Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 66

[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

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

[dendroica]

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?

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

[(Anonymous)]

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)]

I just had the image of guardrails like on ramps in rollerskating rinks that lead to unexpected, unmapped d-e-s-c-e-n-t-s......

Re: Eisenstein - The Mask of Derision

[(Anonymous)]

"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."