ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 145

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.

Current Mood: contemplative

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From:

ecosophia

I'm really beginning to wonder if a lot of people suffer from a poorly concealed death wish.

From: (Anonymous)

I think that, for many people, this is actually so.
Self-described Pychic Medium

From: (Anonymous)

Oh dear gods it just clicked and now I really wish it hadn't. I grew up in the circles of privilege (my parents are in the top 1% of the income pyramid in Ottawa, Canada, one of the wealthiest cities in the world), and one of the many, many issues that afflict these people is that they have an utter inability to ever make any kind of important decision, and in some cases even such minor decisions as "Where should we go for lunch" can spiral out of control and take over an hour to work out. Yes, I've seen it happen. Many, many times. They have to use various crutches to make any kind of decision, such as allowing others to make it for them.

These are also people who have among the most comfortable lives in human history, and yet they like to insist that "life is pain", "existence is meaningless", and that it still beats the "eternal nothingness after death". For the first time in their lives, they are facing a lot of the kinds of things that most people have had to deal with throughout history (such as uncertainty about the future or the usual issues with aging) and are suddenly face to face with the fact that life can be more unpleasant than they are used to, and a lot of them are reassessing the whole "The pain that is life is always better than death" thing, because they now might actually have real, genuine, honest pain. Of course, they cannot admit this, because their entire self-image is of the people who are smart and strong enough to see reality as it really is; empty, pointless, miserable, but still better than the only alternative: the horrific nonexistence of death.

They cannot admit without shattering their egos they've been sheltered from most of the pains associated with life; they also cannot admit that they would rather die than deal with the kinds of discomfort most human beings have dealt with for all of history, because that would mean admitting they are emotionally weaker than those people who they mock for "clinging" to such beliefs as the existence of an afterlife. Their entire self-image is predicated on being superior for having looked into the void, and accepted it as it is.

Committing suicide is a major decision, and since they cannot make decisions, especially not ones that contradict their self-image, they have to pretend that they are not doing exactly that: hence why the experimental mRNA vaccines were made mandatory (so they didn't really decide to inject themselves with it), and also why the fact there was a very real chance it would blow up and kill most of the people who took it did nothing to dissuade the elites: this was the entire point, at a subconscious level. It hit the sweet spot: it would allow them to commit suicide without ever admitting even to themselves that was what they were doing.

This is also why the elite classes in Canada are pushing so hard to implement a system to pressure people into killing themselves at the first hint of medical or financial problems: they know those are coming for them, and that they would rather die than deal with them, but also that they cannot make that decision. Well, if they are pressured into it, then they aren't really choosing to kill themselves, are they? No, it's the system's fault....

From:

ecosophia

It's weirdly common for the very privileged and cosseted to get into that whole "life is pain" business; the Buddha, who taught that existence is misery, was the pampered son of a king. People who actually experience pain on a regular basis seem to be more realistic about it all.

From:

methylethyl

Joy comes from overcoming obstacles.

Must be dull, not having any.

From:

robertmathiesen

Yes indeed! Coddled children grow up to become adults who think that a good life is a painless life. What rubbish!

Pain imposes limits, and "It's our limitations that keep us sane" (one of my favorite quotes). I'd much rather be sane, and hopefully also somewhat wise, than happy.

From:

ecosophia

Granted -- but I think it's worse than that. The people I've known who lived in a bubble of wealth and privilege and were shielded from pain weren't happy. They were bored, dissatisfied, and generally pretty miserable, and they spent their time chasing temporary pleasures to try to fill the void. I've come to think that your capacity to experience joy is measured by your experience of pain.

From:

robertmathiesen

That's been my experience of them, too. (And there were a great many of them at my university.) The bubble of wealth and privilege is its own special kind of hell.

And I really like what you said at the end: "your capacity to experience joy is measured by your experience of pain." Wise words!

From: (Anonymous)

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society.”
Erich Fromm

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-16 03:35 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From:

jdecandia - Date: 2024-05-16 03:54 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-16 05:11 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

adara9

Context: I grew up lower middle class, and now am closer to the upper middle class. A few thoughts:

1. From my time among upper middle class folks, I've come to think that each person has a sort of worry / stress / anxiety set point. If the amount of actual difficulty in one's life, especially that one can do something about, approximately matches that set point, then the worry can be used productively to motivate action to fix things. But for the folks around me, there is way less real difficulty than most folks' set points, so we've got all this free floating worry that wants to earth out in stressing way more than is necessary, helpful, or productive about random minor issues in life.

2. Something that crops up for me, and I suspect other folks, is that I'm well aware my life is good. I have plenty of everything I need, my kids are growing up healthy, my husband and I have a good relationship and good jobs, but somehow I'm still anxious, depressed, and stressed for no good reason. My work with the CGD has been very helpful in improving that, thank goodness, but most people don't have that. And even so, it feels absurd and ungrateful to still be discontented.

3. Perhaps related to 1: when I was younger and less well off, there was always something I was working towards. Paying off debt, losing weight, getting fit, finding a mate, etc. And many of those goals benefitted from pouring in willpower and energy. But now I'm in a place in my life where most of my goals are about maintaining position, or work better if I don't try to pour in lots of effort. So I end up feeling a bit at sea, while at the same time rarely getting that good feeling of achieving a goal that I worked hard towards.

4. Re JMG's suggestion of joy measured by pain, I found the book "Dopamine Nation" quite interesting reading. It appears that our brains do pursue a sort of balance of good feelings and bad feelings, such that giving in to the temptation of all the dopamine hits on the Internet can increase our unhappiness otherwise / overall.

From: (Anonymous)

I don't listen to Bob Dylan much anymore but once I sure did and recall a phrase, 'Helpless like a rich man's son....'

From: (Anonymous)

In the past 5 years, I went through the most painful experiences of my life, and my childhood was none to easy either (father who provided well but was an addict, etc.). The family breakup, due to strange and almost supernatural circumstances, being "swatted" by my straying, borderline ex, losing our house, job, etc. Wow.

Strangely, that forced me to really take spirituality seriously. And to take the divine seriously, and approach it, think about it, experience it. I feel, in many ways, far more robust and "anti-fragile" than I was before. And able to experience the sense that the world is alive, and that there are some (a minority) of real souls out there, worth spending time or energy with. But yes - pain seems to be sort of a forge that either destroys the metals put in it, or refines them.
Only my 3rd post on this forum. It's a great alternative to social media. Seems like good souls.
-Tides of Truth

From:

charlieobert

Wow - thank you for that. Hard as I try I've never been able to completely relate to viewing this life as all pain or as a vale of tears, lousy as it gets sometimes.

If God had meant this life to be nothing but pain She would never have created bacon cheeseburgers.

From:

ecosophia

That mystic sage and initiate Ben Franklin had similar views: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

(Yes, I know it's apocryphal, but it's certainly the kind of thing he liked to say.)

From: (Anonymous)

☕️🍰☕️🍰 🍺🍺

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-16 04:31 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

tritumi

A young man destined to become an important American academic traveled to Europe, "doing the continent" as it was called. In Italy, he wrote home to a friend about a group of small children he observed playing that they did not realize how miserable they are.

Such a view has always struck me as the essence of the liberal imagination.

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-16 07:43 pm (UTC) - Expand

From: (Anonymous)

a vegetarian's take on this, as i've sometimes wondered if the gnostics didn't have it right and the demiurge is this planet's god; finally, fruit trees convinced me that it's not all bad, because all they do is give, and give, and give.

From:

weilong

That's what kept me from really getting into Buddhism when I went through my "zen" phase as a young man. Recognizing that existence is suffering, and aspiring to no longer exist... it just seems like such an unnecessarily negative outlook. I think what allowed Buddhism to flourish the way it did is the fact that Buddhism in practice actually has very little to do with that philosophical underpinning.

From: (Anonymous)

These are two such common and unfortunate misunderstandings.

The Buddha pointed out that life is 'dhukka' of which misery and suffering atrocious translations. It means "unsatisfactoriness"; as in there is no permanent satisfaction to be found.

And there is no aspiration to 'not exist'. Buddha simply points out that we have made a mistake, a fundamental misunderstanding of our world. We think, we _believe_ it is solid, inherently real. That _we_ are inherently real. And because of that belief we always end up dissatisfied when reality consistently fails to meet our expectations.

The solution is not to disappear, give up or cease to exist. It is simply to understand, to adjust our expectations, to _realise_ that we never did, do not now, and never will exist as solid entities. Something which never was cannot cease. That is absurd.

It says a lot about the western mindset that these points are consistently misunderstood and a nihilistic 'boogy-man' interpretation substituted instead.

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-17 10:54 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From:

ecosophia - Date: 2024-05-17 02:22 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-05-18 04:27 am (UTC) - Expand

From: (Anonymous)

At this point a lot of people who thought they were being smart and "safe" -- trusting "their" government, taking the vaccine, and playing what appeared to be good odds in their favor -- are caught in a fear trap: Are any of the health declines, or symptoms, they or their dependents are noticing, due to the Jab? Even if they feel okay now, do they need to be especially on the watch for new cancers or autoimmune diseases? Is their heart really okay? Are they partially sterilized by the Jab?

It was around this time, in 2021, I forecast to a number of my family and friends that the United States would eventually face recriminations, world-wide, and an immense loss of respect and goodwill, as things went significantly wrong. Eventually, I figured, the worm would turn.

I also hypothesized that Covid, and any perceived medical injuries, would be largely blamed on the United States government, and maybe even on the US citizens. That is the cost of practicing real Fascism (fist-in-glove melding of government and corporations). In other words, I expected a lot more anger, and distain, around the world, directed at the US because perceived US "leadership" in the mandates and the Jab itself.

I'm still waiting for better indications where we are with the second consequence (and there are a lot of conflating factors, such as US getting blamed for Ukraine and Palestine). Does anyone else have an opinion or feel for this?

With regard to the first, a supermajority of people (including a lot of Democrats and government workers) now seem to acknowledged that the Jabs, and other policies, have harmed them and theirs. I figure there MUST now be a huge, if generally unspoken, gripping fear that people have injured THEMSELVES, by their own compliance, or that injuries are still to come? Imagine the weight of that anger, self-blame, and dread billions must be carrying . . ?

What, if anything, can or should be done by the rest of us? Should there be world-wide prayers or other action, to support those caught in the grip of real or feared VAX injuries? Would something like a "banishing" ritual for the whole of humanity be useful -- or even appropriate? Or must everyone with guilt, grief, and fear, due to their compliance or complicity, work out their own "Karma" in reality and in nightmares? It seems like a bit of dilemma to me, and for me:

On the one hand, I often pray, fervently, for everyone -- consciously including myself -- to "get what they have coming to them", with interest, ASAP. On the other hand, I don't want people to suffer, just to learn.

What can, or should, those of us who didn't give in to the Authoritarians do about this "curse"?

From: (Anonymous)

I too foresaw that the worm would turn. I did not foresee how long it would take, or how mad & obtuse so many of those who ran to get themselves jabbed would be, nor did I foresee how many people would be so intellectually and morally stupid as to impose mandates. But I do believe my intial sense of things was correct, that this was a crime against humanity, and the day would come that many people would be ashamed of having taken the jabs, and many more would want vengeance.

Wrath always wants its target, deserved or not. As our host has been saying, "It could get ugly, folks."

Now I see the worm is turning, slowly. (In recent days: the HHS talking about barring Dr. Peter Daszak, and the NYT article on vax injuries, for example.) Maybe the worm will continue turning slowly or, maybe it will regress a bit, and then return to slowly turning. Or maybe it will, as that famous saying (was it Hemingway?) goes, about losing a fortune, that it goes slowly, and then suddenly, all at once.

I have also also seen this covidian episode, so very strange as it is, as part of the over-arching story of the end of the Pax Americana-- that apogee in 1945-1955. It's been in decline, slowly, ever since (an outstanding chapter being the loss of the Vietnam War, and a recent chapter, the loss of Afghanistan to the Taliban). No one nation can so dominate the globe indefinitely; therefore I expect the decline of US power to continue, perhaps at varying paces, for a long while. Or maybe not. Anything can happen, things can fall apart superfast— or grind on for decades or more. Or who knows? It seems history can be mighty strange parade to the people watching it in real time.

What to do about pace of things, and about the wrath of the people waking up to the covidian crimes against humanity?

Well first of all, a caveat: It's not just the US; there are other countries that had a lot to do with this criminal pharmaceutical catastrophe, too. But that would be a separate post.

I don't pretend to know what would be best for each person to be doing, or not doing in this regard. Given my own personal talents and inclinations (others may have other talents and inclinations) I focus on what I can do that I believe contributes to a better quality of life for myself, my family, and those around me, and for those whom my work might reach elsewhere, and in the future.

In sum: don't think it's a one size fits all kind of thing.

Also, my metaphysics are apparently somewhat different from yours, in that I don't concern myself with other people's karma, I leave that to the divine, whom I trust sees far more than I ever could. I believe in reincarnation, and therefore I conclude that karma probably unfolds in this much broader and far more complex context, and I also believe that time itself is not as I, in a human body, normally perceive it to be.

In this material world, however, I am all for holding people who have committed crimes accountable before just laws.

Magenta Fragrant Pookalooka

From: (Anonymous)

As a satrapy of the US most people here in Oz take their thinking cues from the US. Since we're a very middle class country in many ways, that generally means the Democrat/left US mainstream media version of reality (eg I get inundated all day at work by my co-workers with CNN/New York Times type hot takes from Trump's trials. Frankly the level of emotional investment of the average PMC Aussie in 'getting Trump' is both weird and disturbing).

Anyways, which is to say the broad social consensus seems to still be at the 'of course a few people have had bad reactions, as the Drs always said there would be, but COVID is so much worse' stage. Most people put their symptoms down to long COVID ('would have been so much worse without the mitigation of the vaccines') rather than the jabs.

People definitely all know the opposing view but to accept it here in Australia would be to accept not just that they made a mistake and injured themselves and often their dependents but that our government officials betrayed us (and we have a much higher trust in our government beaureaucracy than in the US, on average) at the instigation of our closest military ally and major trade partner. As my husband said: 'Maybe you're right but I just can't live in a world where that is true'. So, I don't expect that we'll turn on the US at all unless or until the US MSM starts a witchhunt for Fauci or something and even then presumably it will be targeted rather than all US people.

From: (Anonymous)

Bingo. That and what would a major timeline jump look like? Wouldn't it look like a bunch of people disappearing? Hoomans need their stories to make sense of the world and they tell themselves a story about people taking something tainted and dying from it. But it's just a story.

From: (Anonymous)

I've been convinced since 2021 that Western society as a whole has an unconscious death wish. The whole 'clot shot' thing aside, the non-reaction of so many people (at least in Canada) towards government-assisted suicide, the sterilization of children without parental consent (i.e., 'gender transition surgery'), and the prospects of nuclear armageddon greater now than within most peoples' living memory has me flummoxed. Like zombies, the people seem to feel that "well, we are a shitty species to begin with, we screwed up really badly so the world is probably better off without homo sapiens". It is like they are already dead. Inside.

I am old enough to remember how jumpy North America was during some periods of the 1980s when it looked like Ronnie Raygun and the leader-of-the-moment in the USSR would lock horns and push some special buttons. People feared for themselves, their families, and their nation. Nowadays I feel that if New York City got nuked, families in Philadelphia would make popcorn, sit outside in their lawnchairs and watch the 'fireworks' til they die.

I guess that's why I love to watch Russia' May 9 Victory Parade every year. The people still seem alive, the culture is vibrant, proud, hopeful and grounded, and they seem to understand what 'life is all about'. The West? It's over-cooked and smoking.

Ron M

From: (Anonymous)

Maybe 'we' have a death wish because we are a 'dead man walking.'

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ecosophia - Re: Nobody cares any more about death rates or vax deaths

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