Flight or Fight

 

Now, I don't pretend that EVERYTHING about conservatism is answered by its adherents tending to have larger amygdalas (on average) than other groups in society. But I must say that I find it to be a highly useful theory. (Certainly, geographical and political-economic factors also play a part. People from small towns and rural communities tend to conservatism because everyone knows everyone else and people regulate their own behaviour to avoid ostracism. In big cities, people can "sin" in relative anonymity. As well, minorities ... such as homosexuals ... can find kindred spirits and form communities. Everyone is exposed to a greater variety of human behaviour; cultures, religions, sexual practices, artistic expression, etc. and often develop a greater acceptance of difference. Certain sectors of the economy are conducive to fostering attitudes we characterize as "conservative." The oil industry is an extractive, capital-intensive, polluting industry that involves some degree of risk, ... especially early on, ... but which can produce enormous profits for a small group of people. It tends to produce an insanely wealthy owner class who see themselves as the epitome of the capitalist dream. They buckle at the idea of having to care about the environment and they have the liquid cash to bribe politicians to refrain from imposing regulations on them. By definition their business operates in rural areas, where their relatively small workforces, already predisposed to conservative social values, are paid highly enough to identify with their employers and to see any attempts to tax either the industry itself or the high incomes it pays, as offensive. This produces the political cultures we see in Alberta and Texas.)

So, ... there. I don't think the notion of the larger amygdala explains EVERYTHING. However, smart people who study brains have established this correlation. Self-described "conservatives" have larger amgydalas. Which makes one more prone to feel threatened and to stimulate the "flight or fight" instincts. Smart people who study brains are also saying that brains are plastic and develop in response to stimuli. For instance; times of trauma make people more conservative. They amgydala gets larger through prolonged stress. Which makes sense. Times of stress are threatening. Constant threats stimulates the amgydala. You're less trusting. You're less likely to take chances (except for the occasional big chances necessary to get the fuck out of there). [This is a factoid that neo-liberal liberals and the "pwogwessives" who swoon over them should be aware of. When you subject the bulk of the population to insecurity and austerity you make it more conservative and reactionary.] Being stupid makes the world threatening. The noted correlation between conservatism and being a shit-head attests to this.

Anyhow, one day I was going to eat some pizza. And I decided that instead of reading from my laptop and having to scroll down with greasy fingers, I'd grab an old "Harper's Magazine" from off my bookshelf and open it to a two-page spread of small enough font that I probably woudln't need to even turn a page before I was done eating. And I grabbed the August, 2005 issue and ended up reading "None Dare Call It Stolen" by Mark Crispin Miller. And reading it, and all the detailed, documented, often criminal voter suppression and fraud committed by the Republicans (especially in Ohio) that it documents, I was struck by the contrast between the Democratic, liberal, progressive NON-reaction to this obvious "steal" and the over-the-top shrieking, hypocritical, self-righteous bellowing, invasion of the US Capital reaction of the (mostly shit-headed) fans of the (shit-head) Donald Trump over their claims of voter suppression and fraud, that are all based on hearsay and which have been denied by Republican state election officials, Republican governors and Republican judges appointed by Trump. I realized: It's not just "flight." It's also "FIGHT!" A conservative brain is more likely to fight than a non-conservative person's brain is. Not only do they feel more threatened all the time, they have a higher propensity to lash out at perceived threats.

This is problematic behaviour. But it's also a source of strength. When the working class was less divided, and when the border between being able to access food and shelter versus hunger and homelessness was much more brittle, sometimes we (the working class) had people with larger amygdala's who simply couldn't pretend that their bosses and their enforcers weren't the enemy. The culture was such that these individuals' "flight or fight" instincts were focused on the capitalist enemy. And I wouldn't doubt that some of these people were leaders (of a sort) in the class struggle. Now of course, capitalist-oligarchic brainwashing has been even more well developed. Very few working class blowhards are capable of recognizing the enemy. They've all been told to focus on immigrants, gays, artists, socialists. They've been told that trade unions are a threat to their well-being even though the massive historical evidence shows that to be a complete fraud. I'm not pretending that there weren't bigoted, reactionary idiots among the working class of the early-20th Century. Working men who saw their future with Henry Ford over Walter Reuther. I'm just saying that there was a greater CHANCE that we had more fighters on our side.

What Can We Do About Palestine?

So, the right-wing, fly covered turd, Netanyahu thought he'd consolidate his hold on his fellow extreme racist Israelis by attacking Palestinian Muslims at prayer in the Al-Aqsa Mosque during their holy season while also stepping up expropriations and evictions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem (to make way for extremist Zionist "settlers"). In retaliation for these atrocities, Palestinians in Gaza fired some homemade missiles into Israel which, obviously, made the insanely entitled Israelis feel "justified" in launching a massive bombing campaign, blowing up apartment buildings, media offices, medical facilities, schools and other critical infrastructure. One (intentional) result of this has been to make 58,000 residents of Gaza homeless. These are all clearly war crimes.

Israel gets away with this barbarism because they are enabled by the US government no matter which wing of the Corporate Oligarch Corruption Party is in power. Currently it is the "Democrats" under Joseph P. Biden. US coddling and enabling of Israel's Crimes Against Humanity has no firmer partner than Canada, where both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party vote lockstep to support Israel against the world. (In cases where a country like, say, Australia, might abstain from a United Nations General Assembly vote to censure Israel for some particularly egregious cruelty, Canada will shamelessly vote against censure together with the USA and some tiny Pacific Island nations totally dependent upon the USA's largesse.)

[The NDP, has recently been pushed by its membership to declare its support for the Palestinian victims of Israeli occupation and apartheid. This has been a long, drawn-out process, with the grassroots having to constantly work away at the pro-Zionism of the party brass and leadership.]

And what of the general public? At present, a clear majority of Canadians favour Israel's interests over those of the Palestinians. [That is honestly what I'd absorbed from my very casual, but sustained, experience of opinion polls on this subject. Looking for a link to support that statement, I found this result which certainly contradicts it.] But these numbers have been cratering in recent years. Some Canadians will always support the Israelis over the Palestinians because of a moronic devotion to the Book of Revelations. Others remain steadfastly brainwashed by mainstream news, which is blatantly pro-Israel. But as Israeli behaviour becomes more and more inhuman, and the Palestinians (aside from firing a few rockets in the face of constant provocation and suffering), ... and, I suppose, the memory of The Holocaust fades in the public consciousness, ... it becomes increasingly difficult to see any justice to decade upon decade of Zionist land theft and collective punishment of Palestinians.

So, in response to the latest sickening abuses and slaughters by Zionists, against Palestinians, Canadian leftists and progressives have risen up to stage afternoon protests in many cities across Canada. But what else is planned? Because as I have explained, time and time again, .... and more importantly, as reality has demonstrated, time and time again, ... the present power structures are not terribly inconvenienced by isolated peaceful protests. Please note: We also call them "demonstrations." Because they demonstrate something. That something is supposed to be the numbers of people who will go on to escalate their actions if their demands aren't meant. Demonstrations by people who can't even conceive of escalating are demonstrations of impotence.

So how can we escalate? Deluge our MPs with emails and letters of protest and condemnation? Confronting our MPs with what they're actually supporting (if they're Liberals or Conservatives)? Blockading businesses selling stuff from Israel or the Occupied Territories? Prolonged protests outside of the Israeli Embassy and Consulates? Street blockades? Is anyone thinking of these next steps?

And while we obviously SHOULD commit to sustained activism in the face of the Crimes Against Humanity being perpetrated by Israel, it could be asked why this issue and not so many others. We still have the genocide in Yemen, where a Saudi blockade has already produced millions of deaths and millions more lives have been permanently maimed by malnutrition (and Justin Trudeau's Canada's still sells these monsters weapons!); There is still the malign neglect of First Nations' communities, where communities still endure unsafe drinking water, grossly insufficient housing, and other oppressions deliberately imposed by the Canadian state; There is still Global warming.  

The absence of an organized Leftist movement to win and use power results in our being locked in an endless cycle of reaction to oligarch depredations. We need to think seriously, and full-time about taking power.

Latest Books

 

Currently I'm reading Freeman Dyson's Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters. I got it from the library as an e-book and, not being familiar with modern technology, I didn't see the subtitle and thought it was going to be a summary of 20th Century mathematics and physics for laypeople. Instead it's excerpts from letters to his parents and his sister whenever he was apart from them. They start in the late-1930s and he'll be including stuff from the late-1970's. So far I'm only in the mid-1950's. But it's interesting nonetheless. Dyson helped to reconcile the Quantum Electrodymanic theories of Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman. It's a very human account of the physics world in the immediate postwar period. Dyson writes about having to convince Robert Oppenheimer of the importance of Feynman's work. [INTERESTING: I looked for a link and found that Oppenheimer was praising Feynman in 1943. But by the time Dyson meets Oppenheimer the latter is unimpressed with Feynman's latest work.] He talks as an international scientist about the personal lives and struggles of male and female scientists from different countries in the chaos of the postwar/Cold War era. While I don't agree with all of his views, Dyson appears to have been considerably free of the racism and sexism that prevailed at the time. He rejected any notion that people from different parts of the world or of different sexes had differing levels of intellectual potential.  Even his accounts of travelling across the triumphant United States (by bus often, in order to see as much as possible) are interesting as you can sense the economic vitality through his words and his own thoughts as a British man from a comfortable economic background. 

Years ago I bought David Nasaw's biography of Andrew Carnegie at a Sear's bargain bin in Hamilton's Limeridge Mall. I started it and thought it was a trifle hagiographic but interesting. I gave Carnegie credit for being a principled opponent of war and government military spending. Then Carnegie competed for contracts to make battleship steel for the US Navy and I gave up the book in disgust. I took it off the shelf again a while ago and started over. I have to say that Nasaw is very fair to Carnegie. He argues convincingly that Carnegie's altruism was genuine, but also never fails to point out the man's hypocrisies and delusions. Essentially, Carnegie was a witty, charming young man who landed a job in a telegraph office and was able to make contacts in his city's (Pittsburgh) business community. Success as a telegraph reader led to promotion to telegraph operator, which led to work for a railroad company which led to promotion to a superintendent and so on. Carnegie eventually became a bond salesman and that all led to his becoming the owner and builder of the biggest iron and steel manufacturer in the United States. (I'd thought that Carnegie had been some sort of pioneering engineer/operator of a small steel firm and not a financial guy who drifted into the industry as a matter of happenstance.)

Anyway, obviously, Carnegie became a mega-capitalist. A peer of John D. Rockefeller. Together with his manager Henry Clay Frick, he crushed the union of his workers at his Homestead facilities. Carnegie believed that the political-economy which resulted in enormous wealth being concentrated in the hands of men such as himself was beneficial to society in the long-run. Men like him and Rockefeller were obviously men of intelligence and ability. They could direct their wealth into collective improvements (in Carnegie's case it was public libraries) which would have better social results than if it went to pockets of the thousands of replaceable men in his steel mills who would only waste it on better food, housing, clothes etc. Nasaw doesn't fail to point out the cruel obliviousness of Carnegie's urging his workers (who, after smashing their union, he has subjected to 12-hour a day shifts, seven days a week of heavy physical labour) to not neglect outside pursuits for personal development.

Finally, I got two books out on Athenian democracy. Thomas N. Mitchell's Democracy's Beginning: The Athenian Story.  What I got out of it was that there was some sort of crisis in Athens in the Sixth Century, caused by oligarchic domination and the subsequent impoverishment of much of the population. A respected patrician [that's a term from Ancient Rome but whatever] named Solon was asked to provide legislative changes that would bring some sort of balance back to Athenian society. Solon's reforms failed in the short run but they led to further reforms from later lawgivers which provided the basic structures that Athenian democracy was based on. This was self-rule, through a legislative assembly by all male citizens.  Later, in the war against the Persian Empire, the contribution of the poorest men as oarsmen in the Athenian navy gave them a feeling that they had just as much right as the wealthiest and the noblest in the leading of their City-State. Mitchell writes that democratic Athens tended to be led by members of the aristocracy and/or wealthy class, as these men had the education and self-confidence to take charge, but that the majority had to support them and - importantly - these leaders could be held accountable to the Assembly. (Mitchell points to the increasing lack of accountability today as being dangerous to social stability and democracy's integrity. I heartily agree. I ranted and raved about this problem during the harper years.) In the end, Mitchell says that Athenian democracy produced the lust for imperialism and the pig-headedness that produced the Peloponnesian War that saw Athens broken as a major power. The men in the Athenian Assembly repeatedly rejected opportunities for a favourable peace when a temporary victory produced offers for ending the war from Sparta. Athens would recover, but again squandered it's achievements by pursuing war with Macedonia in the late-Fourth Century. Upon their defeat the Athenians were forced to terminate their democratic institutions and were henceforth ruled by an oligarchy. 

I've only just started Paul Cartledge's Democracy: A Life. I'll try to remember to add my final thoughts at a later time. But basically Cartledge is so far talking about the rather hazy notion of "democracy" that was forming at the time (5th Century BCE) as opposed to the more concrete idea we have of what the term meant and how it operated in posterity. Cartledge will go on to describe the differences between Athenian democracy and "democracy" as it was subsequently defined and practiced in more recent times. He also says that he will differentiate between this concept of democracy and those proposed by [often] non-Western scholars who insist that democracy was not limited to Ancient Greece and Western Europe.

Leftover Factoids From My Covidiot Safari

 

Not much really. In my last post I neglected to mention how the anti-masker/COVID-19 deniers referred to masks as "face diapers." Because ... well, it's pretty obvious why but it's also obvious that these people are revolting imbeciles.

Also, the main anti-masker I interacted with ... our conversation was interrupted by a woman who said she was a nurse working in an Edmonton hospital [I did a search of her name and found her contribution to an online Alberta nurse's newsletter from 2014 and a couple of other pieces of evidence] who said that there very much WAS a crisis in urban Albertan hospitals. (She also said that nurses spoke with each other all the time and that nurses in remote and/or rural areas spoke openly about unused ICU capacities at their locations. IOW she's aware that some places in Alberta are untouched by COVID.)]

The gregarious anti-masker contemptuously told her to continue to wear her masks then, like a sheeple, and that taking the [Bill Gates poison] vaccine would make her even more "safe."

The Alberta nurse said words to the effect of: "You've already made up your mind and talking to you appears to be a waste of time." And left.

Which is further evidence of the utter debasement of these assholes. 

It would be nice if the the mainstream media could act as a gatekeeper against raw stupidity. But Canada's mainstream media almost uniformly endorsed the murderously stupid and murderously evil stephen harper in the last election that that rancid tub of shit ran in.

Hmmm. Can't see how to add a caption to an image in the new "Blogger."

My Time Among the Anti-Maskers

 

As the third wave of the Corona virus pandemic really started to take off, with basically neo-liberal regimes at the provincial and federal levels (but, truth be told, t'was mostly the right-wing "conservative" governments that are mostly to blame) sending Canada's infection rate to that of the USA's, and with Toronto hospitals setting up tents in their parking lots to deal with emergency room overflow, I wondered how the anti-maskers/COVID-deniers could STILL be sticking to their guns.

It has long been a talking-point of mine that any oligarchy that could impose a hoax on the scale that the COVID-deniers seem to claim is happening would be an oligarchy that is simply too powerful to be resisted. And that furthermore, whether or not a bunch of shlubs decide to refuse to wear masks is going to be completely inconsequential to said oligarchies power and rule. This pandemic appears to have begun in China in late-2019. It has dominated government business (or should have dominated) since early2020. It's now the end of the first-quarter of 2021. The COVID-deniers call it a "plandemic." (So clever! Did you see what they did there?) Which is to say that the evil oligarchs have invented a health emergency out of whole cloth. (I'm not clear, and I don't care, whether these denialist shit-heads say that COVID-19 doesn't exist at all or whether they say that it does exist but is no more deadly than the ordinary annual influenza.) The World Health Organization and the USA's Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, working hand-in-glove with the world's giant pharmaceutical companies, and (for some reason) the Chinese government, have all implemented a propaganda campaign, a giant swindle, a fraud, a hoax, that there is a highly contagious virus with a mortality rate of between one percent and two percent.[Anyone who can't differentiate between getting 98% on a test in school and losing one out of every one-hundred people on the face of the earth to a virus probably won't be reading this blog] They have managed to get every government on the face of the earth and every sub-national government (states, provinces, regions, counties, cities, towns, villages) and every public health authority at all these levels (including hospitals) to play along with this hoax. For over a year. With only a few dissenters (mainly cranks and air-heads).

A genuine hoax requiring the complicity of literally MILLIONS of people would inevitably fall apart after a few months at most. (I'm assuming the oligarchy would supposedly impose threats of job losses or actual violence on whistle-blowers.) Imagine how fevered your brain must be (and full-time at that!) to believe in an oligarchic ruling class that could impose a deception of this scale for well over a year! Again, any ruling class that could do this would be far too powerful to resist. And refusing to wear a mask would have zero impact on their power. It's so stupid that it should go without saying. But a frighteningly large proportion of our fellow human beings are so fucking shit-headed that we have to have discussions like this.

Now, let's get some things out of the way right away. 1.) Capitalist oligarchs are mostly selfish psychopaths. 2.) Our governments serve power first and their people somewhere further down the list. 3.) Our governments and mainstream media lie all the fucking time.  4.) Scientists are occasionally corrupted and, more than occasionally, wrong about stuff and intolerant of dissent.  5.) Among capitalists, the owners of Big Pharma are among the greediest, corrupt and powerful. I think I've mentioned at least more than once that we leftist shlubs do share some of the concerns of right-wing shlubs, but that differences in brain wiring and other factors make genuine alliances between us unfeasible.

Are the police oppressive? Obviously they are. More and more, they're cold-blooded killers. Authoritarian goons, accountable to no one.

Is the system corrupt? Are our elites corrupt and evil and detrimental to our health? You bet they are.

So, what about these people? Aside from their murderous rampages, is there any way we could find some common ground with them?

No. First of all, us wimpy progressives believe that the best way to control the government is through firm application of the rule of law on corrupt elites. 

...

Oh yeah, ... organizing to make the government strictly adhere to their obligations on citizens' rights and the rule of law is going to control governments a lot better than putting on sixty pounds and strutting around with semi-automatic weapons while ignoring the police-state abuses of protesters and the poor and minorities ever will.

...

These idiots also disagree with us about the economy. They appear to believe in some mythical never-neverland, where small farmers and small business owners always make a comfortable living because evil governments and corporations don't exist to fleece them. And, decent, hard-working white people can always find a job because there aren't any coloured people with no self-respect who will work at any wage and drive down wages and cause unemployment for white people. In other words, total bullshit fantasy.

...

 Maybe it was their shared recognition with us that a police-state is forming around us and that they're actually fighting back (albeit in a psychotic, stupid fashion). But they're racist conspiracy theorists. There was never any serious belief on my part that they could be our allies.

...

Middle and working class racists and right-wingers who think they're being abused by corrupt elites but who take most of their frustrations out on the weakest in society, generally out of cowardice and/or laziness. Whereas progressives seek to make common cause with the weakest so as to raise everyone up.

In the end, it would be so much easier for us if our governments and media didn't lie so often at the behest of corrupt, amoral, anti-human psychopathic oligarchic overlords. Then, when confronted with their idiotic conspiracy theories [note: not all theories about conspiracies are idiotic] we wouldn't have to filter out reports from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN or what-not because all those institutions are proven, admitted, shameless, serial liars.

Anyhow, the point is that these right-wing shlubs critiques have some claim to legitimacy but only partially. Whatever is obviously true about their views of the world is distorted by their fear-filled conservative brains and the subsequent racism and other distortions that flows from that.

Anyhoooooooo ..... I'm going to confess to having considered some of claims of the COVID-deniers as possibly valid early in the pandemic. Because governments and media lie. Because pharmaceutical companies' practices are often evil. Because a pandemic that makes mass protest supposedly dangerous is so convenient for an oligarchy that is increasingly losing its grip on the mass consciousness.  Is it possible that the lethality of the disease was being exaggerated in order to justify all sorts of elite machinations?

However, at the same time it struck me as bizarre that the oligarchy would create a crisis that exposed so many shortcomings in our society. (In Canada, the case of the abysmal conditions in our Long-Term Care facilities caused a major public relations black-eye to many elites and our whole society.) Furthermore I never gave a second of respect to the asinine claims of the anti-maskers about how masks made it easier for the oligarchy to snatch kids off the street to add to their supply of sexual abuse victims, or how masks suffocate you and make you go crazy, or how wearing a mask when the world's public health experts are saying there's a viral pandemic makes you part of the "sheeple." And, as the pandemic continued to rage and evidence of it became undeniable, I became more and more disgusted with the stupidity of the COVID-deniers and more aware of how they were the same old bunch of shit-head deniers of Global Heating, the same old deluded anti-Vaxxers, the same old worshippers of racist police forces.

So, with all of that out of the way, is my summary of my attempt at dialogue with some COVID-deniers on F-Zookerbooke. I was scrolling through my newsfeed when F-Zookerbooke told me that a "friend" of mine had said something on some page that I'd never heard about. Calling anti-maskers "kooks" or something or other. So I clicked on the story and found myself on a page dedicated to businesses defying COVID-19 regulations. My friend was very much in the minority. She was receiving all sorts of pushback from the regular denizens of this page, some quite detailed. I decided to communicate with them and find out exactly why they thought the way that they did.

I asked the woman who had been responding the most to my phaze-buk friend if she was suggesting (in April, 2021) that hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers (and everyone else in any relevant authority) the world over were propagating a hoax.

This woman told me that she wasn't "suggesting" it. She was "insisting" that this was the case. It's a "fact." She said that when she offered to volunteer at a hospital the workers laughed at her because there's no crisis. (Perhaps they laughed at her for other reasons. Assuming any of this happened outside of her imagination.) Healthcare workers are telling the truth on their fazebuck pages and other venues. And, in this woman's mind anyway, there are ZERO journalists prepared to go to the mat anywhere in the entire fucking world (except, perhaps, for outlets like Ezra Levant's "The Rebel" and other sources of total bullshit) to expose what would be the biggest scandal in the history of the world.

[This is the way these people think about everything. To hear them talk about anything, they are always this tiny band of freedom fighters surrounded by hordes of liberal traitors, communist terrorists, Islamic terrorists ... who could impose Sharia Law on North America in a heartbeat ... savage "rape-fugees," environmentalist terrorists, Stalinst imposers of "political correctness" who want to abolish Free Speech, ANTIFA terrorists dragging entire societies into anarchy, ... etc., etc., ... These people are always surrounded, always in danger, everything is always one step away from total disaster if they relax their "vigilance" for even a second. Again, this is all a symptom of the stronger "fight or flight" impulses of a conservative's larger amgydala. They can't help but be afraid all of the time. Or, more accurately, ... since these people often don't have genuine threats to their very existence, they are dimly ill at ease all the time. They believe that just beyond their personal communities of families and friends and co-workers, vague, powerful all-encompassing conspiracies are at work. As I said above, there is some truth to their fears. But when you're a right-wing shit-head who seriously proposes that First Nations terrorists, aided and abetted by Justin Trudeau, are seeking to usurp the Rule of Law and Parliamentary Democracy in Canada in order to turn the whole country over to Communist China, ... well, it goes without saying that you'll be acting like an idiot.]

I asked this woman about how the pandemic exposed the deplorable conditions in our Long-Term Care facilities. Was this black-eye to the private-sector parasites and their political servants all part of the hoax? Or wouldn't it be better to look at it as an unintended consequence of responding to a genuine pandemic health crisis. She chose not to answer me but instead babbled about my slavish obedience to wearing a "muzzle" (re: a cloth or paper mask) and how I was more interested in arguing than asking for information. [Poor woman. Only trying to inform. NEVER being confrontational!] It was all part of the Communist playbook for subversion. "Divide and Conquer." By asking her questions I was playing right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

I asked her how she seriously believed refusing to wear a mask could have any impact on a ruling class so powerful as to impose a GIGANTIC worldwide hoax. She asked me why anyone was wearing a mask in the first place. We never did before. [!] (I think that statement's stupidity speaks for itself.) Perhaps her rejection of masks is due to the Conspiracy's admission that "there's no asymptomatic spread." Obviously, this is false. But it shouldn't require any research to understand why that claim is also ridiculous. COVID-19 is a virus. It is spread by aerosols released from the nose and the mouth. If you have it, you have it. Regardless of whether you're showing symptoms. And if you have the virus, you will be breathing it out. How in the sweet name of fuck is the virus supposed to become inert just because the host doesn't show symptoms? How does it transform from being infectious to non-infectious just because the host (of which the virus knows nothing since it doesn't think and isn't even alive) shows no symptoms? Perhaps if your being asymptomatic is the result of having taken a relatively small viral load, it would be possible. But that's not going to be the case for everyone who is asymptomatic.

[Now, obviously, COVID-deniers will claim that "Snopes" is just another source for "FAKE NEWS." Along with most of the goddamned liberal-dominated mainstream media. And in that they have some claim to legitimacy. "Snopes" has shown itself to be unreliable in some areas. As is Wikipedia. As is most mainstream media. But they aren't all complete lies from start-to-finish. ONLY in the fevered mind of these conservative nutbars can there be a world where their embattled information sources are the only truth-tellers with everything else being lies, lies, lies. I'm no fan of the Globe & Mail. But I recognize the fact that they have good journalists who often provide good journalism. Relatedly, "Project Veritas" is a hacktacular partisan shit-show run by a scumbag. But when they published a video showing a CNN producer admitting that "Russiagate" was nothing but the network's shows were being ordered to fixate on it for political/partisan reasons, I wasn't going to discount this evidence because of the source. ]

The woman then began babbling about the "Great Reset" and listing off the names of villains (Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, George Soros, Bill Gates and the Rothchilds) and spewing out all manner of theories (Bill Gates' concerns about over-population are evidence of his plans for deliberate mass-murder of tens of millions of people; Trudeau trying to get a seat on the UN Security Council as evidence of something - she could not say -; inflated death count statistics; "false positives" from PCR tests, and empty emergency rooms.) I noticed that this was this woman's main method of discussion. She'd get a question and ignore it except as a springboard to mention anywhere from three-to-five conspiracies, never bothering to reinforce anything she was saying with facts or arguments. 

The "Great Reset" is simply a title for the 2020 Davos Oligarch's Ball. A theme to re-package their usual high-level spit-balling about the future of international capitalism and humanity. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Intercept it's just a slurry of the usual neo-liberal rhetoric, the lip-service to the environment and "stakeholder capitalism." An attempt to put a human face on their pathological greed and narcissm.  Perhaps these COVID-denying shitheads see the grim spectre of Stalinist/Maoist totalitarian communism in these "globalists" schemes. But given the fact that they're totally incapable of explaining how capitalist billionaires and bankers are "communists" it's totally unimportant what they think, except for the hellish reality that we have to share a society with these hopeless fuck-ups.

The "false-positives" from PCR tests is yet another bone-headed, evidence-free bit of drivel. Just picture the arrogance of this woman (and all her yahoo comrades) who believe that all these lab workers are ignorant of the flaws in their daily work, and that if they'd only listen to some of her bullshit ranting the scales would fall from their eyes.

Bill Gates is an asshole. But he did not say he wanted to kill 10-15% of the world's population with vaccines. I took this up with my phazebuck disputant. I asked her why would Bill Gates insist that Oxford University apply for a patent for their Astra-Zeneca vaccine and produce it with a European phamraceutical manufacturer at a profit, thereby making it inaccessible to people in low-income countries if his goal is to kill as many people as possible? My debate participant eventually farted out how Gates (or products associated with him) was banned in many poor countries, because he's committed "genocide.") Which, you'll notice, doesn't really answer the question about why he'd make the vaccine inaccessible if he wants to commit mass-murder. For what it's worth here's a Reuters article dealing with many of the accusations against Gates. For my money it's too exculpatory, but whatevah.

Next I asked the general membership of this fasebuk group why was it that they didn't have ANY politicians on their side? Why did politicians like Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Kenney, ... who seem to say that the virus is a hoax, always seem to be forced to concede to its reality? Why did Trump implement "Operation Warp Speed" to deliver a vaccine for a virus that was no more deadly than the flu? Why isn't Bolsonaro just forcing his critics to acknowledge the reality that the emergency wards are empty and that there is no health crisis? Why did Boris Johnson abandon his strategy of minimal lockdowns and the pursuit of "herd immunity" from most people contracting and surviving the virus? Why does Jason Kenney occasionally have to change his act from seeming to not care about people violating safety protocols to pleading with people to comply with them?

The first response came from a fella who said only that Kenney, having been to Bilderberg, was a "globalist plant." Which makes you wonder how out-and-out fascist a politician has to be to earn these people's trust.

The second responder brought up the Great Reset again. Also, "Agenda 21" and "Agenda 2030" and the New World Order. To repeat: The Great Reset is nothing but the usual Davos rhetoric. Which is to say that the world we inhabit (already controlled by the Davos crowd) won't look radically different were the Great Reset to be implemented in its entirety. Inequality would continue to increase. The destruction of the planet would continue. There would just be a few programs (probably voluntary so as not to offend the freedom and values of oligarchs who disagree) to salve the consciences of "woke" billionaires. What with the fact that EVERY politician is against them, and society itself, from health care workers, to climate scientists, to the education system, etc., is out to get them, ... these people are (as I've said above) a fearful lot. Of course, they have GOD on their side. So there IS that. And God has his own schedule. He's gonna save them. But at His own pace in His own Good Time. 

Anyway, I had to know that none of this is about our health. It's about the Chinese Communists, aided and abetted by Trudeau and the United Nations and the WTO, to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! This [other] woman works in health care. People arent' dying OF COVID. They've got co-morbidities and they're dying WITH COVID. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening. People go to the hospital for the flu and die of cancer or heart failure or whatever, all the fucking time, every fucking year.

I could go on but what's the point? I know that the world is round because I rode a bus up to Thunder Bay and saw the rain turn into snow as I got further north. More importantly, I saw that it took longer for the sun to set.  I know global warming is happening where I live because we always had snow on the ground at Christmas up until sometime in the late-1990s and now it's hit-or-miss. And I know that COVID-19 is real because my experience of previous flu seasons is that I don't get the vaccine and I don't get the flu and I don't hear of anyone else getting the flu. Whereas this year, I've met five people at work who got infected by COVID-19. And there's somebody else in my department who caught it, survived it (as 98% of people will do) but who hasn't returned from quarantine. And there's a guy in my old department who caught it and was hospitalized for it and who isn't coming back to work until the danger is totally passed because he apparently suffered greatly. And there's a guy in that same department whose brother (in the Old Country) died of it. And everyone in the factory heard that a woman on the assembly floor brought it back home and her father caught it and died from it.

Plus, I am not an insane, gibbering idiot who believes that a hoax like this can be perpetrated all across the planet at every level of government, by literally millions of people, with nobody being able to expose it. These people's claims of working in healthcare and knowing there's no crisis are pathetic, stupid lies. Because these people are pathetic and stupid liars. They read shit and it turns their stupid brains into shit. EVERYTHING is a threat to their WAY OF LIFE. And their "way of life" is to work at their stupid jobs and to buy stupid shit and to go to their stupid churches and believe their stupid crap and eat the usual foods and barbeque their meat and to basically do things the same way they've been doing for decades and they're so goddamned terrified all the time that even non-binding UN resolutions to tone-down some of our most damaging behaviour to the eco-system causes these idiots to see themselves wearing rags behind barbed-wire fences in a Stalinist gulag.

Because they're stupid idiots.

Biden's Bull-Shitting

 

What with Canada's dismal failure on the COVID-19 front, I'd ordinarily be loath to discuss US-American stuff. However, I've been working on a long post about our COVIDIOTS and the damage they are doing. It's taking a while. And, so, what I'm basically saying is that this post about US-American stuff isn't a sign that I'm being a typical complacent, self-satisfied Canadian, ignoring my own country's ills to focus on foreign shit.

Joe Biden is a career politician who (by his own admission) prostituted himself out to oligarchs. He was an advocate of cutting medicare and Social Security. He was an opponent of school integration. He's always been pro-imperialism. He was the architect of the racist crime bill and he also wrote the precursor to the Anti-Terrorism Act. He's subsidized and supported by powerful corporate criminals whose bidding he does. This has allowed him to win election after election despite being a dimbulb, pompous ass in love with the sound of his own voice and his delusions of intelligence.

There's been some praise for this shit-head, stammering his way into full-blown Alzheimers, and his State of the Union Address. Biden gave lip-service to all sorts of progressive policies. But Ted Rall has the skinny:

No one, Biden least of all, expects Congress to approve his big infrastructure or education packages. Recalcitrant Republicans and reluctant red-state Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia will probably water the proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill down to virtual under-$1-trillion insignificance. The $1.8 trillion education proposal, which would be funded by a capital-gains tax increase the GOP hates, is an even more desperate Hail Mary pass.

These bills aren’t serious attempts to legislate. Bidenism is a series of rhetorical feints, window dressing, kabuki theater designed to fail, just like Biden’s half-hearted dead-on-arrival attempt to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Since the Senate parliamentarian ruled against attaching it to the stimulus package, increasing the minimum wage hasn’t been heard from again.

The president’s agenda isn’t really an FDR-scale new New Deal. His true goal is to silence his party’s restive progressive base with so much slobbering lip service they won’t know how to hate him.

So, Biden is just gaslighting you. Biden and his advisors have decided that progressives are so pathetic that they'll accept empty promises in lieu of legislative accomplishments.