Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 174

[ecosophia]

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

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 and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. 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 wholly owned 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 plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. 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. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Comments

[scotlyn]

I have seen a level of schadenfreude related to this specific homicide that surprised me, as it is coming from people on the left who, two or three posts previously, might have been lamenting the terrible effects on healthcare that RFK Jr will pose, and expressing worry at the next epidemic which will be caused by vaccine hesitancy. I cannot make out the worldview that holds all of those disparate thoughts in one head.

[claire_58]

Sounds like a "petunias" worldview to me.

[dendroica]

As far as I can tell, the left views the Trump-Musk alliance as the next phase of corporate oligarchy. Dismantle the regulatory agencies that play favorites and create endless red tape, and allow money and markets to have the final word with no input from The Science (or The Bureaucracy) that they still believe in. Things change, but ordinary folks still remain under someone's boot.

Being leftward leaving myself I tend to agree with them on that. But no one has any love for the health insurance industry, and I too have been surprised by the solidarity across political divides.

[scotlyn]

Speaking as a confirmed ordinary person - one of the chief identifying characteristic of this status being, to my own way of thinking, a marked disinterest in the concept of being in charge of anybody, and a pre-occupation, instead, with the small things that lie within one's reach, and the ways in which such small things might contribute to personal, family and community quality of life - ordinary people will ALWAYS be challenged by the demands of current, or aspiring elites, who are always with us. Like the weather, the seasons, the indifference of others to our pre-occupations, and all the other challenges life brings us.

In the face of such challenges, we navigate... :)

Sometimes we benefit from a changing of the guard, because the new elites, for a time, will strive harder to be more help to us than harm. I think this possibility lies open to us at the present time. As always, we do need to hold whoever currently styles itself our elite firmly to account. Still, the new guard will, no doubt, very quickly develop the same sense of entitlement to their superlative status that marks the outgoing guard, and we will, as always, have to keep navigating, dodging, and diving, to muddle ourselves through, and to open hold the space we need for ourselves in which to build some quality into our lives, despite the demands they place upon us.

The left, at least that part of it which DOES aspire to rule, and which is now in the position of the old guard retreating in disarray, might do well to ask ITSELF how effectively it DID stand between the corporate oligarchy and ordinary people during their ascendancy. If it ever does get around to asking itself that question in any public way, and to answering it in any honest way, it will then be fit to begin to rebuild itself into an alternative to the current guard, and be a source of change by the time changing that ossified guard becomes critical.

[dendroica]

I largely agree with you, and only meant to suggest that the "2+2=petunias" mindset exists on both sides, and anyone who believes that a man whose life has been based on greed, glamour, and public promiscuity is a bastion of Christian values, and that another man who is perhaps the world's leading investor in pie-in-the-sky green energy, neural implants, and transhumanism is a bulwark of conservatism, is also sitting on a nest of unexamined incompatibilities.

[scotlyn]

Of course. We all, ordinary people, all have to come to terms with the fact that the cavalry is never going to come. Not for us.

At best we may sometimes be positioned to benefit from internecine quarrels among those who aspire to rule... At worst, their quarrels will lead to battles that flatten our fields and burn our houses as their horses wheel and they hack at each other. And even then, it will not be personal. Just a hazard that goes with the territory... like when someone annoys Thor enough for him to start throwing thunderbolts around, and one of them is what flattens our fields or burns our houses.