these 4 conditions, a narrative is distributed to the population through the mass media by way of the government that indicates a collective object of anxiety

The government and media then offers a collective strategy to deal with it.

The free-floating anxiety (condition 3) then latches onto this object of anxiety, and just by participating in the strategy people are able to mentally control the anxiety, which provides them with a feeling of relief.

This gives rise to a new kind of social bond and sense-making and a new kind of solidarity emerges with a high level of connectedness that everyone had been missing (condition 1)

The people then start “a heroic battle with the object of anxiety” which leads to a kind of “mental intoxication of connectedness” and this is the real reason people continue to buy into the narrative even if it’s blatantly absurd.

This process reduces the social response to the level of ritual. People engage in signaling that they belong to the morally superior group. The more absurd the ritual the better it functions as a ritual. Why? Because it signals a kind of in-group purity – interesting use of language here – a sign that they belong to this group.

And, this is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this, increasingly “the object of anxiety shifts from the object itself – in our case, the virus — to the people who are refusing to go along with the mainstream narrative” They  are now the enemy. Not the virus.

But not everyone experiences this in the same way. Desmet says that society breaks down into 3 distinct groups under these conditions.

About 30% of the people buy into the narrative completely. They are kind of hypnotized by it because they fulfill all of the 4 conditions very well. About 40% of the people don’t actually buy into the narrative completely, they see flaws in it, but they’re too afraid or too comfortable or both to resist it. These are the people who prefer to go along with the majority, who don’t like to make a fuss, don’t want to rock the boat. And then there’s 30% who don’t buy into the narrative at all, and of those many will actively resist. I found this very encouraging – 30% is not too shabby.

So, check out this interview with Prof. Desmet on Dan Astin-Gregory’s Youtube channel where Dan is doing great work. He has something called the Together Declaration which you might want to look into. Lots of interesting stuff coming out of the UK in terms of alternative media.

I should point out that Prof. Desmet didn’t come up with these ideas himself. They’re based on the work of holocaust survivor and political philosopher, Hanna Arendt. She wrote a book called Origins of Totalitarianism. It was Arendt who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and said, “the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons,” says Arendt. A phrase well worth considering.

So, there we have it. Food for thought. Check out my blog on subincontentia.com – yes, .com now, going up in the world a bit – where you can found several articles on juicy topics like natural immunity, ivermectin, and yes, totalitarian creep. I’ll also be posting these podcasts there.

See you next time when I’ll be asking the question: DO THE TERMS LEFT AND RIGHT EVEN MAKE SENSE ANY MORE, AND WHAT IS THIS BINARY REPRESENTATION OF VIEWS, VALUES AND PERSPECTIVES DOING TO US AND OUR ABILITY TO HOLD A NUANCED POSITION ON THE ISSUES.

Remember, you’re one person SO you can do something. Bon courage.

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Nothing going on here – episode 1 – Friendship

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Nothing going on here: the power of one in interesting times.….

This first episode came about after throwing my notes into the fireplace and sitting down to just “speak my peace”. It is an ode to connection, a message of friendship to those who find themselves at odds with the direction the world is taking and are searching for meaningful and effective ways to how to respond.  

Listen to episode 2 below:

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