The Twin Pandemics: Coronavirus and Stupidity

Stupidity: it has a higher R0 than the coronavirus...

There’s always been an element on the internet who would find anything to be paranoid about. If there’s a political power, new technology, new method of producing food, new vaccines (or old vaccines – vaccines at all), there’s a group of people who would think it’s a means of control.

Of course, when the SARS-CoV2 outbreak happened, these people started doing their thing. First it was a Chinese bioweapon used on their own people to get rid of the elderly; then a war that was being fought without soldiers. Eventually people started saying it was connected to and controlled by 5G towers; and the inevitable evolution of this (because Lord knows that wasn’t batshit (see what I did there?) crazy enough) was that the eventual vaccine would be a way to control the virus in individual people and take them down if they stepped out of line through use of implants.

Yep, implants to control a bio-weapon through next-gen mobile tech that wasn't even installed in some countries with the coronavirus. Not even Mulder and Scully had gone this far down the rabbit hole. 

Everyone from your usual Facebook conspiracy theorists all the way to people who you’d assume would know better, especially since they are university educated like Dr Naomi Wolf (love her for going after Angus Taylor and support during 19/20 bushfires; really confused by everything else). But here we are. Going toward the second half of 2020 we have to remind ourselves that educated doesn’t mean not daft. It turns out one can be both.

But it’s here that 2020 would give us one of the greatest comedies ever lived – had it not been paired with such a dangerous and globe threatening virus. The illiterati have risen fearless, steeled with the paranoia of Q and QAnon, the Venn diagram that makes up these groups is now nothing more than overlapped circles with only slivers of outliers on the edges. So thin is the space that you have to label the outside and draw arrows to direct the gaze toward the section you’re referring to.

In America, people protesting the supposedly draconian and purely unconstitutional lockdowns took to the streets, armed with all manner of semi-automatic weaponry that could only be described as extreme overcompensation for what they’re lacking in the boxers. Yes, this would inevitably lead to a spike in Covid-19 cases after people attended these events.

How do you use big guns with such small hands?

What’s worse though, is that the stupidity travelled.

It made its way over to Australia, egged on by Australia’s own tin-foil crown holder Pete Evans. Deciding that there was no such thing as “too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole”, Pete ramped up his posting of the ridiculous, peaking (at least we thought) in the unveiling of his $15,000 Van der Graf generator with neon light attachments for the Apocalyptic Woo Disco you never knew you wanted to attend. It wouldn’t be until Channel 7 dropped him from one of the n+1 reality cooking shows on television would he show us just how much tin-foil he was wearing (hint: he’s likely keeping a company afloat just on his own) by straight up posting QAnon memes.

Now we have antivaxxers protesting in Melbourne and people get up in arms about the civil liberties of people being trampled because the police arrested a woman who tried to use her child as a human shield. For ages we prided ourselves on the notion that we weren’t America, we were smarter, and certainly a little more civilized. Like everything else this pandemic has shown us, it was a lie. A cohort of Australians are three Trump tweets away from injecting bleach, and I can’t say that I would be terribly upset.

Imagine one of these people standing there with a syringe.

You ask them what they are doing.

They say “Trump said disinfectant cures the coronavirus”

You try to explain to them that it’s a bad idea.

They insist they know what they’re doing.

My response to this situation would be a sarcastic “no don’t” while deciding whether to dial 000 or film the moment Darwin’s theory was proven correct (again).

This is where we’re at.

2020, you’re exhausting.