In future, the emergence of Covid-19 will be seen as having occurred simultaneously with the advent of a grim wave of opinions, disinformation and consequential censorship. As Simon Lincoln Reader, a Partner at Trunor Financial Technologies/Ecospend Technologies and a popular columnist at BizNews, brilliantly puts it; ‘In March 2020 we consciously outsourced the administration of humanity’s instinctive curiosity to emos.’ After over 18 months of being constantly smacked by these waves of opinions and disinformation – and being censored for our resistance thereto – we seem to finally be starting to circle back to common sense. Simon Lincoln Reader’s take on our ‘sabbatical from common sense’ – is humorous and very refreshing. Curiosity and common sense shall (hopefully) prevail. – Nadya Swart
What punishment should we issue to the censors?
By Simon Lincoln Reader*
Like Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, the Danish bestseller about a woman’s intuitive understanding of snow, I have a sense of weirdos, and it was precisely this intuition that prompted me to gag the morning YouTube’s ‘rona misinformation’ blanket agreement with the WHO was inked.
Having worked with computer-y/techie people for a long time now, I have, with the help of some cosmetic licence, repurposed two profiles and divided them into groups: goths and emos.
Goths are the good guys – and every office should have at least one (I have many). They are brooding and sullen, sometimes snarling and occasionally patronising (like when you can’t get the printer to work or your phone to make email). They save their socialising for the community forums of Reddit and gaming. They don’t like pets or cooking as that would interfere with blowing people up on screen every night. Their idea of social justice is for the female cast of Baywatch to be immediately habituated in their grungy bedsits. That’s the kind of thing worth taking to the streets for.
Emos are the not-good guys. Examples include Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Dorsey, Google’s Pichai and YouTube’s Wojcicki – and many, many more. In fact, emos account for 99.9% of the prominent computer-y world – and extend to the technology desks at prestige media (‘journalists’ at Now This, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, etc are all part emo themselves – just that they can’t code). Features include: being enraged, pronouns-in-the-bio, cats, asking stupid, hatchling questions on Twitter and reading activist garbage like The Intercept. Ben & Jerry’s might use tramp bum-jam in its ice cream – but they ignore that because they approve of the firm’s position on climate change. They idolise people like New Xiland’s Prime Minister Jacinda Adhern and Minnesota’s horrendous Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Even at 37000 feet – emos cause trouble. Once I walked into the loo of a Boeing 747 to find one sitting on it, pants around his ankles, head rolled to one side, probably thinking about canned hunting or something. Hadn’t locked the door, wasn’t even shocked: what kind of a person behaves like that?
In March 2020 we consciously outsourced the administration of humanity’s instinctive curiosity to emos.
Questioning the approved animal-human transmission narrative of Covid-19, these people concluded, was Nazi, and thus forbidden. Punishment was censorship (see: PANDA’s Nick Hudson) and ridicule – with pile ons encouraged by their prestige media allies (see: Daily Moron’s attack on Nick Hudson). But the truth here may not have the appetite for insult these people assumed it would: in spite of their efforts to popularise the mad bat/pangolin/wet market story – then pervert the virus by incorporating racially-charged dimensions – there appears to be, in the nauseating speech of the Biden chief nurse, Jen Psaki, a massive ‘circle back’.
Although the Trump administration triggered scepticism, it was Nicholas Wade’s article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that prompted the scrambling and reversing. Like rats in a bag, authoritarian scientists are now supporting a full, impartial investigation and Facebook has lifted its ban. The most unconvincing non-political-political operative of his generation, Lord High Chancellor St. Anthony Fauci, has agreed. If you listen really closely, you can hear the sound of Tedros sweating bullets.
So what to do? Maybe … not make these untrustworthy, hostile and damaged people the arbiters of truth? Bit late for that. And who to replace nakedly political ‘fact checkers’ with? To this we should look to how Norway built its sovereign wealth fund by wisely appointing philosophers to frame it (if economists had been involved in its composition, then the country would have gone Somalia real quick). Personally, I believe that dog-walkers and baristas should be summoned to dispel myths the next time something like this happens – there is no way it is possible to screw things up as badly as the emos and their friends have.
And I go back to the need for atonement and the big fire we need to toss emos and their fact-checkers into – as both apology and celebration for the end of our sabbatical from common sense. For our goths, permission to record the hissing and crackling is granted – to be used as warm-up for the next Rammstein concert if they so wish.
- Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Substack.
Read Also:
- SLR: A chronicle of Zuma’s conspiracies
- Angry SAs speak: YouTube’s removal of Nick Hudson video is censorship
- Nick Hudson of PANDA – ‘Look very carefully at what else is being censored’