Second, epidemiological and public health strategies to suppress community transmission of the virus to minimal levels are not being followed across the major developed states and that puts everyone else at risk - we have seen repeated cycles of transmission getting out of control because under the guise of 'protecting the economy' community transmission is being allowed to occur at 'low levels' - defined as not overwhelming Health Services, but allowing constant extra stress on existing Health Services - and that guarantees surges will happen and variants will emerge.
So what populations ought to be united in demanding is support to reduce the transmission in the community to the minimum, and certainly quarantine at borders to limit export/import of the virus. The techniques to do this can be supportive rather than 'draconian'. It can be done.
The vax vs unvaxxed adversarial narrative - essentially a concocted angry argument - is obscuring clarity on what needs to be done. So here's an exploration of why this matters.
Beefs.
There's an industrial scale practice of starting endless arguments, between people imbued with a belief, opinion, bias or bigotry in order to exploit their activity.
It started out as a tactic to drive up traffic to a page that carried advertising, in order to generate income from the page. Start an argument, get believers on board, troll them, get them angry and sit back as more pile on to argue to win.
Start an argument, divide the room.
What is a 'beef'?
Venkatesh Rao the creator of Ribbon Farm Website wrote really informative piece where he coined the term 'beef-only thinking.'
"You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking.
A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.
The connection to crash-only programming is more than cosmetic, but it will take some set-up before I can establish the conceptual bridge.
Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs."
source: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
Continuous conflict. Facebook algorithms that increase 'engagement' are rooted in this dynamic. Fight or flight hormone cascades drive the internal urge to win the unwinnable. Addiction patterns of behaviour becoming habitual. Rational discourse becomes almost impossible, and those who try to maintain a rational stance become exhausted.Many of the online arguments that rage are rooted in this practice. Brexit was an example of this practice being deployed online and in News Media in order to seed irrational divisions across the electorate.
How rapidly the English democratic debate descended into Leave vs Remain as an endless argument largely void of rationality. How quickly previously calm folk became enraged, enervated, to the degree of poisoning familial relationships!
The Vaccinated against The un-Vaccinated against The Vaccinated.
We must protect vaccinated and unvaccinated populations equally, in order to bring this pandemic down to safe and managed levels that prevent avoidable harms. This is critically important given the inequity of global Vaccine distribution, unwillingness to share Intellectual Property rights and technology, which is rendering billions of people vulnerable to SARSCOV2, it's variants and the adverse outcomes associated with it.
what effective suppression of community transmission of the virus using non-pharmaceutical interventions and social solidarity in a population of 1.4 billion people looks like.
That adversarial narrative is a concoction, a logical fallacy, or at least the adversarial aspect of this narrative is a logical fallacy.
Byline Times have published a few insightful and damning articles on misinformation networks linked to the Covid Recovery Group and The Great Barrington Declaration.
Epidemiological recklessness. Emotional blindness.
The point of the vaccines then, from Johnson's perspective, the perspective of those who wish to hold onto their existing almost completely hegemonic power, is to protect their power: because they sense that hospital, health care and social care systemic collapse would threaten their position. They fear that if and when public ire becomes too intense, support would evaporate and the people would demand their complete removal, to be replaced by a government of national unity tasked with suppression of community transmission (which has never been attempted yet in the UK) and so it was never about protecting the NHS, it was about protecting those in Power.
That stance is by definition an evil stance.
Certainly their concern was not about the welfare of all NHS staff, who were denied the pay raises they so clearly deserved. Certainly not about the millions of people receiving paltry state assistance. Furlough protected the large corporate employers for the most part, 3 million small business people were excluded from financial support. Certainly their concern was not for the health and safety of all our children.
Trust.
We must make it happen to bring this pandemic to safe closure.
The Wealth Extractors will never cede this point, because it destroys their foundation and sense of entitlement to power.
I hope more of you will recognise the validity in the essence this perception, and add to it and I hope, fervently, that it will lead towards more effective action, locally, nationally and globally.
Corneilius
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