{"id":1298,"date":"2020-05-14T20:38:47","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T03:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2020-05-14T20:38:48","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T03:38:48","slug":"no-pandemic-on-the-flat-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2020\/05\/14\/no-pandemic-on-the-flat-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"No Pandemic on the Flat Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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It is astonishing, but true: there are people in the world who can read and drive cars and use smartphones and the internet and travel in airplanes, and yet believe the Earth is flat. There are also people who believe the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by the elite and connived at by the media, aimed at pushing us sheeple further down the road to slavery. Flat-Earthery is stupid but mostly harmless; COVID-19 denial is every bit as stupid, but potentially lethal. Unsurprisingly, Flat Earth and COVID-19 denial overlap in the great Venn diagram of conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We have a home-grown example right here in my native province of British Columbia\u2014indeed, I was a little dismayed to see that he and I graduated from the same high school in Vancouver, albeit decades apart. Mak Parhar has run a YouTube channel for at least three years under the name of Flat Earth Focker, offering the usual mix of pugnacious scientific illiteracy and Dunning-Kruger-inspired delusions of grandeur. His day job has been owning and operating a \u201chot yoga\u201d studio in Delta, part of Metro Vancouver. Hot yoga, a form which is intended to make you sweat hard, takes place in a humid 40\u2070C room to simulate the climatic conditions of India, and it attracts me about as much as any other form of yoga.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Mr. Parhar looks more like a bouncer than a yogi, with a funny little quiff perched on his head like a hamster clinging to his scalp for dear life. He first came under public scrutiny back in mid-March, when his studio circulated an email claiming his brand of yoga could combat the \u201csupposed virus\u201d \u2013 a neat way of trying to cash in on the pandemic while not actually admitting the pandemic was real. At any rate, the yoga studio was shut down and his license revoked<\/a> when he was found to be continuing classes and meetings that violated provincial requirements for social distancing and group size. At which point Mr. Parhar went into high gear as a COVID-19 skeptic, to expose the perfidy of the powers-that-be and the folly of the \u201ccovidiots\u201d who follow the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He kicked off with a stealth raid on the Royal Columbian Hospital<\/a> in New Westminster, to ascertain for himself whether a pandemic was in progress. He trogged up and down empty hallways and past closed wards, passed here and there by medical staff intent on their duties, but very few others \u2013 because, hey, visitors were being discouraged. It was a terrible video, with the phone spending uncomfortably long periods showing nothing much but Mr. Parhar\u2019s shirt-straining belly and the crotch of his jeans; there was also a visit to the men\u2019s room for a pee, with the screen mercifully black but the sound on. (\u201cShake it more than three times and you\u2019re jerking off\u2026\u201d) Naturally, Mr. Parhar inferred that the absence of bustle, panic, blood and overflowing morgues at the Royal Columbian was slam-dunk evidence that the pandemic was a scam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I looked at the stats for British Columbia<\/a> on March 28th<\/sup>, the day this idiot invaded a hospital. At that point, about two months after the first case was confirmed in the province, BC had recorded a grand total of 884 cases, of whom only 471 were then active (396 recoveries, 17 deaths). That particular day recorded exactly one COVID-related death, down from two the previous day – so we would not expect to see over-crowded morgues. The number of hospitalizations<\/a> spread over the ENTIRE two months and over the ENTIRE province was 123, of whom 46 needed to be in the ICU – so we would not expect to see panicky seething hospitals, either. Note also that Royal Columbian is one of seventeen<\/em> hospitals in the province designated as COVID treatment centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mr. Parhar’s expectations were more cinematic than realistic. This fool saw a quiet hospital and took it as evidence that the pandemic was a hoax. The rest of us would take it as evidence that our health system was efficiently prepared for the worst, while the public health measures embraced by the province gave us a fighting chance the worst wouldn’t happen. At the same time, I\u2019m sure Mr. Parhar\u2019s experience would have been very different had he wandered through the heartbreaking hospitals and morgues of New York and Milan, Madrid and London. In my books, Flat Earth Focker is an ingrate as well as an idiot.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Now, Mr. Parhar\u2019s foray into what he calls a \u201cLie Centre\u201d did not go unnoticed at the time. BC\u2019s Solicitor General, Mike Farnsworth, described him accurately as \u201ca narcissistic self-centred idiot,\u201d<\/a> putting health-care workers and patients at risk. This was refreshingly direct from a politician. YouTube later removed the hospital video for violation of community standards, but worry not\u2014since then, Mr. Parhar has uploaded over fifty more in a similar vein. For the moment, it looks like COVID-denial has overtaken Flat Earth in his list of priorities. I dipped into a fair sample of the vids to see what I could learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Apparently viruses are not real; they are a cell\u2019s own waste products when one is sick. Viruses are not contagious\u2014the only way to catch one is to be injected with it under the guise of, say, vaccination. Prime Minister Justin Turd-o should be arrested. Social distancing rules are a violation of our Charter Rights. People in masks look stupid. People in masks are<\/em> stupid. In fact, anybody who swallows the \u00a0Crapid-19 hoax is as stupid as any moron who believes the Earth is a globe. The zombies, sheeple, cucks, slaves and COV-idiots who make up the \u201cnormie\u201d population are worthy of nothing but contempt. It is perfectly fine to stand on your porch and bellow to the neighbourhood that the pandemic is fake; also, to roam the streets of Vancouver in loud little bands and harass random passers-by with \u201ctruth-smacking.\u201d Last weekend, it was apparently a fine thing to demonstrate outside a major hospital<\/a>, blocking the Emergency entrance and heckling health-care workers. Mr. Parhar\u2019s sign said \u201cCOVID IS PLAN-demic SCAM-demic.\u201d Another said, \u201cTRAITORS AND DUPES! COVID-19 is a LUCIFERIAN MASONIC NEW WORLD ORDER OPERATION.\u201d It figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are good reasons to wish for the lockdown, with all its economic upheaval, to be lifted as soon as possible. However, the visible anti-lockdown movement is a phenomenon of the lunatic fringe<\/a>, where all manner of conspiracy theories, anti-science agendas, and far-right paranoias intersect. I\u2019m just happy the Canadian variety seem to be armed with nothing more lethal than bullhorns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is astonishing, but true: there are people in the world who can read and drive cars and use smartphones…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,20,21],"tags":[31,30],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-science","category-skepticism","tag-covidiots","tag-flat-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}