When I was in the beginning of the writing up phase of my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors handed back a chapter and rather matter of factly told me that it failed the ‘so what?’ test. It was brutal and it hurt, but his feedback ultimately led to a much better thesis. What he meant by the comment was: why should anyone care about what I had written? I had failed to make the case for why my story was important. I think that is probably the single most important question anyone can hold in their mind when they are communicating something they care about: am I telling people why this matters? I recently read a press release and corresponding article by Dr Peter Doshi of the BMJ which really shocked me. The current population-wide vaccine trials are not designed to answer the only question worth asking: do the vaccines
Last time I wrote about people’s need for certainty during the pandemic, and how this need for certainty was driving people to try to control others. As I was writing it, I thought about my neighbour who has very serious contamination OCD which causes her pronounced mental and physical ill-health. I realised how much of my neighbour’s private behaviour is currently being publicly replicated by people’s corona-fuelled madness. I live in a flat in a house which has been split into 4 flats, which means that each resident shares a communal hallway. This is, of course, normal for the billions of people who live in flats around the world. What is not normal is that my neighbour’s need to control her environment causes her to lie about her neighbours, because our use of the communal hallway (i.e. accessing and leaving our homes) leaks into her plastic coated world. So she lies about us
When I was studying religion at university, I came to the realisation that people who were religious had a need for certainty that I did not share. It seems pretty clear to me that vast swathes of the world have gone mad out of a need for the same thing: certainty. And it is precisely this neurosis which is driving them to (try to) control others. It seems pretty clear to me that it is impossible to control a virus. Aside from the fact that they are a part of the ecology of the earth and our bodies at all times (what else would we “test positive” for if we swabbed for it?*), they are microscopic organisms invisible to the naked eye. Rationally, how do you think you can control something you cannot see? You can’t. This is why everything that you are doing to try to control the virus doesn’t work,
My friend gave me a lift to work yesterday; if we were living in Australia, that would be illegal. What a weird sentence to type. How can a world exist where a friend giving another friend a lift could be liable for an AUD$11,000 fine and/or imprisonment for 6 months? It should be an impossibility. It should be a fiction, not a fact. I can imagine there’s not a few of you who are shrugging as you read this: so what? Serves the unvaccinated right, right? We should just comply and obey and be more like everyone else. If you feel that way, and especially if you feel that way and you are from an otherwise minoritised community, please inspect your emotions and thoughts right now. Please map the terrain of your heart and mind and remember why it is that you do not care about this particular discrimination, or think it
Recently I was disturbed to hear the following from a friend: ‘but they are scientists, they wouldn’t lie to us!’ Something about that statement rolled about my brain for days. I finally settled on the naivete of it: how someone could think that a scientist was somehow different from other human beings. As if scientists were above normal human impulses, free from the taint of greed, ambition, and power. Anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes in academia knows how laughable such an idea is. Science is a method performed by human beings. What is investigated and researched is decided upon by human beings. The direction any one field of science goes in is decided by human beings. What is excluded from scientific investigation is decided by human beings, as is what is included. All of that is to say, scientific fields are constructed and produced by human beings doing scientific