I’ve been paying some attention to “independent researcher” aka conspiratard James Corbett for several months now, as he has attempted to get to the bottom of COVID19 and what it’s really all about, besides (possibly) being a pathogen that makes people sick. In conspiratard circles, Bill Gates and mandatory vaccines come up a lot, and the COVID19 pandemic seems to be just the crisis TPTB have been waiting for to implement global mandatory vaccines, and to put billions more dollars into Bill Gates’ and his charity’s coffers, among other effects.
Corbett’s latest work again centers Bill Gates, this time Gates’ investment into so-called “BiomilQ” — that’s “milk” with a Q — a lab-created synthetic human milk that is grown (somehow) from real women’s mammary cells. Or something. As background, Corbett and the conspiratards are very much against what they call “transhumanism” and the transhuman agenda, which they see as an elitist agenda to remove humanity from the human experience, which is quite a deep hole to go down if anyone is interested. Depending on who you ask, the reason behind transhumanism could be money, where our governmental and corporate overlords steal our resources and sell them back to us at inflated rates and in a perverted, bastardized form, just as easily as it could be Satan himself trying to co-opt and corrupt human souls.
The conspiratards are against transhumanism, or so they say, whether it’s because they are Christians (a lot of them are) or because they are free thinkers and antiauthoritarians who do not accept the nefarious tinkering of our overlords, which is always done to further control and enslave us. That last reason is one I can get behind, and I’m on board with the Satanist explanation too, so long as Satan is understood to be a euphemism for the evil of human males, which I think it largely is. I kind of think the invention of “Satan” and the language of “Satanism” and declaring some things as Satanic is the only way some people have to say NO to the whims of human males, but without seeming all uppity, or too free-thinking, or feminist. But I digress.
Letter writing isn’t my forte, and thus neither is open-letter writing. But I can’t not respond to the bevy of whiney, whingey Western medical doctors who are complaining about their working conditions in Western hospitals, among other complaints, amid the COVID19 pandemic. And in this post, when I reference “Western” anything, I obviously mean capitalistic and patriarchal, and all capitalistic and patriarchal eminations and penumbras arising therefrom. In this post, I am responding to this article, which is only the most recent I’ve seen (but perhaps the only one I actually read) written by these clowns who seem to believe that the risks and fallout from practicing capitalistic, patriarchal medicine should be shared amongst the community, you see, while the rewards of working in a top-tier (read: apex predator) capitalistic patriarchal field, including money, power, status, invincibility and the like, should be theirs to savor alone. #fuckoff
This particular article, that I was actually moved to read, was written by a medical resident and woman of color which are probably the only reasons I read it, already knowing what she was likely to say, but giving her a chance. Residents are barely even doctors, having just graduated from medical school and having not even taken their exams yet. They are not even fully licensed to practice medicine and are also known as doctors-in-training, student doctors, or interns, mkay, fucking interns, yet practicing medicine without a license on a largely uneducated, naive public anyway, a public who thinks that anyone wearing a white jacket automatically knows what the fuck they are talking about and more importantly, what they are doing, physically doing with their hands and directing others to do.
Original title of this post: End of Supply Chain = End of Feminism? Another COVID-19 Post. Discuss. It won’t publish under that title. Hmm.
This is the latest COVID-19 video by conspiratard and admitted paranoid schizophrenic* Clif High. I say that to get the introduction and obvious credibility issue out of the way in the beginning. I keep my eye on many channels and try to take in as much information as I can and use my own discernment the best I can when trying to figure out just what the fuck is happening. Clif High has ideas and cites sources that I find interesting. In this vid, one of the things that caught my ear is his observation that if and when the supply chain ends, and that could happen permanently due to the now-global COVID-19 pandemic, it will mean the beginning of a “male ethos” and the end of feminism, where feminism is more or less completely dependent on the availability of calories (for one thing) and gathering publicly in groups (for another).
He also portends the end of SJWs or social justice warrior type behaviors and activities which are dependent on the same things. Both SJW and feminist activities are also dependent on the court system, but as he notes, the court system is pretty much shut down right now. He doesn’t think the courts will come back online anytime soon if ever and he might be right about that.
Of course, these observations have been made by feminists before who have noted that without electricity (for example) modern women wouldn’t have the energy or leisure time to pursue feminism, which for most feminists is basically a hobby they work on when they aren’t cleaning up after, sexually servicing, and otherwise being actively oppressed by men. In the case of women and feminism, the electric washing machine and vacuum cleaner (for example) have freed up women’s precious resources of energy and time, which some choose to dedicate to the “cause” of feminism. For women who don’t practice domesticity or who aren’t busy cleaning up after men either personally or professionally or both, it’s tough to argue that the easy availability of calories — meaning food — hasn’t been instrumental in allowing them to choose how to spend their time, including engaging in feminist pursuits, instead of foraging or hunting for nourishment.
Apparently, social media is currently alight with a new hashtag, #HighRiskCOVID19 which is being used by people with “underlying medical conditions” who are at greatest risk, besides the elderly, of contracting and becoming dangerously ill with the disease. Some of these people, but not all, are autoimmune patients and others voluntarily taking immunity-decimating Big Pharma medications to “treat” their underlying diseases including cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and Crohn’s disease. The message is intended to convince “well” people to stay home in order to not risk spreading the virus throughout communities and ultimately to those who are already seriously or chronically ill.
Putting aside the fact that these drugs often don’t even work, work well, or work for long to treat the pain and symptoms of autoimmune disease, despite the lies Big Pharma propaganda spews everywhere — lies that sick people’s friends and family often believe instead of believing the testimonies and lived experience of the people they supposedly love — these so-called “biologic” and chemotherapy drugs are prescribed to autoimmune patients because they destroy the sick person’s immune system, thereby (theoretically) preventing it from attacking the sick person’s own tissues. Of course, destroying anyone’s natural immunity also makes them more susceptible to opportunistic infections and environmental pathogens like the common cold, flu and the novel Coronavirus or COVID19. Essentially, autoimmune patients taking immunity-decimating drugs have allowed doctors to give them AIDS and all the complications of full-blown untreated AIDS.
In contrast, actual HIV-positive people with full-blown AIDS (assuming they have access to health care) are aggressively treated with an immunity-bolstering protocol and many are able to avoid the hideous outcomes that were a death sentence for AIDS patients in the 80s including lethal fungal infections/thrush, pneumonia and cancer. But no one is bolstering autoimmune patients’ purposely fucked-up immune systems because that would defeat the point of letting doctors give them therapeutic AIDS to treat their AI. In fact, immunocompromised AI patients, unlike those with full-blown untreated AIDS due to HIV, are fully expected by everyone to just go back to their previous lives, including returning to full-time work, like they aren’t sick at all. Somehow having both AI and AIDS = healthy. Some of them may — or may not — be told to wash their hands and avoid sick people, which is impossible innit.
Many AI patients are not even given the benefit of informed consent and are not fully informed of the very real and expected consequences of destroying their natural immunity to environmental pathogens. Patients often aren’t even told how the medications they are taking are expected to work, or if they are “informed” they are too sick and cognitively impaired to even understand what they are hearing. In other words, they don’t know they are consenting to essentially contracting AIDS. If they do understand it, they may be too sick to even care.*
There is also the issue, isn’t there, of congenitally nonviable infants being handed over to Big Medicine to essentially animate them well enough to be lifelong victims and consumers of patriarchal Western medicine, where many if not all of these infants are immunocompromised and/or have reduced lung capacity and lifelong serious “preexisting medical problems” due to their congenital malformations or premature births. Before that, many Western women take prescription medications meant to prevent miscarriage, when miscarriage has historically (and prehistorically surely) prevented nonviable and congenitally malformed fetuses from being born at all. Get it? Good. Enter the novel Coronavirus.
This was and is the absolute last straw. I have been writing health and medical-related content on this blog for almost 2 years now and I have deliberately avoided this topic because I knew how it would be received. Mothers have been criticized and punished for their choices (and their femaleness) forever and now that we are all enlightened and feminist and shit, mothers and motherhood are beyond reproach. I know because the internet said so! Mom-shaming is right out, no one is allowed to criticize women who conceive, gestate, birth and/or raise children for anything because liberal feminism and besides, under patriarchy, women’s and mothers’ choices are artificially limited and (therefore) coerced so the fucked up things women “choose” for themselves and their children are not women’s fault. Radical feminism supposes that the things women choose are not even choices at all.
First as a liberal feminist and later as a radical, I accepted one or the other of these rationalizations for a long time and refused to criticize women and mothers on feminist grounds, where women as oppressed people previously and/or currently lack the social and political power to be fully actualized, engaged human beings and the central agents in their own lives. Between feminist arguments centering agency and non-agency (liberal and radical viewpoints respectively) women and mothers have secured a free pass to do and choose anything, absolutely anything, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to other people, or to animals, or to the living planet. Rather than examining cause and effect — meaning the intended and unintended consequences of our action and inaction — somehow “shame” has become the focus and women are not to be shamed, and by shamed we apparently mean held accountable for their own actions.
For one reason and then another, cause and effect have been deemed irrelevant to women and women’s choices and women’s interactions with our world — well, with mensworld as it were. Before feminism, women were simply expected to do what they were told and they usually did. But cause and effect are always relevant so long as we are alive on this planet because cause and effect is consistent with natural law. Get it? There are laws that have existed longer than humans, longer than civilization, longer than patriarchy, and which sure as hell predate feminism, and for a long, long time we have acted as if these natural laws were unimportant, or less important than other things. Less important than men’s laws. More recently, less important than not-shaming women. This has been our mindset for thousands of years by now — at least 10,000 years by my estimation, which was approximately the beginning of agriculture where humans sought to overcome or tame nature to our own ends.
We did this, we chose this, and we have been doing it and choosing it for a long time. Where we are now could be said to be the result of 10,000 years of that unnatural/patriarchal policy and practice of eschewing natural law. And where are we? I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say that we are in hell, utter hell, and if the above-linked article isn’t the perfect illustration of that type and degree of hell then I don’t know what is.
This woman gave birth to a child who was born with no anus, a missing kidney, a neurologically dysfunctional colon and bladder and a tethered spine. He was therefore temporarily stomatized for fecal collection as an infant and would later require laxatives and enemas daily for life to eliminate waste through a surgically-constructed “anus” and would likewise need to be catheterized every 3-4 hours for life in order to pee. The child was in pain every moment of every day and night even though his doctors were certain his conditions weren’t painful, and their negligence including misdiagnoses and complications from his spinal surgeries caused his bowel and bladder conditions to become even more debilitating and more painful than they would’ve been without their help. And that’s saying something isn’t it.
Remember when I noted that climate change activist Greta Thunberg and all so-called climate change activism is demonstrably pro-nuclear? And when I speculated that Greta’s self-described autistic “super power” was really brain damage from likely radioactive environmental pollution, exactly the kind of environmental pollution that Greta herself never speaks about or acknowledges at all…in her work as a leader in an alleged environmental activist movement? Well, there is now an article written on a conspiratard site that confirms both of my suspicions. And the above vid that cites the article.
Sadly, there are no citations in the article itself on which to follow up and I don’t know what that means. Did the writer — himself an anti-nuke activist and Hiroshima baby — just make it all up out of whole cloth? Maybe, but we can also get pretty far down that road by simply using common sense, considering that there are a lot of radiation-damaged people in Greta’s neck of the woods. Here is a map showing dangerous, genetically/generationally damaging Chernobyl fallout covering parts (well, almost all) of Finland, Sweden and Norway. Greta’s mother was likely exposed to it as a child in the 80s and they all continue to bask in it today, considering that radioactive contamination stays dangerous forever and never goes away.
When trying to confirm the claims that Greta’s family is involved in the nuclear industry, I found this article on another conspiratard site which seems to back it up and references some intrigue, namely orphanings, adoptions and multiple name changes of her male and female ancestors that make researching her family and their connections difficult if not impossible. Here is the part I would be interested in corroborating. From the first conspiratard article:
Greta’s grandfather Lars Lars Ernman, is retired chief financial officer (CFO) of Sandvik, a world-leading tool-maker that manufactures saws and drills for home carpentry, and also steel pipes for nuclear power plants. In partnership with the French atomic energy giant AREVA, the Swedish manufacturer also produces drilling, tunneling and rock-crushing equipment for the global uranium-mining industry.
I also find it interesting that Greta’s ancestors are seasoned professional actors, as do the conspiratards who are starting to suspect that there’s something not-so authentic about Greta and the movement she has inspired. A movement that both explicitly and implicitly supports nuclear power while blaming soccer moms for catastrophic weather and climate change while demonstrably not blaming one of the — if not the — largest most environmentally damaging industries this planet has ever known and will ever know again: the nuclear industry, which notoriously pumps out not merely genetic/generational mutations, illness and death but also “hot particles” which contaminate our water, soil, biomass and ourselves with literal heat.
Since writing about my own Crohn’s disease and social unsupport-related suicide (well, euthanasia) attempts I have researched suicide a bit and found something interesting. Much more interesting than the usual twaddle about anxiety, depression and so-called “mental health” issues that sorry, every woman in this hell-dimension probably experiences somewhat regularly as oppressed people who are almost always trying to keep things alive in a necrophilic culture whether it be plants, pets, children, partners, elderly parents and/or ourselves.
In my estimation, the unusually high stakes of that particular game and myriad of obstacles intentionally placed in our way — meaning quite literally that if we let our guards down for a fucking second, and even if we don’t, literal death will come knocking for ourselves and/or our dependents for which we will suffer both the loss and the blame — would tend to be anxiety-producing in many, most if not all women. Understanding intellectually, intuitively and/or by experience that our role as lifekeepers in a more or less global necrophilic (patriarchal) context is likely to be impossibly difficult (and ultimately futile, because mortality) is depressing. And when I say depressing, obviously I mean that any of us would be forgiven if we just couldn’t get up the mental or physical energy to do it anymore.
And we all know the effects of gaslighting by now since it was very helpfully illustrated in a play and then 2 derivative Hollywood movies that perhaps not very many modern people have seen but which concept has come to be understood and referenced in popular culture as well as in clinical and research literature studying abuse — the intent and effect of gaslighting is to deliberately drive the victim insane. So we have deliberately and predictably anxiety-producing living conditions for most if not all women, which conditions are or become depressing due to futility and exhaustion and then everyone we know and indeed our entire culture/s gaslight us about all of this — telling us in a million ways every day that these conditions that are demonstrably real, aren’t — until we crack, if we don’t die first. There’s your “mental health” crisis innit.
According to the internet, a “sock gnome” is a mythical creature that pilfers socks. Presumably it lives in or around the dryer where you put an even number of socks in and get an odd number out. Sometimes it gets tricksy and spits out an even number but the pairs don’t match (meaning it’s pilfered one from more than one pair) but the usual evidence that you’ve had a sock pilfered by a gnome is that there is one left over that doesn’t have a mate and the missing sock never reappears ever. This is a real thing (if not a real gnome) and everyone knows what this means.
Well, there appears to be a similar creature that lives at Social Services and pilfers sick and poor people’s applications for welfare benefits. Or something, idk. I assume these creatures are related but maybe not since this gnome doesn’t play games: its goal seems to be to drive you insane before it literally kills you. I wrote here before about an application for benefits that went missing, along with a half a dozen other boondoggles that have wasted my spoons and left me scrambling to repeat some administrative process I was barely able to complete survive the first time.
Because while a sick person’s literal inability to jump through bureaucratic hoops is actually the best evidence that someone is extremely ill, someone has decided that only those who are well enough to sing for their supper (or pursue benefits) deserve to eat, as it were. The first application that went missing was for food stamps, while today I found out that my application to get on a 4 month waitlist to see a doctor went missing 2 months ago and has not been since heard from: although my disability advocate hand-delivered it, the application was never received.
The nuclear family is the site of oppression, coercion and abuse for so many people, especially female people, worldwide, and yet “the family” is rarely discussed in political (or radical) terms. Last year around this time, I wrote about various familial abuses traditionally suffered by girls and women and suggested that oppression, coercion and abuse is the reason “the holidays” are such a stressful time for people, especially women. In my observation, the refusal of most people to address the horrors of what really happens in families just leads to confusion and avoidance — and massive cognitive dissonance — where people express dread, anxiety and other negative emotions around family-focused holidays, but only manage in reducing this common experience to a joke/meme and avoiding unpleasant sensations by drinking (or eating, or shopping, or fucking, or cleaning, or decorating, or otherwise medicating) heavily until it’s over.
That message was generally not taken well, where I gently (and tangentially, it was literally a parenthetical) suggested that a guaranteed way to stop familial oppression, coercion and abuse (of mostly females) was to stop creating so-called nuclear families at all. Antinatalism, basically. I know, right? Antinatalism wasn’t even the dominant theme of that post but I’m such a misogynistic, baby-hating bitch for letting my mind lady-brain wander there, even parenthetically, how dare I (use the internet to talk about the female experience and female oppression). How very damn dare I.
Sticking with the holiday theme of oppression, coercion and abuse — because it’s fucking relevant — those things are known to cause so-called psychiatric symptoms in people, particularly women as they are its primary targets under a more or less global patriarchy. In large numbers, girls and women (female human beings) experience anxiety, depression, disassociation and other uncomfortable and debilitating states as a result of being oppressed, coerced and abused, and a lot of women are prescribed and take psychiatric drugs so that these uncomfortable states go away, or have less of an impact on our lives. And by “lives” I of course mean our ability to show up and be ab/used by our capitalistic, patriarchal overlords including (almost always male) partners, employers and other authority figures. Mother’s Little Helper and all that.
If these medications actually worked — that is, if they did what they say on the tin and relieved us of our agony — they still wouldn’t be beyond reproach. There are compelling political and indeed medical arguments against treating people with dangerous Big Pharma medications to ease uncomfortable states of being. For example, the debilitating and often permanent physical and mental “side effects” of prescription medications, otherwise known as iatrogenic illness and injury that are often just as bad or even worse than the original disease. As usual, Big Medicine offers suffering people the chance to trade one illness for another, and another, and another, and to pay through the nose for the privilege.
Many times it’s not even a proper trade because the drugs are unable to cure the original disease and the new, treatment-induced injuries and illnesses are just added on. (This is the case with Crohn’s disease for example which is known to be an incurable disease.) Either way, the misery is compounded. Well, it appears to be an open secret within the psychiatric community that psychiatric medications don’t do what they say on the tin. Women are taking anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic and other psychotropic medications to treat the effects of political and interpersonal oppression — and are being asked to concurrently swallow the cultural fiction that their discomfort is not political and originates in their own biochemistry — and the medications don’t even work, because they can’t work, because there is nothing chemical to treat, get it?
As discussed below, it appears as if the theory that a chemical imbalance in the brain causes psychiatric symptoms has been thoroughly debunked, yet application of this flawed theory continues: people continue to be medicated for “mental” conditions that are not biochemical and therefore are not amenable to chemical therapies. These medications also cause frightening and severe negative outcomes long-term and psychiatrists know all of that but they keep prescribing them anyway.
Here are some clips that illustrate what seems to be the situation in which we find ourselves. Namely, that oppression, coercion and abuse are unavoidable in this system; families are the original and main exposure to those things for most women globally and familial exposure in particular cannot be avoided; oppression, coercion and abuse cause the symptoms we know as mental illness; and every medication in Big Medicine’s arsenal is known to not work to treat it and to even make patients’ physical and mental conditions worse over time. More videos and discussion below the fold.
Nurse Ratched was a sadistic, evil bitch at the time and would be that and a dangerously out of touch political dinosaur now. Please do not do what she would do. If anything, ask yourself WWNRD and then do the opposite.
Speaking with my mother recently made me sympathize with young smartasses and activists who are just waiting for the elder generation — the out of touch Baby Boomers and the Baby Boomers’ parents and kids by this point — to give up the ghost and die. A “dinosaur” or political dinosaur is someone whose philosophy and worldview are obsolete and rooted in problematic values and circumstances of the distant past. For example, as a young activist in my teens and 20s I remember thinking and saying that the world would be a better place once those who grew up with unregulated environmental pollution and legal institutionalized racism, sexism etc. died off because their environmental unconcern, racism and sexism were so entrenched that they either didn’t realize, agree or care that what they were doing and being was wrong.
Welp. After being sick my entire fucking life with an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, and going on 8 years with a diagnosed one, I am having these same thoughts now about the older generation of Western medical practitioners and others who were born, grew up and/or progenated in a low-population, relatively unpolluted pre-nuclear world where lifelong serious, untreatable, incurable and progressive disease existed only in very small numbers and therefore where older people seem to believe and act as if chronic illness did not and does not exist at all.
To be clear, chronic illness obviously did exist in our recent and distant past, for example, natural uranium deposits are known to cause acute and chronic radiation sickness to those who spend time around it. And humans have likely always been struck down with genetic and congenital maladies that might not have outright killed them. But old/er people seem to have lived their entire lives without chronic illness, including autoimmune and immune-mediated disease, front and center in their consciousness or as a part of their lived experience and this does make sense: before, say, the 1940s and 50s the worst industrial (man-made ionizing nuclear) pollutants had yet to be widely dispersed and contemporary Western medicine did not, because it could not, routinely pluck seriously ill and/or nonviable neonates, infants and others from the brink of merciful, natural deaths. Today, seriously ill children and others are rather forced to live for years, decades and lifetimes with serious illnesses that do not outright kill them, because Western medicine will not allow it, but which Western medicine has yet to figure out how to treat, relieve, or cure.
Having researched chronic illness, primarily autoimmune and immune-mediated disease for going on 8 years now, it seems to me that, in stark contrast to the life experience and worldview of older people, young people today generally are very aware that incurable and progressive chronic illness exists. Over and over I see that young people today, at least young Western people, well understand and accept the reality of chronic illness much more freely than older people, and the implications of that are extremely dark. From what I can discern, this difference in worldview likely exists because young people are increasingly becoming seriously chronically ill themselves. Young people understand and accept the material reality of chronic illness because experiencing it personally as individuals and in their peer group they have no choice but to accept it.
And over and over I see that older people are generally ignorant about issues of chronic illness and that they have not experienced it either individually or in their peer group. Frighteningly, instead of recognizing their blessed ignorance and trying to remedy it, older people think that their personal opinion based on outdated and second- and third-hand pseudo-knowledge about chronic illness matters or affects the outcome. It doesn’t, but unfortunately many medical professionals, healthcare policymakers, paid and unpaid caretakers and the like embrace an outdated worldview that no longer applies in our post-nuclear, Western world, and thus do not or cannot fully believe the self-reports of, or even contemporary peer-reviewed medical research addressing, the experiences and needs of seriously chronically ill.
Will someone please explain to me how a person’s literal death is evidence that they weren’t actually sick at the time they died or ever? The “I Told You I Was Sick” tombstone may (or may not idk) have been around as long as tombstones themselves have been around and it is even cataloged in a collection of “curious epitaphs” as the epitaph of an ancient hypochondriac.
The epitaph. Of a hypochondriac. Hmm. While I process that very concept a moment, I Google “hypochondria” and find that the word doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it meant. Or rather, the origin of the word itself was nothing like I had assumed. Apparently, the very concept of unverified/unverifiable illness causing patients extreme physical and mental distress originated from complaints involving the abdomen. Why doesn’t that surprise me at all. From Wiki:
Among the regions of the abdomen, the hypochondrium is the uppermost part. The word derives from the Greek term ὑποχόνδριος hypokhondrios, meaning “of the soft parts between the ribs and navel” from ὑπό hypo (“under”) and χόνδρος khondros, or cartilage (of the sternum).
Hypochondria in Late Latin meant “the abdomen”.
The term hypochondriasis for a state of disease without real cause reflected the ancient belief that the viscera of the hypochondria were the seat of melancholy and sources of the vapor that caused morbid feelings. Until the early 18th century, the term referred to a “physical disease caused by imbalances in the region that was below your rib cage”. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) blamed it “for everything from ‘too much spittle’ to ‘rumbling in the guts’.
Bolds mine. Apparently, people have been presenting to doctors for a long, long time complaining of upper abdominal pain, too much spittle chronic nausea and/or drooling, and rumbling in the guts the dreaded intestinal gurgling that often foretells an impending Crohn’s flare and they had morbid feelings about that. You don’t say.
I should mention here that capsule endoscopy, which is currently the only way to get diagnostic imaging of the lining of the small bowel, is a very new technology that’s extremely expensive and often not covered by insurance. Before modern imaging technology, including capsule endoscopy technology, diseases of the upper part of the abdomen in particular were virtually undiagnosable. Due to its inaccessible location, in practice, even today, for many if not most people getting a reliable diagnostic image of the hypochondrium (!) or the upper part of the abdomen and gastrointestinal tract is impossible.
Whilst performing my daily catch-up with my favorite conspiratard sites, today I found this: recent peer-reviewed medical research indicating that so-called Morgellon’s disease is actually a real, physical ailment and not all in patients’ — usually female patients’ — heads. I have had a slightly more than casual interest in Morgellon’s disease for at least a decade if not two, and I am seeing the year 2002 thrown around as the approximate date that reports of this confounding, untreatable and disabling medical condition first appeared in the United States. People — usually female people — started presenting to their doctors for diagnosis and treatment of a condition comprised of skin lesions, often with strange “fibers” protruding from them or embedded in the unbroken skin or in the scabs, as well as maddening feelings of itching, crawling, burning etc. under or on their skin as if “bugs” were crawling there. There were almost certainly additional complaints considering what Morgellon’s actually turned out to be — a tickbourne infection that is often comorbid with Lyme disease — but let’s leave it there for now.
Morgellon’s patients routinely brought in a collection of scabs and fibers to show their doctors, intending to be good patients and their own “advocates” to help the doctors do their job, which is the current advice given to particularly women in order to insure that they get the best medical treatment possible (and so that the women themselves as actors or co-actors on their own “care team” can take part or all of the blame when they are not effectively treated). Whereupon the doctors proceeded to mock the women and their attempts to document and provide physical evidence of what was happening to them by referring to such evidence as “matchbox sign” because women allegedly brought the fibers and scabs with them in empty matchboxes. Of course, matchbox sign was a euphemism for evidence of fraud and mental, not physical, disease.
Here is an example of “matchbox sign” where the woman brought her evidence in a folded piece of paper, and not an empty matchbox, but whatever right? The point of inventing and naming matchbox sign was so that doctors could warn other doctors that the person sitting in front of them covered in lesions and in terrible, ongoing and relentless pain, cradling a sad bundle of phony evidence was crazy. The point was obviously not to tell the truth or describe anything accurately or even neutrally, or in a way that was likely to get these women meaningful treatment or relief.
I guess this is the speech that gave Donald Trump an excuse to mock 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg, calling her “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” In it, she says she refuses to believe the “adults” who rape and pillage the environment living planet are evil. She doesn’t say why she refuses to believe it. She offers no evidence that it’s actually not true and that the worst of the worst industrial polluters rapists and pillagers of the living planet including water, soil, air and biomass (read: food, pets and ourselves) are actually good, or even neutral actors. No, she just refuses to believe that the literal monsters responsible for global industrial pollution and its effects are something other than evil because (unstated) reasons, or because no reasons at all.
But I have news for Greta and for anyone and everyone self-inflicting and/or spewing thought-terminating cliches and “refusing to believe” thus and so: just because you refuse to believe something doesn’t mean it’s not true, and your or anyone’s refusal to believe doesn’t make anything that’s actually true, untrue.
Mkay? People think and say that Greta Thunberg is brutally honest but “refusing to believe” is not honest. Greta herself thinks the reason she is able to be brutally honest with herself and others is because autism, but Greta’s self image isn’t entirely realistic is it? She is just a child afterall. In fact, I’m not even entirely sure than any autistic person would naturally “refuse to believe” anything, and instead would either tend to believe or disbelieve depending on the evidence. If they didn’t have enough evidence to make an evidence-based judgement they would look into it further until they knew for sure, especially if the subject matter was an autistic “special interest” like climate change seems to be Greta’s autistic special interest. But Greta isn’t interested in looking further into it in this case to find out for sure whether industrial polluters, corporate overlords and lapdog politicians are evil or neutral or good. Why not?
If the above vid is not the perfect illustration of concept I don’t know what is. This is the most recent YouTube upload by Royalty Soaps, what used to be a one-woman soapmaking business that has grown over several years into something else. The backstory here seems to be that at some point, the eldest yet still teenaged daughter in some freakishly large Quiverfull-type family consisting of a mother, a father and a dozen(ish) Irish twins* started making soap and with the help and support of that family has become very successful and has now delegated some of her substantial duties to others.
As described in this vid, this woman’s business recently experienced an unexpected and frightening setback and she relied heavily on her family to correct the situation and save the day, which they did in spades. They also had the time, energy, material resources and desire to throw her an Insta-worthy backyard 25th birthday party in the midst of this family project. The party was beautiful and the familial love and care given and received there, as documented in this vid…well watch it for yourself and see what you think. For me, the experience of watching this was somewhat complicated. I enjoyed it, was moved by it but it made me deeply uncomfortable and thinky…and hungry for salad, cake and sun tea.
What was so deeply disturbing to me about this footage was the backdrop against which it was shot and I’m not referring to her (albeit somewhat disturbing) home state of Texas, or a photo prop. The backdrop here, as it is most everywhere, is the social context of capitalism and patriarchy and what that means is that, in order for this situation and this footage to exist, this woman has had to comply, comply, comply in order to reap what must be conditional rewards of love; affection; physical presence and caretaking; emotional care and concern; and finally, material things that, under the current system, really only money can buy. Doesn’t it? In her case, she has had to buy into the religious, political and social traditions of her family including the patriarchal authority of her parents, the heterosexual and mommy mandates and more in order to have what she has. Of course, the traditions of her family mirror the traditions of her culture more or less exactly.
Luckily for her there does not seem to be any obvious conflict between her own values, conscience etc. and that of her family (or culture) but what if there was? What would happen to her if she woke up one day with, say, environmental concerns implicating overpopulation and natalism, or economic concerns implicating capitalism and the money system and the ethics of making and selling soap (or doing anything) for profit? What if, God forbid, this Quiverfull (or whatever) daughter woke up one day withfeminist concerns which implicate all of that plus the destablization of the patriarchal authority of her father/parents, her husband, her church and the State?
The above vid is an illustration for those “climate change activists” who believe that hydroelectric and/or nuclear power, in other words, dam/ning the world’s rivers and waterways is going to save us. It’s not.
Greta Thunberg is an international “climate change activist” that probably everyone has heard about by now. She is also autistic and shares characteristics with other autistics, namely, she is serious and sullen; nonverbal by default unless she has something important to say; starkly observant, brutally honest. Although still a child she does not suffer fools gladly or at all, and instead is mercilessly critical of the “adults” who have poisoned, penetrated and otherwise wrecked the “climate” (read: planet) we all rely on for survival. Even worse, especially to an autistic like Greta where autistics characteristically respond with an intense Trypophobic-like revulsion to deceit and lies, the Baby Boomer generation (and the generations immediately preceding and following) lied about what they did and continue to do to our shared world, they covered it up, they continue the lies and cover-ups even as they smile (or cry, or don’t react at all) and lie more and cover up more, right to our collective face.
Greta isn’t falling for it which isn’t odd in and of itself. What’s really odd is that anyone is listening to her, and taking her seriously, a female in end-stage patriarchy, an uncoiffed, disabled nonconsumer and nonworker in end-stage capitalism, a child.
A cynical (or seasoned adult) observer might note that Greta’s story and presence in the cultural conversation has put everyone in their feels and in their imagined political, social and interpersonal power which is right where the “adults” want us to be. In fact I can only conclude that this bizarre spectacle isn’t bizarre at all, but is what. it. looks. like. when end-stage capitalism and patriarchy uses a female autistic to serve its own ends. How can we tell? Because even as she criticizes and shames them, hitting them in their egos and accumulations and rituals (right where it would seem to hurt the most) the “adults” aren’t gaslighting her, they aren’t telling her not to believe her lying eyes, they are encouraging rather than shutting her down, she hasn’t been medicated or institutionalized or driven to suicide or killed. Yet.
(Let’s see how well Greta fares after some time has passed, after a season, a misspent youth or a lifetime of activism seeing clearly how things really operate and what the consequences are and how little things actually change. Or how particularly capitalism and patriarchy don’t tend to change over time except to reliably get worse.)
Instead of punishing her, the adults and other children who inhabit this failing global politic/planet are hailing Greta Thunberg as an autistic savant, a climate change warrior, an infant Wonder Woman but in my estimation she is just a misguided Cassandra.
