Rebuilding the World

[Goddess]

This is the guy we need to watch out for:  He's not done with us yet.

Bill Gates — After Reaping Huge Profits Selling BioNTech Shares — Trashes Effectiveness of COVID Vaccines • Children's Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

‘This is a grift’: Gates’ investments in mRNA vaccines reveal ‘conflict of interest’

Soave said, “Bill Gates was a major proponent of mRNA technology … he was an investor in BioNTech, which developed the mRNA vaccine for Pfizer.”

“We were just doing some digging,” continued Soave, “[and] we saw that he sold a lot of those shares at … how much profit was that?”

“10x,” replied Gray. “He invested $55 million in BioNTech back in 2019 and it’s now worth north of $550 million. He sold some stock … at the end of last year, I believe it was, with the share price over $300, which represented a huge gain for him over when he invested.”

Soave then unleashed critical comments directed at Gates:

“Let’s follow that trajectory: [Gates] invests heavily in BioNTech, ‘mRNA vaccines are great, this is the future,’ he talks about the vaccine timeline and how we can develop it faster, ‘we might have to cut some corners on safety’ … All in … sells it … makes a huge amount of money … but now it’s ‘yeah, it’s okay, it could be better, but what we really need is this breath spray.’”

Soave then said that Gates’ statements, and the broader issue of conflicts of interest between drug and vaccine proponents and the federal government, give credence to the assertions long made by “anti-vaxxers and the like.” He said:

“For there not to be more interrogation of his conflict of interest here by the mainstream is deeply disturbing, and for people who have been skeptical of this aspect of Pfizer and the drug development around COVID and who have been shot down in the media as kooks, anti-vaxxers and the like, I frankly think that this issue of pharmaceutical corruption and people pushing various interventions, having an investment in profit, should have been an issue that the left was leading on.

“We have to be more transparent about the fact that people who are having input in what the government policy is going to be, what’s going to be required people, the Biden administration tried to require people to get this, shouldn’t it be known at least when there are hundreds of millions of dollars of financial interests at stake for the people advising this? And their tune changes as it follows the money!”

 

[Goddess]

 

Saving medicine from the health bureaucracy | The Spectator Australia

When has there been a society that prospers because people are cancelled, removed, or ‘disappeared’ from their vital work because they dared to disagree with the ‘regime’s unquestionable truth’? Do our modern medical authoritarians want to be looked back on with the same pathetic disdain with which we judge similar historical despots?

 

For the public’s safety it’s time to cancel the cancellers

It is absolutely frightening that major medico-legal organisations have issued advice to doctors to be wary about participating in intellectual freedom and that even reporting on evidenced-based scientific data might put them in peril of being professionally ‘disappeared’ if that data doesn’t conform with the government’s ‘messaging’. Is that what the community at large expects?

[Goddess]

Canadians are demanding Dr Theresa Tam be FIRED, citing poor job performance – Toronto 99

Getting rid of this swamp hag would go a long way to rebuilding Canada.

I don't believe she read even one medical study during the last 3 years.

[eyeball]

On 1/29/2023 at 4:06 PM, Goddess said:

Folks like you are far happier when they're in lockdown.  Weird people.

It sucked but it was definitely safer. Smarter too.

[Goddess]

On 1/31/2023 at 8:43 AM, eyeball said:

It sucked but it was definitely safer. Smarter too.

Essay Four: Why Did Jurisdictions Repeatedly Use Inefficient Lockdowns During the COVID-19 Pandemic? from COVID-19: Lessons We Should Have Learned--Collected Essays (fraserinstitute.org)

[Goddess]

2023_Simandan-Rinner-Capurri-accepted-for-publication-The-Academic-Left-human-geography-and-the-rise-of-authoritarianism-during-the-COVID-19-pandemic.pdf (brocku.ca)

 

Abstract:

In this paper, we critically analyze the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting not only the breadth of knowledge geographers have already contributed to this assessment, but also the surprisingly limited critique within geography, social sciences and the broadly defined “Academic Left” of the authoritarian dimension of the public health policies of 2020 onwards. We conclude with a number of research questions for the aftermath of the pandemic, with the hope that they will help spur the growth of a new wave of anti-authoritarian Leftist geographical thinking that reaffirms the centrality of human rights and civil liberties to making the world a better place.

Conclusions and further research 

 

We end this paper by highlighting four themes at the core of a possible agenda for further research and scholarship in human geography and beyond. 

 

First of all, we decried the lack of systematic cost-benefit analysis in the governance of the pandemic, but we are just as much concerned with the difficult to quantify “hidden costs” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. What is the longer-term impact on our collective psyche of reducing one another to potential vectors of disease and repeatedly engaging in the practice of social distancing (cf. Simandan, 2016; Furedi, 2020)? Similarly, mask mandates were pushed on the unwilling with the exhortation that “it is the least that we can do”, that they are cost-effective, and that they constitute a mere “minor inconvenience” (cf. Kisielinski et al., 2021). Leaving aside questions about mask effectiveness discussed above as well as the rampant ableism of mask mandates (Capurri, 2022; Martin et al., 2020; Saint and Moscovitch, 2021), we cannot help but wonder about their hard to measure psychological and political costs (Kowalik, 2021; Shapiro and Bouder, 2021; Strongman, 2021). As Crawford (2021: 1) has put it, “by the nakedness of our faces we encounter one another as individuals, and in doing so we experience 23 fleeting moments of grace and trust. To hide our faces behind masks is to withdraw this invitation. This has to be politically significant”. Furthermore, an estimated 1.5 billion disposable masks found their way into the oceans in 2020 alone (Phelps Bondaroff and Cooke, 2021), adding to the harmful impact of plastic pollution on the earth’s marine ecosystems (Amuah, 2022). Appraising the environmental along with social and economic costs (and possible benefits) of non-pharmaceutical interventions presents an enormous research challenge (see also Turcotte-Tremblay et al., 2021). 

 

Second, critical phenomenologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and geographers need to carry out research documenting the relationship between values, moral(izing) rhetoric, and the emergence of dangerous forms of technologically-enhanced tribalism and dehumanization during the pandemic (see also O’Connor et al., 2021; Ye, 2021). Governments often outsourced the policing of the noncompliant to the “responsible” citizens, by encouraging reporting and/or shaming of the noncompliant in the name of the greater good. This irresponsible license to openly bully one’s fellow humans while feeling good about it (me = “grandma saver” vs. you = “grandma killer” or “variant incubator”) seemed to have been underpinned by two interlocked revaluations: (1) the rebranding of the “vice” formerly known as fear or cowardice into the “virtue” of responsibility, civic-mindedness, solidarity, and being “pro-science”; and (2) the rebranding of the virtue of standing up for freedom and human rights into the vice of toxic masculinity, being anti-social, “anti-science”, psychopath, selfish, criminal, or a right-wing extremist. This dynamic produced pernicious social geographies along new axes (e.g. pro maskers/anti-maskers; pro-vaxxers/anti-vaxxers). The compliant were deplored by the noncompliant as obedient “sheep”, whereas the noncompliant often were referred to by the compliant as “plague rats”. Who benefited from sowing those social divisions? Prior research has 24 repeatedly indicated that dehumanization is an early warning indicator of worse things to come (“re-education”, segregation, extermination; cf. Vaes et al., 2021). Why did our elites selectively exercise “an abundance of caution” to prevent COVID-19 deaths, but not to arrest our descent down the slippery slope of dehumanization and toxic social divisions?

 

Third, we noted the lack of proportionality in the (mis)management of the pandemic, but we acknowledge that getting the balance right was especially difficult in the early months when the magnitude of the actual risk was not yet fully established. This prompts us to ask: to what extent, and for how long, is it acceptable to invoke uncertainty as justification for authoritarian rule? Furthermore, given that uncertainty presents itself as a range of possible outcomes, what is the intellectual justification for focusing on the worst-case scenario, independent of its actual likelihood (cf. Furedi, 2008, 2009; Malviya, 2021)? In psychotherapy, patients who assume that the worst-case scenario will happen are said to commit the cognitive distortion known as catastrophizing (Waltman and Palermo, 2019). During the pandemic, however, people who refused to dwell on the worst-case scenario were often dismissed as “denialists” (Ferguson, 2021). What is the relationship between catastrophizing and the intellectual footprint of the precautionary principle (Stefánsson, 2019)? Does the precautionary principle run the risk of becoming the favourite excuse of tyrants promising to do whatever it takes to keep us safe from real and imagined dangers (e.g., Greenhalgh et al., 2020)? The often-heard phrase “out of an abundance of caution” was unintendedly ironic because the narrow-mindedness of minimizing only one type of risk (COVID-19 deaths and “long COVID”) regardless of the many other resulting risks (economic, political, psychosocial, medical, etc.) strikes us as reckless if not outright criminal (Baral et al., 2020). Science and Technology Studies scholars (Jasanoff, 2020) and philosophers (Rescher, 2018) have repeatedly noted that the relationship between knowledge 25 and uncertainty is often counterintuitive, such that more knowledge often generates more uncertainty, not less. Each new fact we learned about COVID-19 triggered an aura of related questions, that prompted new research, which brought answers that led to yet more questions. This expanding intricate web of knowledge-and-uncertainty means that authoritarians, if left unchecked, can always invoke uncertainty to justify emergencies and restrictions.

 

Finally, we also need a sustained collaborative research effort that investigates why the Academic Left lost sight of established anti-authoritarian thinking during the pandemic and to what extent geographical differences shaped the varied forms and degrees of pandemic-related authoritarianism. What has happened in China is very different from what has happened in Sweden, and what has happened in New York is very different from what has happened in Florida, in spite of the homogenizing influence of institutions such as the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The same scientific evidence has been read very differently by various national health organizations, and that wide variance of interpretation itself is a clue to the propagandistic nature of attempts to depict a monolithic image of “what the science says”. We expect that geographical difference also plays a role in the positioning of the Academic Left vis-à-vis the pandemic responses in different countries, as the very meaning of being politically to the Left might differ across linguistic and administrative settings. Our hope is that, as we collectively engage in the soul-searching and frank discussions needed to answer these research questions, we will witness the growth of a new wave of anti authoritarian Leftist geographical thinking that reaffirms the centrality of human rights and civil liberties to making the world a better place.

 

[eyeball]

18 hours ago, Goddess said:

2023_Simandan-Rinner-Capurri-accepted-for-publication-The-Academic-Left-human-geography-and-the-rise-of-authoritarianism-during-the-COVID-19-pandemic.pdf (brocku.ca)

 

Abstract:

In this paper, we critically analyze the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting not only the breadth of knowledge geographers have already contributed to this assessment, but also the surprisingly limited critique within geography, social sciences and the broadly defined “Academic Left” of the authoritarian dimension of the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...

Good grief woman, give it a break already. There's already two active The Left blah blah blah threads.

[Goddess]

4 hours ago, eyeball said:

Good grief woman, give it a break already. There's already two active The Left blah blah blah threads.

You know you don't have to click on threads you don't want to read, right?

[eyeball]

2 hours ago, Goddess said:

You know you don't have to click on threads you don't want to read, right?

Don't have to read more than a sentence or two you mean.  Calling out horsecrap from the mal-informed world you inhabit is kind of a requirement of civilization.  Somebody has to do it.

[Goddess]

10 hours ago, eyeball said:

Don't have to read more than a sentence or two you mean.  Calling out horsecrap from the mal-informed world you inhabit is kind of a requirement of civilization.  Somebody has to do it.

Oh I see.  That's why you follow me around the board insulting me on everything I say.  Somebody has to do it eh

[eyeball]

6 hours ago, Goddess said:

Oh I see.  That's why you follow me around the board insulting me on everything I say.  Somebody has to do it eh

Follow you? No you just keep getting in the way is all.

[Goddess]

I think if we want to rebuild after covid, it means facing up to what has been done and putting mechanisms in place so it never happens again.  Many are waking up.  Some never will.

Terence Corcoran: The left finally wakes to authoritarian nature of COVID lockdowns (msn.com)

While filled with concrete evidence that details the different forms of political and scientific deception inflicted on Canadians — from masking rules to misleading death-rate statistics and drug overdoses — Canada’s COVID sets the lockdowns into a grand sweep of ideological history from Karl Marx to Immanuel Kant to Alexis de Tocqueville.

“That the deliberate spreading of fear was often a key governmental manoeuvre for increasing population compliance should have been an early red flag for geographers and social scientists familiar with the nefarious politics of this emotion, as exposed by luminaries such as … Hannah Arendt.” But the academic left fell mostly silent through the lockdown fear mongering. In scathing language and supported by detailed references to the academic world’s response to the emerging COVID repression, the paper thoroughly documents its case.

 

Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic – Haultain Research Institute

2023_Simandan-Rinner-Capurri-accepted-for-publication-The-Academic-Left-human-geography-and-the-rise-of-authoritarianism-during-the-COVID-19-pandemic.pdf (brocku.ca)

The Middle-Class Leviathan: Corona, the "Fascism" Blackmail, and the Defeat of the Working Class - Zurich Open Repository and Archive (uzh.ch)

Calling on the Academic Left to do what's right (substack.com)

 

Over the last three years, anti-lockdown ideas such as Allen’s and those raised in the revised Haultain book have been systematically branded as unhinged right-wing Trumpian denialism of the true risks of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the need for strong government interventions. The new paper by the Canadian geographers sets the record straight on the right wing conspiracy idea. Above all, it draws attention to the fact that anti-lockdown commentary on the left is global and reaches back to the early days of the pandemic but has been suppressed, often by others on the left.

In early 2020, Agamben denounced the application of emergency lockdown measures that stifled democracies and freedom. He blogged about “The Invention of an Epidemic” and in a paper Agamben said the issue “is nothing less than the creation of a sort of ‘health terror’ as an instrument for governing what are called ‘worst case scenarios.'”