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Clark:
“… how can anyone actually think like this? “
The explanation might well be that “The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one”.
No, glenn_nl, you’re completely correct. It certainly is cognitive dissonance, yet it also definitely isn’t – not that that’s a bad thing, of course. In this post-modernist, post-truth world, truth can change and adapt over time and according to circumstance, depending on requirements. Yet truth also doesn’t ever change, although confusingly it can even do so mid-sentence. Truth is a convenient fiction, an authoritarian construct, a mere tool with which to mould minds, manipulate public perceptions and herd the murmuration of swarming sheeple into a dark and foreboding cave of disenlightenment – except when used for the purpose of revealing that truth is a fiction, which is self-evidently true otherwise the claim that it is a fiction would be false. However, depending on the speaker’s intentions (as well as what the hearer wants to believe), it is an entirely made-up, but nonetheless immutable, falsifiable abstract quasi-binary ideal. Or not. It may be all those things and more.
If you can hold that infinite swirl of semi-cooked thoughts in your head all at once without the grating discomfort of conflicting contradictions, you must have a very liberated intellect untrammelled by primitive logic. Anyone who calls it “cognitive dissonance” is assuredly trying to impose their fascist worldview upon others by thrusting their phallocentric axiomatic ideology upon a passive liberal pluralistic phenomenology, thereby promoting a single unified narrative with which to attain the illusory hegemony of a dominant consensus.
With the completely planned accidental eruption of an unprecedented pandemic in 2019, a cabal of democratic and despotic totalitarians colluded with unregulated corporations to unleash a fictional virus which is transmitted biologically, thereby facilitating the worldwide deployment of an experimental, carefully contrived, alleged gene-therapy vaccine to which everybody was forced to submit (although a great many enlightened dissenters – who were the main targets – opted out). This infernal iniquitous injection became retrospectively responsible for the huge swell of deaths which preceded its development and deployment, as well as the preposterous but widely predicted second and third waves which predominantly killed the wisely unvaccinated. Is your brain hurting yet? (If so, that’s probably a side-effect either of the mind-control vaccine you decided not to get or of the virus which doesn’t exist.)
These are troubling thoughts indeed, so it’s no wonder people have difficulty sustaining them in a single mind without getting confused or going crazy. The fear that all these conspiracy theories might actually be true is so intimidating that it makes people cling to a discredited postivistic framework, in which some things are more true than others and any dissenting views which haunt the infinite space beyond the prison of reality are branded insane heresies by a global cabal of intellectual bullies – including, and especially, reputable scientists and esteemed experts. The singular grand narrative fed to the population by the establishment via the mainstream media was an exercise in mass hypnosis, with the implication that the endless array of competing conspiracy theories are somehow lacking in verifiable content and cannot all be true at the same time. Nihilistic nonsense!
Maybe the arguably senseless pattern of words above reveals the absolute unshakeable truth about the nature of truth; alternatively, it could clearly be a comical composition compiled from facetious falsehoods and ridiculous riddles. The choice is yours (if you have one).
John?
Dawg, I hadn’t seen your, er, explanation when I posted at 13:49, and I still haven’t seen it now. I see it only when I’m not looking at it; it must be an SEP.
Yes, it’s so obvious that sane people can’t see it, unfortunately.
That degree of cognitive diffusion and inversion may seem utterly absurd to old school thinkers, but the population is increasingly being taught to be so hostile to binary divisions – wrt gender, sexuality, nationality, race, politics, etc. – that normal logic and argumentation is in danger of losing its grip.
If you baulk at believing too many impossible things before breakfast, you might be able to recruit other people to do it for you. Just put out an advert on oaf-guardian: that raucous rabble will believe just about anything, as long as it doesn’t make good sense.
Half truths:
It would be unfair were I not to state that at a deeper level I agree and sympathise with these… But now I can’t finish the sentence.
What term should I use to label this disparate quasi-group, this grouping that is not a group, to enable discussion? They would like to be called ‘sceptics’, but each of them shows minimal scepticism about either their favoured hypotheses, nor those favoured by the others that I am grouping with them. Calling them ‘conspiracy theorists’ angers them. Calling them ‘contrarians’ would imply that there’s a unified narrative they’re contradicting. I’ll call them ‘conspiracy theorists’ because I personally find it most fitting, and…
Conspiracy theorists, I apologise for the offence my use of the term provokes, but please bear with me for what follows will be supportive at least in part – hopefully more supportive than critical.
But having struggled through the composition of this opening I find my inspiration depleted; hopefully I’ll write some more soon. For now I’ll just say that I regard your opposition to ‘the system’ as justified and, in the main, well motivated. Opposition is desperately needed. You didn’t contrive humanity’s dire predicament, which indeed results from the system you’re attempting to oppose. The question is, what sort of opposition can be effective?
First, the conundrum.
Conspiracy theory is reactive rather than proactive. It’s a reaction against the delusion, corruption, and dishonesty of the toxic system, and therefore a symptom of it. As such it is not separate from the toxic system, but part of it.
The toxic system is old; indeed, ancient. As such, it has long since adapted to channel dissent in ways that bolster its own power and security.
If anyone thinks or feels that they can help me with this, please do. I sometimes feel lonely, as if caught in crossfire.
For instance, I regard covid as serious and the vaccines as reasonably effective, based on publicly available evidence that could not conceivably be faked.
But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if in years to come, it emerged from a pharmaceutical company’s records that, for instance, they had a potentially sterilising vaccine that they never submitted for trial on a sample of the public, as doing so would jeopardise the profit streams from existing vaccines.
And I recognise that any influential voice loudly making that claim at the present time would be derided in the mass media as promoting conspiracy theory.
I hope someone can see why I feel lonely in this.
What do you mean by a “sterilising vaccine?” I’m going to assume you meant a vaccine that would have completely wiped out Sar-Cov-2 and returned us to a pre-covid world. How likely is that scenario? The four previously circulating coronaviruses in humans causing the “common cold” have been investigated for decades. The evidence appears to be that even if you have been previously infected by one of these coronaviruses you don’t develop long lasting immunity. People can become infected with the same strain multiple times in as little as 6 months apart. Fortunately they are fairly mild illnesses for most people. Sars-Cov-2 is with us forever now. It’s unlikely, in my opinion, there will be a vaccine in the forseeable future that wipes it out. Again, fortunately, it appears to be tending to a less virulant initial disease though I accept we don’t know enough about long term outcomes. Having said that, I note the rise in covid hospital admissions in the UK and elsewhere currently. Please also look at the chart on that page “Patients admitted to hospital by age” to see the numbers of admissions overall in the 18-64 age group.
I came across this Trial of potential universal flu vaccine opens at NIH Clinical Center today.
“Our study will examine the safety of BPL-1357 and also will allow us to assess the importance of mucosal immunity against flu and whether a strategy of inducing both the cellular and antibody arms of the immune system can provide broader protection against the ever-changing influenza virus,”
So, mucosal immunmity? Do they think from pre-clinical trials on mice that they can provoke secretory IgA or do the mean something diferent? I can’t make out what they mean exactly though it may be promising. Perhaps they have been listening to you John 😀
On your conspiracy theory conjecture Clark. It’s good that people begin to question narratives of anything no matter how they arrive at that point. Theories, conspiracy or otherwise still must have a sound foundation, there must be independently verifiable facts on which to base them. Proactive scepticism applies equally to the “official” narrative as it does to any and all other narratives. Any outlet can use the same propagandising techniques.
ET, yes, I should have been clearer.
My example was very much a “for instance”. Neglecting better alternatives, hiding harms, concealing data, manipulating the publishing environment; these are very much the kind of things that pharmaceutical companies do. They do them all the time and have done them over and over again. Some instances get exposed; after a product has been widely administered to the public for considerable time, public trials and surveillance data become available, drug companies get challenged, and it can lead to court cases in which companies are ordered to release their data and internal communications. But there is every reason to suspect that we get to see only the tip of the iceberg. Governments and government regulators are far too soft on the companies.
What they don’t do is conspire with government to decimate their own consumer base. Thinking that way is conspiracy theory; it betrays a fundamental political naivety about drug companies’ motives.
Yes, I used “sterilising vaccines” to mean vaccines that virtually eliminate noticeable infection and onward transmission; the sort of vaccines such as MMR that really can achieve herd immunity. I thought that “sterilising vaccines” was the correct medical term for these; I thought I’d encountered it in scientific / medical literature, but during the pandemic I have been reading quite widely outside my usual fields and I may have misremembered what sort of publication I read it in.
And no, considering the history of attempts to make vaccines against the common cold viruses, and what little I have read of attempted veterinary vaccines against coronaviruses, I don’t consider such vaccines likely. But that of course is a reason that in the unlikely event of a pharmaceutical company stumbling upon such a possibility, they’d feel quite confident about not pursuing it. Remember the early hostility that was projected towards antibiotic treatment of stomach ulcers caused by helico pylori. I note also that that early hostility has been sanitised from Wikipedia, but I remember it described in an early BBC Horizon documentary that is now all but forgotten.
See, the conspiracy theorists do have a very serious point; in his first comment, John mentioned “the long history of crime and abuse in medicine”. But what conspiracy theory displaces, obscures and distracts from is a mature political consideration of motivation in a capitalist system, as if the profit motive had no systematically corrupting effects and therefore deleterious results could only be the result of a secret conspiracy of well-placed, supremely powerful, and utterly evil madmen.
The reality is actually far more insidious. A handful of powerful psychopaths could be exposed, punished and replaced, and all would be well. And this seems to be the Great Hope of the conspiracy theorists; “just believe us and it can all be fixed easily”, ie. without systemic, political changes. But this in itself helps explain why conspiracy theory is so often promoted by those who lean towards the right of the political spectrum.
John?
– – – – – – – – – – –ET, thanks for the link to the “Patients admitted to hospital, by age” chart. It shows that, since the start of the pandemic, over 300,000 people under the age of 65 have been admitted to hospital for covid. That’s over 41% of total admissions were under 65 years old!
Those who have unquestioningly accepted the minimisation and trivialisation narratives, which only ever compare percentage rates within various defined age ranges, will find that hard to believe.
“sterilizing immunity ” I think is the term. “Sterilising vaccine” has an unfortunate connotation with one of the falsehoods levelled at the covid vaccines (and other vaccines) causing infertility.
John and his Canadian friends appear to want to define covid vaccine benefit solely in terms of sterilising immunity and disregard “effective imunity” (ie. reducing disease severity) and unless they achieve sterilising immunity they are useless. Most current vaccines do not achieve sterilising immunity but are nonetheless highly effective.
For anyone interested enough and with time to read through it, this Nature article is more than enough knowledge for most:
A guide to vaccinology: from basic principles to new developments .ET, thanks. I had misremembered the term. Yes, I see your point about the false scare stories of vaccines causing infertility; hadn’t occurred to me, so thanks for the correction, and I’ll buy you a pint next time I see you down the system sty 😀
Funnily enough, I part struggled, part scanned and part read through the article you linked a few days ago; I can’t remember where I’d found it linked from. Much of it is well beyond my level of background knowledge, which I’d need in order to effectively understand it, but many other parts I found very interesting.
I wonder what John would make of an article like that? If he’d have returned I’d have asked him, and still would.
– “…and part read through the article you linked a few days ago”
Sorry, that was ambiguous. I meant that a few days ago, I read through the Nature article “A guide to vaccinology: from basic principles to new developments” that you linked to today.
Grist to your mill John. CM tweeted part of an interview from Prof.Jeffery Sachs stating that it took him aback. In the presented clip Prof.Sachs stated:
“I chaired the commission for the Lancet for 2 years on Covid. I’m pretty convinced it came out of a US lab of biotechnology […] We don’t know for sure but there is enough evidence. [However] it’s not being investigated, not in the US, not anywhere.”
The full 2 Hr and 21 min video from which that clip is taken is here. The extract starts at 12:24. It’s a question and answer session and he speaks a number of times, not all about covid. You can scrub through the video to find his other answers. He speaks in English but many of the questions are in Spanish.
Here is another interview where he further discusses the possible lab leak origin (approx 25 mins long). I wonder if part of the future of the pandemic narrative involves more intense scrutiny of this issue. Prof. Sachs is an economist, not a virologist, but nonetheless his chairing of the Lancet commission must have given him some valuable insight.
John???
Come on man; ET has posted on the very topic you raised, a possibly synthetic origin for SARS-CoV-2. Having diverted my thread onto your own topics, the least you could do is follow up on the discussion you provoked.
Back when we were in the beginning of the pandemic people were arguing that the excess deaths were caused by lack of care, lack of access to emergency services etc. I argued that, whilst undoubedly some deaths did occur because of this, it would take time for excess deaths to begin to show up due to missed diagnoses, reduced surgical activity, missed treatment cycles and so on. I argued that it would take time for, say, missed cancer diagnoses to begin to show in the deaths statistics.
Excess deaths in England and Wales compared to the 5-year average (which includes 2021) are up over 16%. Covid-related deaths account for approx 10% of those (excess deaths). Take a look at table 1 in the following ONS link.The excess deaths are a result of the pandemic, which impacts upon society. The trivialisers have consistently and repeatedly stressed the effects upon individuals, to the exclusion of its effects upon society as a whole.
That’s like looking at an animal badly injured by a shotgun blast, picking out a pellet or two and saying “these pellets are tiny, and most barely penetrate the hide. They couldn’t hurt anything; the animal must be fine. Shotguns cannot be dangerous, so any restrictions must be government hysteria to curtail our civil liberties”.
I agree broadly with you Clark. Nonetheless, that’s a worrying statistic and it behoves Government and the health care authorities to figure out what the cause/causes of those deaths is/are if they can’t be attributed to covid. It’s not just in the UK.
ET, the thing that immediately strikes me from your link is that countries that have done worse at controlling covid also have the worst excess deaths.
The excess deaths trend continues in the UK and elsewhere with approx half unattributable to covid.
You can download the latest Office for National Statistics deaths data from here. You’ll have to do some mental arithmetic yourselves but the latest data from the week ending 5 August 2022 (Week 31): 10,698 deaths were registered in England and Wales. This was 14.4% above the five-year average (1,350 excess deaths – which now includes 2021 but not 2020 data).
Of the deaths registered in Week 31 in England and Wales, 723 mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”.I stumbled across this guy’s substack today but here is an interesting read: news about elevated death rates is leaking out. Worth checking out the links within this article too, especially the “CG enriched nature of the mRNA vaxxes.” Recently a close family member died from spontaeneous CJD (diagnosed before the pandemic and unrelated to covid, the vaccines or anything covid-related). It’s a horrible disease and the prospect of increased prion disease in the community is horrible.
Also, Clark, the paediatric cases of hepatitis would seem to be unrelated to covid and more likely related to co-infection with two viruses.
I realise I may be reviving a dead thread but these excess deaths are happening all over the world.
ET, that is extremely worrying. I suppose the cause of death statistics will be becoming available in the usual course of things.
boriquagato at Substack seems to have been relentlessly negative about covid vaccines for quite a long time.
Here is some more detailed data from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities with more breakdown of data.
John was correct all along but it seems the confirmation bias in the ‘highly educated and pious’ never wrong, data analysts such as Clark etc was too strong for their egos to handle. Face it guys – you were duped, you fell for the propaganda campaign and will now likely, sadly expire from Prions or Cancer within 5 years, all thanks to a novel gene-editing ‘vaccine’ (by the way the US CDC knew the mRNA potion didn’t even meet the definition of a vaccine – so they changed it last year.
This was a US-led global depopulation campaign which you can decry all you like – but look deeper into the likes of Club of Rome, Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Crown (Temple), and the Masonic Lodge – then tell us the statistical likelihood of there NOT being a highly coordinated attack on humanity, using climate change as a vector for mass formation psychosis, bullying the population into transhumanist dystopia under the Great Reset and UN Agendas 21 and 30??
The ONS data clearly shows the detrimental effects of the vaccine per 100,000. Lower deaths in all cause unvaccinated than the sum of the vaccinated cohort. Enjoy.
ET, I’m getting “server not found” on your app.powerbi.com link.
