Most of us accept that it's entirely sensible to get vaccinated against #COVID19 & to keep new variations under control.
While there are legitimate concerns over lockdowns, anti-vaxxers, & those who believe COVID is 'a hoax', are among the most dangerous fools on earth.
Yet our dysfunctional Govt & PM blather about 'common sense' & refuse to condemn them, having repeatedly failed to take decisive action to control the virus.
We've know about the #IndianVariant since February, but action wasn't taken until late April - & STILL flights arrive!
When combined with a decade of unnecessary ideological austerity, outsourcing, privatisation, & real-terms cuts of 25% since 2015/16 to our #NHS, it is *crystal clear* that these corrupt free-market obsessed criminals are directly responsible for 130,000 largely avoidable deaths.
A cabal of psychologically damaged free-market ideologues, greedy investment bankers & corrupt lobbyists, many of them devoid of compassion, who treat voters & the truth with utter contempt, & mass deaths as an entry on balance sheet, have taken over the Govt, & now rule Britain.
This has been brewing for forty years. The 2008 financial crash was a warning about the dangers of deregulated free-market #capitalism & greedy investment bankers.
These greedy psychopathic criminal bastards nearly destroyed the global economy, causing 30 million job losses.
Govts let them get away scot free with the biggest financial heist in history.
Grotesque & unimaginable wealth - exploited from the poor, the environment, & the low paid - has been systematically funneled offshore, to the extent that at least $30 TRILLION is now hoarded there.
They're insatiable. They own our personal data & pour money into think tanks, the press, the media & campaigns purely to persuade voters to elect Govts full of their own, who create the conditions most conducive to minimizing human & environmental protections & maximizing profit.
In Britain alone, while we've all endured austerity, declining public services & mass deaths, the combined wealth of Britain's richest 1,000 individuals INCREASED by £480 BILLION since 2009, while kids go hungry.
They fund the Tories.
This is grotesque, & it harms all of us.
Since 2000, the global population of billionaires rose more than fivefold, to 2,700.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by $5TRILLION to $13TRILLION - the most dramatic surge ever.
Libertarian media owners & politicians ensure voters don't care about this insidious system. Instead, we're fed a diet of mindless entertainment, COVID & climate denial, & a relentless culture war, which derides those who DO care about injustice, the earth & GROTESQUE INEQUALITY.
Until we get a critical mass of voters, journalists, politicians, CEOs & activists willing to discuss the reality of the situation, & to articulate an alternative, we are doomed to division, despair, exploitation, mass deaths & global conflict over finite & decreasing resources.
ANY political leader who seeks to fuel division & exploit tensions, rather than attempting to defuse tensions & solve this problem is not a leader, but a dangerously irresponsible opportunist who is unfit for office.
And when I say this catastrophic situation has "been brewing for forty years", this #THREAD explains exactly what I mean, in the context of Britain:
There are many different ways to view recent sinister developments in Boris Johnson’s UK & Trump’s USA, process, but perhaps the most important is to view it as a part of struggle to preserve democracy from destruction at the hands of damaged individuals lacking in conscience.
The wave of democratic erosion around the world is undisputable. What’s less appreciated is the role that individuals with personality disorders play in this process, which disrupts our expectations of how things work, based on the normal psychology we commonly & tacitly assume.
First up, a #THREAD about divisive ex-corporate lobbyist, proven bully, & serial Ministerial Code-breaker Home Secretary Priti Patel, who also enjoys attacking "activist" lawyers for doing their job, demonizing asylum seekers, & criminalizing protest:
Here's a long #THREAD about lobbying & corporate propaganda.
1 in 5 of the new Tory MPs from 2019 have worked in lobbying or PR for corporate interests, & 4 of Britain’s largest lobbying firms now have at least one former employee in parliament.
'The capitalist ideology of class mobility remains, but COVID makes the idea that it's the INDIVIDUAL’s fault they're not doing better economically less convincing - the pandemic makes it clear that objective conditions are responsible for an individual’s economic misfortune'.
"Given that many people now spend most of their days on the internet to meet their social needs, the culture industry, which bombards us with ads whenever we are online, has an even stronger and more intrusive presence in our lives than Adorno could have imagined."
"Today’s culture industry... has now more opportunities to mutilate our critical thinking, atrophy our imagination, & silence our critical voice, so we cannot imagine anything beyond what the culture industry impels us to want & buy."
Nick Pisani was appointed #bbcqt Editor in 2000, resigning abruptly in May 2005 after news was leaked that he had been offered a job as David Cameron's head of TV presentation.
Ed Havard was made acting editor in May 2005 & in 2009 offered a seat on the panel to Nick Griffin.
In a shameless & sinister clickbait post in March 2020, #bbcqt uploaded anti-immigrant Twitter comments from a far-right supporter who allegedly also ran for the National Front and showed support for the English Defence League. Baroness Warsi & MP Debbie Abrahams wrote to #bbcqt:
“Producers of #bbcqt seek out controversial members of the audience in an attempt to curry large ratings... By providing a platform for views that are racist or sexist, the institution is normalising them & contributing to the coarsening of public debate & the growing toxicity".
The latest salvo in the "common sense" bullshit-get-out-clause, which the Tories always mobilise to avoid taking responsibility or being held accountable.
The last time Boris Johnson spouted this shit & it was splashed on the front pages was in may 2020, & that went REALLY well.
People who say "just use your common sense":
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Iain Duncan Smith
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Isabel Oakeshott
Allison Pearson
Boris Johnson
Michael Gove
Laurence Fox
Nigel Farage
Toby Young
Claire Fox
People who think that's dumb:
Albert Einstein
Antonio Gramsci
"Common sense" is a myth. The Tories' "common sense" call for #austerity has been revealed as a perverse & damaging ideological ploy.
We now know that cuts to public spending resulted in Britain being one of the most ill-prepared countries in the world to deal with #coronavirus.