Stupid Boris confirms what the rest of us know. He is currently buffering; like a shit internet connection. Information being downloaded, hits low bandwidth. More restrictions coming down the line. What more can they do? Will the regional approach by abandoned in favour of us being kept indoors 24/7? Presumably it would be a return to conditions seen at the start: an hour's permitted exercise and you get to make one trip to the shops a week, or whatever. This of course will be followed by the usual, predictable, bogroll insanity. Andrex Madness (sounds like the name of a great talkshow AI host in a world gone mad).
This weekend is the decider for the coming month, at least. We all knew January would be the big hangover. They should have maintained lockdown throughout December at least, never mind that they left it too late. Never mind that they will never admit their faults - a huge red flashing DANGER! sign. If these people, our so called leaders, aren't willing to learn. Aren't that humble, We are fucked.
I fear the teachers won't go far enough. This is a potentially revolutionary moment. It has potential. They need to make the right decision for the safety of everyone, and I mean everyone. It isn't just kids or even staff. It's everyone to whom a school outbreak could reach, which is...everyone. Stand up to this government; stand up to that creepy Williamson guy. Send these fuckers a message. Teach them a lesson!
What is required now, more than ever, is critical thinking. So many people engage in dreadful and fallacious reasoning in the face of what they, understandably, don't want to believe. None of us want to be in this situation, but we are. Engaging in cloudy logic will not justify the notion that what is happening is either deliberate or completely false. For example, claiming that covid has a high survival rate doesn't detract from how dangerous it is. Nor does it address the fundamental problem; it's highly infectious. That is why it's dangerous, and the current situation, with hospitals in dire crisis, show precisely why.
These people believing this nonsense really need to understand. But in our society it's easier to retreat into personal conspiracy, believe that you with the truth, are special. This is just more divide and rule from a government that has given up all pretense of fighting this situation. They have allowed Christmas to go ahead as normally as possible (which was too normal) and we are being made to pay for it with thousands of new infections, exhausted and crippled health infrastructure and staff, and more death. None of this they will accept blame for. However people would rather believe infantile conspiracies or employ simplistic and fallacious reasoning. They blame Neil Ferguson because the right wing press scapegoated him for scaring the economy but they don't blame their own for breaking the rules.
You can thus see why critical thinking isn't on the education, and yet it is one of the most important skills you can learn. The ability to sift through the deluge of bad reasoning that would expose our terrible leaders is vital. The biggest culprit is irrelevant arguments and whataboutisms - a bit like when they pivot from accepting responsibility by asserting Comrade Corbyn would have been worse. Irrelevant, he's not in charge. Another is the appeal to numbers, big or small. "99% survival rate", "it only affects people over 75". Problem is that 99% of 65 million is still a lot of death, and in the meantime while it might not kill it spreads, therefore keeping the problem going and infecting more people.
So don't let the bad arguments from the covid deniers win the day.
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