I saw this on Facebook yesterday. It's from something that looks a bit like a self-help book, but which also seems to be based on a personal experience of despair with the world as it. It is also absolutely fundamentally right:
THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
Worth remembering.
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Keeping calm is good….. and I would add George Orwell’s line…..
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Could this be a good strapline for your blog?
Yes
But what is the truth? Please don’t believe the truth to always be your opinion because it isn’t. Let’s be Frank a lot of what you portray is propaganda. Peddling SAGE as the the truth is a good example.
So you have a problem with the expertise of medical professionals
Remember to reflect on that the next time you’re ill
I respect medical opinion for what it is..SAGE extrapolate using assumptions and their recent analysis on omicron made no assessment of probability. You took what amounted to their worst case assumptions and publicised it on social media as highly probable. That is not the truth.
I took their best judgement, backed by Sir Patrick Vallance who chairs it
Of course it is not fact
It was estimate
But it seems you can’t appraise any such issue
I don’t think Joe that SAGE is as bad as you make out.
This new version of Covid is still really little known about other than that it is very contagious. We still need to be very wary – there may yet be another variant as well at some stage.
But I see that you say nothing about the crux of the issue – the Tory Government response going back to early 2020 – how they’ve responded (or rather how they have not responded) to SAGE.
I was listening to one scientist the other day criticising the initial lock down as rather draconian. He argued that all that needed to happen was for society to have focussed on its most vulnerable people and locked them down in some way.
No doubt the revisionists will have a field day as they look back.
But what troubles me is people like you Joe – with your short memory spans and ignorance. So let me just remind you of a few things eh?
Tory Government austerity had already weakened our society’s capacity to fight an epidemic even though prep for such an event had been discussed and budgeted for previously by other administrations. It had frozen budgets for the NHS to 2010 levels. It had allowed stores of PPE to go out of date, did not have enough ventilators and even given it away to places like China when the pandemic first hit there. The Tory Government even denied that Covid would pose a problem initially at a speech Boris gave in place called Greenwich in early 2020 – you might have heard of it? Added to this, they’d already put supply chains in doubt because of something called BREXIT – have you heard of that?
The Tory Government did not throw a protective ring around care homes as it lied to the public – loads of elderly were sent back to these to die and infect others to clear the wards of underfunded hospitals. And already, under cruel and unnecessary benefit cuts, thousands in society are already weakened living without enough food and heating in a country whose average life expectancy has been reduced as a result of 10 or so years of Tory austerity.
So, never mind SAGE or Prof Paglia and people like that. I work in construction OK and if you want something building and maintaining you employ a builder NOT a demolition contractor.
The Tory Government is actually a demolition team who since 2010 have set about demolishing Government as we know it – a Government that does not want to be troubled by running a country for everyone, just doing enough to look after the interests of the rich. It’s this denial of wider responsibility as well as Covid itself by the Tories that has got us where we are today.
It’s about time people like you woke up. Stop being a victim for all our sakes, get your head out of your conspiracy websites and look up to the top of society to know who’s responsible. Try it. For once.
As for the post, I commend it.
150,000 deaths, and rising
Sage said we could do better
Joe thinks things are just fine
Shall we conclude he is at least a sociopath?
A sociopath?
Ok with me although I’d like to know about how he got to be that way?
Tell us Joe – are you monied – you know – doing well are we? – pater and mater set you up nicely did they? Or maybe you area true Thatcherite and got rich at others expense?
Or are you one of the much abused working class/ shrinking working middle class who are always being encouraged by those that cause your woes to look at anyone but them – ‘them’ being the Tories?