I recently wrote about existential terror in the context of motherhood and post-partum and maternal angst. When reading about a rich girl who needed deprogramming after taking one gender studies course, my mind again went to existential terror. This young woman somehow remained “unprogrammed” for 2 years at an elite women’s college despite the culture being “aggressively anti-male” but then in her junior year, a gender studies class threw her for a loop:
“This professor tells me about the patriarchy,” Rockwell told The Post. ” I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wasn’t someone that into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism. But I was told there’s the patriarchy and you don’t even understand it’s been working against you your whole life. You’ve been oppressed and you didn’t even know it. Now you have to fight it. And I just went down this deep rabbit hole.”
Mount Holyoke grad deprogrammed from women-only woke culture. From The New York Post and other outlets.
There is a lot to unpack in this article, but for the record, I would like to start with this: patriarchy refers to the demonstrable fact that more or less globally, all political power lies in men’s hands, including military, economic, academic, scientific, judicial and every other damn thing you can imagine. Any alleged power or powerful positions held by women is tokenism only and does not change anything. This is the definition of patriarchy given to us by Kate Millet in her 1970 book Sexual Politics and according to others who were around at the time, that was the first time patriarchy was identified and named. It is difficult to even imagine, some 50 years later, that “patriarchy” has not always existed as a definiable political concept but indeed it has not.
Thus, all radical feminist theory followed from Kate Millet’s rather unassailable isolation and identification of patriarchy as a system. There is no way that radical feminist thought — getting to the root of female oppression — could have appeared or developed without this basic, core tenet. The existence of a more or less global patriarchy, as defined by Millet, is beyond debate and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about it. If elite women’s colleges are teaching another definition of patriarchy I really can’t speak to that.
I can report that my closest childhood friend dropped out of a non-elite college after taking one Women’s Studies class, which class demonstrably mentally and intellectually broke her. At the time, she had 5 brothers and came from a Catholic family; she now has 3 sons and a porn-addicted husband. Because Women’s Studies, WOST101 to be specific, my friend never finished her freshman year of college and has been supporting her family of 6 for the last 20+ years by working in a supermarket. Her porn-addicted husband is unemployable and (therefore) a stay at home dad. Apparently, she can handle “non-traditional gender roles” (and porn) and might have been a liberal feminist in deed if not in name, but learning about patriarchy in an academic setting was clearly a bridge too far.
This is the Died Suddenly video that everyone is currently talking about. Here is the BBC trying to debunk it. I can’t tell you whether or how much of the information in Died Suddenly is true, but I offer my readers the full video anyway. This is where thinking people use discernment, where we are free to consider radical, weird or unpopular ideas and decide for ourselves what value the information likely has based on our own knowledge and lived experience, feminist canon, common sense, intuition and whatever else we have at our disposal. Remember that merely considering an unpopular idea does not indicate a lapse in critical thinking, despite what the normies say.
Another tool in our discernment toolbox is this: how credible is the information — and sources of that information — that attempt to debunk it? I can’t promise that the Died Suddenly information is credible, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that the BBC — like all mainstream media — is well-known documented to be a bunch of dick-licking Big Pharma lapdogs and that the article they released debunking Died Suddenly is literally one of the stupidest articles I have ever seen, so let’s start there. (Conflicts of Interest. 10/10)
First up, we have the BBC attempting to put a human face on their “issue” and they chose a lesbian face. Instantly the BBC’s narrative is beyond reproach because although normies obviously hate lesbians, especially the radical feminist kind, the LGBTLOLWTAFBBQ+/- is a political force to be reckoned with — and thus this lesbian is a reliable narrator and the BBC article discussing her experience is unassailable — because transgender. Of course, LGBTWTFBBQ is also a bunch of dick-licking Big Pharma lapdogs because transgender (and HIV/AIDS) but let’s not talk about that. Well played BBC. (Cynicism. 10/10)
Here, we have a lesbian whose partner died suddenly and the surviving partner was cruelly attacked by online trolls who made a tenative connection between the sudden death, the documented excess mortality event currently underway, and the documented adverse events caused by the COVID vaccines. The “human face” on the issue is actually a sad emoji and everyone responding to the sad emoji (sad LGBTBBQ emoji) with anything less (or more) than fake empathy and platitudes are anti-vax trolls. 😢😢😢😢 Are we living in a children’s cartoon? If so, and if the cartoon is an 80s cartoon, the lesbian and her suddenly-deceased partner are the Smurfs and the evil, anti-vax trolls are Gargamel. Good v Evil. (Reductionism. 10/10)
I am tempted to address this frankly astonishingly disingenuous article paragraph by paragraph but I’m not sure that’s the best use of my time. Maybe if we can tease out some additional criteria for evaluating the information — criteria that will aid us in using our discernment here and everywhere — that will turn an otherwise boring media-critical task into something worthwhile? You tell me.
“Seven days, 18 hours, 39 minutes ago my beloved… died suddenly of cardiac arrest”. When Victoria Brownworth logged onto Twitter to post these words about her partner of 23 years, she didn’t know that two of them in particular would provoke a storm of online harassment.
Because, as Victoria waited at her home in Philadelphia on Sunday night for her wife’s ashes to be delivered, a video titled Died Suddenly was about to drop.
In an hour and eight minutes of dramatic music and out-of-context news reports, the film tells a fictitious story of a dangerous vaccine killing off swathes of young people – all part of an imagined plot to depopulate the earth.
It landed on niche video-sharing platform Rumble on Monday and began to spread. By Wednesday morning it had been viewed more than 4 million times on Rumble and at least 1.5 million times on Twitter.
The claims made in the video quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Vast amounts of evidence from different independent scientists all over the world, as well as the experiences of billions of people, have shown that serious Covid vaccine side effects are rare.
The Died Suddenly story is “fictitious” because the BBC says so. The plot is “imagined” because the BBC says it is. It was posted on Rumble instead of YouTube or another mainstream source because illegitimate/nefarious reasons. Trust the Science and Trust Scientists despite all the valid reasons not to. Appeals to Authority. 10/10
But its call for people to look at any reported deaths through a lens of suspicion had made Victoria fair game – and as the phrase “died suddenly” started to trend, people flocked to her memorial thread.
“How long’s it been since she got the jab?”, hundreds of people began to reply.
Victoria’s wife, Madelaine Gold – a painter and design professor – had an advanced stage of cancer, though she had been doing better just before she died. There is no suggestion the vaccine had anything to do with her death.
A lens of suspicion is the wrong lens. A lens of infantile naivete and blind trust is the correct lens. The original author didn’t suggest that she was alarmed by her partner’s sudden death, and she didn’t make a connection to the known adverse effects of the vaccines, so this story is not alarming and nothing will make it alarming, nothing to see here, move on. Normalcy Bias. 10/10
I came across yet another Mommy Guilt article and these set me off every time I see them. This one was about so-called maternal ambivalence, where mothers feel conflicting emotions about their children or about motherhood and the maternal role. From what I can tell, maternal ambivalence exists on a scale of negative maternal emotions including relatively minor “baby blues” to postpartum clinical anxiety and/or depression and postpartum psychosis. From where I’m sitting, these negative maternal emotions are fully expected and explicable, considering that bringing new life into a more or less global patriarchy is probably the most evil thing anyone could ever do. I personally think mothers are shit and that they deserve to feel like shit for doing what they’ve done. It goes without saying that fathers are shit for bringing life into this hellscape and for impregnating oppressed women under conditions of servitude and/or slavery. I’m sorry (not sorry) but I really don’t know how anyone can be okay with that.
And I am sick to death of hearing this self-indulgent shit from mothers, who talk constantly about their emotions and experiences with motherhood — whether positive or negative — while concurrently insisting that they aren’t allowed to talk about it at all. Are people consuming the same media I am? Because this shit is seemingly everywhere, you can’t get away from it. Mothers are more than free, actually, to discuss their alleged feelings of maternal guilt, shame, ambivalence, sadness, regret, elation, superiority, arousal, whatever, as long as the conversation is limited to 2 areas: discussing “gender” and socially-constructed roles including the maternal role; and the individualistic, self-indulgent and therapeutic, including utilizing talk and drug therapies to help women manage their emotions and cope. Strangely, none of this seems to help (does it?) and these conversations ultimately go nowhere. But who cares right? It’s only women’s (and children’s) lives we are talking about here. It’s only procreation and (therefore) only a matter of life and death.
Since both gender and therapy are boring as shit and obviously haven’t solved the problem of negative maternal emotion, let’s talk about existential terror. I found this article to be enlightening of the concept of existential terror: it is someone’s doctoral dissertation and is titled “Psychoanalysis and Modernity: A Failure to Find Relief from Existential Terror.” I guess we know now why therapy doesn’t work on mother guilt, innit. Or rather, if therapy doesn’t work, we can infer that what we are dealing with is (or at least could be) existential terror. Tangentially, upon reading this paper, I wondered how the author has fared in her profession, where her doctoral thesis in Clinical Psychology was that psychoanalysis has failed and was always doomed to fail. lol. From the paper:
This project considers the ways in which culture—the symbols and institutions that guide behavior and provide meaning to the individuals living within a community—serves a defensive function against conscious awareness of existential terror. […] I will argue that psychoanalysis emerged during a time of tremendous cultural flux and represents the de facto model of psychological defense in modernity, replacing religion as the primary cultural mode of meaning-making. I will argue that as a system, psychoanalysis is doomed to fail in its mission[.]
Article Abstract. Psychoanalysis and Modernity: A Failure to Find Relief from Existential Terror. Erin Liat D. Claridge (2017)
I read and annotated this entire paper, 150 pages worth, and I won’t attempt to fully address every point here. My first impression, after wondering if this woman was run out of (or ran from) her profession, was that existential terror is and has long been addressed in terms of mother-child, but it is always from the perspective of the child and it’s pretty obvious why that is: it’s a male perspective, where all men were once babies but no men ever go on to become mothers.
Existential terror involves the fear of death or nothingness but it is not exclusively the fear of death or nothingness. Feelings of existential terror are related to and rooted in the recognition of human vulnerability, of living in a frail, soft body that has material needs that are not guaranteed to be met, including the need to be not-tortured, not-exploited, not-raped. There exists plenty of psychobabble about babies allegedly forming defenses against the terror of existence, which ideas are dubious at best, (transference, anal/oral phases etc.) but I have never seen maternal angst spoken about in terms of existential terror, rooted in either the reality of a woman’s vulnerability or that of her child. But what is motherhood except a stark, undeniable confrontation with human vulnerability?
Men can wear sparkly shirts or whatever, but women still can’t speak in public without getting death threats, when we are allowed to speak at all. This is where feminists stumping for gender including so-called transgender has gotten us.
So where did we go wrong? And when I say “we” obviously I mean women, liberal feminist women, okay, handmaidens, none of which are reading this blog, so I guess it’s an us and them situation. Radical feminists didn’t do this, this was the libfems, including libfems who identify as radicals. So where did they go wrong? Was it stumping for males including gay and allegedly “gender non-conforming” males? (Spoiler alert: all men are gender-conforming. There is no such thing as a gender non-conforming male). Was their error in supporting Big Pharma and Western medicine and making access to care a feminist issue? Or in believing that the trickle-down economics of gender — when trickle-down economics demonstrably never trickles, seriously look it up — would benefit women, eventually, just as soon as the men get what they need?
Let’s review. Clearly, this all started with feminists attempting to be clever, when they asserted that sex and gender are not the same. Here, feminist women were supposedly* trying to show that the female-sex-role foisted on us by men was abusive and exploited us and (therefore) that it should end. We called this female-sex-role “gender” instead of calling it what it was — a female sex role. We called the abuse something other than abuse. We didn’t talk at all about how sex-based power is a zero-sum game and that abusing and expoliting women = empowering men. We didn’t criticize Western medicine and Big Pharma and its rather central role in the transgender movement (and female oppression). We didn’t say what we didn’t say because saying it would’ve made men mad. And being male-pleasing, as we all know, is central to feminism. Being male-pleasing is central to everything women do. Almost always this is the case.
With this anemic skeleton of an argument (that sex and gender are not the same) and oh look there, it’s a huge cancerous tumor on the anemic skeleton, that won’t turn out well (the tumor is male pleasing BTW) we forged ahead with gender discourse. And this is where we are now: the “Let Women Speak” rally in NYC is successfully quashed by transgender activists. They didn’t let women speak — apparently the main organizer and keynote speaker wasn’t allowed to speak at all. She wasn’t even physically allowed into the event she organized and instead of being escorted-in as was planned, she was evacuated-out of the area. Men can wear sparkly shirts or whatever, but women still can’t speak in public. This is where 50-some years of gender discourse has gotten us.
And I will duly note that there is irony here — they didn’t Let Women Speak, point made, how clever — but are we satisfied with irony? Are we? What has irony ever gotten us? Has irony ever gotten us something we can actually use? Is there a single time that has happened? Please let me know in the comments if women have ever gotten anything meaningful from irony. I would say name 3 instances of this occurring but I don’t think there is even one instance. Likewise, has being clever ever gotten us anything we can actually use or anywhere we actually want to be? Has it?
Has stumping for Big Pharma and Western medicine — including making “access to care” a feminist issue — gotten the patriarchal boot off women’s neck? Has it? Or has it just made everything worse? And don’t talk to me about abortion care mkay, you don’t need Big Pharma or Western medicine for that.
In keeping with the theme of his blog, I think it’s worth thinking about: where will we be after 50 more years of “feminists” shilling for Western medicine, on issues of transgender or vaccines or anything? What part has Big Pharma and Western medicine played in the success of the transgender movement over the last 50 years, including its role in getting us to where we are today, where women cannot even speak? I’m still thinking about that and will continue to think about it. Afterall, this literally just happened today. From experience, I suspect that Big Pharma and Western medicine did more to bring about this outcome — where women are not even allowed to speak on the issues that affect us or on anything — than anyone probably thinks.
*I don’t believe anymore that most feminist women ever wanted to be free. Regarding the desire of women to attain actual freedom from men and sex-based oppression, I think the radicals were projecting.
TW: Actor Juliette Lewis screaming “How sexy am I now?” while pretending to kick the shit out of and then kill some hillbilly rapist who deserved it. He initially found her character to be sexy (or sexy enough to exploit) but then rapidly changed his mind once she did something he didn’t like. From Natural Born Killers.
“Kary Mullis [PCR Inventor] – The Full Interview by Gary Null [HIV/AIDS]” (1996) ⚕️
This made me laugh and laugh. Somehow, I happened across this article from Skeptical Inquirer magazine describing so-called Nobel Disease. Upon reading the preamble I knew that Nobel Prize recipient Kary Mullis would be on this list. And indeed he is. Apparently, enough distinguished scientists, particularly Nobel Prize recipients, are predisposed to entertaining unusual ideas and/or are prone to irrational thinking that someone decided to name the phenomenon. Apparently, whoever names these things settled on Nobel Disease.
In this article, we explore the [] question of whether and to what extent the Nobel Prize, conceptualized as a partial but imperfect proxy of scientific brilliance, is incompatible with irrationality. To do so, we draw on case studies of several Nobel-winning scientists who appear to have succumbed to the Nobel Disease. […] In the case of the Nobel Disease, the capsule case histories we present strongly suggest that intellectual brilliance can coexist with yawning gaps in skeptical thinking.
Specifically, we offer brief descriptions of eight Nobel laureates in the sciences who embraced “weird” ideas. Following Shermer (2003), we define weird ideas as assertions that are (a) highly implausible in light of scientific knowledge; (b) roundly rejected by essentially all scientific experts; and (c) based mostly or exclusively on anecdotal or uncorroborated evidence. Because merely entertaining the possibility of an unsupported claim, such as the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP), does not indicate a critical thinking lapse, we focus on Nobelists who clung to one or more weird idea with considerable conviction.
That last part is important and I do not think Skeptical Inquirer pays it the attention it deserves: merely entertaining the possibility of an unsupported claim does not indicate a critical thinking lapse. And indeed it does not. We have discussed that before in the context of COVID panicpanic where a normie sister put her “conspiracy theorist” brother on blast for daring to entertain the possibility of various so-called COVID conspiracy theories early in the pandemic. For those who have had their fingers in their ears the last weeks and months and haven’t heard the latest news, many if not most so-called conspiracy theories are turning out to have been spoiler alerts and the truth is coming out just now. In many cases, it’s turning out that the COVID conspiracy theorists were right and have been right or at the very least were rightly skeptical of the Establishment narrative this whole time. D’oh.
This about sums up the three possible explanations for what is currently being recognized as an excess mortality event, where on a more or less global scale, especially cardiac events are causing more people to die weekly now than were dying before the COVID pandemic. Now 3 years into a global pandemic, a pandemic that’s supposedly over, why are we even worse-off than we were before as far as local, regional and global death rates from especially cardiovascular events, despite Draconian measures taken to “stop the spread” and otherwise protect the population from the effects of SARS-COV-2, otherwise known as the COVID virus?
In the first vid, Jonquil Jones annoyingly and ritualistically repeats the “wear a mask” mantra interspersed with listing the effects of so-called long-COVID which is causing people to become too ill to work with symptoms including extreme physical and mental fatigue. While universal masking would seem to be a relatively innocuous intervention and easy enough for most people to implement, lest anyone think Jones favors innocuous interventions generally, she also continues to insist that anyone who isn’t a complete shitheel (or a misogynist) will also be “fully vaccinated” whatever that is adjudged to mean today, this minute or this second, which currently means having accepted every available dose including the newly released Bivalent booster which is now available to everyone at age 5.
Jones also notes that young children are taking ill and dying due to a surge in RSV infections and postulates that it’s because their “immune systems are shot” which does seem to be the case, but why might that be? Here, Jones chooses to believe that children’s immune systems are shot because COVID, specifically COVID infection and the effects of long-COVID, and thus that wearing masks would have prevented the current outbreak of RSV in children and will prevent such outbreaks in the future, but are any of those things really true?
Equally if not even more compelling explanations for children’s immune systems being “shot” 3 years into a global pandemic would seem to be that the effects of social isolation from the COVID lockdowns have interfered with children developing natural immunity to common pathogens like RSV, and/or that the mid- and long-term effects of experimental COVID vaccines have had unintended (or unknown, or unknowable) consequences to people’s immune systems, including the immune systems of vaccinated children. But Jones does not find these alternative, yet at least as (if not more) likely, explanations compelling enough to even talk about because it interferes with her agenda, which is apparently authority-worship and to shame and coerce women and children into accepting the diktates of our corporate and State overlords including Big Pharma and patriarchal (Western) medicine. Whatever those constantly changing diktates are today.
Next up, in the second vid, John Campbell addresses the current, documented increased mortality event (he has previously addressed the increased mortality of specifically neonates) and notes that we are losing far more people now than were lost pre-pandemic, and that these excess deaths have been found to be unrelated to COVID. So what is the cause? And troublingly, why were the numbers of COVID-related deaths meticulously reported-on by the global corporate media while the current even greater deaths in every age group are not being reported by the mainstream media at all?
Campbell includes quotes from a researcher and cardiologist saying that we should never ever have implemented a pandemic response that did not consider indirect and long-term effects of COVID interventions including lockdowns and vaccines. And that as it is, we are now demonstrably experiencing more deaths, morbidity and economic effects from the lockdowns and other measures than were experienced from COVID itself, and yet, the direct effects of COVID infection are still being prioritized while the indirect, knock-on effects of the response to COVID are being largely if not completely ignored. Campbell concludes that “there is something pretty horrible going on” resulting in over 1,800 non-COVID related excess deaths per week in the UK alone, compared to pre-pandemic rates, and that it is time to demand investigation of and action regarding this documented excess mortality event.
For anyone who is interested, here is some information on the history of the Welsh Hat. What is a Welsh Hat, you may ask? Review the information, silly. Here are some photos that someone who knows about the Wesh Hat thought were relevant:
What would a Welsh hat, or a similar hat, like these lovely French sugar loaf hats, have looked like once it had been tossed to the ground and stomped on? I’m just asking. What does severely bruised skin look like, in the weeks and months following trauma, as it heals? What does a swollen (or gouged-out) eye look like? What does someone’s smile (or cry, or scream) look like after they’ve had all their teeth pulled out, or knocked out, or broken? What do broken noses and fingers look like? A little crooked maybe? A little stiff?
Where does this image — the image of the Green Witch or any witch — come from? Did people really see something that looked like the image above? If they did, it seems pretty obvious why they would. And the cackling. Could just be normal laughter, if coming from an occupied abode, especially if no males are there. A male-free abode is truly bliss. Could even be laughing at or about men, but probably aren’t. Could be hysterical laughter, if the person had been broken first. Could be screaming, could be a death rattle. Could be just about anything, innit. This is an image of a torture victim.
Taylor Swift was nearly canceled recently over this video which has now been edited, where she is (well, was) shown stepping on a bathroom scale that reads “FAT.” Self-identified “fatties” everywhere including small fats, medium fats, large fats, superfats and infinifats — again, these labels are all self-imposed — and their allies found this content “fatphobic” and demanded that Swift edit the video, to which demands she obliged. Two additional female artists, Beyonce and Lizzo, also recently edited their work where their use of the word “spaz” was found to be spazphobic. Of course, the use of the suffix “phobic” indicates fear of a thing, which I think is a lazy use of the word. Of course, we have all been beaten about the head and neck over perceived “transphobia” for the last decade (or more) when we aren’t actually talking about fear there either. At least, not fear of gender as such, including trans gender.
Although activists don’t appear to recognize this, obesity and spastic conditions have a shared origin in serious physical illness that is largely untreatable by Western medicine, also known as chronic illness. This includes autoimmune disease. People with spasticity or spastic conditions are recognized to be legitimately, systemically ill, but fat people are not, even though serious illness is known to cause obesity or something that looks like obesity: systemic inflammation. In my experience, the key to distinguishing systemic inflammation from obesity proper is in the ankles. Kankles, swollen feet and sausage-toes are indicative of inflammation, not fat, and pitting edema is definitely not fat for fuck’s sake. A few times, very few, I have seen fat people with bony ankles, but I have never seen bony ankles on someone who was chronically or acutely inflamed. I recently came to understand that I am probably allergic to honey, when after using it in my tea for several days in a row, I experienced a raging case of kankles that mostly went away once I stopped using honey. Great, one more thing I can’t have since becoming seriously chronically ill. For the record, I myself am now “fat” having experienced weight gain for the first time as an adult in my late 20s-early 30s, concurrently with my declining health.
And pitting edema was one of my earliest signs that something was seriously wrong, where 7 or 8 years before I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, my abdomen, lower legs, feet, and ankles started routinely swelling up to nearly twice their size, and pressing a finger into the flesh left a lasting divot. According to the Mayo Clinic, edema including pitting edema is indicative of serious health conditions including congestive heart failure, kidney failure, cirrhosis, chronic venous insufficiency, inadequate or damaged lymphatic drainage, or severe, long term protein deficiency. Let that sink in a minute, especially that last one. Apparently, starving to death on a severely protein-deficient diet can make you look fat. It looks like fat, but it’s not fat.
There are a few things that could be said about this latest update about excess neonatal mortality in Scotland following the COVID pandemic. Apparently, starting in 2021, newborns have been dying shortly after birth — from minutes to days — at twice the average pre-pandemic rate and the deaths are not due to COVID infection of the infants. So what could be the cause?
John Campbell is a nurse and academic with a Ph.D. who has been publicly coming to terms with what is by now an obvious fraud perpetrated on the global community with regard to COVID including where it originated, the effectiveness of COVID restrictions and mandates, and adverse events related to the vaccines. Here, he covers this recent reporting detailing an excess mortality event and what’s being done about it, specifically, whether the mothers’ vaccination statuses are being investigated as a possible explanation for the event. In this case, public health experts “ruled out any link” to the COVID vaccines without ever bothering to ask whether the mothers were vaccinated or not. The reason any possible link to vaccines was “ruled out” is this: as a matter of public health, even investigating a possible link does not survive a cost-benefit analysis where even asking the question would tend to cause disenchantment with the vaccines. (Click on the first image to view as a slideshow).
Look at that face. John Campbell, not wishing to endanger his YouTube presence by actually saying what he thinks about this astonishing deception by public health authorities, instead utilizes the British icy stare, looking directly into the camera, saying nothing, and not-blinking for some 6 seconds before moving on. Message intended, message received. In a nutshell, the Scottish health authorities have decided that potentially causing the public to lose faith in the vaccines is too high a price to be paid, even if the vaccines are killing babies. They are also saying, I believe, that even if a link was found, the public health “decision making” would not change and everyone including women and pregnant women would still be vaccinated just like they were before so what’s the point? Literally no answer to the question, “Is vaccinating women killing their babies?” would cause public health authorities to change the messaging, execution and enforcement around the COVID vaccines and they can’t have the public changing their minds about it either.
Get it? What this means is that it doesn’t matter from a “public health” standpoint if the COVID vaccines are safe and effective or not. Whether they are safe and effective is not the point, vaccine compliance and vaccinating everyone and everything that doesn’t run away fast enough is the point. Does this tell you something about “public health” and what it means and what it doesn’t? I fucking hope so because this lesson will never be any clearer than that. Public health refers to public compliance, it does not refer to the health and wellbeing of the public, or the health and wellness of the individual, or positive pregnancy outcomes, or dead versus not-dead babies, or anything close to what it sounds like.
Even so, vaccine hesitancy in the community is the second reason they gave for declining to investigate the possible link beween COVID vaccines and this excess mortality event while “potential judgment and shaming” of vaccinated women was the first. What I would really like to talk about is judgment and shame, and how very recently judgment and shame and judging and shaming people has become unacceptable in polite society. Asking women if they have been vaccinated or not, even anonymously and in aggregate as in the above public health example, would potentially have caused the women shame and to feel guilt or regret about their “personal choice” to have had the vaccine, and/or would have caused others to judge them for their personal choice, which judgment and shame might cause harm. Think about that shit a minute. Judgment and shame are to be avoided at all costs, apparently? Clearly we don’t care about harm per se so we can ignore that bit about judgment and shame causing harm — harm or potential harm from vaccines is apparently just duckie, it’s the judging and shaming we can’t have.
I have written about this multiple times, and I don’t wish to write about it at length again now, but natural law aka cause and effect doesn’t give a fuck about your or anyone’s feelings mkay. Guilt and shame are an indulgence to be honest, a self-indulgent chemical-emotional cascade that draws resources (attention and care) to the individual and away from the community, obscuring the nature of cause and effect and the material reality and real-life consequences of whatever just happened, consequences that we individually and collectively are left to deal with long after the mucosal hissy fit has passed. And everyone seems to know this except us.
Get it? Ultimately, guilt and shame are for their benefit, our guilt and shame is for them, not for us. Look at how they use it for fuck’s sake. Look at how they used potential judgment, guilt and shame of vaccinated women as an excuse not to get to the bottom of why twice as many women’s babies are dying since the beginning of the COVID pandemic including COVID-related restrictions and mandates (and vaccines) than were dying before. Look at what they did. Just fucking look at it and don’t look away.
I started half-watching lesbian separatist Jonquil Jones because she knows men are trash and that women should stay the hell away from them. So, so refreshing. I agree completely of course. Specifically, Jones has said that women need to stop having intercourse with men, and stop dating men, which is an excellent start in being both a lesbian and a separatist, but it’s really not enough is it. To wit, in order to be a lesbian, it is generally accepted that one must actually love and be attracted to women, and that it is not enough (or even required) to hate and be repulsed by men and I assume she has that down.
But what is a separatist? To be a separatist, it is generally accepted that one must separate not only physically but also mentally and emotionally from men and maleness as much as possible. Isn’t it? If a woman hates and is repulsed by men as a class, and does not have interpersonal including sexual relationships with men, she might be a lesbian or a political lesbian but that doesn’t make her a separatist. Being a separatist requires more, but exactly what is required seems to be a huge mystery to pretty much everyone. In this vid, Jones mentions that she and her wife have 8 COVID shots between them so far and gloats about their continued good health — as a fuck-you to anti-vaxxers — despite the risk of adverse events associated with the vaccines. All I can say about that is, most people enjoy good or relatively good health in the first part of their lives, innit. If you are currently enjoying good health, you are probably still in the first part of your life. You haven’t seen what comes next. And hold onto your ass because Act Two is fucking gnarly. Seriously, only someone who enjoys good or relatively good health would ever be so flippant about maintaining (or risking) it with vaccines or anything. But I digress.
Jones is both pro-vaccine and anti-anti vaccine and this “rant” explores several reasons for her stance. People can and often do have more than one reason for believing or acting in the ways they do and I will not address each of her reasons in this post. For purposes of this post, I would like to address her reasoning that getting vaccinated against COVID lessens the risk of serious illness and death from COVID. Assuming that’s actually true, in my estimation, that’s a good enough reason to be pro-vaccine, meaning, it’s a good enough reason for anyone to get vaccinated themselves and to support others in getting vaccinated if they want to. But she also uses that reasoning to support her anti-anti vaccine stance — her belief that people should not have the option, that vaccines should be mandatory, and/or that the unvaccinated are anti-social shitheels who “don’t support” women — and it’s not a good enough reason for that.
To wit, Jones is concerned about “personnel” meaning Western medical doctors and nurses who have (allegedly) been overworked and traumatized from their employment in hospital settings since the COVID pandemic began. Again, assuming that the COVID vaccines actually work to lessen the risk of serious illness or death, she notes that a heavily vaccinated population would tend to be less taxing to medical infrastructure like clinics and hospitals. She asks, how is it “supporting women” for unvaccinated feminists to essentially throw female personnel under the bus by voluntarily and needlessly getting seriously ill from COVID or even dying on their watch? And clearly she is upset and concerned about that. But I would like to know, since when is the working conditions — including job satisfaction and the personal cost-benefit ratio — of Western medical professionals my or anyone’s fucking concern? This is not a rhetorical question.
Jones says directly that it’s part of the social contract to “support” (read: prioritize and organize our lives and values around) Western medical professionals but is that actually true? Did feminists and particularly radical feminists and lesbian separatists tacitly agree to pander to both males and females, and in a male-dominated, male supremacist, misogynist, elitest, racist, classist, ableist etc. profession to boot, when we agreed that “supporting women” was generally a good thing to do? If we did, it’s time we address this bizarre result. The very obvious fact that unconditionally “supporting” medical personnel necessarily includes accidental blanket support for woman-hating, male supremacist males who are also in that profession is problematic and hardly separatist. And yet here we are, listening to a lesbian separatist who isn’t even willing to maintain separation between her own body and whatever Big Pharma wants to penetrate her with. How or why a lesbian or a separatist would ever be enthusiastically and repeatedly penetrated by a male or a male-supremacist Western medical ideology is some complicated, fucked-up shit that we are not satisfactorily dealing with.
Nor is it separatist, I don’t think, to look to Western (patriarchal) medicine to protect our health or to save our very lives, although Jones is also adamant that COVID cases not take up space in critical care lest there be no available beds for non-COVID patients when they become injured or seriously ill. Here, I would just like to mention that it is not a feminist, a separatist, or even a female perspective to fear and avoid death at great (or all) cost to ourselves. The reality is that Western medicine exists largely to support sickly male infants — who often do not survive gestation and infancy the way females easily do — and to put men back together when they do stupid shit and get themselves hurt, like this male turd who told doctors he wanted to be kept alive even if he “was just a head” following an unsurvivable work injury. Is supporting idiotic and/or otherwise nonviable males, fearing and running-from more or less natural death, and burden-sharing/burden-shifting with (allegedly) overworked, traumatized (and fully compen$ated BTW) doctors and nurses the reason that 4 billion females globally are expected by feminists (and separatists) to take vaccine after vaccine indefinitely, or until the cows come home?
Someone recently told me that continuing to talk about COVID and the vaccines and vaccine mandates is irrelevant. Honestly that makes me wonder what anyone thinks is relevant, then, or what most people think relevant even means. For purposes of this post, I would like to talk about virtue signaling and the part that played in the beginning, where people were told that they were “doing it for Grandma!” or whatever, when they accepted the vaccine allegedly to “stop the spread” of the virus between people and particularly to prevent spreading COVID from healthy people to those “at-risk of severe disease” like the elderly and chronically ill.
At the time, I and others noted this shocking turn of events, where we had experienced little or nothing but cruelty and dismissal from friends and family (and the State and the larger culture) once we became seriously chronically ill. No one cared to help us in the form of emotional, financial or physical caretaking and more to the point, no one cared to stop doing things they knew were harmful to us. Before COVID, no one cared about Grandma and they didn’t care about the seriously chronically ill either, and certainly no one in a position of power to affect overlapping official State and quasi-state policy and practice that clearly communicate Fuck Grandma and Fuck the Chronically Ill too.
For example, from the time I got sick and continuing, my own mother seemed to relish in stressing me the fuck out whenever we would communicate, to the point that the last time I spoke with her I addressed her as Nurse Ratched and predicted that she would go to hell — if there is such a place — for the way she has always and continues to treat sick people including her patients and her own family members, several of which have had the extreme bad luck to become seriously acutely or chronically ill in the presense of a Western medical nurse. Seriously, never do that if you can help it. I haven’t spoken with her since before the COVID lockdowns, when I was experiencing what I now suspect was probably long-COVID where I was likely infected in the summer/fall of 2019 and immediately started having relentless 4-day puking migraines and extreme mental and physical fatigue — on top of my preexisting debilitating Crohn’s sypmptoms — that left me completely helpless and unable to work on my business or perform self care. I had already been denied disability benefits and was already holding on by a thread before I got COVID and then I got even worse. It was and is a horrific and completely terrifying place to be.
Against my better judgment, but because I felt I had no choice and was absolutely circling the drain, I had reached out to request that in the event that I needed help paying my rent, utilities or other essential bills because I was too sick to work, that she be there for me on a temporary and emergent basis only. I didn’t even need anything right that minute, but the stress of my predicament was unbearable and making my health and life demonstrably worse and I was desperate for relief from that stress. Not surprisingly she declined but that’s not even the worst part. Like I knew it would, that interaction only increased my stress and decreased my physical and mental ability, leaving me even more vulnerable than I was before, and as I knew she would, she absolutely delighted in it.
So. Did my sadistic mother get the COVID vaccine shortly thereafter, and if so, was part of the reason that she allegedly cared about sick people? If I ever talk to her again I would honestly like to know the answer to that. If she managed to convince herself or others that she cared about sick and vulnerable people except as an outlet for her bottomless roiling anger and as living props in her own sadistic entertainment, she was not the only one. As several chronically ill writers and speakers noted at the time, the virtue signaling and gaslighting around doing for others and “stopping the spread” was extreme. Welp, as of today, apparently, Pfizer has admitted that its COVID vaccine was never even tested regarding its effects on transmission at the time it went to market, but we all had to live through the gaslighting and virtue signaling about Saving Grandma and caring about chronically ill people anyway. How did we miss this?
The following clips of libtard newsreader Rachel Maddow have not aged well, but look at how arrogant and self-sure she is, berating everyone about Grandma Spread when at the beginning of the rollout in December 2020 there was apparently no evidence that those claims were actually true, at least with respect to the Pfizer vaccine.
Interestingly, in the first clip, we are told that breaking “real-world data” (read: anecdotal evidence) from 4 months after people were first vaccinated shows that vaccination stopped infection and transmission, which not only turned out to be false with regard to all COVID variants, but Maddow does not indicate that this “real world data” was the first and only data showing that getting vaccinated was likely to prevent infection or transmission to Grandma or anyone. Nor does she hint at what “real world data” really means, and that in other contexts, anecdotal data is largely regarded as meaningless and not scientific at all. In December 2020 at the start of the vaccine rollout, whether the Pfizer vaccine actually prevented infection or transmission was simply unknown, but the Save Grandma/Stop the Spread/We Care About Vulnerable People campaign was begun and continued in earnest anyway.
‘We Can Get There!’: Stunning Pace Of U.S. Vaccinations Puts Pandemic’s End In Sight | Rachel Maddow. Mar 30, 2021
Set Your Concerns Aside And Get Vaccinated. Do It For Others If Not For Yourself | Rachel Maddow. Apr 9, 2021
So what was this gaslighting and virtue signaling campaign around anyone giving a single flying fuck about the elderly and chronically ill about anyway? Are we willing to revisit this now, in light of evidence from Pfizer that it was all a bunch of shit? I think this new information and this discussion is very relevant, actually, perhaps especially to radical feminists, because authoritarianism is a feminist issue where all authority under patriarchy is necessarily patriarchal, and psychological operations are a feminist issue where the patriarchal State and quasi-state uses psychological tactics to manipulate, undermine and control women, and Western medicine is a feminist issue, and capitalism is a feminist issue, and on and on.
How can anyone even imagine that COVID is irrelevant to anyone, least of all to feminists, when it has impacted and continues to impact women’s health, finances, rights and obligations, our dependents and our very lives? Astonishingly, it seems clear that feminists and everyone have just thoughtlessly accepted mainstream media’s very obvious pivot away from discussing COVID at all, even though now (and from now on) we are only likely to learn more about COVID than we ever knew before, and one reason we were in the dark from the beginning is because Big Pharma, world governments, and the mainstream media fucking lied.
I thought this was relevant and timely. This image gallery was taken from the recently released movie Hocus Pocus 2 which is a woke sequel to the 1993 film Hocus Pocus. (Click on the first image to view as a slideshow and to read the captions if they are too small.) I kind of doubt that anyone thought too deeply about it when they wrote the script, but we have discussed this before, where women correctly “inferring” future events, including what’s going to happen to us if things continue down a certain road, is framed as catastrophizing. The inference is dismissed and we are pathologized for having inferred, as if inference isn’t an actual, real cognitive ability that humans possess. And by humans, clearly I mean women since men may or may not have this ability. They sure seem “shocked” and baffled” and whatnot on a regular basis, perhaps especially when it comes to natural occurrences and the results of their own policy and practice, otherwise known as cause and effect.
For our purposes, I often talk about inferring/futuregazing in the context of serious chronic illness and I have gotten shit for this on my own blog. Here is what happens when a chronically ill male infers/futuregazes this way. His witchcraft gets fucking published.
The suffering [ME/CFS and its non-treatment] causes is so profound. I can only liken it to one of the hell realms described in Tibetan Buddhism. A world full of nothing but pain, loss, agony and constant never-ending challenges in holding on to what little I had left.
Of those who manage to get (1) a diagnosis and (2) are lucky enough to either not get worse (rare, especially if they are trying to maintain a healthy person’s workload, which is very common) or (3) have people in their lives willing and able to take care of them and (4) are emotionally able to carry on despite the incredible suffering ME/CFS inflicts, how many of this dwindling percentage are interested in social media/find the forums and social media pages, and then how many are even capable of using computers (many ME/CFS patients are not able to)?
This is what it takes to be “seen” as an ME/CFS patient. The people on Facebook, Twitter, Phoenix Rising and other ME/CFS forums are the very tip of the iceberg. We only hear from people who make it through these five tiers. It’s likely that this is a very, very small percentage of ME/CFS patients.
What happens to the rest of the diagnosed/undiagnosed ME/CFS patients in the country/world? This is something no one talks about. If you just look at the facts, human nature and how our society functions, it suddenly becomes horrifying. They must wind up on the streets, getting worse and worse until they die a terrible death alone in a gutter somewhere. I believe this happens to a huge number of ME/CFS patients.
Even though this will never happen to him personally, he somehow gets this right.
Staying on the topic of Halloween, witchcraft (and real-life body-horror) for a moment, in Blade, a black male vampire who does not even exist correctly notes that there is another world below the one that middle class princesses know about and inhabit.
“Shut up Blade! The sugar-coated topping is the real world!” said absolutely no one, in response to this scene. Sadly, and often very annoyingly for myself, I sometimes think all I have reading here are middle class princesses because when I say the same fucking thing all I get is blank stares and/or arguments (or blank arguments, which is absolutely a thing and it sucks so bad because blank arguments are thought terminators and a fucking waste of everyone’s time). Also, just because something is re-enacted in film or another medium does not mean that it’s not true and doesn’t happen for real, in life. We are talking about literal culture afterall. Think about that shit a minute, if you haven’t already.
So, when it comes to women only, it seems, inferences are witchcraft and looking beyond “glamour” is verboten, even though “glamour” itself used to refer to women’s magic and was a spell that affected something’s appearance. The sugar-coated topping if you will. And don’t even get me started on manifesting. In the context of manifesting only, it seems as if practicing “witchcraft” in the sense of performing (well, mimicking/cargo culting) rituals and spells is preferable to actually getting off your ass and doing something in real life, innit. Of course, considering that “doing something” and manifesting positive change more or less requires good health among other things, rituals and spells are about all a lot of people can put towards creating something, including changing or attempting to change their own lives and stations. Since about 2013 when my chronic illness became unmanageable, I have been struck at how stagnant and small my life has become. At some point I realized that whatever forward/outward movement I have experienced in my own life was largely (or fully) created/caused by myself and whatever resources I could muster and that I had been doing those things, to whatever extent I could. Now that I can’t do it anymore, it’s just not happening. This is not a coincidence.
In my own case, as things currently stand and as I have very few energy credits (money) and even less energy (health) and no realistic hope of that ever changing, I haven’t traveled outside a 50 mile radius in going on 8 years now. I won’t be getting any more degrees, or starting any more businesses, or “manifesting” much of anything because in my experience, all that ever took was a fuck-ton of actually mentally and physically doing shit over time (and resources and a reason to do it) and I just can’t do it anymore. Even so, as almost impossibly difficult as it was to manifest anything, what I was able to manifest wasn’t enough to save me in the end. And for the record, I have been engaged with herbs and potions the entire time, and continue to engage with them as I always have — as medicine. I find it fascinating that after everything, it was the herbs and potions that estranged me from my family and evacuated me from polite society. Not my sickness per se, and not the fact that I’ve been manifesting my ass off for decades. And as far as being banished from family and society, the futuregazing/inferring probably didn’t help.
Storm surge = men build things in the fucking ocean.
This is some of the most extreme hurricane footage I’ve ever seen. This needn’t be a long post. Last time, I offered a thought exercise: to reframe the survivor-hero narrative that we see so often in a medical context to more closely align with what being victimized by megalomaniacal Western medical practitioners (and being raped by men, these things are related) actually entails. As thought exercises often do, that thought exercise suggested a solution to the problem, innit. To wit: stay the fuck away from dangerous things if you can help it.
This time, I invite my readers to reframe a more or less “natural” phenomenon known as “storm surge” which is commonly understood to be something very much other than what it actually is. When I lost my apartment in Hurricane Sandy, after a long and mostly boring day of riding out the storm at home, we ended up “evacuating” when we swam out in chest-deep water at midnight. We had about 4 feet of water come up the street and only tropical storm-level winds where we were but it was enough to absolutely destroy Long Island, and New York City and the Jersey coast fared even worse than we did. A lot of people, myself included, never got their lives back after suffering a devastating, drawn out loss including widespread infrastructure damage and the worsening of a preexisting housing crisis where thousands of people were left homeless by the storm with no intact properties to return or move to, at any price point, for literally years. People in NYC drowned in their own homes ffs. Can you imagine? A lot of people left the area and never returned.
The water line on the sides of the houses was at about 5-6 feet when we came back to inspect the damage which means that things got quite a bit worse after we left and that’s saying something. We hadn’t intended to evacuate at all, having only very limited options in where to go which could be a post in itself. Turns out, it’s actually impossible to “evacuate” some 8 million people (and their cars, pets and essential belongings) from an island at the same time, but the questions and comments we received from family and friends suggested that most people don’t actually recognize impossible when they see it, partly because they have been fucking lied to about hurricanes and “storm surge” and that’s where the thought exercise comes in. In contrast, Hurricane Ian was a Category 4 with storm surge reported at 10-15 feet or more in Ft. Myers, Florida and surrounding areas that took a direct hit when the storm made landfall. The above footage shows what 10-15 or more feet of “storm surge” really looks like and what the conditions are really like on the coast during a very strong hurricane. So what is storm surge?
As anyone with eyes can plainly see, “storm surge” is literally the ocean being the ocean. So-called storm surge is nothing like what it sounds — a “surge” of water from a storm — and there’s a reason for that discrepancy and it’s because men build in the fucking ocean and they want and need to pretend like they don’t beause reasons (rea$on$). Seriously, what does this footage look like to you? This road and other paved areas, these residential and commercial buildings, water and power infrastructure etc. are in the fucking ocean. They aren’t in a storm. Most people know what being in a storm looks like and this ain’t it. Obviously, the ocean is a little bigger — and coastal “land” is significantly smaller — than we’ve all been led to believe. Are you going to believe what land developers and politicians tell you about where the ocean begins and ends? Or are you going to believe your lying eyes? Think about that shit a minute. If you are doing it right, the experience of seeing “storm surge” for what it really is for the first time will be something like this:
What do you see? Can you switch back and forth?
As always, my thoughts are with the seriously chronically ill who were in the path of this storm and what they have endured, are now enduring, and will be forced to endure on top of being ill in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. My thoughts are with those who will never recover, or never fully recover, from the mental, physical and financial toll that dealing with men’s bullshit takes, when so-called “natural disasters” and their effects are made exponentially worse by men (and land developers and politicians) and we are left homeless, with nowhere to go and no comfort, privacy or resources with which to deal with our preexisting serious chronic disease. That’s all I have for now.
I’ve been writing about unethical sci-med and megalomaniacal practitioners and I promised a part 2 to the Survivor-Hero narrative post which has yet to materialize. What I really want to talk about is 2 female ME/CFS patients who have had radical, experimental neck surgeries to treat or cure their ME/CFS but got more than they bargained for. The first one, the “success” story of the 2, had multiple neck and spinal surgeries after which her ME/CFS has been “in remission” but she now has recurrent cerebrospinal fluid leaks and other complications from her surgical wounds. You really have to search for that information too, because from what I saw, she doesn’t say it until literally the last and final post on her blog. One could easily spend hours reading her self-reports and come away with the impression that the surgery cured her with no serious complications or need for ongoing care. That impression would be wrong.
The “tragic” story is that of Jenny Rowbory, a UK patient with ME/CFS and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) who had a similar spinal fusion surgery that left her even more disabled than she was before, and considering how serious her ME/CFS was that’s saying quite a lot. Before the surgery, apparently Jenny had severe symptoms from both the ME/CFS and EDS including neck instability but had been able to at least sit up and toilet herself. Now, after the surgery, she can’t lift or move her head, and thus is left supine and immobile in bed and requires constant care including the use of a bedpan to relieve herself. She can’t be bathed or shampooed because any movement of her neck could cause asphyxia, spinal cord injury, paralysis or death. She is currently attempting to raise funds, hoping that with £750,000 — nearly a million US dollars — she will be able to fund private medical flights to and from the UK and to be operated on by a “brilliant” American neurosurgeon who “know what’s what”. Here is what the family writes on Jenny’s GoFundMe page (linked above):
Jenny’s operation in January was meant to help support the skull and vertebrae below so that they didn’t move around anymore. Other people with M.E. have found that they have the same structural problems and when their instabilities were fixed with a fusion, they were also cured of their M.E. and their reduced blood flow (due to the structural problems), returned to normal when the structure was fixed, and so they instantly had their energy back. So not only was Jenny expecting to wake up from surgery with her life saved from having the structural problems fixed, she thought the severe M.E. would potentially be gone too. Neither of these things happened. In fact, her neck became more destabilised, not only at the fusion site but in additional places all the way down, and the M.E. got worse because the operation blocked the place where she was managing to get a bit more blood through to her head. We all have been devastated.
Expectation vs. reality. Where have we heard this before.
That’s what I really want to talk about, but where to start? How can I possibly begin to talk about this without sounding unsympathetic (or cruel) to the victims of both serious chronic illness and of Western medicine that either replaced one illness or disability with another or made the patient demonstrably, objectively worse? We are talking about so-called “side effects” of medical treatment here, otherwise known as iatrogenic illness and injury, where the medical intervention present risks and dangers in itself. Welp, after thinking about it for weeks, I offer the following thought exercise. What if we replaced the Survivor-Hero narrative literally everywhere it is used with the following narrative: a “Survivor” is a stupid shit who got too close to something dangerous, and there are consequences for that. Does that sound mean? Maybe it does, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. People take risks every day, people get close to dangerous things because reasons, people get hurt. It happens. Does accepting responsibility for the risks we take change anything about the Survivor-Hero narrative that makes having this conversation possible, even productive? You tell me.
From where I’m sitting, a Stupid Shit narrative is helpful because it forces us to recognize risk and calls attention to the consequences of risk-taking and of performing inadequate cost-benefit analyses. Getting too close to dangerous things is a reckless behavior that could theoretically be remedied, but the thought-termination around evaluating actual risk — what is dangerous and what is not — is extreme. Thinking (actually, forced-perspective, which is devoid of thought) of often megalomaniacal Western medical doctors as “heroes” and their victims as survivors or heroes themselves is just one example of a thought terminating risk-obscuring narrative, but it’s a good one. Here’s another: for awhile now, rape victims have been called “survivors” instead of victims but what if we called raped women what they often are: stupid shits who got too close to something dangerous and got themselves hurt? Men are dangerous, vile creatures (obviously) and they have been self-reporting for millenia that they are physically, mentally and otherwise compelled to rape. We know this.
Obviously where the victim is a child and/or otherwise had nowhere to go/be except to be in the presence of a rapist, I would not call the victim a stupid shit, but I would say that they are suffering forseeable consequences, not just of forced proximity to dangerous men (well, men) but of having to rely on almost exclusively female “caretakers” who allow it to happen and a justice system and larger culture that deliberately undermines victims and supports perpetrators. Oh dear, now my alternative framing/Stupid Shit narrative is taking us into collective responsibility territory and ain’t no one interested in that. Does the Survivor-Hero narrative actually prevent us from considering collective responsibility for what happens to friends, family and members of our communities and for that matter, for what happens to ourselves? Because that’s interesting. That’s very fucking interesting. I will leave it there for now.
This is a classic scene from the 1993 film Jurassic Park. Here the discussion is about “scientists” harnessing (well, attempting to harness) genetic power, which of course is a real contemporary issue and is severely fraught. I grew up in the 80s and the issue of medical and scientific ethics and the can ≠ should message was very visible to me in the media of the time including in films like Project X and E.T. The Extraterrestrial, where sentient beings were imprisoned and experimented on, and even in superhero themed media like the 1978 television series The Incredible Hulk, where the unintended consequences of attempting to harness nuclear power turned a man into a monster. Then came Jurassic Park and the voice of sci-med ethics and common sense (IOW the voice of dissent) Dr. Malcolm to lay it all down. The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here staggers me. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent penetrative act. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world. Indeed.
80s kids also grew up during the AIDS crisis, where our young psyches and developing cognition and worldviews had the following message pounded into us 24/7 for years: our immune systems are important and literally don’t fuck with your immune system to avoid negative outcomes. Seen through a contemporary, post-COVID lens, Dr. Malcolm could be directly addressing the fast-tracked COVID vaccines and related propaganda when he says “before you even knew what you had you packaged it and sold it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox” etc. But I digress. Clearly, these messages didn’t soak in to the broader culture and the people in a position to do anything about the staggering lack of sci-med ethics (and common sense) of the time were apparently happy to just write books and movies about it and unethically hoard the profits.
Just like they’ve been doing for many decades even before the 1980s I might add. Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t anyone’s idea of an ethical scientist or physician even in 1818, and the horrors of unethical sci-med and megalomaniacal practitioners of sci-med was literally spelled out by Mary Shelley in excruciating detail, but did anything actually change? From what I can tell, no one has ever done anything about the lack of sci-med ethics except complain about — and take artistic license — with it. Or, they haven’t done anything effective anyway. Certainly, science and medicine devoid of ethics is horrific and has long been illustrated as such, but (somehow) horror is good so who cares?
So, I’m actually pretty bored by now from talking about mainstream media and what seems to me a completely obvious cultural acknowledgement of the megalomaniacal doctor/scientist and the problem of sci-med devoid of ethics. We acknowledge that this exists and that it’s a problem, or at the very least, if people somehow think these characters exist only in fantasy (?) we acknowledge that if it did exist, it would be a problem. Wait, do people know how to apply allegory to real life? I’m not sure they do. I’ve run into this problem literally since I was a child, where I would become upset over depictions of animal torture in “children’s movies” like Project X and E.T. but if anyone responded to my upset at all it was to say or imply that there was no need for upset because it was just a movie. Just a movie. Or just a book or just a television show or just a bedtime story. As if the situations and events depicted in literal culture don’t also happen for real in life. Jesus fucking Christ. I will leave it there for now.
Cannabis Refugee, Esq. 
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