#like I disagree about vaccine mandates or whatever

[thebookewyrme]

If you like everyone in your coalition, your coalition isn’t big enough.

This. This so hard.

Fran drescher opposes vaccine mandates just fyi

[forsetti]

On The Right’s Response To Covid: The Backlash of Losing Cultural Relevance

Right now we are in the middle of a surge of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus, a virus that has already claimed the lives of 640,000+ Americans. Yet, in spite of hospitals in the hotbed states of Florida, Alabama, Texas...being filled to capacity, people suffering from the virus being sent out of state for care, makeshift patient rooms being set up in hospital garages, and the new variant hitting younger people much harder than its previous version, there is an angry sector of the public that is still adamant the virus is a hoax, refuses to get vaccinated, protests any mask mandate, and is getting more and more violent against anyone who disagrees with them. Whenever all this madness comes up in conversation with anyone not part of the anti-science, anti-functioning cerebral cortex, the following always comes up, “I just don't understand why they are acting this way. It makes no sense.”

I fully understand and appreciate why it is difficult to grasp why there is a very vocal, very angry faction of our country that is actively doing whatever it can to undermine even the most basic solutions for dealing with a world-wide pandemic. Their words and actions defy fundamental common sense and basic humanity. When things like this happen a lot of people respond with shock, amazement, and even anger. Whenever someone expresses these feelings to me, a part of me completely understands and sympathizes. It is when the discussion shifts from, “Can you believe?” to “Why are they acting this way?” is where a discussion about the hard truths need to happen.

Whenever someone asks, “Why are they acting this way?” what they mostly want is some quick, easy explanation to make them feel good about why some of their family, friends, coworkers...are acting so horribly. I wish the answer to this question was something that was easy and allowed the person asking the question to feel good when they heard it. Most people have a difficult time believing people they know, care about are not the sweet, caring, smart people they think they are. The hard truth is, in a lot of cases, this is exactly who these people are. This answer may be difficult to come to terms with but it should be is easy if you understand the big picture of how/why of belief systems, a passing understanding of American history, and a grasp of modern-day conservatism.

The main reason there is a good-sized chunk of American society who are standing in the way of properly dealing with a pandemic is the same reason the U.S. is the ONLY major economy that doesn't have some form of universal healthcare. It is the same reason twenty three school children were murdered in cold blood and not one single law could be passed to protect against future school shootings. It is the same reason a significant number of Republican voters still believe President Obama was not born in the U.S. It is the same reason these same voters believe the 2020 election was stolen. There is a significant portion of American society who have been on the losing end of the “culture wars,” and instead of adjusting their belief systems to adopt even a fraction to meet these changes, they've dug in their heels in order to protest not only past loses but the ones they are certain to lose now and down the road. These cultural loses can be traced back to the South losing the Civil War. More recently, the loses go back to the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education. For a good number of Americans, black people are naturally inferior to whites and that is just the way God intended the world to be. How dare anyone suggest or make mandatory that their precious, God-blessed, God-preferred white children be in the same classroom, be considered in any way equal to black children. To make matters worse, a few years later, these “inferiors” were legally given the right to eat at the same diners, drink from the same water fountains, swim in the same public pools, and *gasp be allowed to vote. In 1964, black people didn't have one iota of economic, legal, or political power. Hell, one can easily argue they don't have these things in 2021. Yet, to those opposed to the Civil Rights Act, it doesn't matter what black people really have. The ONLY thing that matters is the very idea that black people can be equal, even theoretically, to whites. The next “L” American conservatives took was with women's rights. No matter how adamant they have been that women don't belong in the workplace, shouldn't be treated equally to men, have no rights over their bodies...our society has delivered them one loss after another and continues to do so. Conservatives feel “forced” to have a woman as the Vice President. They are “forced” to see women referees and assistant coaches in major league sports. They are “forced” to have women as their bosses, doctors, state representative... Deep down, they don't want any of these things and see these changes as a slap in their face and in the face of God because, like whites being inherently superior to non-whites, men are naturally superior to women. People don't “get over” things like this. They internalize them. They fume about them. They build up anger and hatred about them. They do not get over things like this or cope with them. The next major cultural losses conservatives experienced was the election of the first black president which was quickly followed with gay people being granted the right to marry. Despite what the Civil Rights Act says, for a lot of Americans, black people are inferior to whites. For conservatives, having a black man sitting in the Oval Office was like having Judas being granted sainthood or Bin Laden being given the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was an affront to God, America, apple pie, and the ghosts of the Founding Fathers. Instead of coming to terms Barack Obama was president, even if they didn't vote for him, the conservative outrage cottage industry fed their base's already built-in racism to undermine not just his policies but the very legitimacy of his election. This didn't happen by accident or came out of nowhere. It was already baked into the belief systems of conservatives and has been reinforced over and over and over again for decades. As bad as having a black man as their president was for conservatives, it wasn't nearly as bad as gay people being allowed to marry. For these people, blacks are inferior. However, gay people are an abomination. America may have elected an inferior to be president, that can be rationalized as a one-off, a Black Swan event (no pun intended,) something that will never happen again. Barack Obama was a single individual. Gay people being allowed to marry is an entire subset of people and, unlike a one-off, happens over and over and over and over...again. After eight years in office, the black man in the White House went away. Gay couples legally being able to marry doesn't have an end date. It may be decades before America elects another person of color to the highest office in the land. Every day, gay couples are getting married, having kids, attending PTA meetings, being accepted as normal, fully functioning members of society. If Brown versus Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act were the genesis of American conservatives losing their minds, the election of President Obama pushed them to the edge and Obergefell versus Hodges pushed them right the fuck over. Because these two events took place directly after a major financial crisis, a lot of people missed the real underlying reasons why conservatives lost their minds and blamed it on “economic anxiety.” Excusing racism and bigotry on “economic anxiety,” allowed people to “feel good” about the batshit nuttery coming from every pore of the American conservative movement. White people, in particular, will go to amazing lengths to avoid viewing or calling a fellow white person, “racist,” “bigoted.” Deep down, we know being a racist/bigot is really, really horrible. This is why we have such a difficult time calling out people when they say/act in racist/bigoted ways. Yet, this is exactly what has been going on and driving American conservatism since the first European stepped foot in the New World. As deeply ingrained as racism and bigotry are in conservatism and even though it has been this way for centuries, the one thing white conservatives could always rely and fall back on has been the fact they are the majority and had all the power in society. However, since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in spite of their majority, it has been one cultural loss after another for American conservatives. Each loss doesn't count as a single loss to be added to the total. Because of the personal nature of the issues involved, each loss increases the sense of loss by a factor. It isn't three straight losses equals three. It is three straight losses equals eight. Four losses becomes sixteen. The more they've lost, the more angry they have become. In Trump, they really believed they had someone who was going to reverse this losing tread and put them back in their self-appointed place of prominence in society. Trump knew this and used it to his advantage and in the process, gave conservatives a false sense of hope which is and will continue to be dashed on the rocks of reality, only fueling their outrage.

Certainly, there have been cultural “wins” for conservatives since 1964 but they have been few and at best, briefly slowed the culturally shift. They have never completely stopped or reversed the changes they've spend their lives fighting against. Deep down, conservatives know, when it comes to culture wars, their winning record is in Washington Generals territory. This has to sting. It sure as hell has led to some very nasty and dangerous consequences. Consequences we are seeing played out right now when it comes to dealing with a pandemic.

If you feel your belief system, which in turn becomes inseparable from your self-identity, your self-worth, is always under attack and no matter what you do, you can't get a “win,” you will latch onto anything and everything that might remotely make you feel like you are on the right side of things. If you've lost a bunch of large battles, this means you are relegated to fighting small, often meaningless ones. Conservatives can't win the war against blacks, minorities, women...being viewed and treated as equals but they will damn sure try to win the war over wearing masks or getting vaccinated. Because they've lost so many big battles, making sure they win the smaller battles take on even greater importance. The fights whether to wear/not wear a mask or get/not get vaccinated are not really about these particular issues. If they are, it is only tangentially. The fight is about winning a battle against their opponent, against a world, that has kicked their ass up and down the cultural field their entire life.

This is why so many people on the right are willing to risk the health and well-being of others. The “others,” are viewed as the enemy and must be defeated, no matter the cost. This cost even means the health and well-being of themselves and their own children. If someone is willing to sacrifice their kid's health to “own the libs,” which really means, “win a culture war,” they can't be reasoned with. There are not arguments or data point sets or incentives that will change someone's mind who is willing to let their own child get sick, suffer, and possibly die rather than wear a small piece of cloth over their mouth when in public or get vaccinated just like millions and millions of Americans of all political persuasions have done for decades. It doesn't take much to see just how far conservatives are willing to go right now to get a cultural win. They will willingly inject bleach into their system. They will happily inject medicine specifically to rid livestock of worms. They will scream at grocery store cashiers for wearing a mask. They will be on their deathbed in a hospital, dying of COVID-19, and with oxygen-depleted lungs, insist they don't have the virus. They will assault cancer clinic workers and patients over a mask mandate for the clinic, even though they themselves don't work their and aren't a patient. They will threaten public health experts with harm and death for telling them things they don't want to hear and/or believe. They will literally put themselves, their families, their friends, their coworkers...at risk of a very transmittable, dangerous virus rather than wear a piece of cloth other their nose and mouth when they are out in public. If this sounds crazy, it is because it it.

As crazy and seemingly unbelievable the right has been the past few months with their reactions to the 2020 election and the pandemic, they are only going to get worse. The world where they have relevance and where their ideas are deemed even marginally acceptable is shrinking. There really are not many big cultural battles for them to fight anymore. This doesn't mean they have or will stop fighting these large battles. They do and will continue to do so. However, I don't think they really believe they can win battles they lost years ago and continue to lose. This means they are reduced to fighting smaller and smaller battles-battles that have crazier and crazier rationalizations and justifications. The size of the battle no longer matters. What matters is getting a win, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Even if it means losing their own lives or their children's. This kind of mindset cannot be changed through persuasion. An individual here or there might change but it will only be because of some deeply personal reason. For the masses, they are going to be who they are. The only thing the rest of us can do is make sure they don't get the levers of power because as they continue to rack up cultural losses, they will lash out in more and more violent ways against anything and anyone they see as being responsible for their losing streak. America has been moving towards this moment for a long time. It is very much at a “make it or break it,” moment where it either becomes the multicultural democracy it has promised it could be or it becomes some form of an apartheid, authoritarian state. My heart is always with the former but knowing how mean, angry, and spiteful conservatives are, the latter is more of a possibility than I like to admit.

[pixiedoodlein]

10 days until school and I’m no more decided than I was a week ago. I flip flop ten times day about what might be best. A is sick of hearing me talk about it. He doesn’t disagree with my risk assessment but he is sick of talking about it.

It caused an issue with his friend, a friend who is his best friend and is unvaccinated and works in a jail. Months ago we told friend he could only visit (this place is their boyhood dream) once he’s vaccinated. Friend typically believes in science and is very health conscious but his gf is a moron Trump lover and her family the same and that’s who he’s been spending all his time with since this all started. When I asked friend why he’s not vaccinated he said he’s young & healthy, didn’t trust the vaccines, would do it when they got full fda approval. Plenty of young healthy people are dead of this. Anyway then I asked ok so what if you give it to someone who isn’t and dies, people incarcerated in the jail he works in and don’t have the luxury of social distancing, and he was like eh whatever. So yes friend is an asshole, but his best friend for decades, friend has always been kind of an asshole but has many redeeming qualities too. So we said no visit. But then in July when there was no covid here and no covid where he lives and we were blissfully living our covid free lives we loosened up and said he could visit with two negative tests. But then covid got bad again and when asshole friend contacted A the other day to say he took time off in late Sept to visit, A said sorry, it’s fully fda approved now you have no excuses not to vaccinate, we’re worried about our unvaccinated kids, and as of now you can’t visit but hey maybe if you get vaccinated and the numbers look better we can reassess in a month and you can come. Friend was a total dick about it, didn’t understand our point of view at all, stressed A about it, who was in a bad mood about it for days afterward.

Then there’s the neighbors. I had a chat with the kids and a chat with the mom. I framed it as we love them so much and I know they’re careful but I think we should all be more careful while the numbers are so rising (aka only outdoor hangouts) and we are careful but I’ve heard terrifying stories from doctor friends about kids and babies getting very sick, and they have a baby who I don’t want us to make sick, and she said she agreed. The kids have been pretty good about making the adjustment from constant sleepovers to playing outside but M keeps asking me “the kids need to pee are they allowed to use the bathroom, the kids are hungry are they allowed to come inside even for one minute for a snack,” and I feel like the villain (I’ve been saying yes to pee, snacks I’ll bring out). Everyone’s been understanding but nobody is getting what I mean when I say only outdoor socializing. All the kids keep asking me when I’ll take them to town again for ice cream, “but it’s outside” (um yeah but the car’s not), asking their mom to ask me for sleepovers even though they know what the answer will be. The other day they were playing in our yard then it started raining and they were like “we can’t walk home in the rain”- I don’t want them to walk home in the rain, but again the car is indoors!- so I drove them home (but made M stay at our house). They’re not my kids so I can’t make them wear masks and it feels like now I am in the position of being the mean parent who’s psycho about covid, which in a way I am, but it would help me to stick to my guns and feel okay about sticking to them if the government policies matched the severity of the situation, ie mask mandates in public places (instead of stores posting polite recommendations), vaccine mandates, virtual learning options, etc.

Which brings me to school. After selling M hard on real school, then I sold her hard on home school. She already “did” 3rd grade last year (as much as me teaching her in my pajamas counts as doing), but this district has an earlier cut off than the city, so she’s in 3rd grade again here. Which is fine by me- her birthday is the same day as the very late nyc cut off (12/31) and I hated that she was the absolute youngest. I used to beg the school to hold her back and they’d say “but why she’s doing so well!” not understanding that I was thinking ahead to the teen years. But anyway, despite her haphazard pj’d professor, she seemed to learn a lot last year so homeschool this year could basically be unschool. She’d traipse around the forest identifying birds and trees with A and her brother, reading for pleasure, and I’d spend an hour here and there reviewing some worksheets with her so she’d be on track when she starts real school after she gets vaccinated. She was into the idea, until she found out she and one of the neighbor kids are in the same class. Now she absolutely wants to go to real school, AND ride the school bus. The school bus part makes me very nervous. While there is now a school mask mandate (but will it be enforced? what are their lunch procedures, what % of teachers are vaccinated, what % of the older kids in the same building as the little kids are vaccinated, did they actually really update their ventilation system?) and a bus mask rule, it’s a long rural route (15 min drive or 45 min bus) and I have no faith that bus windows will be open and all riders will be masked the whole time.

So just tell her she can go to school but has to be driven by a parent, right? Not so simple. I was offered a job at a (somewhat, commuting distance) nearby nonprofit- an easy low stress job in a bastion of liberalism with very very nice smart coworkers, excellent work life balance, a writing job that sounds made for me, like the job description is exactly what I would put together if I were putting together my dream job (except the pay, which is half what I was making at a fancy DC nonprofit, but high for this area, and our housing cost is half so it should be fine if A can get away from little guy long enough to bring in some money too). It’s mostly remote but approx one day a week in the office and some days there will be things I need to attend out in the community (not necessarily our community, they serve the whole region). It won’t always be the same day in the office and the office is an hour away- so on those days A would have no car to get her to and from school, since I’d need to leave before school starts and get home after it’s done. So I guess we need to buy a new car? Aside from this issue we really don’t need a second car now, were planning to get one eventually, but not until A’s business has enough projects to justify the cost.

Despite its many demands/challenges/ stressors, home school is sounding easier to me at this point (especially because she already did this grade), except she WANTS to go to school. Someone talk me out of putting some lipstick and a pantsuit on her and taking her to get vaccinated. I know, I know: the 5-11 dosage is 1/3 of the 12-adult dosage. The doctors I’ve spoken to are split on this hypothetical kamikaze mission. The doctors I’ve spoken to are also split on me and A going to a pharmacy now for booster. It’s been almost 6 months since our 2nd dose. We do not have compromised immune systems. This county has way more doses than demand and I would feel better sending M to school (bus or not) if we had our boosters and she had a first dose- moral and scientific quandaries aside- because there is A LOT of covid here now, a lot of covid everywhere now, and I feel like we are returning to regular life at the time when we should be most hunkered down.

Which brings me to the data. Per capita there are as many known cases here as in nyc, except nyc has a 50% higher vax rate, much more mask usage, better medical system. People are not getting enough tests here, there is a higher positivity rate, and so I think the actual number of cases is much higher than the reported number of cases. It seems like, friends here and in the city and in the suburbs (I just broke up with a friend in the suburbs because she professes to be a good democrat but is hosting a bonafide super spreader event and vacationing in a place with 39% positivity and a collapsed health care system), are thinking of covid as something you catch from strangers- they wear masks in stores- but aren’t careful at all around close friends and family (so many extended family gatherings, so many, cousins and grandparents and half-siblings and aunts and uncles and whoever), when this is a disease that kills via the people you love most, the ones who’d never intentionally hurt you.

[cassatine]

and now a full write-up for the second half of propaganda garbage: the show ep 2. first half here.

yesterday i left off after the unsurprising revelation that the Flag Smashers have eco-fascist talking points - to be clear, they’re not actually eco-fascists, it’s just that they exist to be a made-in-conservatlandia caricature of radical leftism (that cannot but turn bad) and the eco-fascism taking points make it a tad less on the nose for the non-conservatives who want to believe they’re being catered to.

the Flag Smashers aren’t supposed to even hint to a real ideological alternative to that which is pushed by the show: they suscribe to the view that injustice is basically baked into humanity, or as Sam said “making things better for one group makes them worse for everyone else“. they don’t disagree with that premise at all, and in fact reiterate it when Karli Leader Lady outright says things were better before the Blip because there were fewer people, and now things suck because all those refugees getting repatriated is eating all the ressources: making things better for Blip victims is making things worse for everyone else. (also amazing inversion here, with the US military and government and let’s just say first world countries since lbr who the fuck do we think has power in the GRC doing A Lot for “refugees” and the caricature-radical-left baddies arguing *checks notes* that the gvt is allocating to many ressources to the refugee crisis. no one actually says refugee crisis but like. come the fuck on. this comes back to the Flag Smashers not being any kind of real ideological alternative: even under the eco-fascism talking points they’re just rehashing anti-immigration conservative rhetoric.)

where their views truly diverge is in their, ehr, solution to the inherent injustice problem. they’re not into maintaining the status quo as the least worst option, but they’re not really into changing it either - they don’t have an alternative to the curent world order to offer: theyre ‘against borders’ but again, that kind of stuff’s just there to make them look radical-left-adjacent. what they’re into is fewer people so that the ones left have moar ressources.

so when we pick up, their ideological stance’s just been revealed to boil down to “we had a glimpse of how things could be” when half the planet’s population killed off, and then Flag Smashers hint they have something big in the plans for the next day, so big there’ll be no going back. also their motto is ‘one world, one people’, because 'stand up, damned of the earth’ would be too on the nose even for this show.

meanwhile, Sam and Bucky go visit Bucky’s...not friend? a guy he knows called Isaiah in Baltimore, where we first get a scene with two black kids calling Sam ‘Black Falcon’ when they recognize him in the street. he pretends to be Not Amused, stopping to say it’s just Falcon and ‘do u want to be called Black Kid’ but hahaha he was joking, not being serious. social commentary bait - i kinda want to like that scene, tbh, because it’s less artificial than most of the previous ones, but also the situation is written so that Sam can’t really say how he feels about the moniker, because he’s talking to two black kids happy to see a black superhero - one of the kids even explains it’s his father who told him to call Sam Black Falcon.

and it still ends on haha joke now, which is kind of a pattern in this episode, and we move on to Bucky’s not-buddy Isaiah. they met during the Korean war. Bucky was with Hydra killing US soldiers there or some such and Isaiah was sent by the US military to deal with him and they fought it out in a bar in Goyang. it’s unclear why neither finished the other but that was their one and only interaction until now, it seems.

Isaiah laughs when Bucky says he’s not an assassin anymore, because you think you can wake up one day and decide who you wanna be? doesn’t work like that. Isaiah is a black man, so when he adds that ‘well, maybe it does for folks like you’, it sounds like he’s saying something to the effect of ‘systemic racism means only white people get second chances and that’s deeply unjust and i’d know because that’s my life’ or maybe ‘people don’t change but systemic racism lets white people pretend they can’. the end of the episode also gives you the option to see it a Hydra dig. no, really - turns out Isaiah’s serum-enhanced, and it’s not yet clear if Bucky wants intel or more from him, but Isaiah doesn’t care that there are superstrong meanies out there because after his Heroic Time In Korea he spent thirty years in jail being experimented on and he’s understandably Done; ‘even your people weren’t done with me,’ he tells Bucky, but the twist is that at the very end of the episode Bucky comes back to that conversation, going ‘when he said my people’, and Sam tells him not to take it to heart and ~that’s not what he meant~. which Bucky already knew, because by that Isaiah meant... Hydra.

so there’s that. the wonder duo gets thrown out, and Sam’s pissed too because no one’s ever told him Isaiah, black super soldier, existed at all - but his attempt at confronting Bucky on that is cut short before he even gets to ‘were u going to tell me or anyone at all that said first black super soldier spent thirty years being experimented on in jail or is it fine with you that it’s all been hushed up, what the fucking fuck man‘ because enter two white cops. racial profiling scene that turns into sorry Mr Wilson i didn’t recognize you without the goggles (unlike the army, the police very much can be shown in a bad light) means that if Sam doesn’t get to confront Bucky, Bucky does get to say he remained silent on the matter of Isaiah because Isaiah had suffered enough. Sam doesn’t get to confront him on that excuse either (reminder that Bucky hasn’t seen Isaiah since friggin Korea and thus is unlikely to have any idea what Isaiah actually wants; maybe he’s superdone superheroing but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t want a measure of justice if he could get one), because there’s a warrant on Bucky, who missed court-mandated therapy, whoopsie, and thus is under arrest and taken away.

there areno real repercussions to that because Discount Captain America gets Bucky out of his police station cell in a jiffy ince the world is small and DCA and Bucky’s therapist know each other from the army. said therapist is there too, to force Bucky and Sam into making-up through a therapy session in an interrogation room. somehow it turns into queerbaiting when the therapist tries an exercise she ~uses with couples trying to decide what kind of life they want to build together. it’s the miracle question, and the miracle they both want is for the other to talk less, because it’s back to banter, baby. Bucky gets to talk about what aggravates him in Sam, and of course it’s why did you abandon the shield blah blah blah you threw away Steve’s legacy and maybe Steve was wrong about you whoop de woo it’s really about Bucky himself, because then maybe Steve was wrong about Bucky too. cue the violins. Sam gets to tell him he did what he thought was right, but he doesn’t get to reopen the Isaiah confrontation or the cop situation or anything weighty and instead a deal is made: deal with the Flag Smashers, separate and never see each other again.

DCA was waiting for them to once again offer working together, and explains he thinks the Flag Smashers will be distributing their medecine in camps in Central and Eastern Europe - and since those camps are Blip refugees camps he’s either wrong or it’s probably not medicine that’s going to be distributed, unless the show drops all pretenses of coherency. he doesn’t know where they are though. there’s antagonism, mostly from Bucky and DCA, and still no working together, but Sam’s reason this time is DCA needs authorisations and shit whereas him and Bucky are free agents who can do whatever. as proven by *checks notes* his government property drone, his work for the USAF, and Bucky’s court-mandated therapy.

meanwhile in Slovakia the Flag Smashers are loading an airplane when new players enter, peeps working for ‘the Power Broker‘. they kill one of the Flag Smashers but the others get away. the Power Broker seems to be behind the ‘u stole from me imma kill you’ text, and it all seems overkill for stolen vaccines or whatever, and since the Flag Smasher’s super strength is apparently serum-induced and Hydra’s fucking everywhere maybe he’s the middle man.

and finally, as covered: ‘when he said my people’, Bucky starts - and immediately Sam tells him not to take it to heart and ~that’s not what he meant~ because friggin Hydra. so instead of Sam getting to read the ‘were u going to tell me or anyone at all that the first black Super Soldier spent thirty years being experimented on in jail or is it fine with you that it’s all been hushed up, what the fucking fuck man‘ riot act or anything like that. the episode ends on ‘let’s go talk to Zemo’.

and that’s a wrap without a conclusion because the only one i have is yesterday’s: it’s a show that makes a perfunctory attempt at pretending it’s not propaganda, but only so it can win the participation award.

[zeddfrost]

A Frostitute State of the Union Address

Here we are Frostitutes, the eve of an era and the dawn of a potentially exciting new one.  As Rosenberg’s run on Uncanny nears it’s end and Hickmans’ tenure begins, I thought it might be nice to take a step back and take a gander of where were at before the X-Men’s supposedly (and by all accounts it’s true) new, shiny and radical era begins. 

Admittedly, I was supremely worried that Rosenberg would have just wasted all the cache and capital established by Leah William’s work establishing Emma as the new Black King of the Hellfire Club.  The first solicited covers didn’t fill one with any confidence, despite protestations from official channels that Jordan White has heard us and is on ‘our side’.  Witness this cover in particular.

If that doesn’t scream ‘evil bitch’...I don’t know what does. 

But, I’m delighted to report that I was proven somewhat wrong, and if not for the perennial toxicity of shipping once again rearing it’s ugly head, this last Uncanny arc would have been decent, dare I say it, actually good.  We see glimpses of all the set up Williams did in X-Men Black coming to fruition.  We see Emma’s raison d’etre for this new Hellfire Club as being distinct from the old Hellfire Club and this slapdash incarnation of the X-Men, but still with an eye towards protecting mutant interests.  It’s especially refreshing to see her take more of an explicitly non super-heroic path to protecting mutant rights, taking to heart her declaration that it isn’t enough to hope that the tides will change.  Issue #19 in particular is a good example of this.  

I wish there was more of this, but I suppose there aren’t enough pages available for this AND the rest of Rosenberg’s extremely convoluted final arc. 

I also appreciated, though at the same time (and we’ll get to this in a second) kind of didn’t, Rosenberg’s positioning of Emma as the behind the scenes driver of the plot ever since the aftermath of Disassembled.  It’s very fitting for her character and new status as the Black King, and for the most part the reasons given for her choices make sense and doesn’t do a disservice to the character. 

 But, there are some choices made that seem unnecessary and  made just for the sake of ensuring that at the end of the day, she *really* is the baddie all those toxic fans want her to be.  There was no need to have her manipulate Anole into giving Callahan the vaccine (which, let’s not forget, was created by Hank in the first place) to get us to where these last few issues needed the characters to be.  Admittedly, Rosenberg does allow her a scene expressing her shame and regret about that decision, but it feels hollow and perfunctory: a not at all convincing moment included just to make sure accusations of doing her dirty won’t get much traction. See? Look! We’re fair AND balanced.  

The same sentiment is felt with another seemingly important plot point in issue 21.  Emma, with the help of Fabian Cortez, Nemesis and Sinister, is able to wipe all knowledge and memory of mutant kind from humans everywhere, in effect giving mutants the gift of anonymity and the ability to live their lives shielded from human prejudice and persecution.  It’s a fantastic moment, one that showcases her power, her ability to turn the tables so effectively on a seemingly intractable villain and positioning her as the actual protagonist of the last ten issues of this run.  

But, as with that smaller moment of regret about manipulating Anole, the excitement and payoff is short lived.  Rosenberg reverses this massive plot development in scant pages in the next issue, leaving one to wonder what was the point of this whole thing anyway?  

The answer comes into view in a few pages when the rest of the crew returns from X-Man’s made up ‘no love, no attachments’ reality.  The first thing Jean does, OF COURSE, is share an intense kiss with Scott, much to Emma’s and Logan’s chagrin.  The whole affair is of course innocent, no slight is meant....it’s all about true love or whatever, but one can’t help but feel a kind of immature face rubbing on the part of Rosenberg. Haven’t we tread this ground already at the end of Phoenix Resurrection and that Uncanny X-Men annual with Ed Brisson? WE GET IT. You don’t like Scemma.  These scenes feel like overkill perpetrated by someone who really wants to make sure you GET IT and that you DON’T MISS THE POINT.  It comes off as petty and utterly unnecessary.  

Why couldn’t we have given Scott and Emma a nice moment to acknowledge this Scemma business is over, has been over, say their goodbyes, and move on to better things? Why this regressive, pre pubescent obsession with Jott, which honestly also does a disservice to Jean AND Scott, all for the sake of playing ‘my ship is better than yours’? I just wish this whole ship nonsense didn’t exist.  It’s just so uncouth and marred what may have been an all around decent run.     

Lest we forget between pages and to drive the point home even further, Scott also makes the BRILLIANT...and somewhat uncharacteristic, given all the whole ‘I was wrong’ nonsense he’s been spouting lately, that the whole ‘mutants are now hidden from humans’ thing is a bad way to go and promptly disagrees and wrecks Emma’s plan in the most unsubtle put down imaginable. 

 SO, now we have this potentially interesting plot development that took so much work to get, undone in a few pages, all for the sake of once again making sure we don’t forget that Rosenberg and White are all in the ‘Emma was WRONG’ (for Scott too y’all, don’t you forget!) camp.  What a waste, and honestly we already know this.  As with that supposedly humanizing moment of shame and regret about manipulating Anole, we get a cool plot development that’s quickly undone to serve as cover against accusations of impropriety and dirty character work.  To quote a famous song, even if Emma gave these bunch of ungrateful ingrates actual diamonds from her womb, that won’t be enough to overpower the seemingly built-in sway of the all powerful (and toxic) Jott ship on some creatives.

....but at least we end this whole sordid affair with this page, with Emma alive and in formation with the rest of the team.  

We should also, perhaps, be thankful that the histrionics about Emma, the evil bitch, we’ve all witnessed during the ResurrXion (and shortly thereafter) era are absent.  I have things to say about Scott’s seemingly too easy reversal from ‘I was wrong’ to this more...Utopia/Bendis era radicalism...but I’ve droned on enough at this point.  And if a bit of hand waving is needed to get us quicker to Hickman’s promised land, hell I’m willing to let it go.  Let’s hope this splash page hints at the greatness to come during the aforementioned author’s tenure.  Jonathan hasn’t been shy at all about his love of Emma.  Let’s hope this forced editorial-mandated group shot (because Hickman gets what he wants, obviously) is a hint of things to come. 

[quicklyseverebird]

@aridara​ Thanks! :) Finally the last post on my to-do list.  Got the time to go through this, because I wanted to see if you were being honest with your copy and paste, first off.  (credit where credit is due, you were pretty much on, only minor mistakes, but you didn’t delete parts like I feared you would, so thank you for your honesty)  Your common MO, as observed in your blog and in past interactions, is to dump so many words into a post that people just get tired of it all rather than pick through it, even if what you are posting is not only wrong, but much of it disproves the very points you claimed they did.  People just don’t have the time you apparently do to go through it all read, write and check them.  Effective admittedly.  It’s the stygian stables method, in reverse.  Of course that requires a similar outpouring on my part. I will admit, reading back through this, that I did get over-emotional, and that probably didn’t help my cause, but you didn’t prove your case here.  You simply took us off into the weeds. Bottom line response, and don’t worry, this is my last post on this, so chalk it up to a win for yourself or whatever, doesn’t matter. Bottom line, and I don’t think all your words disproved this: On the scale of liberalism and authoritarianism, your position is closer to the latter than mine.  The idea that “only authoritarians were against vaccines so anyone who is against them is authoritarian” is ludicrous and disproven by history and your own admission.  Forced vaccinations are, themselves, a form of A.  Literally.  Now you can make an argument that its still good, but that’s not the issue.  Some laws are needed of course, because I’m not an anarchist, and society does require restraint.  It’s not an all or nothing system.  Nuance, remember?  But forced mandates take away from free will and the choice of the individual.  The fact that one A society chose not to do this doesn’t make all the others not-A, it simply becomes an example of one that didn’t do this particular thing that other A governments do.  The Prussian empire didn’t gas jews, but it doesn’t make them any less A because they didn’t do that particular act. Again, the fact is, you claim that only authoritarian governments (nazis) were against vaccine mandates.  I would point out that only authoritarian governments DID mandatory vaccine mandates.  Not all, but the ones that did enact them, were.  If only because doing so is itself proof of that. Did some anti-A groups not have a problem with vaccine mandates?  Sure.  That doesn’t prove anything.  At the time they had much BIGGER concerns to deal with, and they also were born into a society that had accepted such things as the norm, blinding them to it.  It literally proves nothing.  When your house is on fire, you don’t really have time to concern yourself with another spark fizzing up out of it. Again, and you can’t get away from this.  I say, leave me alone, smaller government, smaller government involvement in my life. You say, more government involvement in my life, less freedom of choice of the individual for the sake of the “common good” (paraphrasing, re:your arguements about the vaccine and builder analogy) I want less government control, you want more.  And you have the hutzpah to say that I am the authoritarian?  That my position is like the Nazi’s?  Your political position is quite literally closer to them than mine is on the political spectrum.  But then, because I disagree with you on this issue, that’s all you need to claim the opposite?  Hilarious. re: the builder analogy.  Was it perfect?  No.  I tried repeatedly to add nuance to my response, but you continue to once again simplify and make it a black and white issue.  I maintain that the government needs to be less all up in our business, that free market control can and will straighten most of this out much more effectively and efficiently.  The building code law bureaucracy has become insane by this point.  I’ll walk it back a little (again nuance) and say that they shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever the heck they want, I’m not insane, but they should be allowed more freedom, and should be punished and held accountable if things are done wrong.  Tell me how that’s any worse than what we have now?  

You say that you know that not ALL laws are made with your best interest at heart, yet you continue to want more and more of them, as if the assumed good will outweigh the bad, if you just add ENOUGH of them!  Kind of like the words in your posts.

I want the freedom to control what is done to my body.  You want to take that away.  I say you can do whatever you want, get the vaccine if you want, I won’t stop you!  Protect yourself however you like! I’ll stay out of your business if you stay out of mine. But somehow giving you the same rights as I want myself makes me a fascist (which is what you implied repeatedly)?  Your argument doesn’t even make sense logically or scientifically.  And we’ve seen that played out in real time.  The most controlling states continue to have the highest rates of infection.  Those more freedom-inclined, have less.  Real life is proving me right.  Fun fact, the vaccine doesn’t keep you from catching Covid or from passing it on, so your point is dead on arrival.  We literally were told this from the start.  This isn’t the polio vaccine or the smallpox vaccine.  It barely even fits the definition of a vaccine.  It only makes your symptoms less.  That’s all it has ever promised, and then only if you keep up with your “boosters” every few months...with no end in sight....  

My parents both got the vaccine, then both got Covid anyways.  Dad is on oxygen right now.  Perhaps the vaccine kept him from dying?  Maybe?  Sister got the vaccine, and now is suffering from MIS as a side effect of the vaccine.  Think rheumatoid arthritis in her 20′s, and the doctor’s don’t know how to treat it.  Friend’s sister started having seizures within hours of her vaccine and is literally waiting to die at this point.  Those are risks and benefits.  You have the right to choose your risk for yourself and family, not the government.  We know that side effects will kill 117 children under 18 years old that get the vaccine for every life they save, because kids simply don’t die from Covid, yet some governments are forcing this anyways?  I’m more likely to die driving home from work than from Covid.  Yet for my father, who is immune compromised, it actually made sense for him to get the vaccine, though the same issue kept it from being as effective.  (only 50% of immunocompromised people develop the antibodies, with every additional dose increasing this by 50%)  I don’t WANT to get Covid, and if I do, I will quarantine to avoid trying to transmit it to anyone else of course, as a decent human being.  And that should be my choice.  Anyone who says otherwise is an authoritarian jackboot who can, to quote you, F&%* off. Bottom line again.  I’m for freedom, you are for control.  I’m for less government regulation, you are for more.  You are far more authoritarian than I am.  And you simultaneously decry that while agreeing with it at the same time.  You are the one trying to make my choices for me.  So who is the bad guy?

[heatherhasbetterthingstodo]

Letter 22 of 22

February 3, 2022

Dear Premier Stefanson et al,

It has been twenty-one (21) days since I sent correspondence with feedback that was expressly solicited when you said on January 12th that you "will be taking advice from other Manitobans…moving forward." To date, I have received no response whatsoever from either yourself or any representative of yours. This is disappointing, though not unexpected.

The press conference yesterday was yet another discouraging instance of the current government in Manitoba seeking to forge ahead without proper regard for the short or long-term consequences of easing restrictions yet again (while case numbers are beyond counting, transmission of Covid-19 is at an all-time level, and deaths related to Covid are still climbing). Contrary to what you said during the question period, we actually do not all have the same end-goal in mind. Those individuals and communities that have remained steadfast in their objection to public health orders/measures are being increasingly released from any responsibility they have to get vaccinated, remain masked, limit contacts, etc, which has always been their primary goal. This dissent is seriously problematic, unjust, and has literally cost people their lives. What's more, with Dr. Roussin providing false hope about a spring re-opening with zero restrictions (?), this will only serve to strengthen obstinacy, complacency, and revolt. Who knows. Maybe circumstances will be significantly better by then…for everyone's sake, I hope they are. However, that remains to be seen, and the evidence world-wide is not yet confirmably pointing in that direction. In fact, as Maria Van Kerkhove from the World Health Organization disclosed yesterday, since the Coronavirus is continuing to circulate and evolve, we need to do all that we can to reduce our exposure to whatever variant is circulating.

Second, your continued partisan critique of the federal vaccine mandate for truck drivers was not what Manitobans needed to hear - along with your unwillingness to speak against MP Candice Bergen's comments that unashamedly equated hate symbols like the Nazi flag with the removal of tacitly racist/colonization-supporting statues. You said repeatedly that you "don't condone any violent behaviour." Good. And yet a clear statement that you fundamentally disagree with the ideology and practice of protesters in both Ottawa and Alberta was glaringly absent. Though property damage and hate speech are both unlawful, they are absolutely not equivalent.

And one final comment. To reiterate the very last thing that you uttered to people yesterday: "We're done"…for now. It's clear that the provincial government is unwaveringly set on doing the very opposite of what I had passed along exactly three weeks ago AND that you have no intention of reading or replying to any of my correspondence. I guess what you said on January 12th about "taking advice from other Manitobans" was just rhetoric…I always knew it was, but this has been a helpful exercise these past twenty-one days of sending daily emails to manifestly confirm the indifference and undependabilty of MB Gov's current Conservative leadership. I earnestly look forward to voting for Wab Kinew whenever the next provincial election takes place (who - as a point of trivia - was the one and only person that personally responded to the initial message I sent on January 13th).

I wish you and your family health and safety for however many years this worldwide epidemic continues.

Sincerely, X

p.s. At the very least, if you're not going to listen to the lay opinions of a non-health-expert like myself, perhaps take some time consider the advice of professionals like Dr. Jason Kindrachuk or Dr. Souradet Shaw, who both agree that the plan to reopen is premature and shortsighted (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-reopening-plans-premature-experts-1.6337588?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar).

------

Dear Premier Stefanson et al,

Greetings from Southern Manitoba. In light of the comments made at yesterday's press conference (i.e. January 12, 2022) - where it was specifically stated that the provincial government "will be taking advice from other Manitobans as well moving forward" - I would like to take this statement seriously/literally and provide you with some feedback from a deeply concerned resident of the Rural Municipality of Hanover. While the term "stakeholders" was likely used to refer primarily to business owners, I think it's vital to point out what should be obvious: all residents/citizens collectively are the most significant stakeholders in Manitoba, and if these voices - like my own - are not being listened to, what this conveys is that there is some serious misgovernance taking place (which undermines the democratic purpose/process of politicians acting on behalf of those who they are supposed to represent). Obviously, I don't expect a response, since it's clear that leaders in the current administration aren't even willing to answer direct questions from official members of the press. But if any confidence in this current government has any hope of being restored, I would appreciate if this correspondence was at the very least passed along to the people to whom it's addressed. Accordingly, at this time I would like to name four different issues: suppressing public health recommendations, the provincial response level, forced back to school, and expanding the proof of vaccination.

First, it was painfully obvious at yesterday's press conference that the government was indeed advised by its own public health division that stricter measures were needed in order to protect all Manitobans. Instead, what we saw was a blatant disregard of such recommendations in favour of a what was termed a "balanced" approach, which is clearly no longer concerned at all with "containing" the spread of Covid-19 but resigned to allow the entire population to contract the virus that some of us have been trying extremely hard to fight against these past two years. We're only in this position now - of supposedly needing to accept that "Covid is here to stay" - because the provincial response to the pandemic has ever tended to be reactive (as opposed to proactive) and has not listened to expertise from medical professionals soon enough to "mitigate" the collateral damage of human lives that we've seen. Granted - this is a worldwide problem and not a shortcoming that's specific to Manitoba; however, this does not release us from the responsibility to do our utmost to keep people safe - no matter the cost. Sure, listen to multiple sources. But if it's a veritable issue of life/death or health/illness, this alone trumps any political, economic, or religious interests. Therefore, if public health and/or medical experts are telling the government anything that has relevance to decisions that are being made at the provincial level, this ought to be transparently disclosed and must factor into policies that are enacted to protect the well-being of those who call Manitoba home.

Second, it was a common refrain the last few press conferences that Manitoba has had more strict measures in place than the other provinces across Canada (as some kind of justification/rationalization for not stepping up the current response level). To be perfectly honest, regardless of what our neighbours to the West, East, or South are doing, what matters above all else is to hold to a higher standard than those whose response has been subpar. In other words, the province of Manitoba should be seeking to be a leader nationally and globally in its championing of health and safety (instead of a follower, or a pariah). As it stands, we currently have the worst rate of active Covid-19 cases in Canada (again), and the province's response is to keep the response level at Orange - even though case numbers are worse than they have ever been throughout the entire pandemic. This is completely irresponsible and unacceptable. The province's response level should have been at Red long ago - with stay-at-home orders for all not-yet-vaccinated people (except for essentials), no guests at all for households that have any unvaccinated individuals, no special treatment for religious organizations, expanded and consistent enforcement of public health orders, etc. What's more, what Canada needs is a more unified approach, because what's happened to date - with each province essentially acting in isolation - is not working. Similar to the federal mandate for all civil servants to be vaccinated, a more unified partnership/coordination across provinces and territories to implement public health measure compliance is necessary to have any hope of preventing and containing future waves of the virus.

Third, this rhetoric of schools being "last to close, first to open" has to stop. Obviously no one wants schools to be closed since in-person learning spaces are inarguably preferable to online/virtual formats for most students. The reality of the capitalistic world that we occupy is that most people are reliant on children being in school so that parents/caregivers can work. And yet, by compelling students, staff and teachers to attend classes at an unsafe time during a global epidemic - without ensuring sufficient access to scientifically proven medical-grade masks for all, not substantially upgrading ventilation, not allowing time for students to get their second dose before restarting classes, etc - is nothing less than willing endangerment of human life. My kids, for example, got their first dose of the vaccine on the very first day they were eligible (i.e. November 28th); however, with the 8-week period that they are supposed to wait until their next vaccine appointment, the earliest we could make a booking was January 23rd (which we have done). Based on the "Severe Outcomes by Vaccination Status" graphs shown in the press conference, two doses provides significantly more protection than one (with any number of doses being preferrable to zero). That being said, there is no way that we are sending our children back to school before they have the opportunity to receive their second shot. Fortunately, we have the flexibility to do this as a family. But what about the large number of families who have no other option than to send their children back to school, or for those whose employment is school-based (who themselves have no option to strike because of the collective bargaining agreement)? Thus, it's crucial that the province delays the start of in-class learning until this present wave peaks and/or the province can adequately demonstrate that safety measures have in fact been systematically, expansively and verifiably increased at each school across every school division. Alternatively, distance options should at least be provided for families who have been advised to "look after themselves."

Finally, we already have a reliable system in place to ensure that the most people in public spaces are vaccinated, but it has not be expanded to its full potential. Only a vocal minority of Manitobans have expressed disagreement with proof of vaccination, so this should not prevent its continued use long-term. After all, there should be a lasting benefit for those who have faithfully abided by the province's strong recommendation to be vaccinated (and enduring consequences for obstinance). Also - if the province actually believes in vaccines as an important measure to contend with the Coronavirus (i.e. something "we're going to need to learn to live with…in the longer term"), then Manitoba seriously needs to consider implementing a vaccine mandate for all citizens and permanent residents, as well as requiring vaccines as a condition of attending public schools. Requirement is proven to yield more results than recommendation, and while there will always be those who stand in opposition, the cost-benefit of safeguarding life for all outweighs the preferences of individuals…otherwise, we wouldn't have laws that protect each other from harm.

All this to say, when it's communicated to us that, "it's up to Manitobans to look after themselves," what this signals is resignation and abdicating responsibility. That's not what we need from elected officials. We need you to set an example for us to follow; to inspire us to do better; to make hard decisions that will cost financial and political supporters; to answer questions honestly when asked directly; to keep calm and carry on with all of the things. That is the way out of the pandemic: not giving up.

Sincerely, X

p.s. Next time when N95 or medical grade masks are provided for Manitobans - which we as a family did not receive - please consider doing so at a location where there's more access for everyone, such as a Canada Post office. Not every community has a Liquor Mart, but even the smallest town has a post office (or is proximate to one).

[xtruss]

Are You Ready and Willing to Be Free Again?

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

— By Stacey Rudin | September 16, 2021

The modern West’s sudden and near universal acceptance of “lockdowns” — a novel concept of government-enforced house arrest — signifies a far-reaching and sinister shift away from bedrock democratic values. When fear was injected into the atmosphere by the media, the West was a sitting duck, ready to accept any lifeline offered by any politician — even the communist dictator — in a stunning reversal of our nation’s founding principles.

“Give me liberty or give me death” was our original rallying cry. Oppressed by British rule, Americans rebelled. They fought for independence, for the right to live their own lives in their own way. This passion for liberty created the most successful republic in history, a nation to be proud of — a beacon of hope and prosperity for people of all nations.

Today’s Americans behave in a diametrically opposed manner, trusting the government with blind allegiance and giving it full and total control over their wellbeing. Even personal health decisions like whether or not to receive a quickly-developed vaccination are entrusted to politicians to mandate. Any neighbor who disagrees is marginalized and rejected: “She’s an antivaxxer; she must be an ignorant Trump supporter.”

You cannot betray the concept of “give me liberty or give me death” any further than by adopting the premise that no one can disagree with you and still be a reasonable person. When you are on board with a plan that includes subverting your neighbors’ autonomy and violating their bodies as you deem necessary to satisfy the people on TV, you’ve rejected the American experiment. You’re a collectivist, and I wonder: have you looked into how well collectivist systems have worked out for regular people lately?

It is shocking how many people appear to want to live in a world where everyone thinks just like they do. The average person quickly distances himself even from political opponents, as if it would be desirable to have just one political party that everyone votes for. Yet in 2021, in affluent coastal communities, republicans have to pretend to be democrats, and they actually do it. When even this commonplace difference of opinion cannot be accepted and dealt with, it’s clear we’ve moved far away from prizing eccentricity as John Stuart Mill did in 1859, back when Liberty was cool:

“[T]he mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

“The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it”

This fear of eccentricity — which I’d argue is tantamount to freedom — was laid bare in March 2020. Even when the “deadly disease” propaganda out of China was thickest, the average person really did not want to lock herself at home and pull her children out of school, let alone force people out of work. Yet it was only the very rare person who made this desire public. Everyone else pretended to agree — they decided to “go along to get along.” They put the “stay home, save lives” sticker on their Facebook profiles. They did drive-by birthday parades (my God.) And now that the failure of lockdowns is irrefutable, they refuse to admit they were wrong, afraid to face the damage they helped to cause.

To summarize, the appearance of universal agreement with lockdown was just that: an appearance. Agreement was depicted because most people do “what’s cool,” and because mass media is everywhere, and because social media astroturf propaganda efforts are very effective. A society that wants to “be cool” is very easy to manipulate. The dissenters will betray themselves to stay cool, so just make something appear cool, and the conformists will jump on board.

To today’s Americans, appearances are everything — we are afraid to be different, lest it make our friends uncomfortable (maybe we will lose one, whatever will we do?!) We have ceased caring about truth and authenticity entirely. We have tacitly agreed as a society that true things should be hidden whenever they conflict with what is “popular”; with what everyone “smart” and “cool” is doing. Anyone acting outside of these boundaries — the “eccentrics” of centuries past, considered by Mill to be geniuses — are today’s untouchables.

In a nation founded by rebels, somehow it has become cool to be a conformist.

Thanks to lockdowns, we know that people want to “stay cool” more than they want they want their kids educated, more than they want to open their businesses, and more than they want to breathe freely. They will even accept open-ended vaccine dosages for an illness that poses less risk to them than driving a car — anything to “stay cool.” Disagreeing with someone is too much for Americans today. Confrontation is so scary that we’d rather let society dictate who we are; that way, everyone else will feel comfortable.

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

This is how the West sacrificed freedom before lockdowns were ever imposed. We care far too much what other people think of us. We fear freedom. Freedom is truth and authenticity and acting in your own interest, as your own person, even when — especially when — it makes other people uncomfortable. Why would you want a bunch of fake “friends” who only like the image you’re projecting? They will leave you the second your social power is tarnished. If you’ve never burned a bridge in your life, these are the people you’re surrounded by, guaranteed.

Speaking the truth, even when it burns bridges, will dissatisfy just the people you want to be rid of: the people who want you in a box, who resent having to follow onerous rules themselves, and mean to force you to do the same. The only power they have is the power to reject you, and once you don’t care about that, you’re free. You say the truth, accept the results, walk away from the wrong people and end up with the right ones.

Trade truth for popularity, by contrast, and you kill yourself in a sense. All that’s left of “you” is what society finds acceptable, which isn’t “you” at all. It’s completely external to you and has nothing to do with you. By conforming, you betray yourself by accepting the premise that there is something wrong with the real you. Maybe you’re so bent on being perfect (as defined by others) that you don’t even know what “you” is. That would make you the perfect cog in a machine, but as for your personal well-being, there is nothing worse. You will suffer.

“We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.” — Montaigne

The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it. There are dozens, hundreds of people who email me thanking me for opposing lockdowns and for standing up for medical choice and privacy. So why aren’t they doing this themselves, if they admire it so much, and know it needs to be done? If everyone did it, there could be no repercussions for any of us. Yet it isn’t happening because we are scared of telling the truth, which means we fear freedom. Far too many of us fear freedom.

We fear freedom and authentic humanity so much that we pretend people are robots. One glimpse of human frailty and a person can be blacklisted without a trial. Humanity is barbaric at present, demanding a certain perfect image and absolute cooperation with majority rule or social death. It isn’t hard to understand why people eventually crack in such a system, or develop severe anxiety disorders. Consider one of my favorite passages of literature from modern philosopher Karl Ove Knausgaard, discussing how he was banished by his family for simply telling the truth in his epic autobiographical novel:

“The social dimension is what keeps us in our places, which makes it possible for us to live together; the individual dimension is what ensures that we don’t merge into each other. The social dimension is based on taking one another into consideration. We also do this by hiding our feelings, not saying what we think, if what we feel or think affects others. The social dimension is also based on showing some things and hiding others. What should be shown and what should be hidden are not subject to disagreement . . . the regulatory mechanism is shame. One of the questions this book raised for me when I was writing it was what was there to gain by contravening social norms, by describing what no one wants to be described, in other words, the secret and the hidden. Let me put it another way: what value is there in not taking others into account? The social dimension is the world as it should be. Everything that is not as it should be is hidden. My father drank himself to death, that is not how it should be, that has to be hidden. My heart yearned for another woman, that is not how it should be, it must be hidden. But he was my father and it was my heart.”

“He was my father and it was my heart.” What is there to gain by calling Knausgaard a freak and rejecting him, when we know these things happen all the time — alcoholism and infidelity? Shouldn’t we revere him for his brave example, for his confidence? I find his display of human vulnerability incredibly attractive, perhaps because I see so little of it in my daily life. I’m tired of the display of perfect people with perfect lives and perfectly-scheduled, perfect kids on the path to Harvard. I want the mess, and I want to show my mess and still be accepted and loved.

Knausgaard, I guess, is the rare modern eccentric. He puts it all out there. Here he is again, discussing the purpose of publishing a novel so true that he lost family members over it:

“I was there, turning 40. I had a beautiful wife, three beautiful kids, I loved them all. But still I wasn’t truly happy. It’s not necessarily the curse of the writer, this. But maybe it’s the curse of the writer to be aware of it, to ask: why is all this, all I’ve got, not enough? That’s really what I’m searching for, in this whole thing, an answer to that question.”

Maybe that’s the heart of it all — even the heart of the current crisis. We are all so empty despite “having it all,” because “it all” has been defined by something other than us. Hollywood, the media, popular politicians — they are telling us what to be, and we have listened, and we are miserable. We are lying, pretending, putting on a show; hiding our pain with drugs, drink, porn, overspending. Things that they sell us.

The end result of this entire exercise in anti-self-development is lockdowns and forced perpetual vaccinations, a segregated society with everyone suspicious of everyone else, and technological apartheid on the horizon. Slavery. If we had all defined ourselves, instead of turning into a mass with one hive mind, afraid of any differences — of freedom — would we be here? I don’t think so. We’d be happy, healthy, and free.

“To be satiated with the ‘necessities’ of external success is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes a source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness.” — Carl Jung

We’ve neglected individuality in pursuit of perfect conformity, and as a result we’ve become a miserable society filled with miserable people who will never feel safe enough. There is no boundary they will not cross in pursuit of perfect compliance with the rules, doing anything and everything that’s needed to “be cool” today, as defined by The Today Show. “Come to our all-vaccinated wedding!” “I won’t play tennis with ‘the unvaccinated,’ regardless of the fact that I took my own vaccine and stand 40 feet away.”

This is what we’ve become.

We simply must revisit truth and authenticity sometime very soon. We urgently need to find what’s real in all of this fake, and that can’t be done without individual human voices. If you care about liberty, you must do this one scary thing: embrace it. Be free. “But to be free, you have to be inconsiderate.” Yes. Inconsiderate to others, but considerate to yourself. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

— Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA

[zombies-aliens]

TLDR second to last paragraph

I’m cool with people who got the vaccine, I literally do not care if people do or dont, believe in the vaccine or not, I’m just here to say don’t mandate a vaccine to the American people. Do not make it a requirement to inject a vaccine with no long term studies into our bodies. And even if, why mandate people to get one? What’s happening to the freedom of choice? So republicans don’t like democrats aborting/killing babies and we let them anyway though we disagree with it, but democrats can’t accept republicans refusing a vaccine or the practice of vaccine being mandatory? This is crossing boundaries but it’s not enough for me to be worried. If there’s a mandatory requirement to get the vaccine then that’s sketch. I’m not for Republican or Democrat, but requiring people to get vaccines through force is not the American way, freedom (ohhh I know some of you guys just hate the word freedom and what follows) to choose what we want to put in our bodies is not just the American way but more importantly, the right way. The fair way.

And another thing, places like New York being pretty much shut down for people who don’t want to get the vaccine for whatever reason whether it’s sound or unsound reasoning, is bullshit. People know what they’re playing with. I for one do not want to get bullied into getting a vaccine, I do not want others to, and I don’t want me or other people to be forced by taking away our liberties to enjoy our cities, to be submitted to getting the vaccine just because our governors think it’s the right thing to do. Too many people are playing God thinking their way is so right and just that it should be mandatory. It’s concerning. I hope it doesn’t happen. And this is about America, I don’t care how other countries are doing it.

And hate to say it, not really, but the vaccine IS political. But I can’t be bothered to explain this. Another time.

So to recap, I’m cool with people using their freedom of choice to get or reject the vaccine, I just don’t agree with the vaccine being a requirement for people because I don’t that’s right. Let people have their choice in this.

Maaaaaan it’s been a while. Glad to get this out of my system.

[plumberry]

So I see a lot of anti covid precaution type people saying like we can disagree about what kind of precautions work and are good or whatever, but can’t we agree that the government is overstepping it’s bounds if it requires vaccines or masks?

My answer: no, we can’t. Literally half the government’s job is mandating things like that. We have literal passports to go places. We have clothes mandates, and not just private businesses, but actual city ordinances and stuff. And it’s a reasonable precaution for a public health matter. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable stance to disagree with whether or not the government is overstepping it’s bounds.

[conservativemalarkey]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the latest article is stupid, as it mostly boils down to suggesting that liberals consider facts while conservatives only consider dogma. Except for basically all of these cases (prison terms, war on drugs, terrorism, abstinence education, welfare), I would expect a liberal to take the side they take *even if* the facts appeared to be against them, that it may be less effective but it is still morally mandated.

I generally think this is tied to compassion/less-tribalistic empathy instead of merely being willing to consider facts at all, but also, there are many people who would agree that killing Islamic terrorists does not stop Islamic terrorism, but would likewise passionately argue in favor of killing white nationalist terrorists, citing Hitler's words on the topic as proof that only an immediate violent response can function. This shoots holes in both, by just being nakedly political.

On the one hand, I think you have a point. All people have tribalistic tendencies, and no one is purely rational. You can manipulate facts and statistics to say whatever you like, and this is one of the things that both sides do. I suspect I should have thought harder before reposting that without commentary.

On the other... well, I do think there’s a difference between liberals and leftists.

I try to differentiate between the two without sounding holier-than-thou or like I have a very large stick up my ass. Because let’s face it, talking about intra-left divisions is... not usually very helpful. It is more helpful to build coalitions, work together on the things we do agree with, and try to stop things like anti-trans legislation and anti-humanity healthcare policy. Even if I rabidly disagree with many leftists, I think they are mostly Less Wrong and coming from a better place than the American Right right now. 

 ...but there are a lot of leftists who are much more nakedly ideological than center/middle-left self-proclaimed liberals, and it shows.

As a relatively simple and non-controversial example: someone who says they are anti-vax because Big Pharma is evil is disregarding the massive corpus of evidence that shows vaccines work, that they keep children and adults from dying, and that getting vaccinated is a civic duty.  Regardless of whether or not Big Pharma is evil, vaccines work. 

Slightly more controversial: someone who says they are a Stalinist in this day and age is completely disregarding facts like ‘the Holodomor’ and ‘political purges’. What Stalin did may have created a strong nation, but it hurt the people who lived there. Even if they claim that All of That Is US Propaganda, they have shown a severe willingness to disregard the truth in favour of their chosen Cause.  

Leftists are more likely to say ‘Nazis need killin’, whether or not it works’ than liberals are, because they are more likely to be ideologues. Now... I think we need ideologues, and thank you for reminding me to make a post on that. 

But the fact remains that someone who calls themself a ‘liberal’ is a little bit less likely to be an ideologue than a leftist. Not significantly, but a little bit.