November 2020. Why do I always talk about the same things? Is this the start of the Rise and eventual Fall of the Anti Vaccination movement and, if you are lucky, other things.
Tuesday the 17th November 2020.
Firstly the omission of a photo of my wife and myself is nothing to worry about. We remain very happily married and glad of each other, after meeting in 2016. I just decided I would rather keep her out of the sorts of things I will be discussing on this site.
It is the 17th of November 2020. As usual I am using this blog to sound off about the issues that preoccupy me. Never sport, politics, art...so many things that my life is full of. No, I just use these platforms for specific issues. Other things are part of my life but I don't usually discuss them here.
I always though other people were doing a better job than I could about politics for example. Also I tend to see the worth of both sides of situations, or often several at the same time equally. I am just not in the habit of relating my views on what I absorb daily. What is spoon fed me by the media outlets that I relatively trust.
As you will see in this piece, the quest to have absolute belief in what's going on around oneself has led some of us down a dark path to what I consider to be a very dead end. This seemed to me to be what motivated the student political societies in the Polytechnic I went to (it converted to a university but we all know it was nothing else in drag, marking it's own papers). You got these zealous fanatics you could not have rational conversations with because they were too busy asserting their ideas. Sound familiar? Some motives never change. Now read on...
Twitter has been a very quiet and peaceful place for me for some time, due to my elimination via blocking of the (tiny) group of trolls that formed the Autistic Dark Web group. An apparently organised team of autistics who strove to make anyone who disagreed with their ideas around the term Autism to be stupid and narcissistic. Ah, that term, narcissism. So overused now. I have met something like three people I reckon had the condition in my life after I left school. Otherwise it's just people saying things that you disagree with, having opinions about themselves and others you want to block, negate and shut down. Generally having a bit of front in putting themselves out on social media to do that. I guess this very blog is what those people would call narcissistic.
But never, ever, what they were doing. Simple as that.
The 2020 pandemic has pleasantly eliminated any considerations I used to have for that small gang of circular statement making, nasty, fairly pointless to try to talk to, people. They were always hiding behind Twitter alone by the way. You never met them anywhere else that allowed long, mature dialogues. Now an older enemy is asserting itself, and I reckon is facing it's end. The Anti Vaccinationists or Anti Vaxx movement.
That's right. I always believed that what would finish off Wakefield's bizarre cult (more on that later) was it's being brought out into the daylight of direct confrontation on the scale it seems to be heading towards. Mainstream media now regularly carry stories of how Anti Vaxxers (here given the same overarching style title as was done to the companies making vaccines - 'Big Pharma') should be outlawed. Yes, governments such as ours are considering making anti vaxx statements in the media illegal. Because of the harm they will and are doing, if and when Covid 19 vaccines are rolled out.
This is of course great news for someone like myself, who wrote the Vaxxed One film review you can find on my paulwady.com website. The writing of the second equally bizarre film - Vaxxed Two The People's Truth, is coming along slowly. Sometimes being abandoned altogether. This is due to sanity, and having a life in the real world.
Eh? Well...you know? It's a load of rubbish. It's clearly the product of a cult. You should just ignore it, vaccinate as much as you can then hope for the best. Because in the real world that's it. That is all you get in life. Vaccines to tacke viruses. Aside from isolation, avoiding anyone who could be infected, staying as healthy as you can and just plain luck...what else is there to protect you from a virus? Well?
One answer is the entire field of complementary medicine. This is the heartland of the Anti Vaxx movement. Homeopathy, Naturopathic practices (?) reiki, you name it. Balancing and cleansing them chakra's etc. So much you can do with diet and crystals, channeling your energies and dancing around the woods with nothing on. I used to hear about all of this during my FWBO Buddhafield days. Oh yes, I too have walked down Glastonbury High street. Hell I stood on it more than once, fundraising for charities a long time ago.
It was always fun doing different things for a living that did not mean being trapped in an office. For a phase of my life I wanted to move, and not be still. Courtesy of ADHD and another issue to do with my brain structure that I have known about for about 19 years now, I have this intellect but not the capacity to use it in a traditional way. You can asses how smart (or not) I am from this site and my writing. You would assume I would have followed procedures years ago and become some professional in a field. So why didn't I? That is another story.
So bereft of the sorts of mental health issues people in my position usually have, I found myself having many adventures. Several days of them were spent on the relatively dry and slightly windy Glastonbury high street. Now this was once described thus: YOU CAN GET ANY CRYSTAL YOU NEED, BUT NEVER THE SHOES YOU WANT. There I was, surrounded by refugees from reality. They appeared early afternoon and sat there on benches along the road, talking and drinking. Thus earning their local title The Brew Crew.
The road had a slight incline with the oldest Christian church in the UK and the post office at one end, and all these shops, the Glastonbury Hall that all the functions and presentations happen in and a pub at the other. It was the start of 2004, during my eventful year in Bristol having a sabbatical from living in London. I had no idea how all of this was going to look in the future. I just though it was a few steps away from a children's toy shopping village. Like the one Clarke's have in the village of Street in Wiltshire where you can buy factory outlet price goods.
Whilst I was there, a man hitched his pet owl to the railing outside of the post office and popped in for a minute. The owl and I looked at each other. Both of us said and did nothing. it was one more quiet afternoon. The odd car went past. Men older than myself told me 'I don't have a bank account' when I approached them to support my charity.
Now for me, the 2/3rds of the population of a former conservative retirement village who came to live there, may represent a rancid and potentially dangerous culture of adults who are no better than children. A world of 'Alternative' culture. Where people think they don't need vaccines in the face of all manner of heartfelt beliefs. Ideas. Dreams you live through. Faith based things in your head.
Let us return to the main point. The Anti Vaxx movement. Lets tie all of this up. Quite simply - I HAVE SEEN WORLDS LIKE THIS, PLACES LIKE TOTNES, THE TEEPEE VILLAGE, TRAVELLER GROUPS AND MANY ASPECTS OF THE CITY OF BRIGHTON. WHERE PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK THAT THEY CAN LIVE THEIR DAILY LIVES ASIDE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CULTURE OF THE COUNTRY THEY ARE IN.
The protests that happened every weekend in London, and places like Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester these past few months are a fine example of when groups form to create bubble worlds. Micro city states in which everything is their way, their rules and their perception of reality. This goes on all the time of course. Walk into a church, a mosque or a synagogue. Same thing. Walk into an office in Central London where everyone is from the same Middle Eastern culture and you are in the mist of Sharia Law. But them someone enters who is not part of such a world, through birth or coming from those countries, and the effect evaporates. See? You get it in people's homes.
But what has happened is the internet. I am sure no one who helped to evolve Twitter and Facebook had any idea that these would go on to create sub culture worlds that to an extent, would become part of main stream 21st century civilisation itself. The idea that fantasy bubble worlds full of people rejecting vaccination however, may not have been apparent even to science fiction readers like me.
You must remember that science fiction was written by rational, proof based people. Not those thinking (more like feeling) the way the people I am describing do. Such people would have featured in sci fi stories as the Vandal, mutant hordes. Animal primitives of an underclass. Scenario's like that. IT IS THE YEAR 202O AND A SOCIETAL APOCALYPSE HAS HAPPENED. TRIBES OF VACCINE HATING SAVAGES ROAM THE EARTH, TRYING TO STOP EVERYONE ELSE GETTING PROTECTED AGAINST VIRUSES BECAUSE THEY THINK THE VACCINES DO MORE DAMAGE. STUPID, AGGRESSIVE MEMBERS OF A CULT BASED AROUND A STRUCK OFF DOCTOR.... See?
The only representations of such things were in Monty Python style 1970/s satirical stories. IT IS THE YEAR 202O AND AN INSANE CULT HAS EMERGED THAT COMMUNICATES MAINLY BY COMPUTERS YOU CARRY IN YOUR POCKET AND IN YOUR BAGS AND HAVE ON YOUR DESKS LIKE ELECTRIC TYPEWRITERS. If you know the reference you will see the point?
The sorts of people I talk about in my Vaxxed film write ups and in the first Guerilla Aspies podcast I produced, come over to me as bad actors playing maniacs from old science fiction tv shows. At the start of this year I was trying to forget about them, only to join Emma Dalmayne in a protest against the screening of the second film in London.
It is worth remembering that Wakefield attended the Vaxxed One screening in Regents Park University building in 2016 and boasted of 350 people attending. This year the venue used had a maximum capacity of 175. There have not been any other screenings I was aware of. (One reason being that the people I am in touch with, monitored the Vaxxed supporters online and stepped in to try and stop local screenings. With success too). So it's a bit telling just how badly the cult is doing as far as meetings in London go. Or considering where some of them said they had come from online, when spied on, the entire country.
To conclude. Previously I used the term Wakefield's Bizarre Cult to describe what seems to me to be the heart of the global anti vaccination movement. Although you get groups in all countries, curiously it seems to me that via the medium of online enquiry (watching their films and reading their material providing it is English language which prohibits me casting my net wider) it all seems to trace back to the concepts and statements made by one man and his closest associates.
A group that seems to live their lives in a war zone. As if a brave resistance movement against an evil empire of governments and pharmaceutical companies that are mass brain damaging children via the one thing that facilitates western civilisation. The capacity for strangers to be physically close to each other anywhere on the planet. Public transport, offices, places of worship and study.
Vaccines allow us to travel all over the world. If they had never been invented we would not all be here either, would we? Many blood lines would have died off. Just as we in the UK will never know the people from families truncated and butchered by world wars one and two.
But these things are invisible. We only see what is around us. Only ever did. Ideas inform us, photographs and history try to educate. But as with the anti vaxx movement it's the immediate reality that is in our faces day to day.
A reality it is very easy to mis interpret. OH WE ARE ALL RIGHT TODAY. VIRUSES WONT GET US. IF WE GET THEM WE WILL RECOVER AND HAVE IMMUNITY BECAUSE LIFE IS THAT SIMPLE FORE EVERYONE. WITHOUT EXCEPTION. WE DO NOT NEED VACCINATION. BECAUSE WE HAVE FAITH IN OUR BELIEFS. Can you hear music whilst you read this? Film style soundtrack stuff.
If you talk to people who know what they are talking about as concerns virology, we simply do not know everything about Covid 19 yet. The one luxury I realised we did not have at the start of this epidemic was certainty about anything.
We still do have this.
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