Iron Bru › Forums › Blast Furnace › The playing squad › Reply To: The playing squad
It’s this ridiculous mindset which stops people coming out and saying what they feel/think. This is why everybody nowadays feeling like they’re constantly treading on egg shells.
WG, I’ve read your stuff before and frequently agree with your knowledgeable comments on football matters, but this is a shot wide of the post.
We all have opinions about all sorts of stuff, you’re absolutely right. But our opinions shouldn’t confuse feelings with facts.
We all have feelings about football, our wife/girlfriend, family, maybe our job. But here we’re talking about factual matters. It’s a fact that masks help, if they are clean and fit well. It’s also a fact that infection rates are lower in some areas because people are taking precautions by social distancing, wearing masks, not going out much, etc.
It’s also foolish and dangerous to think that because Covid infection rates are low, it’s safe to go back as usual to social gatherings. It’s like saying that it’s OK to drive without your safety belt, because death rates from car accidents are nothing like they were in the 1970’s, so the risk must be lower!
Trouble is, in the current climate it’s become ok to confuse feelings with facts. Populist politicians like Trump, Johnson, and Farage all rode high by making people prioritise feelings over facts, feelings about immigrants, feelings about the EU, feelings about nationhood and exceptionalism, even over Covid, initially.
The government even said it didn’t like experts (or unskilled immigrants, for that matter), and they worked hard to target their messages at the kind of voters who would be susceptible to their propaganda, voters who were unlikely to seek out factual information (middle-aged and elderly, with a big family and non-university education).
Putting our trust in such a band of fools was catastrophically wrong, as we’ve discovered to our cost. And the more we let feelings rule over facts in these matters, the more we let the lunatics run this virus-riddled asylum.