Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 108

[ecosophia]

We are now in the third year of these open posts. As the phrase "died suddenly" repeats in the mass media like a mantra, statistics for work days lost to illness and all-cause mortality mount up in heavily vaccinated nations, and more and more ugly facts about the official response to Covid spill out into public, we are entering what may well turn out to be the most difficult period of the Covid disaster -- the phase in which denial rises in lockstep with the death rate, and a great many people try not to admit what has been done to them by the people and institutions they trusted. It could get ugly, folks.

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

[(Anonymous)]

Yup.

I've posted here more than once that I went to a fancy private school and selective liberal arts college, where I say in classes rubbing elbows with future doctors, including some who went on to attend the most prestigious medical schools in the country. And yes indeedy, one of their defining characteristics was conformity. Medical training, like training for all high-status, well-paying, ostensibly-meritocratic professions, is set up to select for rule-followers. Or, as author William Deresiewicz described people selected for by the system, "hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers."

Mainstream medicine is not totally useless, and I don't eschew it completely. But I always remember when I'm interacting with the medical system that, even if the people I'm dealing with are neither malicious nor stupid, they are conformists - because if there weren't, they wouldn't be there. They may have some useful skills and knowledge, but they are also by definition the kind of people who believe what they're told and don't ask the wrong questions. And I take that into consideration and proceed accordingly.

[(Anonymous)]

Similar background here. My ex-boyfriend from college, then a very handsome boy and excellent student, is now a well-established neurologist. I do not know, and I'm not going to try to find out, but from what I remember of him all those years ago, I could definitely see him gaslighting his parade of jab injured patients, no problem. I hope I'm wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll never forget a pre-med in my chemistry college lab class spiking reagents after he did his own lab work early in the week to skew the grading curve in his favor. He was caught - the filthy evil twat - after the rest of us had spent 2 weeks very frustrated with the wrong reagents. We were graded on the quality of our lab notebooks not our lab results after we were the ones to realize the reagents had been spiked.

I was also long past college age when I found out my local big university frat houses at Stanford were full of file cabinets with old tests the too-many lazy tenured professors would use year after year.

Another college pal is now the head of a big national university which receives massive funding. He's in favor of masks, tests, jabs, and 15 minute cities. Trained as a medical doctor. He was an introvert scaredy cat in college who would never for one second ever rock a boat.

Thus, I'm rarely impressed with anyone with a "degree" in something until I see the quality of their work product and their ethics.

[(Anonymous)]

I spent a few years in the academic research field.

During my (admittedly limited) tenure there, I was never aware of any overt fraud in any research study - I never saw nor heard of anyone I knew knowingly falsifying data or making data up out of thin air or anything like that.

What I did see, though, was no end of shoddy studies and manipulated data - studies carefully up so they were virtually guaranteed to "find" the desired result, cherry-picking data, ignoring inconvenient findings and changing course mid-study to ensure a more-desirable result after the first approach was giving the wrong answers, etc. The desired results were inevitably the ones that fit a political agenda, gave a funder the answer they wanted, or both. As a result, the "correct" answer would always have apparently-legitimate data behind it, that was not made up or overtly falsified - just heavily massaged. And, there were also often issues of time pressure - if the funder wanted the study done by this date, then it would be done by that date, and if some corners had to be cut, so be it, and all sorts of honest mistakes slipped through because "they want it by Tuesday!"

Why? Because conformity. The system selects for people who give the "correct" answers by an arbitrary deadline to whatever questions the people in authority ask (be it an elementary school teacher or a grant funder decades later), and selects against people who challenge the correct answer, or who attempt to ask the wrong questions, or who just insist that something will take more time to do correctly that others are willing to wait.

And those few years in the research field decades ago are why I still roll my eyes at the phrases like "studies say!" or "experts agree!" What studies? How were they done and by whom? Who were those "experts" working for - who pays their salaries and funds their organizations, and what is their agenda? Because studies can be made to say ANYTHING, experts are by definition people selected to be agreeable to people in authority, and whoever controls the purse strings controls the narrative.

[scotlyn]

Why? (Also)

Because gaming politics by (fallaciously) invoking the Authority of Science(tm) is the current method du jour for obtaining the highest return in the unthinking obedience of the "lower orders" and the "lab fodder" with the least expenditure in outright violent coercion.

Is it working? I think... the results are still very mixed.

But, personally, I like to stress that these debates we are having, when they concern one another's behaviours, are not scientific debates. They are political debates. Even when scientists engage in them. If a scientist cares how you behave, they are wearing their politics hat, and not their science hat.