A sizeable minority believe the Chinese Virus (Covid 19) is a sinister plot by a shadowy group of wealthy industrialists to enslave the world. I believe this to be misconceived. The real cause is ‘hidden plain in view’ on our TV screens. It is a creation of our unified media, a case of Marshall Mcluhan‘s, ‘The media is the message,’ a built in, self referencing narrative of ever simplifying alerts about a never ending procession of more lethal variants.
Will we ever be free of these ‘alerts’ ? No, because the media needs more and more stories of dangerous variants and as screen time is money they have to be simple. At the same time the public seeks to justify its own self destructive behaviour by believing these messages. Eventually there will be only one story, ‘Covid19 is everywhere and will be with us for ever and the only cure is more and more vaccination.’
Are we proposing a life hiding out in our houses in winter with an occasional bask in the sun in summer than back inside in winter ? Covid is deadly for the frail and elderly but how far should we take a plan that seems to be in the mind of epidemiologists of vaccinating everyone from 3 to 99 years old every year or maybe more than once a year?
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EM Forster Novel ‘The Machine stops‘ about a society living underground serviced by a giant machine that starts to fail is reading for our times.
An unquestionable “virus” from China.
See “How Beijing bought up Britain,” Sunday Times Business Section, May 2, 2021
Comrade Harris, you seem to be punishably ignorant of Comrade Trotsky’s doctrine of Permanent Revolution. It is essential to vaccinate every year, because every year brings new challenges to the proletariat! Whether the virus is real or imaginary, whether the vaccines are effective or poisonous, whether Prince Philip was killed by a vaccine or by agents of St Meghan Markle, is unimportant. What matters is to march forward to the sunlit uplands with a cheerful song on our lips, a tracker app on our phones, and a shining needle stuck in our powerful proletarian arms!
No one is forcing us to watch. Just switch it off.
A comment on the familiar suggestion that if an individual viewer dislikes a TV programme, all that is ever necessary is to switch off. This leaves open the questions whether there is anything on screen which deserves critical examination, whether there is a reasonable choice of alternative programms, and whether a programme has an effect on other viewers with undesirable social consequences in general.
Here are three observations that reflect concerns wider than individual preference: (1) TV “news” programming currently reflects an ideological slant that suppresses inconvenient information (e.g. on race & crime); (2) there is something curiously unrepresentative about TV advertisements showing exclusively “black” people, predominantly “black” people and mixed-race BMxWF couples, out of all statistical proportion to their population numbers compared to other ethnicities in Britain; (3) there is something limited in a “choice” of TV entertainment featuring films displaying torture or other forms of sadistic violence; car and building pyromania; quiz shows &c overloaded with e.g. feminist “comedians”, homosexuals and celebrity black pople; features about naked dating, student sex-workers & porn industries; soaps appropriately nicknamed BAMERDALE, COTTAGING STREET & DEAD-ENDERS; childish competitions with canned shouting; leftwing documentaries, like PBS; cheap-to-make cooking programmes; &c.
The menu on offer needs improvement.
40%. This essay began well but the student has made inadequate use of prime resources. References to the World Economic Forum website, Klaus Schwab’s ‘The Great Reset’ and UN Agenda 2021 are lacking. The student appears to have only paid attention to the Media Studies module. As an examiner I would have liked more on governments and their policies and official data rather than Marshall McLuhan.
He is showing his age as a mature student, who may need more help with the internet.
I interviewed the chief advocate of the danger of ‘The Great Reset’, Piers Corbyn, last year in his bunker in South London soon after the Chinese virus swept into Europe. He alleged Covid19 was a hoax whose purpose was to drive the population indoors so that a network of 5G masts could be erected all over the country without their knowledge. I was shown various graphs and diagrams demonstrating how 5G would enable those involved in ‘The Great Reset’ (Bill Gates) to supervise all our comings and goings, and eventually those of everybody in the world via a signal given off by the vaccine. As large parts of the UK still has hardly any 3G coverage for mobile phones something must have gone wrong with this plan somewhere.
No matter how often the two of you deny the existence of a McCrae + Harris conspiracy to use the AZ vaccine to abolish all letters of the alphabet from B to Y, we’re not fooled! Do the math: McCrae + Harris = 666! Hahahahahahahaha!