Hello everyone
Sorry I haven't posted much since joining, just too low.

So much for online chatting - I've been banned from another chat board for being anti lockdown. It was like a hobby board.

There's no escape is there? I hope we can meet in real life after all this.

Welcome ScarlettR. I would be very surprised if you would be banned from here for being antilockdown. 🙂

It's important to make any contacts you can. Yesterday I joined the Stand In The Park FB group and attended a gathering today in my nearest 'park'. There were only 5 turned up but it's a new thing and hopefully will take off. Even if it doesn't lead to mass gatherings, it is an opportunity to network and feel less alone.
Some brave people later uploaded pics of themselves doing a solo 'stand' when they were they the only ones. It's happening in lots of towns and cities.
I hope people don't forsake FB just because it's FB; some of us cannot be arsed joining too many platforms and it can be hard to find the like-minded if everyone flees to ghettos.

It's important to make any contacts you can. Yesterday I joined the Stand In The Park FB group and attended a gathering today in my nearest 'park'. There were only 5 turned up but it's a new thing and hopefully will take off. Even if it doesn't lead to mass gatherings, it is an opportunity to network and feel less alone.
Some brave people later uploaded pics of themselves doing a solo 'stand' when they were they the only ones. It's happening in lots of towns and cities.
I hope people don't forsake FB just because it's FB; some of us cannot be arsed joining too many platforms and it can be hard to find the like-minded if everyone flees to ghettos.

Just tried to search for this and there are various groups with similar names could you supply a link or the exact name of the group you mention please Jane G.

I am glad to read your post and hope you are right but, for some of us, this is just more chronic powerlessness. Maybe you can organise if you have a car and can travel in a private space. I could never learn to drive because I could never afford to pay for lessons and could never afford to run a car anyway so, what was the point in learning something that I did not need and could not use? The only problem is that is a rational arising from poverty and powerlessness that, sadly, was even more true of what I spent my life struggling to pay for at university, getting nothing and never needing anything anyway because what I did was fraudulent and bankrupt, bleeding resources away from me and many others, as education does. But underneath this whole saga is the institutions that legitimate the messages and validate the reality, enforcing compliance via complex neuroses inducing mechanisms of segregation that pit person against person, much as the labour market does. What can I do? My life is enforced isolation. If I apply for any job I will never ever stand any chance. Every action I take is more or less futile. I can read, and try to understand the nature of the virus and about the mechanics governing its transmission so that I can defend myself if the only place in the world I have had to go for the last twenty years ever reopens so that I can actually leave the bedroom in which I exist. So, really, what can we do? If you have some kind of employment then I hope you have some kind of income. But, in terms of my sphere of possibility what can I do? All I can do is refuse the vaccine, that is about it.
The issue really does raise issues about the the class hierarchy of understanding and the consecration of some forms of understanding: without scientific training you really cannot contest anything or contribute. I notice on many of the social media platforms a lot of professional people with high-status credentials able to make a name and act in the public sphere but for a lot of us, we can't even get into any public sphere. Realistically, what can be done? Other than refusing the vaccine, which is a purely passive act, what can one do?
I saw a post today of George Bernard Shaw talking about making people undergo a tribunal to justify their utility and explain their existence. The thing with this attitude is that most of the unemployed (and who are they? and what is this phenomenon?) would agree with this. I know a man whose words closed a book I wrote who has to get his parents to shop for him because he will not leave the house. What intentional states do people think characterise those who are outside of any sphere of contact and what do they think the nature of this experience is? The problem with George Bernard Shaw's position is that reasons-for-being are themselves effects of ways-of-being and the devalued undergo a complete destructuring of their existence which robs of them of initiative because they have no possibilities and I think the lockdown is confronting a far wider section of the population with some aspects of this experience. It is enforcing passivity and powerlessness (which are themselves crucial conditions of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)) and my feelings are that the moral argument against lockdowns are not given due consideration and there are sections in the population (like me) who allow us to see the long-term effects of such conditions. The state apparatus, globally, is prolonging these conditions because they want to effect a fundamental restructuring of economic dispositions and our dispositions are resistant, "essence is what existence was" as Hegel put it (I am paraphrasing from memory so excuse me if I did not get that quite right) or as Leibniz put it, 'we are automatons in three-quarters of what we do', fundamental values are fundamental dispositions of the body, this is why these policies are trying to enforce behavioural change to induce attitudinal change: there are behaviourist psychologists in Sage behind much of their thinking. Their ideas are not powerful because of their truth value but because they can make their ideas true by affecting reality via their implementation, shape reality as part of generating the conditions that establish the appearance of the validity of their ideas.
I have gone on here and did not mean to. I wanted to try to reflect on the nature of the powerlessness that is being instituted. Obviously, you are not all in such a bad situation because the policies are pushing people back onto whatever their personal and private resource base is. This is a fundamental aspect of the strategies I think. They want to reduce people to bare economic functionality and deny any spheres of public existence beyond that under the guise of the threat of a virus.
My thinking may be warped but I simply do not see how these strategies can make sense, whatever the epidemiological rationale. It says much that considerations that ought to have been primal are not even considered, that tells us a great deal about the nature of our political culture and the people who institute it. What subtends their way of thinking about public life, the life of the nation and what is a prioritised and why? Alienated political schema are part of the bankruptcy of distant political classes and those distances lead to tragic, badly informed, policies. It is endemic in our public institutions which is why this has been possible because our institutions have been failing for decades.

“There's no escape is there? I hope we can meet in real life after all this.”

Scarlett we could meet in real life now if you ignored the rules.

I hope you’re mental state improves soon.