Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 65

[ecosophia]

As we proceed through 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. 

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. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religious, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.    

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"if we just do this [totally useless but metaphorical] thing [mask, get injected, distance, stay home] in a super pious way, everything will be fine! So people who don't do it should be compelled to do it!"

The longer this goes on and some people still cling to this nonsense, the more I'm leaning towards an OCD-like explanation playing some role.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is said to be related to anxiety, with people using bizarre ritualized behaviors to deal with anxiety about other matters.

There definitely seems to be a correlation between anxious, high-strung personalities and the need to cling to the cootie rituals.

I wonder if people who on some level see the writing on the wall about the long decline, but who can't face it head-on, found that cootie rituals soothed their anxiety, because it was less upsetting to worry about germs and perform related rituals than it was to face up to other sources of anxiety. And now they can't let it go because it's serving a sort of function for them. If they had garden-variety OCD, they might know that their behavior was irrational even as they did it - but with cootie theater, they can tell themselves that they're still sane and rational, and avoid dealing with the fact that they're really having a meltdown over a much bigger challenge to their belief systems while hiding it behind OCD.

[(Anonymous)]

To the tune of Big Yellow Taxi:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
They paved drive-in theatres, put up Cootie Theatre
(Shoo-bop-bop-bop-bop
Shoo-bop-bop-bop-bop)

[(Anonymous)]

I like this theory a lot. It applies to more than long decline issues, such as no more happy motoring and contracting world economy. It also applies to the failure of Progress™ across the board and the loss of personal power and job insecurities of a wide swath of Upper Middling Classes. I do not see a way to test the theory but it rings true for me.

[(Anonymous)]

I have two family members with OCD. One of them was very extreme and non-functional long before the pandemic; the other had been able to live pretty normally before, but I'm not sure she ever will again. There are little cracks in the dam; she's starting to have a little human contact again. And I convinced her to avoid the bivalent booster. But the pandemic has basically broken her; she gave up a lot of things she enjoyed and I don't know if she'll ever have the courage to go back to them. It's very sad.

I think of OCD as a quintessentially American mental illness. There has been so much social support for it. Decades of ads telling you to scrub your house with poisons to save your chirren from germs. Portable bottles of hand sanitizer marketed with a belt loop so you can quick-draw it. If you're too slobby, they can take your kids away. If your house looks like an operating theatre, you are praised. OCD is just an elaboration of the American bourgeois fear-ridden way of life.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're onto something.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're onto something.