ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 66

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 66

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.

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Charles Eisenstein's latest essay.

I find myself resonating with a lot of his sentiments here. In all of the calls for Nuremberg II, I have been tempted to ask why exactly did Nuremberg I happen, and what exactly did it accomplish? If a coalition of foreign powers had invaded and conquered the USA in 1870, might they have been equally appalled at our genocide of indigenous peoples and have convened similar trials? Was Nuremberg really an ideal example of justice for evil actions, or was it specifically designed to humiliate the losers of a long and bitter war? Is Nuremberg II really what we should be aiming for, or can we step out of the cycles of hatred and counter-hatred, oppression and punishment, and transcend the tendency toward dehumanization?

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/love-is-unconditional-trust-is-not

"Similarly, something primal lurks beneath the rationale for punishing the architects of pandemania, the calls for a Nuremberg II, and so on. The rationale is about deterrence and “holding people accountable.” The ideal is “never again.” But are we immune to more savage impulses masquerading as ideals? The lust for revenge, the desire to dance triumphantly over a humiliated enemy? Can we distinguish rational measures against a recurrence of genocidal madness from the madness itself? The madness which seeks to control evil by projecting it onto a sacrificial victim whose removal from society cleanses evil from the world?"

"Did Nuremberg I prevent a recurrence of genocidal madness? Did the perpetrators of the Rwandan massacres pause to think, “Hold on, if we slaughter a million people we will be punished?” Come on. The purpose of Nuremberg was not deterrence. It was a sort of theater. It was an attempt to affix onto a few individuals culpability for an unspeakable, mystifying, and therefore all the more terrifying crime. True, those individuals stoked the furnace of anti-Semitic hate and rode it to power, but they did not invent the fire, and could not have carried out the Holocaust in the absence of a kind of collective madness, whose symptoms range from howling bloodlust to cowed acquiescence. It is the same madness that fueled the witch hunts and other horrors. It is indeed, as the word Holocaust implies, an all-consuming inferno. The hysteria of the mob is a terrifying force. It is primal, animal. It defies sense and reason. Yet the way we try to corral it into a narrative, through performances like Nuremberg, feeds its underlying fire. That fire is the meta-pattern of dehumanization. It is the energy of hate."

All good questions. For my money, I'm happy to not extract revenge. As long as I know this won't come for the kids, I'm content. Right now I am far from sure of that. What is to be done then?

I think the key question is: how do you deter psychopaths? If you trace this back, it wasn't some mad, mass impulse that just sort of occurred, like weather, which set this off. It was particular individuals, with some kind of agenda, purposes unknown. It was trained for. It was premeditated. I mean, how else do we get a vaccine ready two days after "work" started? That wasn't premeditated? For real? Anyone selling any bridges? Once rolling, of course the mass madness appeared. But there are psychopaths that need to be deterred from the levers of power. How?

Murmuration

How do you deter psychopaths? That's easy: just determine what caused all of us non-psychopaths to indulge their insane cruelty, so long as sufficient crumbs continued falling off their tables in our direction.

Imperial trade arrangements always end up being run by psychopaths, since they are one of the most efficient and effective ways of hurting incalculable numbers of people. The question is why the rest of us find it so convenient and comforting to attribute away our windfall under such systems by positioning ourselves to be "deserving" and some distanced other's suffering to be lamentable but "necessary".

Indeed, all this was very much trained for. Industrial, technological society trained all of us to expect just-in-time delivery to offer up vaccines in impossibly short time frames. We were lulled, one online order at a time, into unquestioning complacency with a wildly distorted and destructive system of wealth distribution. As long as our i-gadgets kept arriving promptly in our bread-and-circus shipments, most of us never learned how to doubt the financial magic holding the entire system together in thrall.

Fortunately, enough of us were able to notice the extreme imbalance and insanity of the psychopathic distortions we were being trained so meticulously to ignore. It's certainly better late than never, but deterring psychopaths from repeating this dreary cycle ad nauseum would require being early rather than late! As long as we go on being satisfied with securing excessive resources for our tribe, while allowing the monkeys across the river to starve to death, psychopaths will continue to rise to silverback status among us.

- Christophe

As I see it there are two distinct ways to perpetuate these psychopathic inequalities to a wider population.

One is through "othering" where people are convinced through propaganda or mass formation that another group of people really are effectively less than human or worthy of death. This allows the attacks to be carried out in plain sight. This is the phenomenon of the covid wars that is on a continuum with genocide.

The second is through abstraction, where the product is effectively decoupled from the suffering involved in its production. I know plenty of people who will happily eat chicken but could never bring themselves to kill a live chicken. (For the record I don't have a problem with eating meat but I also participate in all parts of the process.) The global economy is designed such that "products" are value-neutral objects that appear on store shelves guided by the "invisible hand" of the free market, and any link between a t-shirt and the sweatshop where it was made exists only in the most abstract sense. It's not that people believe sweatshop workers to be less than human; it's that those workers only exist and connect to a clothing purchase in the most abstract sense.

Inequity by othering is "Nazi-ing".

Inequity by abstraction is "not seeing".

Perhaps not so much of a difference in effect, but it is the othering that we are confronting here and the abstraction is a different problem in which probably all of us are complicit and that has different solutions.

"Nazi-ing" "NOT see-ing"

"NaZI-ing" "Not SEEing"

I see what you did there, Mark... ;)

To SEE the human is what redeems the human.

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

(Anonymous) - 2022-11-11 15:53 (UTC) - Expand

Christophe,
Most dangerous psychopaths can't be deterred, are very bright and motivated and rarely respond to rehabilitation. Some like Hariri revel in describing, in detail, what they will subject the "usless eaters" to while proclaiming their virtious mandate to do so.
We've lost an eldery family member within eight weeks of a second dose to aggressive brain cancer and seen complications in others.
We've learned to believe people when they show us who they are.

I couldn't agree more, Christophe, and I am also enjoying Mark's input here as well. Nice conversation overall!

I really don't know what's going on in America, at the street level. The sudden call for "amnesty" struck me an awful lot like a drunken abusive husband snarling at his battered wife between blows that she must forgive him, otherwise she's a beast. Of course, I do not have a front seat to the spectacle, so may be missing key details.
One thing I've observed elsewhere is that when someone concludes that some other person or group of people are unfit intellectually and/or psychologically, and thus beneath their dignity (and this is a common human flaw), they are likely never to change their mind on that, dismissing evidence to the contrary and rationalizing their initial impression. And from the words I've heard from the article that set this off, it seems to me to be part of what is going on.

Live in small tribes again, no big cities where you can live anonymously.

VA Mtn Man

I really enjoy Charles' essays. I guess he is simply asking for what every good wizard is suppose to achieve, self knowledge. Simple, but not that easy to distinguish your own anger from your hate. I think it is easy to hate, but hard figure out what to do with your anger that is constructive.

My best guess is that we are being asked to treat the objects of our anger as if they were people we love, like a child or spouse or other close relative. Beloved people do things that anger us, and how do we react? Usually not with the full force of hate and malice and vengeance that we accord to our enemies, right?

So to love our neighbors as ourselves, we make the effort to stand in their shoes and see what they see from their perspective. We discharge the hot anger in some form of necessary work, hard physical labor or an angry stomping dance to music that energizes and dissipates energy.

Then we are left with cool anger and we begin to plan. Plan what? Whatever it takes to get across to the offending parties that we find A, B, C, Q, and X situations intolerable and that we will not put up with those. At all. On those we will fight and make life most unpleasant for the Offenders.

That We find D thru P and R situations less obnoxious but still smelly. These are negotiable and we are willing to consider options that will allow Us and Them to get some of what we each want some of the time.

We firmly state what we find valuable about our relationship with Them and that we are unwilling at this time to damage the relationship. We ask for their responses to our declarations and then we listen and consider what has been said.

It is dreary work. Tedious, icky, time consuming, heart-achy and head-knocking work. But, being the grown-ups in the room, we do it the best we know how.

This is what we do unless we perceive that there is clear and present danger to us or Anyone and then we take immediate steps to halt the Offenders in their tracks and prevent them from doing more harm.

Don’t know if this answers your question.
I was more or less trying to work out a game plan for myself.

Thanks for your ideas. I think you are right about dreary work, very tedious and of course, case by case, situation by situation. I have already told one friend that I wouldn't discuss COVID with her anymore as I valued our friendship too much to damage it by continuing in such discussions. I don't think my anger was quite cool yet in that situation, but I wanted it to be, so I just called Pax. As time goes on, I think my original knee jerk othering reactions have calmed down. I may not love the COVIDIANS in my life, but at least, I don't want to other them, I hope. I think there is something of Aikido or Sun Tsu about all this. Seems to me that when your anger seeks expression in hate, you have already hit the matt.

I don't know, it's all a bit grandiose and flowery for me. Like somebody in love with their own prose.
I don't want to boil in hate
but no I don't want to cut 'Jerry' any slack for drunk-driving into the kids out for a ride in a hay wagon pulled by Ol' Nessie.

(commenter with self-evaluation)
I'm not sure I said this in the best spirit. I think the comments in the first two sentences
are somewhat, more than somewhat, 'dingy' and unfair.

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

(Anonymous) - 2022-11-11 03:13 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

(Anonymous) - 2022-11-11 16:42 (UTC) - Expand

The point of sending murderers to prison is not to stop murder forever. That’s a ridiculous premise.

Agree with this.
I can think of all sorts of analogies about crimes that will 'never stop' and laws on the books that inhibit those future crimes and laws on the books that punish for committing those crimes.

This. Demoralization is key. Punishing criminals is only half of the equation. The other half is living in a just society.

If you feel you don't live in a just society you are demoralized... quite literally you have had your morals removed.

What are demoralized people capable of?

Harrison Koehli, of the Ponerology Substack, has a good take on this in my view:

https://ponerology.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-covid-amnesty

"I’m going to take a surprising position on this one. Yes, I say, let us have a full Covid amnesty!

"Let me pause for a moment to allow my dear readers to recover from the shock. Then, let me lay out my conditions. Because of course there are conditions.

"Let there be a full amnesty for all the Covid totalitarians—all those leaders who through ignorance, spinelessness, greed, or malevolence created and maintained these policies—but only on this condition: that they willingly retire from their current positions of influence and power, from which they will thenceforth be barred for life. Those who refuse will be subject to a pandemic inquiry ..., with all the legal consequences that may follow.

"I think this is a fair compromise. Each side wants their cake and to eat it too. Oster and those like her want the record wiped clean. No real apology, no real repentance, but full amnesty for any moral lapses or crimes committed. 'I want amnesty for all the bad things I did, but I still want to keep all the social and professional perks I currently have.' That’s not going to work.

"On the other hand, those who have been proven right about all these things want some justice. '1) Put yourself on trial! 2) Find yourself guilty! 3) Punish yourself to the full extent of the law!' Good luck with that. The people responsible are the people in power, and they will not admit their errors, let alone step down from office and give up without a fight, so long as there is even the hint of possible retribution—aside from a few scapegoats, perhaps.

"This is essentially what Lobaczewski recommended in the 1980s just prior to the fall of communism, and more or less what happened when it did fall. There was very little if any retribution. Where that process went wrong was allowing too many of the previous leadership class simply to change their ideological allegiances and retain power. They should have been barred from power, but offered nice retirement packages as an incentive to go away peacefully. What’s better? Amnesty, on the condition that they’ll never be allowed to wreck things again? A steady stalemate of more of the same? Or civil war? "

Michael Martin

I notice that in the United States everybody and their grandmother mentions "civil wars" to an Easter European it doesn't seem that probable but the easiness that this can be seen as a reality in US is scary.

It is some sort of magic too, the imagination that can be a civil war, an there is a retoric on both sides that violence is escathological and that can fix many evils and injustices. That seems to be the single point both sides agree, that is a dangerous point.

I have to agree with some of the responses here. The writer starts out fairly enough; there's much being spewed on both sides. But then he loses his way. The call for Nuremberg II is not the same as the call to replicate what happened in Rwanda. Holding the two together to appear as if there were some degree of likeness between them seems to me to be intellectual sleight-of-hand and a kind of moral dissembling. As flawed as the original Nuremberg was, and for whatever reasons it was carried out, overt and hidden, it was not a Rwanda. If anything, it was an attempt to hold back a Rwanda.

Very interesting interpretation. New cards drawn changing the composition of the 'hand.'

I didn't interpret the Nuremberg-Rwanda connection that way. To me, he was simply saying that the Nuremberg trials failed to prevent future genocides (like Rwanda), because they sought to punish particular individuals rather than to truly understand the deeper psychological mass formation that drove Nazi ideology.

I think it would be reasonable to make a counterargument that there isn't really anything we can do about "collective human nature" and so the best we can do is enforce individual accountability and punishment as we do for other forms of immoral and illegal behavior.

I *do* think there is value to be gained by looking deeper though, as Eisenstein does in his writings. If destructive and dehumanizing movements take on a life of their own and become bigger than, more powerful than any of the human beings involved, does it really solve that much to put some humans on trial for crimes against humanity? Or might it be more helpful to have their *ideas* and *motivations* put on trial as well? What if the lesson learned from the Nazi genocide was not just about the evilness of Hitler and Goebbels and antisemitism but about the evilness of dehumanization and othering more broadly? If this lesson had been used to write new charters of rights and freedoms, new constitutional amendments, would it have put us in a better place today? If we get an opportunity for Nuremberg II, can we make it more about building guardrails to prevent a recurrence than about punishing and humiliating particular human beings?

Edited 2022-11-11 17:09 (UTC)

I’d argue that while they did mainly focus on punishing individuals, they also DID understand the psychology behind the moment, and they DID put guardrails in place. The rails just lead to places few of us here would agree with. The people who learned the lesson learned it well. They just aren’t healthy individuals.

Murmuration

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

(Anonymous) - 2022-11-11 23:27 (UTC) - Expand

"If destructive and dehumanizing movements take on a life of their own and become bigger than, more powerful than any of the human beings involved, does it really solve that much to put some humans on trial for crimes against humanity? Or might it be more helpful to have their *ideas* and *motivations* put on trial as well?"

That sounds like a slippery slope right there. Yes, Nazism and ideologies of all sorts should be scrutinized and picked apart intellectually. And yes, the mass movements that go along with them exist and how they work on a psychological level should also be scrutinized. But in the end the best response of civilization to such things is to highlight once again the need for and value of individuality and integrity. That's what individual accountability is about.

The preceding is a very strong theme that runs through post-Holocaust Jewish philosophy. Emil Fackenheim, not without controversy, wrote: "In Germany the Jew was not the ominous 'other'; in Germany the Jew was the proverbial 'girl next door,' the family acquaintance, the classmate, the colleague. [...] To face this truth requires a maturity that would surpass every temptation at self-justification."

Doesn't he have a podcast called A New and Ancient Story? I listened to the episode he did with CJ Hopkins in November 2021 and Charles' position at that time was people should be vaccinating because it shows they care and if people don't vaccinate, we should forgive them for their selfishness. He also thought the tracking and mandating was wrong.

I found his position unworkable in that he used "we" as a pronoun often and his use of language encourages the mob mentality he says he doesn't want to see.

Could you link to the podcast? I would really like to think he did not take that position, but I would like to see the evidence first.

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