Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 53

[ecosophia]

As we move into the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. 

(Yes, the change in image theme reflects that; the earlier sequence served its purpose. With a nod to El Gato Malo (1, 2, 3), the posts to come will be headed by thoughtful memes relevant to the Covid mess. Yes, I'll take nominations -- you can post links in the thread.)

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before: 

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, the floor is open for discussion. 

Comments

Re: More thoughts on reconciliation

[dendroica]

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful and thought-provoking replies. I have to say that any doubts I had about this community have been alleviated :-).

A few further thoughts on some of the common threads in various replies.

Is the change sincere?

That's hard to know. Are places retracting vaccine and mask mandates because they really feel they don't matter anymore, or are they just reluctantly following the herd? I probably give people the benefit of the doubt more than I should. The True Believers usually leave some virtue-signaling hints around though, like signs saying "all of our employees are vaccinated", and I take that as a sign that I'm not really welcome there.


Is it primarily about disease and fear of disease?

That seems to vary from place to place. Some of the places that had the most draconian restrictions have also completely relaxed them (e.g. Australia) once it became clear that vaccines didn't stop spread and other measures didn't effectively control it either, which to me indicates that fear of disease spread was the dominant force guiding policy. Then we have Canada. It is perhaps not surprising that the replies saying "it's not about disease" are largely Canadian. Although many leaders are on tape attacking "the unvaccinated", not many went so far as Trudeau in also openly calling us misogynists and racists. So I would have to agree that there is something rotten in Canada with regard to using vaccination and covidianism as a subtext to set up demonization/dehumanization of the less compliant as a political agenda. That agenda is present in the US (which still inexplicably has a vaccination requirement for entry) and around the more WEF-tainted parts of the world, but it still seems to me that the everyday people I meet are much more concerned about the disease than they are about punishing bad noncompliant people.


Is this just a small battle in a larger war?

Some of the folks who are least willing to forgive firmly believe that the covid coercion and authoritarianism is a component of a global war on personal autonomy - a war that we stand little chance of winning but that we must fight nonetheless. From this perspective, folks who believed and who enforced the unreasonable rules were at best enablers and at worst foot soldiers of the enemy, who are likely to lead the charge in the next push for climate lockdowns or eating bugs or banning meat or ending homeownership and settling everyone in small city apartments. While I certainly won't deny that such an agenda exists, my perspective is closer to JMG's (https://www.ecosophia.net/the-great-rehash-part-two-the-futures-cold-eyes/) in the sense that this agenda is in all probability doomed to failure in the face of resource limits and the great cussed complexity of our planet, its biosphere, and 7.5 billion humans. But I accept that I might be wrong, or that even if it ultimately fails the techno-dystopian agenda might achieve at least a temporary victory in some parts of the world and cause a great deal of suffering.


Why the tendency toward purity-seeking as opposed to coalition-building at this time in history?

Coyote Girl asks, "Is there a relationship between the woke and covidian like there is a relationship between the worms and the spice?"

I'm not sure if this is meant to ask whether wokism gave rise to covidianism or if perhaps there are deeper levels of meaning and nuance from the Dune universe that I am missing. Assuming it is the former, I would have to say, from my perspective, probably not. Certainly many of the woke became covidians, and they used the same language and virtue signaling (taking action to protect the most vulnerable and less privileged), but I don't think the former gave rise to the latter, or that we would have avoided covidianism had we avoided wokism. Certainly a significant proportion of the anti-woke left - the "intellectual dark web" - fell for covidianism.

It seems to me that the current wave of with-us-or-against-us, purity-test-enforcing reasoning in the USA started on the right during the Clinton administration and really took off following the patriot fever that followed 9/11. It then moved to the left in the form of wokism and accelerated with Trump Derangement Syndrome and especially covidianism - at which point the right started to appear more reasonable by comparison.

The fact that this sort of reasoning shows up even on a dissensus-promoting, free-thinking forum like this one may be a sign of the times more than anything else.

I'm curious how this ends (I really hope not with open warfare), and I would like to see JMG do a post some time on historical patterns of divisiveness and coalition-building and how societies transition from one phase to another.

Without a strong grasp of history before my birth, it would seem that McCarthyism represented another peak - if substantially less severe - in divisiveness in the 1950s, which was followed by predominant coalition-building in the 1960s leading to the Civil Rights movement and landmark environmental legislation. Since the 1980s the trend has been toward renewed divisiveness. The movement for marriage equality was perhaps the last effective coalition-building effort, after which every social movement has been divisive, polarizing, and ultimately self-destructive. Climate change activism, BLM protests, Trumpism, covid response, etc.