Imagine a world where journalists were required to promote the official government line in order to keep their jobs. No text or report which reflected poorly on the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex would be allowed.
Imagine a world in which children were taught from an early age that it was unsafe to touch other human beings or to be touched by them. They would be required to wear masks and full-face plastic shields and to wash their hands frequently and to attend school by video conference because, they would be sternly instructed, otherwise they might kill somebody else’s parents or grandparents, even though they themselves were not ill. If the children found any of this a source of anxiety, they would be prescribed psychiatric medications to transform their view of the world, so that they would accept rather than reject what they were told were “the new normal” contours of reality.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/welcome-to-zombie-pharm/
Imagine a world where you were required to cover your face and nose whenever you stepped out of your home or when anyone came to your door. No one would know when you smiled or frowned and the difficulty of communicating the ideas you attempted to share would eventually deter you from saying much of anything at all, frustrated as you would be by the annoyance of always having to repeat yourself. There would be no point in asking anyone questions requiring more than a “yes” or “no” answer, because more complicated replies would be muffled by their masks and not worth the time and effort needed to decipher.
Imagine a world where all inhabitants of a city, state or country were told where they could go and what they could do, not only in public, but also in their homes and in privately owned businesses. Healthy persons would be quarantined to prevent other people from becoming ill. Good citizens would be enlisted and surveillance and tracking apps used to identify anyone who refused to abide by emergency lockdown and curfew orders or the required hygiene measures. Small business owners would be fined for attempting to run their businesses or neglecting to enforce emergency laws. Employees would be arrested for attempting to go to work.
Imagine a world where private tech companies collaborated with government bureaucrats to censor your written speech. You would not be permitted to share texts which conflicted with the official story of whatever the authorities claimed that they had done and were doing and wanted you to believe. You could still write texts, on your own computer, but there would be nearly no one around to read what you had to say. The censors could not suppress texts faster than they could be written and shared, however, so some would slip through. This would necessitate visits from the state police to the homes of those who had attempted to incite violations of any emergency laws which happen to have been enacted by administrators to protect their constituents. Whether or not the measures actually helped anyone would be entirely beside the point, because everyone knows (from all of the “just wars” throughout history) that all that matter are the lawmakers’ publicly professed intentions to do good. The perpetrators of what were deemed dangerous texts would be arrested and taken away, if necessary, by force.
Imagine a world where journalists were required to promote the official government line in order to keep their jobs. No text or report which reflected poorly on the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex would be allowed. A few of those who “indulgently” refused to comply might then impudently begin their own publications, such as The Intercept, issuing their interpretation of what was going on in the few sequestered places (made difficult to find by Google) where independent journalism was still possible.
Imagine a world where the independent media, too, had been infiltrated by persons keen to hold the line, to defend what they had been persuaded to believe (by hook or by crook, carrots or sticks) must be upheld as the truth. Anyone who attempted to share inconvenient “disinformation” or “fake news”, as it would be denounced, would then have their work edited to conform with “the official story”. The “traitors” (as they would be characterized) who disagreed would have two choices: either to stop writing or to flee to another place with even fewer readers than before, such as Substack.
Imagine a world where publishers who revealed crimes committed by governments would be subject to criminalization: arrest, incarceration, isolation, extradition and more. Those who exposed murderous crimes would themselves be treated as though they were violent criminals, even when they had never in their lives wielded any implement of dissent beyond a pen.
Imagine a world where oppressive lockdown and curfew policies were said to be necessitated by case surges of “infections” in persons many of whom, while testing positive, manifested no symptoms at all. Suppose that the tests being used were revealed to be notoriously inaccurate, by some estimates, 90% inaccurate. Yet the testing continued on, ever faster and more furiously, and the case surges would serve as the basis for preventing healthy people from living their lives. When vaccines emerged, everyone who tested positive before but survived would still need to be inoculated, because, the “Listen to the Science” crowd would insist, it might be possible to become reinfected. People who had already survived the dreaded disease would only know that they were safe and not a menace to public health if they took the new vaccines, whatever they were, and whether or not they had been demonstrated to prevent and transmit infection, and no matter what the unknown side effects might be. Because, obviously: Science.
Imagine a world where people with life-threatening diseases were required to postpone their treatment because another disease, 95% of whose victims were octogenarians or older, had been designated by select “expert” epidemiologists as more dangerous and life-threatening than cancer, heart disease, stroke, and the other top killers of human beings. Imagine a world where distraught and desperate people reduced to poverty and rendered homeless through not being permitted to work began turning to deadly drugs such as Heroin, sometimes Fentanyl-laced, with the result that, in some cities (such as San Francisco), more persons died of overdoses than of the disease serving as the pretext for the laws forbidding those people from working.
Imagine a world where citizens were required to undergo medical treatments not known to prevent disease but believed to alleviate the symptoms of a disease for which the vast majority of humanity suffer only minor symptoms. This would be undertaken in the name of public health, but the effect would be to harm some of those who were not vulnerable to the disease and essentially had been tricked or coerced (since uninformed “consent” is not really consent) into volunteering as subjects in an enormous experimental trial with the aim of determining the outcome of introducing into human bodies certain foreign substances deemed potentially profitable by the companies which produced them. Most people would line up enthusiastically for such vaccines on the basis of widely disseminated claims of 90% and 95% efficacy lauded by well-respected experts, with details about the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” available only in the fine-print of a few more nuanced articles which nearly no one read.
Imagine a world where people who had already survived the dreaded disease and also had been vaccinated were nonetheless required to abide by all of the ongoing hygiene measures, from wearing a mask, to staying home, to taking more vaccines on a schedule determined by their government. There would be no need to explain what any of this was for because all good citizens would already be accustomed to reciting the mumbled refrains (behind their masks): “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!” and “We’re all in this together!” Everyone would have to comply, everyone would need to be quiet, everyone would be required by law to roll up their sleeves for the clearly compelling reason that a global pandemic was tearing through the world like a tsunami, wiping out everyone in its path. Except that most of the victims were dying at the same rate and age as the actuary tables would have predicted even if the culprit virus had never arrived on the scene. And the death toll over the course of the year would be about the same as for any other year, but with a slightly different distribution in causes of death.
Imagine a world where you were required to present your health record on demand and you would not be permitted to enter stores, restaurants, schools, to work or to travel without first proving that you had agreed to participate in an experimental vaccine trial for a disease from which you were at minimal risk of harm. The local health authorities would determine when you needed to present yourself again, for a new treatment, as the virus in question could morph unpredictably over short intervals of time into something else, thus necessitating that you and everyone else on the planet prepare your bodies once again, just in case this time around it might be more dangerous to you and those around you.
Imagine a world where a healthy person’s refusal to undergo medical treatment for a potential future possible disease to which he was not vulnerable, according to all available statistical indicators, was taken as proof of his suffering from another disease, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), as clearly indicated in the latest edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The person thus diagnosed would be required by law to submit to whatever medication would make him more amenable to the other forms of medical treatment to which he was opposed because obviously there would be something very wrong with him, constituting as he would a grave danger to public health.
Imagine a world in which children were taught from an early age that it was unsafe to touch other human beings or to be touched by them. They would be required to wear masks and full-face plastic shields and to wash their hands frequently and to attend school by video conference because, they would be sternly instructed, otherwise they might kill somebody else’s parents or grandparents, even though they themselves were not ill. If the children found any of this a source of anxiety, they would be prescribed psychiatric medications to transform their view of the world, so that they would accept rather than reject what they were told were “the new normal” contours of reality.
Imagine that everyone around you embraced all of the above and undertook public shaming campaigns against anyone who disagreed. Their faces would turn red and they would shriek in righteous indignation, “Listen to The Science!” whenever anyone attempted to point out the manifest absurdity of what was going on. They would denounce as degenerate, anti-science, anti-vax ignoramuses anyone who pointed out that pharmaceutical firms are profit-driven, publicly traded companies whose success depends on their ability to develop, produce, and market new wares.
About Laurie Calhoun
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.
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