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){kind=small}
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.
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-11 02:18 pm (UTC)-Translucent Jejune Octopus
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-11 06:58 pm (UTC)The thing is that there were so many "mixed" neighbourhoods and marriages, and families, throughout Northern Ireland in the 1950's, but it suited the extremists on both sides to "unmix" them. This did not happen as an inevitability, but by dint of actual terror and fright being visited on whatever "wrong uns" did not "fit" in the neighbourhood they were in, until segregated neighbourhoods got ever more so, and those who had happily "mixed" got forced to pick a side, and if that meant picking *against* half of their own family, that's what it meant.
I also remember reading a blog by someone called "riverbend girl" in the very, very early days of the Iraq war. Where she described the exact same process happening around her. Whereas the year before, knowing whether someone was Sunni or Shia was neither necessary nor important, all of a sudden everyone had to "declare" for one or the other, and anyone happily mixing had to "unmix" or have their house burnt down. Both processes, once set in motion, were exceedingly difficult to stop, and demonstrate that it can be the most intractable, the most intemperate, the most intolerant minority who can set their stamp on everyone else.
Good examples of what not to do.
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-11 11:34 pm (UTC)Meaning I suspect, for all intents and purposes, unscathed.
I'd had a wild ride in my youth so the word 'street' was there in my self-identity but she punctured that balloon with gravitas.
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-12 02:44 am (UTC)Now the modern social justice scene has turned around and re-kindled the divisions again. Yes, many of those involved have good intentions, in their minds they're doing this to help others, but I don't see the end result of this as helping anyone. Greater acceptance usually comes from divisions becoming "not a big deal", not from certain groups claiming to be special, whether it's the majority or minority groups. I'm not saying people should give up their cultures or pretend to be something they're not, just that it works well when the differences become just something interesting to talk about rather than points of contention. Take Italians or Irish in America for example. At one time, both of these ethnicities were marginalized groups here. Their plight improved enough that they're never considered such these days. It became not a big deal. Some people with Italian ancestry make it a central point of their identity and some don't, and either is fine. That's what it looks like when a formerly marginalized group achieves equality with the rest of society.
I wonder if anyone ever has done a detailed study of formerly marginalized groups that have improved their plight in society? That seems like it would be an extremely helpful resource for anyone who's actually interested in currently marginalized groups achieving the same goal. The fact that almost nobody seems to be asking that question is very strange to me.
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-12 09:57 am (UTC)We are in new territory here and there is no modern map.
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-12 02:01 pm (UTC)I think that when diversity exists (hurray) potential faultlines also exist (boo!). And they can easily be made wider by driving wedges into them. In Northern Ireland, the wedges driven into small faultlines, which made them so much more "abyssal", were actual atrocities, each of which made the "other" side seem more frightening and alien, and "charged" the alienness with grief, sorrow, shock and awe. Even though the actual atrocities fell on relatively few individuals, each one amplified the "charge" in one of those positive feedback loops that you get in badly placed speakers. I often speculate that it would have been easy to start the feedback loop with a psy-op or two (there were plenty of "security" personnel busy about the place) to get things going, and then the runaway process would have developed a momentum of its own, as locals joined in.
To do the opposite, would be to somehow "remove the emotional charge" from a potential division or faultline. As you point out, this was actually done by generations before us, through the Civil Rights years, and right up to and including the passage of "marriage equality" provisions almost everywhere. The "charge" had been removed from previously highly charged differences, even though the differences themselves did not stop existing.
So, perhaps the task set before us (and I do seem many commenters struggling valiantly to accomplish this), is to "take the charge" out of existing faultlines as much as possible. And yet, those who have suffered atrocities, may simply be unready or unable to allow their real emotional experiences to be defused without some sense of a "balancing" of injustice. (And I also see many commenters struggling valiantly to express their sense of an imbalance, an injustice, needing to be rectified).
I think we cannot "wish away" the emotional charge that arises from harm and damage done to people. Their pain exists, and it cries out to be spoken, and to be heard.
Perhaps, though, we can decide to not be "amplifiers" in any positive feedback loop of suspicion and fear that will ultimately frustrate any possibility of future rebalancing or reconciliation.
Taking the charge out, can only be done one by one, by people who will risk "coming out" to those near them - "yes, I am the scary monster you've been told about - gay? atheist? unvaccinated? etc - but ALSO I am the son, daughter, sister, brother, friend, neighbour, that *you* already know and love. So, now that you know, do you still feel like you need to be scared of me?"
Re: breaking the binary
Date: 2022-11-12 05:42 pm (UTC)I don't think I would *define* wisdom that way, but certainly taking emotional charge out of memories/history is one of the *keys* to wisdom.
This might help to explain why our modern historical memory of the Nazi phenomenon - which largely reduces to an emotionally-charged "fascism bad!" - seems more likely to facilitate than to prevent a recurrence as both sides project the "fascist" label onto their enemies.
For me, personally, the covid years have helped to break down these faultlines. Previously, I was largely on "team blue" and (especially during the GW Bush years) viewed "team red" as rather frightening and alien. Seeing the blue team double down on irrational belief and the red team stand up for personal freedom in this case has effectively balanced the scales - where now I see the whole political landscape as filled with good ideas and bad ideas tangled up together in an oddly tribal, divided world.
If I may seem optimistic about our chances to avoid civil war, it is because my own desire to fight on either of the sides that may arise from a red-blue divide has - over the last three years - dropped to zero.
I suspect that the general working-class shift from blue to red that has occurred over the past 20 years might represent a similar awakening and softening of charge for others, who are now voting red but who are really waiting for a real populist uprising. Any other realignments that occur as people become disenchanted with some position of their "tribe" will help with this, even as others find themselves more polarized.
With the exception, perhaps, of the regions where the original Civil War was fought, my sense is that the USA is largely lacking the sorts of ancient and deep-seated cultural, ethnic, and religious hatreds that can be rekindled into open warfare - which I see as a reason for hope that we might make it through the next decades without major violence.