The issues you are raising are fundamental but they are characteristic of other groups who endure this in their daily lives.
The issue that is overlooked is that cognitively significant content is not merely passively received but something we experience via meaningful forms of involvement that create our capacities through involvement that makes a world and capacities that inhere in belonging to it arise. This is my main interest because of the work I have done on poor and stigmatised people but without contact you are cut of cognitively significant aspects that you access via the mediation of others, so, this state is like bereavement. I lived my whole life like this, imagine that, this is why I understand it!
This is why online learning cannot be a substitute for participatory involvement in spheres of co-presence because cognitively significant representational content requires the interpersonal mediation of co-presence, this is why the government and their advisors want shooting for the inhumanity inherent in their decision making: they are formulating decisions based on alienated forms of reasoning that are effects of their own distance from the practical phenomena: our lives.

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

Well you can, I can't afford to go into the nearest town. Least this will end for you, I hope, when this situation is resolved, however long it takes for it to dissolve into civil disobedience since it cannot be a tenable basis for a social order, however much they want it to be, but for me and other members of the long-term unemployed, there is no escape from our condition and we will be living what is driving you knuts for a long time after this is resolved for you, it will only make our situations even more precarious.

You haven't been silenced. That is the illusion and it's based on foundational principles in social psychology that involve influence and group dynamics. It is inferred the group wants to silence you but the group doesn't exist. People in their droves are being used in a huge dark social experiment to drive fake solidarity, trust and to push group think and cohesion in order to then push the mainstream narrative. None of these people are actually part of something that resembles an actual fully functioning viable group. They don't have your best interests at heart, not when they are acting on behalf of what they assume is what is expected of the group. People will do vile things in situations like this, experiments and research in social psychology prove this. In a blink of an eye these people would awake from their slumber as if hypnotised and quickly disband back to their lives before all this happened, if that's what the government wanted. They are expendable. This is hardly a prestige exclusive club full of all the cool people, although that's what the behavioural scientists want you to believe using well researched behavioural modification to affect attitudes, relationships, induce conformity, peer pressure and perceived exclusion from the group if the demands of the group are not met.

When you think about it objectively, that's hardly a group you want to be part of. And because the group doesn't exist, you can never be part of it anyway. What group? A group that magically just formed over the last year but didn't exist before that? Hmmmm.. strange... seems too good to be true. Where did they come from? Why didn't I know about this before?

It's an illusion, much like group dynamics in a cult. The people aren't there for each other because of each other. They are there because their rulers want them to be and because their rulers know how to get into their heads and make them do what they want them to do.

Nobody is winning a gold medal from any of this, not even the most well behaved during this pandemic. So if that's the case, what have you lost? Not much. The illusion of loss is exactly what they want you to experience because it's more likely to make you conform with the demands of the group and therefore comply with who is the ruler of this group, the government. The people blindly following the psychological operations are the fake tribal community your human brain is wired to immediately identify and respond to. Oh look, there's my people! I must listen to them! Doesn't exist. We knew this before the pandemic when people's hardwired tendency to act like they do today hadn't been exploited. That's why we don't just get involved with random masses of people in the street unless we know them and can vouch for their motives and character. All that has been bypassed by exploiting the primitive impulsive group behaviour of humans.

In today's modern world with 8 billion people, all of them unrelated to you and none of them, you have no obligation to them personally. But the government want you to go full primitive and start to look for your home in everything that is happening only to find you won't find it because its not actually there, intentionally so. You'll start fighting to prove you belong, precisely what they want you to do knowing so many people are going to reprimand you on not obeying the new group dynamics. Your home is where you are as an individual separate to all of this, seperate to what's going on in the external world. This is called locus of control and its a theory often used in social psychology to determine whether people attribute control and influence over their life based on whether the external or the internal is more important.

Those who define themselves based on how the external world responds to them solely, often are the most likely to feel powerless or in Martin Seligmans definition, at a stage of learned helplessness that greatly impacts their ability to function and less likely to remain motivated to achieve their goals. Likewise, Banduras theory on how people perceive their own ability to resolve issues in their own life relative to a certain stressor applies here too.

The reality being projected onto your life right now is not indicative of how things are. This ongoing war of attrition is a very common tool in government arsenal and has been used throughout history to wear down the most strongest of enemies. They want you to give in to the self doubt and the negative thoughts about yourself so that you capitulate. They want you to feel community no longer exists. That you have nowhere to go. Through cognitive dissonance and sheer reduction in stimulation from your usual daily life prior to the lockdowns, you're expected to just submit and accept what is going on.

It's not uncommon throughout the world although it's new for most Western people who are not part of marginalised groups and so this is all very real, but for many across the world this is everyday reality. Their government stigmatises and dehumanizes them for not aligning with their political beliefs and narratives. They are political outcasts.

There is a world out there, and there are the groups you are looking for, you just have to find them. They exist. And they are everywhere. People just like you and me. Normal everyday people. The key is to not forget that and to remember there is NEVER such a thing as a group dynamic unless you are consenting to being part of the group ie family, good friends, loved ones etc. If you're blindly adopting a groupthink mentality and assuming a blind role in an unfamiliar group dynamic, which pretty much sums up most of our interactions in everyday life, you risk losing yourself among the faceless crowds.

Know yourself before you know the group. Know the group by knowing yourself in relation to it while also knowing your separation from it. The group in the example is the population who have already fallen victim to the cult-like toxic relationship/group dynamic, of which doesn't exist and doesn't serve you even if it did.

Also, getting banned from a forum or wherever because of being against what is going on is hardly a punishment. I see it as a gift. You're liberated. They are not. They are showing you they don't have what it takes to meet you on the same footing. They cannot think for themselves and have loaned their ability to use their own mind body and brain to external influences. Again, group dynamics at play. It's all group dynamics.

You don't need the group. The group needs you, in this context anyway. You should use the same level of caution as you would when talking to strangers in any other situation. Don't just expect people to understand you and be able to relate you and support you. It's never the case anyway. We just lived in a society prior to this that took for granted a certain level of freedom and awareness of one another that hasn't been tainted by politics to the same degree it has now. It doesn't mean forming relationships were any easier or that people liked us more or that our relationships were more meaningful with people we barely knew. Naivety over our past experiences and how we usually consider our memories to be precisely how things were and usually over identify with them can hold us back. Life has always been difficult in that we're dealing with lots of people everyday who we don't know who we are not responsible for nor know their motives and who are not obligated to do us any favours or be what we want them to be.

We just enjoyed social inclusion more and in that we developed a strong bond and association to being able to freely take advantage of our environments so we overlooked the complexity of our social environments and the complex nature of the relationships involved. Going for a coffee in a coffee shop like Costa has its own processes going on defining the environment but we don't think about this, or we didn't before lock downs. How many people did you actually really care to notice when coffee shops were open? How many of them would you blindly follow if they began to demand people align themselves with their individual beliefs and started marching out of the store? You'd have no doubt shook your head and grinned and thought "This guy is nuts! Just another day in society" and carried on.

Why make it out like you've lost something today just because the illusion is of missing out on something? It's still there. What you might be missing is actually the idea of what society is in your mind based on your past experiences. Society changes all the time. Nothing is solid forever. We forget that society was just as complicated and in many ways just as problematic and people were just as strange and likely to side with bizarre things as they are now. Still doesn't make society as less real. Its just a choice of seeing that and believing it. After all, it is the people of society in their droves who define society.

This will past and best of all, the real victims of this will be the ones who chose to nail themselves to a cross waiting for the promise of Jesus to appear only to find it never happened and never will happen, like that anyway. These promises have been made throughout history to get the masses to do things they otherwise wouldn't do and it always ends up in them cleansing themselves and licking their wounds for quite some time but they will hang their head in shame and you can be assured it will be lots of people who no longer will have any excuses when it comes to "being fed up of the government" and lecturing those on how the government screw everybody over. They will soon be the laughing stock and what will be the most hilarious about it all is it will be 99% of those you work with and 99% of those who consider themselves masters of their own lives. Most couldn't get beyond a little bit of peer pressure and the threat of taking things away like you do to naughty children.

What goes around comes around.
We are out there. And so is the big wide world. You've just got to know it is and know that the only thing stopping you believing that is what you tell yourself 🙂

This is a big struggle isn't it. Or....it's that we are 5% or whatever, which I do really believe. Majority are in favour of this.

I could get myself a different telephone to join Telegram I suppose, I am not keen to give my phone number out to strangers.

Can't see any signs of a Stand in the Park in my area even looking at Facebook.

No offence but looking at this board, people seem keen to write long essays but are there any women based in London who just want to meet up and chat? With email correspondence first?

I think it's good common sense to be wary of meeting strangers.

@ScarlettR See other Forum topic "Meet other Sceptics" and take note of the ability to send private messages.

No phone number is given out on telegram.you dont need to and telegram wont either..
🙂