Anti-Dementors : The AD’s

[MinkyGreen]

Anti-Dementirs. These are a long running group of threads on Mumsnet.
I’ve recently been on a Covid thread and felt attacked by a group of posters for stating a consensus science view.
I then looked into who this group are - and they have formed threads called the ‘Anti-Dementors”. Dementors being those who wore masks/followed lockdown rules.
The groups they perceive as ‘dementors’ are dismissed/ridiculed as putting ‘cheese in coffee’, - or sitting in their garden with laptops during lockdown. The fact is that many were vulnerable/protecting the vulnerable.
There us also support/links to publications like ‘Unherd’ and ‘State of Fear’ which are bordering conspiracy theory territory.

While I think the discourse is important - it makes me very uneasy when people form ‘echo chambers’ and ridicule/attack/make snide comments in a group towards those with opposing views.

I look forward to your response!

I remember that.

And the mother blasted for letting her child play in an open communal sand pit on their estate of flats.

The family who wanted their parents to take turns to walk their SN children for a second time in empty fields.

The lonely mothers of babies/ toddlers missing the chance to go to groups and meet others at the same life stage, something that generally didn't return until summer 2021.

Even if you were clearly within all legal definitions, say going for a short run from home, you'd still be in the firing line for "panting" likely followed up with the phrase "death particles"
Deaths from cycling accidents were higher than usual in 2020 as more people made the most of quieter roads. Unintended consequences.

You can see clearly how the government valued different demographics by their voting and economic power and how children and the vulnerable were merely afterthoughts. The playgrounds reopened 4th July 2020 because of the irony that people could go drinking indoors, and the safer outdoor play areas would have had to have still been shut off. I say playgrounds re-opened... if it was relying on parish councils and insurers nit picking over the finer points of how to enforce cleaning and social distancing, it could take many more months. It was the extra layering of restrictions and measures beyond the legal that added a lot of extra burden in difficult times.

The fact is that many were vulnerable/protecting the vulnerable

And many were enjoying every minute throwing their weight around and enforcing the rules - not to mention bullying people who were already scared, uncertain and off balance.

I then looked into who this group are

They weren't a secret cabal and you aren't some investigator fearlessly uncovering them. They were people posting openly about their feelings and thoughts and were subject to the same posting rules as anyone else. Stop trying to make out that they were trying to do anything other than they did - which was provide a sorely needed refuge on the site at a deeply stressful and worrying time.

I honestly hasn't seen many covid threads recently and zero 'anti dementor' ones.
I did use search for a (grim) trip down memory lane and can't believe how some people behaved.
Wanting riot police to go in and break up gatherings of people meeting outside.
Wanting young people to be permanently excluded from school/thrown out of uni for meeting up. So bloody scary!!

@PretzelKnot my prayers for that little girl. I feel tearful thinking about what her and her family have gone through.

OP "I then looked into who this group are - and they have formed threads called the ‘Anti-Dementors”. Dementors being those who wore masks/followed lockdown rules."

actually this is just plain wrong anyway, we followed the law as well.

saying you "looked into who this group are" is quite creepy. Ordinary citizens concerned about the damage caused, is who we were/are.

actually this is just plain wrong anyway, we followed the law as well.

ahem …. I followed the same interpretation of the law as the politicians who made the law ……

Okay, you did that
but we are absolutely not a group who broke the law.

if we were, we would not have been posting in despair on here because people mostly made fun of my suicidal thoughts anyway.

I particularly remember the nastiness on here when garden centres were actually open and someone spotted a wheelchair user with oxygen, among the shoppers. I think they were outraged that this shopper might catch covid and burden the NHS. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Most posters agreed. Trolling? Temporary insanity? Who knows.

I did mostly follow the rules but I wish I'd not bothered!

I followed the rules. Just because I can’t afford a 10k fine for breaking them. Unlike our ‘leaders’.

Hollow laugh at a daily mash headline “woman planning on giving birth in the pub so husband can be there”. But on here women upset about giving birth alone while hospitality was open were treated with such bile. Ad threads were my anti depressants during lock down.

My concern from the beginning was that people adopted their own much more strict versions of the law, scarily, including several police forces.

Fair enough if that made sense to individualsa as long as they didn't try to impose their versions on everyone else (though not those whose job is upholding it, there's no excuse for that), but it seemed to me that people had an idea of what we must do from film and TV and adopted that. Often people doing totally lawful activities were told it wasn't in the spirit....

Eventually it was like a whole mountain of spaghetti but initially it wasn't hard to find the relevant legislation and read for ourselves. There were even human rights lawyers explaining and discussing it on twitter and in podcasts.

For example, Boris Johnson's announcement with great fanfare that we could meet one other person for exercise had me scratching my head. It was there all time.

Michael Gove's assertion that we could go out for an hour of exercise also had no basis in reality. I tried to help on MN by explaining this. I thought it would help people's mental health where getting outside into nature was their coping mechanism, but people didn't seem to want to know.

It was distressing to see that people felt they had to explain themselves and constantly caveat everything lest someone advise them of breaking rules. "While I was out for my daily exercise" was a very common one. "I saw my mum (she's in our bubble)" another, once that was allowed.

Dementors were not people that followed rules. They were people that wanted to enforce their version of, on everyone else. They posted things like "You can't take children in supermarkets. Sorry" or posted photos of a a huge stretch of beach, shaming the "covidiot" who had gone for a walk.

I followed the letter of the law. I did not follow the MN version of the law which had no basis in reality. I didn’t limit my exercise to 1 hour per day as that was not the law.

I didn’t know about those threads and wish I had. I now think of covid as global IQ test. Today, none of the lock down supporters around me seem to be acknowledging everything that is coming to light.

Love the idea of thinking of covid as an IQ test. Can def recall saying to a mate at the time 'Do you ever get the feeling human intelligence is actually going backwards?'

none of the lock down supporters around me seem to be acknowledging everything that is coming to light

People mostly find it very, very difficult to acknowledge that they have been scammed, misled, lied to - however you care to describe what went on.

MN taught me one thing about the pandemic - whatever you do trying to do the right thing - it will never ever ever be enough and people will take take take every drop of resilience from you and then hang you out to dry whenever you have nothing left to give.

I'm a rules-follower by nature - I'm autistic - I DO rules. But what we were accused of when we saw things like the media narrative being manipulated to keep us just the right desired level of "terrified" - what is now being proven to be really something that happened with the WhatsApp files planning when to wheel out a new variant of fear.... that was horrendous. We were accused of gleeful granny murder, wanting teachers dead, there was a quote at one point advising those wanting schools reopened to pack their child's body bag along with their school bags.... and now, three fucking years later - we're still being slandered and taunted in attempts to paint us as some militant organised dissident group and it's NOT bloody on for this to be happening, MNHQ. We stayed largely in our own little thread out of the way of everywhere else and we were bullied, harassed, taunted and accused of shit that was not bloody true - and these were some of the warmest hearted women I have ever met, able of feats of complete arsekicking - but who also kept a lot of us sane in the most fucking batshit insane of times (remember the fortnight or so of "does a scotch egg constitute a significant meal?") and they do not deserve that.

I kept a diary through the worst of it all as I could see news and history being rewritten on the fly and the Orwellian nature of that terrified me - it's bloody painful reading now, and really really terrifying how a newspaper clipping from one day was then deemed to "not have ever happened" a week later.

and now, three fucking years later - we're still being slandered and taunted in attempts to paint us as some militant organised dissident group and it's NOT bloody on for this to be happening, MNHQ

This. Why is this happening now? and 👏👏👏to the rest of your post. I lurked on AD threads, overwhelmingly relieved that it wasn't just me thinking like that. I begin to wonder if this post is coincidence now the enquiry has actually started.

Mine too.

Think of the number of ridiculous threads on here, such as the cheese in coffee bollocks, and you can see why they were needed.

They helped keep a balance from the doom and gloom mongers who wanted nothing more than us all imprisoned in darkened rooms eating only stale bread and water.

I've had nothing to do with them for a long time though, and have hardly even looked in the Covid topic for at least a year. I'm rather relieved that it has mostly faded from the Active conversations list now. It had become very tedious indeed.

I kept a diary through the worst of it all as I could see news and history being rewritten on the fly and the Orwellian nature of that terrified me - it's bloody painful reading now, and really really terrifying how a newspaper clipping from one day was then deemed to "not have ever happened" a week later

So did I. Have a 2020 diary and a ring binder bulging with press articles from 2020/2021. I was inspired by a local museum asking people to keep pandemic diaries for posterity. I don't think they'd like mine - some very harsh comments about people are in there - but I studied history and I know how things can be re-written and 'lost.'

YY @MrsDanversGlidesAgain The gaslighting and psychological abuse was off the charts Im sure it was me that got it in the neck for saying it was like an abusive relationship but i remember a couple of other posters saying it too.

In fact I copied this at the time to a word doc, I agreed with it so strongly. The date I saved it is 6 March 2021 - two years ago, so even then posters were saying this

QUOTE

We are in a fucking abusive relationship with the government. Can nobody see that? They have DELIBERATELY taken away all our coping mechanisms, such as seeing each other, swimming. Even in wartime, people were not criminalised for seeing each other. They are DELIBERATELY stringing out unlocking to fuck with our minds even further. They are DELIBERATELY brainwashing us with a campaign of fear to keep us docile, terrified, and to stop us rioting. They are DELIBERATELY playing divide and conquer - now it's so that we fight over whether the deified NHS deserves the 1% pay rise. Why bring that up in when we're still in the pandemic? Despite the stupid roadmap, with no roads, and the only transport is horse and cart which may well break down on the way, there is still NO END IN SIGHT; because we know how much Saint Boris loves his U-turns. I've just had another bad night of not sleeping, because of all this worry about the dystopian future which Saint Boris and his merry men (and Mumsnet) are drooling over.

. Someone posted on the FWR board once about if you wrote about the government's tactics on the relationships board, you would be roundly told LTB. They were savagely dismissed.

END OF QUOTE

It’s the inference that those who supported consensus scientific opinion were ‘demented’, putting cheese in their coffee, were calling everyone ‘granny killer’s’, saying things like ‘follow the f-ing rules’ and sitting in their garden with a laptop.

I felt at my absolute lowest point during lockdown - I have a huge amount of anecdotal and highly distressing reasons as to why I thought it was best to support the NHS during Covid.

Of course opposing views are important, but I have NEVER felt the urge to form a series of threads where I ridicule those who were anti restrictions - and call them demented.

@HopeMumsnet

It’s not ‘demented’ - it’s ‘dementors’, as in the creatures from Harry Potter.

You've entirely misrepresented the threads. They weren’t calling everyone who supported lockdowns ‘demented’. For a start, ‘dementors’ are completely different to ‘demented’. Have you read Harry Potter? Dementors were creatures who sucked the souls out of people. Dementors in this context were those who took every single people of guidance and magnified it; those who ranted at people for taking a 65 minute walk a day, those who said people buying Easter eggs in their weekly shop had people’s deaths on their conscience, those who jumped on anyone who expressed any discomfort or distress at the hardship lockdown was causing.
Why, 3 years on, are you attempting to have these views shut down?

@Worldgonecrazy

www.mumsnet.com/talk/coronavirus/4754309-the-whatsapp-message-leak?page=1

I felt at my absolute lowest point during lockdown

Join the club. One bedroom flat, no garden, WFH with a crappy laptop, told I couldn't have visitors for months by a Health Secretary who at the time was shagging his side piece and looking at 'run off their feet and exhausted' nurses dancing in TikTok vids.

And as someone pointed out, it's not 'demented' - although God knows some posters on here in 2020 and 2021 would qualify - but 'dementors.'