Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 66
Nov. 8th, 2022 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

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.
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-10 04:40 pm (UTC)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
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-10 06:57 pm (UTC)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
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-10 09:29 pm (UTC)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.
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-11 03:45 pm (UTC)"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
Date: 2022-11-11 03:53 pm (UTC)Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-11 12:35 am (UTC)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.
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-11 06:46 am (UTC)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.
Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision
Date: 2022-11-10 11:28 pm (UTC)VA Mtn Man