Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 96

[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 uselessness 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, religions, 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

[scotlyn]

"When you have a company or a government or a country full of these people, everybody does whatever stupid thing "the system" tells them to do. And nowhere is anybody responsible for it. From the top to the bottom and back, the buck just gets passed round and round."

Ok, this is a statement of the problem that the series above considers (at some length, but then, I like that kind of thing).

But in the last essay - https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-thresher/ - he makes a handy distinction between different kinds of power.
Agency - which is personal power
Command - which is power OVER others

I found that this distinction beautifully explains what *exactly* is going on in the scenario you describe. (And it is almost equally true of mobs, as it is of bureaucracies).

When no one has agency, it is harder for them to fend off structures or entities that command them, even when it works against their interests.

However, not having (or not accepting) agency powers does not mean one does not have or exercise power, because certain group entities - eg. a mob, eg. a bureaucracy - can wield, and even weaponise, effective command powers without any participating individual ever being responsible (ie - accepting the responsibility that their *agency powers* would entail).

Of course people always have MORE agency than we believe, if we choose to act on it, but a) everything in our economy, culture, politics, etc, has an interest in helping us ignore this, and b) there are risks, since accepting power entails accepting responsibility, and it is all too human to be risk averse.