The media landscape is breeding a generation of citizens that is getting taught to respect the authority of the state above all. No matter what the current issue of the day is, the pandemic, the War in Ukraine or climate change, it all boils down to a very dangerous thing: a citizenry that can't, or won't, think independently.
Taking stock of the civil liberty and privacy nightmare we have built for ourselves in the pandemic and explaining why I don't think reporting on it accomplishes much at this point.
When who to save in case of a medical emergency becomes a moral, or even worse, a legal decision instead of a medical one, we all lose. This will soon be the reality in Germany, though, as the Constitutional Court has just passed a very unfortunate ruling in this regard.
A look back at the second year of the show, through the lens of the topics covered and the things discussed.
The German Constitutional Court has decided that the strictest pandemic measures were within the remit of the law. The government is already talking about force-vaccinating everyone. I feel stoicism is the only recourse left for freedom-loving citizens of this country now.
In Germany, the pandemic emergency has now been declared over by a new law. But instead, the government can now just use all the measures, and more, whenever they want. Not even the parliament needs to approve.
How can the hope of a new drug that might help fight COVID-19 get turned into bad news? Bad journalism, that's how. Let's look at how Matt Taibbi breaks it down in his exemplary writing on the topic.
Again and again, so-called journalists in big media outlets exaggerate or even outright invent stories to scare or outrage the public. The audience just buys it wholesale and never notices when, a day or two later, it all turns out to be complete bullshit. Today's example: Ivermectin.
The people responsible claim nobody could have predicted what happened in Afghanistan this week. But their experts did in fact did predict it, which wasn't exactly hard, and then the people in charge lied about it. The public now desperately needs to understand how governments operate, or it will all happen again. And soon.
The certificate infrastructure of the German digital immunity passport, based on an EU-wide system, has been completely undermined by a hack that's so easy to pull off that probably any twelve year old with a computer can accomplish it.
