I Believe

A Random Example:

The subject: Scottish Independence.
The statement: "If Sturgeon gets her way there will be double yellow lines on every road in Scotland, you'll be charged for breathing just to pay for it."
The response: "You don't know that; no one has said that will happen."
The reply: "You can't prove it won't happen and I believe it will..."

And there in lies the rub. Anyone who stuck with these blogs during their most prolific period will know and vouch for the fact I've been calling Belief Politics out for about five years now. The people who won't let a good fact get in the way of what they believe. It's how we ended up with Brexit and a nation almost split down the middle, because just about half the country trusted the data and just over half BELIEVED in fairy tales and lies and many of them still do. COVID19 has been a godsend for many of the devout anti-European politicians, because you can't nail all the problems onto Brexit, even if the overall data suggests leaving the EU is much worse than it might have been.

The British way to deal with politics now is to ignore the problems created by it by comparing it to something someone else has done rather than deal with it. Politicians are trained in the art of deflection; steering you away from one subject by having histrionics about a lesser, trivial problem and the press play along. Need a scandal covering up? Let's tell everyone they're not playing Land of Hope & Glory at the Proms and get every hot blooded British (gammon) person shouting at the political correctness of it all. Get the newly appointed Tory Director General of the BBC to play along with it by saying 'Land of Hope & Glory will remain at the Proms or he'll chain myself to the railings at Epsom and die for the cause...' When of course the song was never dropped from the Proms but it gave the Gammons something to strain their necks about and spit raged soaked saliva over their children while something else happened that the press conveniently ignored. A bit like some of the injustices taking place in the country at the moment that you'd be hard pressed to find even a mention in any of the newspapers or television news programs.

People believe that there are thousands of illegal immigrants queuing up at Calais ready to jump into dinghies to break into Closed Britain™ and steal jobs, take benefits they're not entitled to and generally put excess stress and strain on what's left of our public services. People believe this despite having voted for the most racist, xenophobic and antisocial bunch of politicians since the North Koreans went it alone. People want to believe they voted for the party who got Brexit done and have their own interests at heart while simultaneously accusing the same government of giving illegal immigrants the benefits they fight tooth and nail not to give ANYBODY! People believe these dinghy people are being housed while there are 40 million homeless British war veterans who have to sleep in piss-soaked sleeping bags under bins in the street. They must believe it because they post enough memes about it on social media and then get angry with people when they're told it's not true. I was told to get off an ex friend's Facebook page because I proved his racist meme was just that - a racist meme perpetrating a lie. He didn't want truth, he wanted justification of his racist beliefs.

Tonight, the BBC News interviewed a butcher in Lincolnshire who said, 'People are fed up with wearing masks, it's going to cause confrontation and anger in the streets.' Personally, I think that's a tad irresponsible for the Beeb; it's like giving idiots ideas. I'm sitting in my lounge utterly bemused that people can risk their health and the health of others because 'they are fed up' with something. Can you imagine London in 1941 with people confronting air raid wardens and telling them they're fed up with blackouts? Better still, can you imagine a zombie apocalypse? I once heard someone suggest events in The Walking Dead couldn't possibly happen because people wouldn't be that stupid... Really? We still have nurses and health and social care workers refusing to have a vaccination (AND I STILL DON'T REALLY KNOW WHY)! Health reasons, I get that. Religious ground, I sort of get it. Thinking it's some kind of governmental control, 5G conspiracy or an infringement on your rights - sort yourself out, you selfish pricks.  I don't wear a mask, I have a lanyard that says so, but I also keep a visor handy, because, you know ... twats. 

Let's not forget the conspiracy theorists; the barking-at-the-moon loonies and the people who will put any kind of illegal drug or MacDonald's processed shite in their bodies but not something that can protect them and other people. If I'm transmitting personal data or helping to power 5G because of my vaccinations, I'm completely unaware of it. I mean, I have been receiving more spam than usual, but I blame that on the Labour Party for having their list of past and present members hacked. Conspiracy theorists were very much the looney minority before the internet, mainly because their platform for promoting the bonkers ideas they believe to be true was so limited, but now with the internet any cockwomble with a half baked idea can gain traction and get half a country believing them, because, you know, it fits in with how they want to believe the world works. 

One of the biproducts of belief is where it was once the domain of the ultra religious zealots it's now a political tool. Donald Trump, for all of his unbelievably idiotic musings, used belief to win a Presidential election and then lose one with almost more votes than won him it. People are believing anything now, especially if it panders to their own disillusionment. Politicians have made people think that their problems are caused by anything but politicians. The NHS and social care isn't in a mess because of underfunding, it's a mess because of doctors, nurses, porters, illegal immigrants, the EU and uncle Tom Cobley - if people will believe that the reason they can't see a surgeon is because of Ahmed in a immigration holding cell in Dover rather than the health minister stealth privatising the NHS or because of Brexit and our willingness to kick out of the country all the people who did the shitty jobs, then you deserve what you're getting. It was always going to be Ahmed's fault because he's brown, owns an iPhone and might be Muslim. I mean, it's obvious it's his fault...

Or how about 'concerned British citizens' preventing the RNLI lifeboats from rescuing immigrants in the channel? Actually physically stopping them from doing their jobs to prevent people from gaining asylum. Surely this is attempted murder at the worst, but not in these peoples' eyes. They're doing the country a service, albeit in a slightly psychopathic way. The fact we're not sending the police down there to deal with these wankers says more about our country now than most other horrid things. Most of this has been created by a succession of home secretaries, two of which have been women and one is the offspring of asylum seekers. You really couldn't make this shit up and it be believable...

The frustrations begin when, as I said at the top of the blog, people refuse to believe facts over what they believe. Cognitive dissonance isn't a modern phenomena but it's definitely a growth industry and what is happening now is the argument of 'it's a matter of opinion', which is one of the most cowardly and lazy retorts you can imagine because if you have facts versus beliefs, opinion has fuck all to do with it. NOTHING. AT. ALL. If one person says the sky is blue and another that it's red, that isn't a topic of debate or a matter of opinion, it's an excuse to ridicule the idiot. So when people, for example, tell you that there are thousands of homeless veterans missing out to illegal immigrants, it's not opinion, it's bullshit and if any of these believers went to the proper places they'd discover that apart from the two things being as different as going to a pub or having a bath in phlegm and also not true, but they don't want to because 'being wrong' is now obviously a sign of weakness. Opinion is like offence, it's a personal thing, pertaining to the individual; an opinion is what someone thinks or believes not a written-in-stone fact that cannot be disproven. An offence is something that offends an individual not something that should be made a capital crime; both are personal BELIEFS and not a consensus, regardless of how many of your equally ignorant mates click 'like'. 

I had a discussion with someone I know recently about the COVID death toll and he believes 100% that the UK is the only country in the world that is being truthful about the number of people who have died of the virus (Yeah, I know...). He believes that EVERY other country has suppressed or lies about its death rate and that when this is all over the UK won't have the third highest death rate per capita. I mean, as conspiracy theories go it's at least on the possible but highly unlikely scale rather than the WTF scale, but how do you prove to someone they're talking bollocks when the basis of their argument is everyone is lying so no one knows the real truth? I mean, I know idiots who think the moon landings were faked and yet over 50 years since they happened there hasn't been ONE SINGLE PERSON who has stepped forward to say, 'they were faked; Stanley Kubrick filmed it all at Shepperton Studios, I was there, here's the contract I had to sign under the punishment of death to keep my mouth shut.' I mean, when over a quarter of million documented people worked on the Apollo missions and no one of them has even, for a joke, said, it was fake, what you need to consider is why hasn't someone come forward to expose this lie? Just one person, who isn't certifiably mad, coming out and saying it?

But then again, there is an army of wankers that think billionaire philanthropist George Soros is essentially bankrolling all the 'lies' out there to keep decent folk oppressed. I mean, that in itself is crazy, but no more so than idiots posting memes suggesting that if Jeff Bezos, who's personal wealth is something like $177billion, gave every human being on the planet $1billion he'd still have $170bn left. Seriously, how some people believe this bullshit even if they have no fundamental understanding of how maths works is staggering. He could give 7 billion people a dollar each and still have $170bn; that's how maths works and I appreciate the preciseness of it can be confusing, especially to people who so desperately want to believe everything they think is true.

The crazy thing about the world, especially over the last 10 years, is how it's started to look like a satirical disaster movie serialised across a number of seasons. Brexit was the first proper example of belief over common sense and this was followed by magnificent events such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, COVID19, billions squandered on crap PPE, politicians so woefully out of their depth that if this really was a TV show people would be switching off because it simply stopped being real. "Have you seen the latest season of Earth? It's getting a wee bit far fetched what with the wankers running the asylum and the apocalypse happening while people argue about face masks. I'm going back to Strictly..."

One has to wonder if the erosion of facts and the replacing of them with beliefs is some kind of long game plan to undermine peoples' trust in everything, making them easier to manipulate, easier to do the bidding of our dark overlords? Yes, I know that sounds a wee bit mad, but I'm being ironic, facetious, sarcastic. I can see the difference between barking mad swivel-eyed ridiculousness and the fact that many cars run on petrol and not the dreams of unicorn's poo... 

In conclusion, I don't think things are going to get better; not for a long time and many people will die. We're seeing it already with the UK allowing 100+ extra people dying PER DAY because of a virus we're all fed up with is now acceptable losses, despite evidence suggesting that economies always bounce back but dead people don't unless they're in an AMC TV series. At some point in the last six months, the impatient people decided they'd rather risk the lives of their vulnerable friends and family because they were missing going to a night club or the gym. I accept that lockdown wasn't good for many people, but part of me - the scared bit - thinks that death is far worse than not being able to see a gig.

Now we have the Omicron variant; what I expect is serious by the way the powers that be are frantically altering their narrative. This isn't the first variant and it almost certainly won't be the last or the worst. Part of me thinks COVID is actually an extinction event, it's happening slowly, but will gradually kill off 90% of the world's population by the time we get to the Zeta variant; this will obviously be down to a nasty virus but a lot of it will be down to nasty people fed up with being restricted or told what to do to save the lives of others. Who knew the 21st century would end up being the era of selfishness?

But hey, since when was common sense regarded as good advice? Why concern ourselves with blaming the people responsible when we can blame everyone else. Two years ago teachers, nurses and doctors were heroes; now they're enemies of the State because... well, because someone in some press department decided people needed to blame someone they could shout at and get away with it, but not the people responsible. The same press that struggles to hold the government to any semblance of blame. But, I've seen the Daily Mail run a letter in 2018 from a concerned reader complaining that the then opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn hasn't done enough to solve the Brexit crisis... Never mind the actual people 'negotiating' it, someone managed to blame someone with absolutely no involvement. A bit like people stopping the RNLI from doing their job because it's obviously their fault all these asylum seekers aren't allowed to drown in the channel.

That's what kind of people we've turned into. 

However, there could be people out there reading this who think I'm just a leftie twat talking out of my arse trying to hide the truth behind reasonable thinking. What a bastard I am? I should not be allowed to speak plain truths because it upsets all the lies people have invested in. In fact, I see more and more idiots shouting at and shutting down people telling the truth because if you suppress the truth the lies are much easier to believe.