This and other dysfunction like it are just ordinary run-of-the-mill, well-documented societal effects of the rise of the kind of socio-political order proliferating lately.
It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
Such self-absorbed puffery is the hallmark of any similar regime, and those "toeing the line", which at the moment - is a large number - are of course puffed-up along with the "upper brass" they've aligned themselves with and dutifully follow, and so reap the benefits reserved for and bestowed upon only those who conform, do what they're told, and further dispense those orders to others they themselves see as subordinate.
It's pathetic to watch, will come crashing down eventually, and as the dust settles, those who were ostracised and persecuted for questioning it, will lead us back. As always.
Your comment is so drenched with florid contempt and disdain that it's actually really hard to understand what you're talking about.
I'm trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but even leaving aside the style, it's extremely vague. What I've taken from your comment is:
- this bad thing is like other well-known bad socio-political things (which ones?)
- people are just going along with it without openly acknowledging it
- there are a lot of those people, and there's a hierarchy of them
- it's sad and bad, but will end eventually, and as usual, some outsiders who questioned it will come back in and form the new hierarchy
Now to be less than charitable for a moment, I think "It was a dark and stormy night" now has competition with:
> It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
I sympathise, and appreciate your summary. I was intentionally vague about exactly what I was referring to, for the very reasons that form the subject matter.
Specifically, stating it directly leads to wild denials, ostracisation, persecution and generally overwrought and unjustifiable discombobulation from many - as they puff about unwilling to accept it.
From a less-reticent perspective:
"On 12 July the British Government announced that it will be strongly encouraging vaccine passports for venues and events to exclude the unvaccinated from public life. Although they say this is a voluntary act of discrimination, they have explicitly stated that they retain the option to make this mandatory in the future, as they also retain the option to resume police state measures as and when they please. The French government co-incidentally announced the same measure on the same day, only going much further, barring the unvaccinated from cafes, metro etc, and mandating vaccination of health workers – which is to say, putting the unvaccinated out of work. They follow the Irish and Greek governments which have brought in similar measures, along with other countries and states worldwide.
The long-term effects of these measures will be disastrous. It will normalise the discrimination, exclusion and persecution of a section of the population.
[...]
Never underestimate how powerful the motive to retain one’s self image is. The longer this goes on and the more brutal the measures enforced the more powerful this motivation becomes. The difficulty of admitting you have been fooled is directly proportional to how much and for how long you have been fooled. Perhaps my labelling of the new regime as fascist will make it even more difficult for people to break from it, as the immediate instinct is self defence – ‘I’m not a fascist. This guy’s a lunatic, he’s calling me a fascist!’"
Thank for you at least giving slightly more concrete examples.
There are a lot of semantic gymnastics going on in that blog post, specifically around identity groups:
- how lockdown/virus/vaccine skeptics _are_ an identity group,
- how lockdown rules and vaccine requirements are repression against those identity groups,
- how fascism is repression of identity groups,
- therefore a lot of people and governments are fascist now.
I think we'd both agree that it's wildly unjust that actual human beings have far fewer freedoms (a major one being freedom of movement) compared to corporations or their capital, so I can sympathize with the notion that more restrictions on biological beings is unfortunate, to say the least. But like in chess, we must play the board as it is, not as we wish it to be, and we're responsible for the predictable (especially policy) consequences of our actions.
The author is also a lockdown skeptic:
> Leading up to a (ritualised) date that announces a review of restrictions, the government generates terror on a mass scale – through its new gargantuan propaganda machine.
> The evidence mainly consisted of Sweden, Florida and other places that actually exist in the real world, and also the fact that the lockdowns haven’t worked
AND a virus skeptic:
> Imaginary variants, case numbers, double mutants (the possibilities are endless)"
And hence presumably a vaccine skeptic. These are further critical failures of analysis to add to that of "what constitutes an identity group and fascism".
Honestly, the _blog post_ itself almost reads like a psyop, but probably it's just the kind of nonsense that people like George Galloway and Aimee Terese are known for. Maybe if these failures weren't so central and didn't compound on each other, there'd be something else useful to say having read it.
It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
Such self-absorbed puffery is the hallmark of any similar regime, and those "toeing the line", which at the moment - is a large number - are of course puffed-up along with the "upper brass" they've aligned themselves with and dutifully follow, and so reap the benefits reserved for and bestowed upon only those who conform, do what they're told, and further dispense those orders to others they themselves see as subordinate.
It's pathetic to watch, will come crashing down eventually, and as the dust settles, those who were ostracised and persecuted for questioning it, will lead us back. As always.