I see that the nutters are all out again, ranting and railing against the new lockdown. You know who I mean, the sad characters who, every so often, gather in Trafalgar Square to worship at the feet of the likes of David Icke and Piers Corbyn (both of whom are crackpots, if you didn’t know already). Apparently, even Right Said Fred were at one recent event, supporting the pandemic deniers. I don’t what shocked me more: that they are Covid denying loonies or that they are still a thing. They join various other has-been nineties pop icons like Noel Gallagher and Ian Brown in aligning themselves with the crackpots and contrarians. As someone who always steadfastly resisted the alleged charms of Oasis and The Stone Roses, I’m actually glad that they’ve ‘come out’ now as the utter knobs I’ve always thought that they were. Mind you, an equally disturbing development is that Jedward have emerged as the principle pop-world advocates of common sense. The world, truly, has gone mad. Of course, the crackpots would say that the madness lies with the rest of us accepting the existence of the current pandemic, when it is obviously just a conspiracy on the part of ‘them’ to oppress us, steal our data via things like track and trace apps and track us via microchips injected into our bodies under cover of vaccines.

Not, of course, that they can see the irony of spreading their message using technology which, itself, is incredibly intrusive. Social media, like Facebook, is designed primarily to gather your personal data, while access to most of the wider web is controlled by corporate behemoths like Google which, likewise, are intent upon gathering your data and exploiting it for profit. As others have pointed out, Ian Brown uses an iPhone to post his Tweets on the ‘conspiracy’ – a device manufactured by a company that not only seeks to capture your data, but whose business model – using cheap labour in China and elsewhere to manufacture goods sold for premium prices in Europe, Japan and the US – is fundamentally exploitative. So, if you are worried about having your data stolen as a result of the pandemic, you are too late. We’ve already given it away to social media operators, our mobile phone services, web providers and countless other tech companies. That’s the irony: people spent years worrying about ‘Big Brother’ and state intrusion into their privacy when, in reality, it was private corporations who actually wanted all that data, for the purposes of profit rather than surveillance – and we gave it to them willingly.

If, on the other hand, you are worried about being watched – you already are, by Google, Facebook, Apple etc. Getting back to our specific loons – the ones who gather in Trafalgar Square, that is – it seems that their main criteria for not believing in the existence of the pandemic is that they, personally, don’t know anybody who has had Covid, let alone died of it. Jesus! I’ve never met anybody who has had beriberi, but I don’t doubt that it is real, (although I have no bloody idea what the fuck it is). Although, as it happens, I do know several people who had Covid-19, one seriously enough to be hospitalised. Thankfully, though, none of them died. But this, apparently, is how we are now supposed to judge the veracity of anything – whether or not it actually lies within our own limited and very narrow personal experience. This solipsism extends beyond Covid: I’ve encountered a number of people who refuse to acknowledge that disproportionate use of force by US police against black people is real, because they’ve never, themselves, seen such instances. The reliable testimony of others, fact-based evidence and scientific studies are no longer good enough.

Now, I know that Aristotle refused to believe in the existence of elephants, as he’d never seen one himself and descriptions of them that he had heard sounded too ludicrous to be real. But he lived in age where there were no photographs, film or video – the only representations of things you personally hadn’t seen or experienced came, primarily, in the form of oral histories, paintings and sketches or sculptures – all of which included a fair amount of the artist’s imagination and were themselves based on third, fourth or more, accounts. Today, we have no such excuse. But such a refusal to accepts facts, evidence and expert testimony lies at the heart of conspiracy theories, which are all about feeding the ego. They are a way of saying that the facts don’t conform to my personal views, so therefore I’m going to ignore them and substitute alternative facts not based upon evidence or drawing on the experiences of others. Which is why these loons don’t base their opposition to lock downs and other measures brought in by governments to combat Covid on actual facts or rational arguments, but instead upon their personal prejudices.

Which is dangerous. But even more dangerous than these nutters are the political opportunists – like Nigel Farage and assorted self-described ‘libertarians’ – and the right-wingers who put profit before health, who have seized upon the lockdown as a means of pursuing their own political aims. For them, it isn’t so much denying that the pandemic exists, but rather that lockdowns and similar measures are the answer. These are the people who deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue with references ‘deadly lockdowns’ (deadly to whom, the virus?). Or they t to deny the actual effectiveness of lockdowns when it comes to controlling the spread of the virus – a lot of these ‘arguments’ are based upon questioning projected death and infection rates. (Most recently we’ve seen these clowns lambasting the ‘4,000 deaths a day’ projection used as part of the government’s decision making process in announcing a new national lockdown. They point out that it has now been revised down to ‘only’ 1,000 possible deaths a day without a lockdown, as if that somehow undermines the case for the new measures, as 1,000 deaths is apparently acceptable). Most puzzlingly, they keep saying that ‘lockdowns don’t work’. Which is puzzling because, unlike Aristotle and elephants, they must have seen the same evidence as the rest of us: that in many of the places where the pandemic formerly had a grip, control of the situation has been based upon the imposition of lockdowns and social distancing. Like it or not, lockdowns work. Quite obviously, in fact: this virus is extremely virulent, the only way to lower the infection rate is to deny it the vectors by which it spreads, In other words, you limit human contacts. It’s a matter of logic, nothing else. So, these nutters and opportunists realy do need to start believing in elephants.