Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 67
Nov. 15th, 2022 01:05 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: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-18 01:13 am (UTC)Had the receptionists walked off the job, hospital administrations would have locked the front doors, not flung them open to the world. As for doctors and nurses, I believe most hospital workers in 2020 did the best job they knew how, often at their own risk, while having to obey management and government dictates that were often well-intentioned, but excessive and cruel. If they could have guessed that avoiding the threat of Nuremberg 2 required them to respond to that unfairness by quitting and giving up their careers, the already shambolic health care response would have been even worse. Had the doctors and nurses quit because they thought covid patients were being badly managed, a lot more people would have died of appendicitis and heart attacks out in the parking lots of shuttered hospitals. And they didn't have the option to say they would stay on but only to treat non-covid patients.
Some health care workers clearly lost their heads (or marbles) and did things that were illegal or morally indefensible. Most of them were just trying to do their jobs. Most people in any walk of life are not devils. Hindsight is 20/20. And most Americans either have a nurse or three in their families, whom they know to be hardworking and decent, or know someone whose life has been saved or bettered by good medical care. If they're like me, they have plenty of malpractice stories to go along with those. Still, the idea of sending the town's HCPs to the gulag is not going to be an easy sell for most of us.
-Translucent Jejune Octopus
Re: Peggy Hall
Date: 2022-11-18 04:23 am (UTC)I've been that voice in the past here, and I don't always have the energy for it.
Like all internet forums/communities that persist for some time, this one is developing a group of "regulars" who post most often and a certain "vibe" that develops as a result. My sense is that the "all nurses are party to mass murder", "even the receptionists are guilty", us vs. them vibe represents the views of a small but very vocal section of the commentariat. Thank you for speaking your own truth.
Re: Peggy Hall
Date: 2022-11-18 07:10 pm (UTC)I am surely part of those regulars. I also thank both of you, and Hearthspirit, for constantly attempting to pop bubbles. Please continue. Even beliefs I feel intensely, I tried to hold lightly. I'm always grateful for pushback, even if I wind up disagreeing in the end anyway. At least I've thought through opposing views before I continue to hold a belief lightly.
If I had to guess, the McCarthyite and Nuremberg calls surely correlate strongly to how insane your area was during the depths. I'd guess in red and purple areas calls are lower, and in blue areas, despite the blue veneer, there are more grumbling McCarthyite's that is immediately apparent.
Murmuration
Re: Peggy Hall
Date: 2022-11-18 10:33 pm (UTC)Certainly the desire for something on the spectrum from apology to accountability to revenge will correlate with the degree of harm incurred. I'm in a pretty crazy-blue area but by virtue of being self employed and not having children and having mostly-reasonable friends and family I haven't had a horror-story experience.
I think you can make a strong ethical argument for tallying those who had courage to resist and those who went along out of fear and those who were true believers.
I also think that once this expands from the scale of a bank robbery or a mafia to an entire segment of society that has propagated crimes against another segment, that this approach is more likely to perpetuate cycles of othering and division than it is to heal them, and that it is better to leave the balancing of the scales to a higher power.
I think that to hold judgment and contempt for others in our hearts generates hardness and bitterness and can create a victim mentality from which it becomes easy to blame our problems and emotions on others and find reasons to assign others to the class of "perpetrators". This particular thought pattern seems to have poisoned the social justice movement. Although justice and accountability may be laudable goals, I'm not sure it is possible to seek them without falling into this pattern.
It is, on the other hand, possible to create a positive coalescing movement focusing on ending ongoing harm and standing up for personal freedoms (see e.g. Canadian truckers, Civil Rights movement), even potentially winning over those who were previously on the other side. That is the direction I would like to see our society go after this, rather than focusing on justice and accountability.
Re: Peggy Hall
Date: 2022-11-19 02:48 am (UTC)"standing up for personal freedoms" -- that gets my whole-hearted applause.
Thanks for your comment.
Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-18 06:35 am (UTC)i respectfully submit these people were more concerned with keeping their jobs, rather than doing them. if they were concerned about malpractice issues and were even remotely informed, they would have quit.
it was, admittedly, a confusing and trying time. people were living paycheck to paycheck and faced with all sorts of inconvenient, even ruinous outcomes if said paycheck didn't show up in time to make their monthly payments. a consequence of playing the game.
it's still not a reason to allow people "just following orders" to walk away scot-free. does the receptionist deserve the death penalty? no. does the receptionist have to do 60 hours of community service and think about how and why what they did was wrong? maybe.
until the persons responsible for the bad orders are held to account, it's a fool's errand to worry about the underlings.
Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-18 06:38 pm (UTC)I don't know that it's a pointless exercise now, or McCarthyism, to metaphorically or collectively tally up those who chose to keep making Porsche payments (or simply rent) in one group, and those who also had bills to pay also, but decided to make hard sacrifices, in another. Seems like something worth doing as a society, if you want to reward the character traits of moral courage and stiff spines. Maybe we aren't going for that any longer though.
Murmuration
Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-19 02:17 pm (UTC)https://brownstone.org/articles/tribunals-would-introduce-dangers-of-their-own/
TL:DR - "[A]ny such tribunal would be a political body. Each proceeding would be incurably and poisonously political, as would each finding, verdict, and sentence." And, because "almost every significant change in policy can be portrayed by its opponents as an unwarranted assault on humanity ... empaneling tribunals today to punish officials whose policy choices were implemented yesterday will, going forward, discourage not only the active taking of bad policies, but also the active taking of good policies." The "satisfaction and gratification [of seeing today's leaders punished] would be swamped by fear of the actions of future tribunals."
It's easy to say, from the outside and post facto, that if HCPs cared about malpractice they would have quit, and that if they didn't think malpractice was happening in their hospital, well, they SHOULD have. But if staff had quit en masse from hospitals that banned visitation, that would have done more harm by leaving patients uncared for, not only those dying of covid but those dying of every other cause. Would they not have had equal reason to fear future tribunals for abandoning patients to suffer and die? Even under present rules, it could be grounds for loss of license at least.
Tribunals can sentence people to labor, and in some regimes to public self-abasement sessions, but they can't make people actually "think about how and why what they did was wrong." If anything, those who feel they're being persecuted for having tried to do right will thereafter be less willing to consider that they might have erred from ignorance. Boudreaux suggests public hearings to address what happened, but not to target individuals for punishment. That strikes me as a far more rational approach, and one less likely to create a weapon that could later be turned back upon its creators.
-Translucent Jejune Octopus
Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-19 08:10 pm (UTC)Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-18 12:51 pm (UTC)You make good points.
I don't agree with your take on Peggy Hall, however, because I have watched many of her videos and I do not have that impression at all. In the interview, after making her rather shocking statement, she goes on to ask Thesa Buccola further questions, and the inerview goes into further detail that clarifies things somewhat, so yours isn't my take-home conclusion.
But I would agree with you in that I do believe that most hospital staff were doing their honest, energetic, best to care for their patients, and unfortunately, we are going to see some lawsuits targeting people who don't deserve to be targeted. And in some cases the plaintiffs may have a highly distorted view of things. When a loved one has died, it is, alas, oftentimes be the case, that the bereaved want to blame someone, and they blame someone who doesn't deserve the blame. I have no doubt that many doctors and nurses have terrible stories to tell of injustice in this regard.
Re: Peggy Hall Interviews Theresa Buccola - Part 3
Date: 2022-11-19 02:41 am (UTC)In short, it's complex picture, with good and bad.
I think it's also fair to say that for most people, including hospital workers, the first stages of the covid catastrophe were very frightening and very confusing.