I've just realized an old question I asked on (I believe) a Magic Monday several years ago seems uncomfortably relevant. Sadly, I can't remember where it was, and have not yet been able to find it again, but it had to do with a question on an idiotic working for political purposes. In this case, it was an attempt to try to bring about "clarity of thought" to anti-vaxxers, and remove the emotional baggage that prevented people from seeing vaccines as the life saving inventions they are. Your reaction was to note two of the asumptions this working had, namely that vaccines were all overall life savers, and that what was motivating anti-vaxxers was emotional baggage; and that if they were not true, the working would fail to accomplish much of anything; and then someone else noticed that there were two intentions that were potentially opposed to each other (allowing others to think clearly on vaccination, and making sure people see them as life saving), and asked what would happen if they both were to recieve enough force to have effect, and vaccines caused more harm than good. You said something along the lines of "I'd expect to see the people who cast the working becoming increasingly obsessed with vaccination, and lose the ability to think clearly about the topic, instead only able to think "warm-fuzzy"; and for the resulting mess with at least one spectacularly dysfunctional vaccine seriously injuring or killing people to convince others to carefully rethink vaccination, with the effect of this working bringing them clarity on this that would otherwise be lacking." Someone else then asked about if this could be used to create a death trap for the people casting it, and your resposne was something like "I'm not going to help anyone with magic to kill people."
Well, what's occurred to me is that this may very well help explain what happened in 2020. It wasn't a sudden shift: the rhetoric around vaccination was always problematic, but it started getting really weird in the time around when Trump was elected. Things got extremely messy in 2020, but there was a very, very strange shift in late 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccines were first brought to market. It was as if millions of people suddenly lost the ability to think clearly about vaccination; and could only see them as positive no matter how many people died from them. Meanwhile, a huge number of people who previously strongly supported vaccination, suddenly had insight along the lines of "This vaccine is going to be very dangerous; I'd better not take it." I'm one of them: things suddenly fell in place, I suddenly found myself with a whole lot of understanding and insight; but this always felt very odd to me.
Well, this matches what you said you'd expect if both of those intentions were to have been activated; and we also know, courtesy of the person who brought the old Magic Monday questions about workings to kill people who support Trump, that some people in the alt-right occultist scene had absolutely no problem with doing magic to try to kill the Magic Resistance, so it seems uncomfortably plausible to me that this working may have been given that kind of attention...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-06-28 06:36 am (UTC)Well, what's occurred to me is that this may very well help explain what happened in 2020. It wasn't a sudden shift: the rhetoric around vaccination was always problematic, but it started getting really weird in the time around when Trump was elected. Things got extremely messy in 2020, but there was a very, very strange shift in late 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccines were first brought to market. It was as if millions of people suddenly lost the ability to think clearly about vaccination; and could only see them as positive no matter how many people died from them. Meanwhile, a huge number of people who previously strongly supported vaccination, suddenly had insight along the lines of "This vaccine is going to be very dangerous; I'd better not take it." I'm one of them: things suddenly fell in place, I suddenly found myself with a whole lot of understanding and insight; but this always felt very odd to me.
Well, this matches what you said you'd expect if both of those intentions were to have been activated; and we also know, courtesy of the person who brought the old Magic Monday questions about workings to kill people who support Trump, that some people in the alt-right occultist scene had absolutely no problem with doing magic to try to kill the Magic Resistance, so it seems uncomfortably plausible to me that this working may have been given that kind of attention...