Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 102
Jul. 18th, 2023 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
As we near the end of 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.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-21 04:05 pm (UTC)What if a lot of it comes down to pattern-recognition skills?
Many people have been abused, or lied to by the medical industry, or encountered some other authoritarian system, or studied history/sociology/political science/psychology, or seen a psy-op before - but not everyone recognizes it when they see it again. In fact, many of us were shocked that people went back for more shots after being injured by the first (or got shots despite past negative experiences with the medical-industrial complex), or dumbfounded that academics couldn't see the sorts of things they'd supposedly studied happening in real life right in front of them, or that people with medical backgrounds couldn't look at the real data and SEE what was there, or surprised by how many artists and "rebels" who claimed to be questioners didn't question when it mattered, or people who claimed to have faith didn't have any when faith was finally truly needed, etc. The fact is, having seen, experienced, and/or learned about something wrong and crazy only helps if you have the pattern recognition skills to spot it again the second time around.
Many people seem to lack the fundamental ability to see a long-standing pattern when it crops up in a new context, and it seems like the people who saw through Cootie-palooza were very often the ones who could say, "I've seen this before in a different context; the details are different, but I recognize the same PATTERN in a different setting."
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-21 04:55 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-21 08:06 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-21 11:21 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 11:13 am (UTC)I learned that I preferred privacy, the privacy of my own thoughts... and later in life when I was attracted to political activism, I learned to steer clear of those who thought nothing of asking "how is your consciousness raising going?" with the expectation of an equally soul-baring response, without recognising the intrusiveness of such a question.
The "shape" of this sense of the increasing social permissiveness of such privacy intrusions - "have you tested?" "are you vaccinated?" (Why are you asking me about a private health matter?) also came to the fore during this pandemonium.
In all cases the "shape" feels the same. As if a group of people have decided that certain privacy intrusions will be treated as universally permissible, that some kinds of thoughts must be subject to group policing.
I don't know if I've phrased this well, but these types of "shapes" that carry over between disparate groups, often at odds with one another as to goals or motivation, is what I notice.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 11:19 pm (UTC)Because being a selfish racist was the only possible reason for not wanting to declare my vax status to anyone who asked…
The parallels are exact but I hadn’t fully connected the dots, thanks for pointing this out.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-23 10:32 am (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 11:08 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 04:02 am (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 03:50 pm (UTC)Wisdom is different than intelligence, although the definitions can be hard to nail down. Generally speaking, intelligence seems to be more about things like analytic problem solving, logical thinking, the ability to take in and process new information in an efficient manner, etc., while wisdom is often thought to be more experience-based and to have a more "practical application" component.
I think what we're trying to parse out here is, was there some sort of "pattern-recognition across different contexts" skill that resisters tended to share - something that enabled us to say "no, it's not different this time, this is just the same old abuse/authoritarianism/lying/manipulation that I've seen (or studied) before, and/or this is just the same old flu-like respiratory virus behavior that we've seen before, I looked at the actual data, and it really isn't all that different this time," and to be able to stick to that perspective despite propaganda telling us we were wrong and crazy.
Maybe the ability to stick to your guns and believe your own perceptions when everyone around you is saying something else is also a key factor? Maybe that's part of wisdom? Because ultimately it doesn't matter WHY you thought the covid response was a scam - it could have been any one of the factors I listed, grounded in any combination of intellectual knowledge, instinct, prior personal experience, or faith - but the important thing was that once you perceived it, you stuck to and trusted your own perception, and were able to keep stubbornly sticking to your own perspective in the face of a huge society-wide effort to tell you that you were wrong, and punish you for dissenting? Something about having a stronger internal locus of knowledge/belief rather than a more socially-constructed one?
I don't know. I'm just throwing things out there. We've talked about what made resistors able to resist before, and it's an interesting question.
(FYI, I posted the pattern recognition comment above, as well as the original list of 10 factors that seemed to contribute to resistance to the narrative. I should probably make a habit of signing things...)
Mauve Erudite Stoat
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 05:44 pm (UTC)Rudyard Kipling's poem still nails it, after all these years... IMHO.
Sound advice for sons, and for daughters, too!
"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
"If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
"If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
"If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!"
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 06:48 pm (UTC)According to the MBTI, there are 16 personality types, which are different combinations of preferred cognitive functions. What you described above are people with either introverted intuition (pattern recognition) or introverted feeling (deeply personal value systems) as their dominant function.
The interesting thing about the MBTI is that the types are not equally distributed among the population. Types with dominant extraverted functions occur at a higher percentage than introverts, sensing is more prevalent than intuition, etc. Introverted intuition as the dominant function only turns up in about 3-5% of people, iirc. If you added up the numbers of people who have introverted intuition or introverted feeling as either their most or their second-most preferred function, I suspect you'd come pretty close to the percentage of jab-resisters.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-22 11:22 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-23 12:42 pm (UTC)I still think there is a connection, especially since so many of the appeals seem to focus on the different dominant functions: "Follow the science!" is such a Te-targeted slogan! "Save grandma! (Your grandma, everybody's grandma)" seems designed to trigger Fe. "Safe and effective (just a vaccination like all the other good vaccinations you had)" is made for Si. "You'll be allowed to travel again"? That's for all the Ne-dominants out there. "It's just a tiny prick" for the Se.
And the Ti, Fi and Ni are the conspiracy nuts, anti-vaxx deplorables. Good thing there are so few of them that we don't have to think up slogans for them, too.
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-23 04:28 pm (UTC)Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-23 09:22 pm (UTC)