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

[p_coyle]

be ungovernable, or, as scotlyn put it so well many weeks ago, be a weed. now is the time for sand in the gears, sugar in the gas tank, &c.

the other day a pitcher in mlb who was given some consideration for the cy young award last season (the highest honor for a pitcher in any given year for the legions of non-baseball fans here) tried to blow a ball into foul territory. not the first time this tactic has been tried in history, and it ultimately failed. he had no help from his teammates, which may have produced a different outcome.

there are ways to operate within the system, yet askance of the rules, that just might work in the right situation.

[scotlyn]

since you invoked me, here I am... :)

I have had a few more thoughts on the matter, partly in response to stuff I'm reading... https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/

One of the things he points out (in several places in this series), is how "we" (meaning, generally, western peoples) have come to trade in our actual power for the appearance/image of power, or failing that, for a story about how all power lies ELSEWHERE and is being misused...

As I riffed on this thought, I realised that to accept a power is to also accept responsibility for the use of that power, and for the consequences. Whereas to accept the image of power, or to accept a story of power lying elsewhere, does not.

Each of us is powerful, as in we possess abilities, and capabilities, often unregarded, unused, untested, but real. These powers may be small* - we can change things that are within our reach - the state of our houses and gardens, the happiness of a few people, etc - BUT they are real. If we choose to use one of our powers, this directs us to the domain of ACTION, not of APPEARANCE. And, of course, in the domain of action we risk failing. To act, is to accept risk. And to accept the power of action, is to accept the responsibility of action.

And, actually, I think this is the move most likely to restore each of us to our place in the dance... :)

*obviously none of us is ALL-powerful, and the world remains chock full of things we cannot change or influence. However, the real, if small powers we do have, should not be discounted, or disregarded, nor left to rust unused... nor should we be too quick to succumb to the multiple temptations to cede them to outside forces - whether narratives, or experts, or rules, or conventions, fear of failing, fear of judgment, or the weightiness of personal responsibility, or anything else.

[weilong]

That looks like something interesting to read. Thanks for the link.

Something that has been bothering me more and more in the last few years (not that it's a new phenomenon, just my focus has changed) is that so many people are willing to say "rules is rules" and go along with whatever stupid diktat comes down the pike. What is especially disturbing is that people do that despite privately thinking that the diktat is nonsense. Actually, I've come to believe that the whole point of school is to train people to follow nonsensical instructions without grumbling or asking questions.

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.

The only way to stop this whole mess is for individual people - each of us - to take responsibility for our own actions. We have to do what we think is right, and refuse to do what we think is wrong. We have to accept responsibility for, and the consequences of, our actions. It can be small things, and one at a time. Responsible action will be the building blocks of our new society. That might look like the dark ages, but at some point it might look better than what we've got.

On the subject of rules

[(Anonymous)]

There are more and more nonsensical rules, that is for sure, but here is another thing going on: they make rules and then don't tell us about them until we have broken them. Was in a work situation this week where to attend a certain remote meeting, you had to connect with a laptop. Except, no one told attendees they were forbidden from joining the meeting with a phone or tablet. When folks did join with a phone or tablet, they immediately got a very public and humiliating scolding, i.e., this was not a polite request to please connect with their laptop, it was a virtual pointy finger shaking, you are a bad person, dressing down. One person being scolded stood up, virtually, and said, show me where it says I have to connect with a laptop. He was emailed an obscure policy document that no one had ever seen before. The lesson from the experience for me was, when you get called on something, the first thing to do is say, show me where it says I have to do that. They will most likely have a document or edict they can cite, but at least then you have a solid target you can fight. I started my campaign right after the meeting, asking why the policy exists and how we change it. If the idiots making up this bullcrap are busy fighting to keep the existing moronic policy, they won't have time to make up new ones. And if I am fighting moronic policy instead of working and they are not making new policy because they are fighting to keep the old one, well hey, that is sand in the gears of the machine.

Re: On the subject of rules

[scotlyn]

Ha, ha, thanks for this. A nice bit of bureaucracy-fu!

Re: On the subject of rules

[(Anonymous)]

Congrats: you have now experienced being autistic ;)

The whole rest of the world is running on a handbook of inscrutable rules nobody ever told you about, and which you will not find out about until you have violated them so egregiously that someone feels compelled to tell you what you are stupidly doing wrong. If you're lucky. Most of the time people don't tell you, and you can't figure out why you got kicked out.

Re: On the subject of rules

[weilong]

That's basically how the whole industry works, where I spent the last ten years of my corporate career. There are mountains of procedure and policy manuals, which you may see once or never at all. You do your job the best way you can figure out. Then, years later, there is an audit and you get called out on the carpet to explain why you weren't following the rules laid out in some obscure document that you may or may not have read once but certainly can't remember, and which anyway is far from clear.

Re: On the subject of rules

[scotlyn]

...and also there are (were?) mountains of people employed to produce the procedure and policy manuals which will never be read, or acted upon, except under audit, inspection, or trying to figure out how best to "win" in a conflict between parties in or connected to the company...

For a few years, I was one of those people, employed "defensively" by a small food producing company increasingly subject to audit and inspection - especially by its corporate clients' "Quality Depts". I was terribly aware of how little value I produced for the company's bottom line compared to the people on the floor and in the transport departments. My role was simply to make sure an auditor or inspector would not find an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i" in any of the dusty tomes that I myself had mainly to produce, and with everyone - auditor and auditee - conspiring to pretend that the paper trail is an adequate proxy for what actually happens in practice during production.

It struck me that my presence, at first filling a brand new job title for a small company that had never before hired a whole "quality control officer", and later, having to train in three different people to replace me when I left, was surely part of the "bureaucracy" stage in Stages of Chaos, which is highly destabilising (ie the multiplication of non-productive employees at the expense of the productive ones), and must surely be followed by a fascinating "aftermath"...

Which, I suppose, we are all witnessing, and participating in, round about now...

[(Anonymous)]

"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."

Indeed..."You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about." Many fine insights here...thanks.

[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.

[scotlyn]

And, ok, sudden "lightbulb" just switched on for me when I looked back at your post and the word "system" jumped out at me.

We are always complaining about "the system" and yet are never (except by butchering a lot of facts) able to precisely locate who is running it.

And this is because *no one* is running it (ie - with their own self-appointed agent powers), and yet, it HAS the command powers that effectively DO push people around, because people in groups can DO that - relinquish individual agency powers in exchange for an invisible stake in a group structure with command powers.

And this is why the "system" can certainly goose us in the rear end, but is never ever to be seen when we turn around.