this stage of the pandemic is really one of the more mystifying parts. if you listen closely, you can hear the popping of burning wires.
i got vaccinated.
i got covid.
i got really sick.
thank goodness i got vaccinated!
you should get vaccinated too!
i mean, at a certain point you’re thanking your lucky rabbit foot for keeping you from having lost your gold fillings on top of your wristwatch last poker night…
it’s like the last vestiges of observational capability have finally been beaten out of a meaningful portion of the population.
truly, we have entered the post rational world of the unfalsifiable claim.
“it would have been worse if i had not!”
it’s such a wonderful meme. so pervasive. so persuasive. and so totally, utterly impervious to contradiction.
it’s the perfect brainworm to justify what you did.
you can show them all the societal data you like about higher rates of hospitalization this year than last in groups that were 95%+ vaccinated.
it does not matter. no aggregate data can refute any individual belief about one specific datapoint among many.
“i’m sure it helped.”
this belief lets anyone feel good about vaccination and boosting even as they fall ill.
it literally turns the contraction of covid by vaccinated people into the belief that covid vaccines worked for them.
this may be the most successful piece of product positioning in human history.
cognitive bias becomes cognitive dissonance becomes an iron bar certainty that your virtuous behavior saved you.
as a perfect pathway to self justification and validation of priors, it’s near 100% effective if you simply believe hard enough.
the alternative is admitting that you were played for a chump. people are highly averse to such conclusions.
of course, spotting the chump is easy:
ask such a person what would convince them that the vaccine did not prevent covid from being worse.
see if they have an answer.
if they do not, well, then it’s pure presumption.
that which cannot be falsified cannot be proven either.
bingo. chumpitude verified.
and boy do people not want things proven.
we’ve reached the point where agencies will no longer publish objective data because it does not support their conclusions.
“we cannot provide data because people might analyze it!” is not much of a mantra, is it?
How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks.
Those of us who advocate for a woman's right to home birth and natural birth are quite familiar with this "thank goodness" thing. I can't tell you how many times I have listened as women tell about hemorrhaging or some other terrible adverse outcome during or after a medically-assisted hospital birth, saying "good thing I was in the hospital" and "thank goodness for modern medicine". We have loads of data showing that medical interventions, prohibitions against movement and eating, etc worsen outcomes for birthing mothers and infants. Anyway. This is the modern medical delusion at work.
Amazing mental illness affecting institutional and academic medicine. Total lack of perception about what is happening in their ICU covid units. Hospitals have become the “killing fields “ and concentration camps of America. Without asking for my advice, five of my friends have gotten admitted to our local hospital (where I used to work before retirement)... Without consent, all got intubated (and I am sure got Remdesivir) - four of five died .. one strong man survived a month in ICU and now has terrible brain fog. 80% mortality sorta fits what we are seeing fir hospitalized covid ICU patients. It fits. The last three words in the movie “bridge over the River Kwai” were “madness, madness, madness” boy oh boy does that fit today
Please get in this leaky lifeboat with me because, even though it hasn't done anything I was told it would do and expected it to do, I want us all to go down together.
I deleted my twitter account and just can NOT do this anymore to be honest. Really it's sad to see people fall down the rabbit hole. Two years into "covid" COUGH COUGH and I am done... If people haven't come to understand this WHOLE disaster and still have this "if I didn't get the vaxx it would be worse" they cannot be helped.
How do most people hold jobs?? How does the guy driving a Mercedes SL convertible with the roof down with a double mask on make the money to buy that car when his decision making process is that flawed??? Please tell me because it drives me nuts. And some well respected people...people I know and like tell me the same thing...just sounds nuts.
When I hear that I tell them how do you know? Where's the data to prove that? I can't say it's false just like you can't say it's true...it's just a dopey opinion and opinions by their very nature are unprovable!
It's like the guy married to the anti-Christ says "Oh well...my life would've been worse if I stayed single!" LOL!
I and 3 coworkers had COVID in Dec 2021. I was the only unvaxed one. I had a fever for 4 hours and took horse paste that night and for the next 10 days. I really had no other symptoms than "tired." My vaxed coworkers had horrible coughs, congestion, headaches, etc. It took them all over 3 weeks before they started to feel and sound normal again. Imagine how sick I would have been without horse paste. 😉
I think one of the biggest factors in the self delusion is that people don’t want to admit that they lined up like sheep and let their government tinker with and inject their body with unknown and untested substances for their own petty vain selfish reasons. They thought they could go to restaurants, football games, concerts. Total insanity.
I've a slight background in science (BS) and a bit more in literature (MA). So take that as a disclaimer for what it's worth.
In traditional science (e.g. before the "woke" took it over, which in case you didn't know, happened long before you were even born, at least in some fields; it's an ill going back generations.) there is/was a quite high burden of proof. This is especially so in the purer sciences: mathematics and its brethren. Let's just say for now that it is very, very difficult to prove something, to a scientific standard.
Quick aside: I never liked the verb "falsify," but that is, indeed what's used in academia. In common use, of course it means "to forge" or "to counterfeit." However, the more obscure usage in science means "to disprove" or "show to be false." Thus, to falsify a theory doesn't mean that you plagiarized or otherwise wrote a bullshit paper. Even though that clearly happens a lot. In fact, when research is done right, that's precisely what the working system WANTS to happen: to disprove a current theory, or conversely, to fail to disprove it, which tends to support the prior theory.
Absolute, final truth DOES NOT EXIST. It never has and never will. Even the best, most battle-tested, time-honored theories are always subject to falsification. If you ever hear the phrase "the science is settled, " you know you are dealing will a bullshit artist or a liberal arts major (but I repeat myself.) Of course, such absurd claims to final truth are common in religion and politics and similar mucky, swampy domains of human "thought."
Now I'm getting to what was sort of the intent of this post, ere I lapsed into verbal diarrhea. If you accept what I've told you above, that it is very difficult to definitively prove or falsify a proposition, consider the following statements:
Just because you cannot prove a statement, doesn't mean it's untrue. Or conversely,
Just because you cannot falsify a statement, doesn't mean it's true.
At this point, we enter the thicket of correlations, inferences and probabilities. This, alas, is where most "facts" in the real world reside. But all is not lost. The human mind and many of its creations are designed, either explicitly or implicitly, to be able to operate on incomplete information. In fact, if you think about it, that's about all we ever have available. If one demanded absolute proof of safety, for example, no one would ever take a pill, board a plane or even cross a busy street.
Public Health Scotland refusing to release its data is yet another class of problem. This gets more into psychology: basically the childish wish-fulfillment thinking along the lines of "If we don't see (or name) an evil, it doesn't exist and cannot hurt us."
Paging Lord Voldemort. White courtesy phone please.
Got my hairs colored yesterday. Wore a mask, as I'm in Maine & our Governor/CDC are insane.
My stylist wasn't wearing a mask. She said, "You don't need to wear that."
Me: "I'm unvaxxed. Won't you get in trouble with the CDC/State?" (Maine still pretends it's safer for the vaxxed to go about unmasked. Pretty sure they know it's bullshit. But then, so are masks.)
Stylist: "I'm not vaxxed. I've had COVID 3X & still keep getting it. But, I'm also still here. It's a cold for most of us and your health status is none of my business."
We then discussed all the vaxxed folk we know who got COVID anyway & moved on to girlie topics.
When I tell people I have had omicron they are very concerned because... no jab. How was it??? Me: I sat around, I laid around, I made food, did laundry and coughed my ass off. The usual.
I think they don't like that answer.
I'm pissed I'm not like that Nancy in the tweet above who lost his appetite. I never lose my appetite. Rats!
We must do everything to protect an obese person from going to hospital with COVID to ensure that there’s enough hospital capacity for obese people with their usual ailments.
The lady who cuts my hair was, for the first time since covid, wearing a mask; I didn't ask, but she got to talking and it seems she got the omicron, then went out and got her vax. And telling me how "safe" she feels now that she got her vax......... I can't even at this point....
NEW - Public Health Scotland will stop publishing data on Covid deaths and hospitalizations by vaccination status because there are "significant concerns about the data contradicting the narrative"
Yep. I started saying this in 2020 when they put the lockdown idea out - that everything they did would be justified by, "But think how much worse it would have been if we hadn't!" Not "could" have been; "would" have been.
It is like a religion without the hope of an afterlife and without the meaning that belief in God gives you. Also, the believers really hate those who don't believe. Sad. And I know some of these folks. Sad.
When assessing medical claims, it's important to remember the job of a doctor: selling medical procedures. Now, if those medical procedures work, it'll have some small positive benefit on sales, but - as anyone in business knows - the actual quality of a product is relatively unimportant to its sales. (Does anyone think McDs makes the world's best hamburger? Yet, it's inarguably the #1 burger chain.)
Thus, doctors will always favor products that result in higher total sales over products that actually work. Talk to any pediatrician and they'll tell you it's impossible to make money w/o vaccination. If vaccines impair health - resulting in lots of infections and other chronic problems - you'll make even more money!
Given those economic incentives, it's ludicrous to think that doctors will investigate the safety and efficacy of vaccines - they have literally no incentive to do so and lots of reasons to avoid such investigations.
One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that people will respond to their economic incentives. If we pay doctors to "treat" our illnesses, they aren't going to help us avoid illness (and, thus, avoid paying them!)
If we combine their incentives w/ our own (few of us pay out of pocket for all of our care and many of us pay very little for any additional care), then nobody has an incentive to minimize treatments... and we get more treatments! (Indeed, it's been shown that people w/o medical insurance are healthier than people w/ Medicaid because a bad doctor is far worse than none at all!)
To be clear, there are counter-pressures that limit doctors' ability to over-treat, but those counter-pressures are imperfect; overall, we treat too many people for too many things (by which I mean we tend to favor treatments that are expensive & ongoing over cures & that we tend to minimize side-effects, preferring to "treat" them over avoiding them in the first place).
Economics explains why we spend so much achieving so little.
It gets funnier in a way. The man they hate and fear most--DeSantis--has been very pro-vax but completely anti-lockdown. He's like the black 'n white guy from the original Star Trek. Something to despite for everyone, but for the part they most revile, he's been right. No wonder their heads are starting to explode.
They will never admit that we, the filthy crazies, have been entirely right, when they can't even deal with him, who at least had believed in their fairy dust...
“Other reports tell of political officials and party followers who cried out ‘Long Live Stalin!’ as they were being taken out to be shot by the Soviet Secret Police.”
And:
“As in the Stockholm Syndrome, thus does the abuser become the perceived safe haven – a person or an entity to whom one can turn for help, mercy, forgiveness, comfort.”
As I recall from some decades ago, some Japanese business people were fascinated by the ability of American businesses to sell inferior products. They set about studying the formulae.
Now we have this jabmad fad (our society is so susceptible to fads) and the resultant burgeoning of globalist coffers.
The land of merchants utterly subdued by the merchants’ comprehensive, omnipresent marketing campaign. Every masked face is an ad for their profitable toxins.
I’m reminded of the story from England some months ago about the woman with COVID who spent a month in a medically induced coma only to (supposedly) be save people by a dose of viagra. Later she said something like “Thank goodness I was vaccinated! Imagine how much worse it could have been!” There might be a few things worse than a month in a coma, like being burned at the stake, and death, but… Really?
The craziest thing has been that the people who've failed this logic test the worst have been the self identified intellectual crowd. The vast majority of them actually believe they're the smartest guys in the room - and often they have the degrees and pedigree to reinforce their self image.
I am not vaccinated and had a pretty unpleasant experience with COVID. It lasted 12 days and it took me three weeks to recover. I got it from my daughter, who is vaccinated (forced to for her job), and her experience was pretty much the same, as it was for the other vaccinated people we know who got it. Everyone was out of commission for a month with the same symptoms, vaxxed or not. My family, some of whom refuse to associate with me in person, have shut up about vaccinations as the be all and end all finally, especially after my brother and his wife got a mild case after their boosters. He had refused to attend my mom’s birthday in December if I was there. They are lifting the mandates here next month and many people, vaccinated, of course, are freaking out. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Awesome. Hah. My sister--a trained lawyer and supposedly smart--did this EXACT thing. I didn't bother pointing out the logical problems with her assertion. Also, get this, she said that at least her infection wasn't as bad as her reaction to the vaxx injections! Dudes and chicks, you can't make this stuff up.
Are the vaccinated getting more severe sickness or are they just whiners?
Everybody I know unvaxxed with Omicron in the past 2 months has had a cold. And with my man, it wasn't even a man cold. I guess the "get unvaccinated" advice would be insensitive.
went through this exact thought experiment with my ex wife a month ago. she’s triple vaxxed and caught covid only a few weeks after the booster. I asked if she now realizes the vax was bunk and she won’t relent that it was worthless. she’s lost, but no skin off my back. I tried to help she wouldn’t listen.
I was vaccinated and still got Wuhan about 5 months after two Pfizer shots. Everything said by gato malo is spot on. Everyone said it would be worse if I hadn’t been vaccinated. I said how do you know that? I said I didn’t catch Wuhan until after I was vaccinated. I went a year and a half around the public but didn’t catch it but I did after being vaccinated? You probably had the Delta Variant. How would they know that? Well, that’s what’s going around now. I said my test just said CoVid positive and nothing about Delta. Was there a secret code or test I didn’t know about? Suffice it to say it’s all BS.
Logic is irrelevant at this point. The answer to the “what would convince you” question would be “death” (hard to ask a dead person if they’re convinced now-see tombstone meme), or “my symptoms were so much less severe than the unvaccinated”, based on personal anecdotal evidence (from physicians I know). It truly is a massive snake-oil salesman, sleight-of-hand. Fascinating and terrifying in its pervasiveness.
And even worse, people who are in the cult actually sound proud and virtuous when they talk about their experience of having covid - no self-awareness at all.
That tombstone is no joke. There was a case in the USA where the relatives of someone who was fully vaccinated but still died from CoViD basically said exactly what is on your mock tombstone. I'm still trying to dig up the link
Where Is The Pandemic? According To The BC Government Records Hospitalizations and ICU admissions in BC During the Covid-19 Pandemic Did Not Increase Compared to the Previous Years
All these years of conditioning people to make arguments based on 'how you feel' versus facts and data has really paid off, and has been accelerated 2020 and on. The whole point of all these non-sensical measures and contradictory messaging is precisely to erase the concept of critical thinking, logic, and all other scientific means of proving something. All can be shot down with 'oh yeah- you'd FEEL different if you got C19!" If we continue with 8 more years of this, we will definitely have a cross between technocracy and idiocracy.
The unfalsifiable claims, as you point out, the totally childish 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' application by politicians (and it's opposite). That is - 'we locked down and did better than country X, therefore the lockdown worked'. Which by itself would never be accepted in ANY field of work. At which point you go to multiple countries where they did the OPPOSITE, and ensure they had the opposite outcome. They did not. And so, as ELGATO did months ago, you repeat this across dozens of jurisdictions, look for correlation between stringency and outcomes via XY scatter plot and correlation coef. Then you see complete lack of correlation in this case.
My experience has been that once you push 2 or 3 layers down into their lack of logic, the believers simply change subject or give you the 'would have been worse', 'overwhelmed', whatever lets them back to believing their governments.
I used to debug and troubleshoot mobile devices in the field before mass production. If you had a problem, you take 100 sample devices, repeat the problem reliably, then apply a proposed/suspected solution to 50 of those devices. Then take all 100 back to the field, and ensure that if the problem arises, that it is, only seen on the 50 unmodified devices. To be thorough, you then take the repair solution out of the 50 modified units, and apply it to the other 50 - again to ensure the problem stays with the unmodified devices. I.e. your 'fix' 100% repairs all 50 units, and the problem only ever stays those without the fix. Can't be done with people of course, but they didn't even bother to attempt a double-blind study since the unblinded the whole placebo group.
![Sal the Agorist on Twitter: "When the public 'schooling' kicks in https://t.co/vcOoVmczHo" / Twitter](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8de77b10-9b13-4049-8596-20ca598737a3_1072x804.jpeg "Sal the Agorist on Twitter: "When the public 'schooling' kicks in https://t.co/vcOoVmczHo" / Twitter")
How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks.
Those of us who advocate for a woman's right to home birth and natural birth are quite familiar with this "thank goodness" thing. I can't tell you how many times I have listened as women tell about hemorrhaging or some other terrible adverse outcome during or after a medically-assisted hospital birth, saying "good thing I was in the hospital" and "thank goodness for modern medicine". We have loads of data showing that medical interventions, prohibitions against movement and eating, etc worsen outcomes for birthing mothers and infants. Anyway. This is the modern medical delusion at work.
You missed a step. It goes:
*I got the jab
*It made me feel bad, that shows it is working with my immune system.
*Then I got covid...
Amazing mental illness affecting institutional and academic medicine. Total lack of perception about what is happening in their ICU covid units. Hospitals have become the “killing fields “ and concentration camps of America. Without asking for my advice, five of my friends have gotten admitted to our local hospital (where I used to work before retirement)... Without consent, all got intubated (and I am sure got Remdesivir) - four of five died .. one strong man survived a month in ICU and now has terrible brain fog. 80% mortality sorta fits what we are seeing fir hospitalized covid ICU patients. It fits. The last three words in the movie “bridge over the River Kwai” were “madness, madness, madness” boy oh boy does that fit today
cognitive dissonance meets sunk cost fallacy.....
you just didn't vaccinate hard enough!
Please get in this leaky lifeboat with me because, even though it hasn't done anything I was told it would do and expected it to do, I want us all to go down together.
I deleted my twitter account and just can NOT do this anymore to be honest. Really it's sad to see people fall down the rabbit hole. Two years into "covid" COUGH COUGH and I am done... If people haven't come to understand this WHOLE disaster and still have this "if I didn't get the vaxx it would be worse" they cannot be helped.
Sometimes the biggest lies that people tell are the lies they tell themselves.
How do most people hold jobs?? How does the guy driving a Mercedes SL convertible with the roof down with a double mask on make the money to buy that car when his decision making process is that flawed??? Please tell me because it drives me nuts. And some well respected people...people I know and like tell me the same thing...just sounds nuts.
When I hear that I tell them how do you know? Where's the data to prove that? I can't say it's false just like you can't say it's true...it's just a dopey opinion and opinions by their very nature are unprovable!
It's like the guy married to the anti-Christ says "Oh well...my life would've been worse if I stayed single!" LOL!
It’s slowly but surely moving from mass delusion to righteous anger.
I and 3 coworkers had COVID in Dec 2021. I was the only unvaxed one. I had a fever for 4 hours and took horse paste that night and for the next 10 days. I really had no other symptoms than "tired." My vaxed coworkers had horrible coughs, congestion, headaches, etc. It took them all over 3 weeks before they started to feel and sound normal again. Imagine how sick I would have been without horse paste. 😉
I think one of the biggest factors in the self delusion is that people don’t want to admit that they lined up like sheep and let their government tinker with and inject their body with unknown and untested substances for their own petty vain selfish reasons. They thought they could go to restaurants, football games, concerts. Total insanity.
I've a slight background in science (BS) and a bit more in literature (MA). So take that as a disclaimer for what it's worth.
In traditional science (e.g. before the "woke" took it over, which in case you didn't know, happened long before you were even born, at least in some fields; it's an ill going back generations.) there is/was a quite high burden of proof. This is especially so in the purer sciences: mathematics and its brethren. Let's just say for now that it is very, very difficult to prove something, to a scientific standard.
Quick aside: I never liked the verb "falsify," but that is, indeed what's used in academia. In common use, of course it means "to forge" or "to counterfeit." However, the more obscure usage in science means "to disprove" or "show to be false." Thus, to falsify a theory doesn't mean that you plagiarized or otherwise wrote a bullshit paper. Even though that clearly happens a lot. In fact, when research is done right, that's precisely what the working system WANTS to happen: to disprove a current theory, or conversely, to fail to disprove it, which tends to support the prior theory.
Absolute, final truth DOES NOT EXIST. It never has and never will. Even the best, most battle-tested, time-honored theories are always subject to falsification. If you ever hear the phrase "the science is settled, " you know you are dealing will a bullshit artist or a liberal arts major (but I repeat myself.) Of course, such absurd claims to final truth are common in religion and politics and similar mucky, swampy domains of human "thought."
Now I'm getting to what was sort of the intent of this post, ere I lapsed into verbal diarrhea. If you accept what I've told you above, that it is very difficult to definitively prove or falsify a proposition, consider the following statements:
Just because you cannot prove a statement, doesn't mean it's untrue. Or conversely,
Just because you cannot falsify a statement, doesn't mean it's true.
At this point, we enter the thicket of correlations, inferences and probabilities. This, alas, is where most "facts" in the real world reside. But all is not lost. The human mind and many of its creations are designed, either explicitly or implicitly, to be able to operate on incomplete information. In fact, if you think about it, that's about all we ever have available. If one demanded absolute proof of safety, for example, no one would ever take a pill, board a plane or even cross a busy street.
Public Health Scotland refusing to release its data is yet another class of problem. This gets more into psychology: basically the childish wish-fulfillment thinking along the lines of "If we don't see (or name) an evil, it doesn't exist and cannot hurt us."
Paging Lord Voldemort. White courtesy phone please.
El Gato Malo savage af
Can I share a beautiful story?
Got my hairs colored yesterday. Wore a mask, as I'm in Maine & our Governor/CDC are insane.
My stylist wasn't wearing a mask. She said, "You don't need to wear that."
Me: "I'm unvaxxed. Won't you get in trouble with the CDC/State?" (Maine still pretends it's safer for the vaxxed to go about unmasked. Pretty sure they know it's bullshit. But then, so are masks.)
Stylist: "I'm not vaxxed. I've had COVID 3X & still keep getting it. But, I'm also still here. It's a cold for most of us and your health status is none of my business."
We then discussed all the vaxxed folk we know who got COVID anyway & moved on to girlie topics.
When I tell people I have had omicron they are very concerned because... no jab. How was it??? Me: I sat around, I laid around, I made food, did laundry and coughed my ass off. The usual.
I think they don't like that answer.
I'm pissed I'm not like that Nancy in the tweet above who lost his appetite. I never lose my appetite. Rats!
the cat wins the internet, again. This and the "your mask ennobles me" post are pure gold
I also hear the en vogue my family and kids has omicron. It was mild because we were vaccinated. Nope. It was mild because you’re young and healthy.
We must do everything to protect an obese person from going to hospital with COVID to ensure that there’s enough hospital capacity for obese people with their usual ailments.
It may not stop transmission or prevent death but according to latest pfizer-funded study only the vaccinated go to heaven.
Why do the vaccinated have to act so dramatic about getting sick?
The lady who cuts my hair was, for the first time since covid, wearing a mask; I didn't ask, but she got to talking and it seems she got the omicron, then went out and got her vax. And telling me how "safe" she feels now that she got her vax......... I can't even at this point....
NEW - Public Health Scotland will stop publishing data on Covid deaths and hospitalizations by vaccination status because there are "significant concerns about the data contradicting the narrative"
Yep. I started saying this in 2020 when they put the lockdown idea out - that everything they did would be justified by, "But think how much worse it would have been if we hadn't!" Not "could" have been; "would" have been.
It is like a religion without the hope of an afterlife and without the meaning that belief in God gives you. Also, the believers really hate those who don't believe. Sad. And I know some of these folks. Sad.
My mechanic said the new tires probably saved my life, even though they blew out. Definately would have been worse if i had kept the old tires.
When assessing medical claims, it's important to remember the job of a doctor: selling medical procedures. Now, if those medical procedures work, it'll have some small positive benefit on sales, but - as anyone in business knows - the actual quality of a product is relatively unimportant to its sales. (Does anyone think McDs makes the world's best hamburger? Yet, it's inarguably the #1 burger chain.)
Thus, doctors will always favor products that result in higher total sales over products that actually work. Talk to any pediatrician and they'll tell you it's impossible to make money w/o vaccination. If vaccines impair health - resulting in lots of infections and other chronic problems - you'll make even more money!
Given those economic incentives, it's ludicrous to think that doctors will investigate the safety and efficacy of vaccines - they have literally no incentive to do so and lots of reasons to avoid such investigations.
One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that people will respond to their economic incentives. If we pay doctors to "treat" our illnesses, they aren't going to help us avoid illness (and, thus, avoid paying them!)
If we combine their incentives w/ our own (few of us pay out of pocket for all of our care and many of us pay very little for any additional care), then nobody has an incentive to minimize treatments... and we get more treatments! (Indeed, it's been shown that people w/o medical insurance are healthier than people w/ Medicaid because a bad doctor is far worse than none at all!)
To be clear, there are counter-pressures that limit doctors' ability to over-treat, but those counter-pressures are imperfect; overall, we treat too many people for too many things (by which I mean we tend to favor treatments that are expensive & ongoing over cures & that we tend to minimize side-effects, preferring to "treat" them over avoiding them in the first place).
Economics explains why we spend so much achieving so little.
It gets funnier in a way. The man they hate and fear most--DeSantis--has been very pro-vax but completely anti-lockdown. He's like the black 'n white guy from the original Star Trek. Something to despite for everyone, but for the part they most revile, he's been right. No wonder their heads are starting to explode.
They will never admit that we, the filthy crazies, have been entirely right, when they can't even deal with him, who at least had believed in their fairy dust...
The vaccine is their holy savior—what you worship can do no wrong.
As quoted in “Is Government the New God? – The Religion of Totalitarianism” (https://academyofideas.com/2021/12/is-government-the-new-god-the-religion-of-totalitarianism/) by the ever-brilliant Academy of Ideas:
“Other reports tell of political officials and party followers who cried out ‘Long Live Stalin!’ as they were being taken out to be shot by the Soviet Secret Police.”
And:
“As in the Stockholm Syndrome, thus does the abuser become the perceived safe haven – a person or an entity to whom one can turn for help, mercy, forgiveness, comfort.”
—Alexandra Stein, “Terror, Love and Brainwashing”
They’re going hot and heavy on the pneumococcal vaccine now. Soon instead of weather we will just have vaccine seasons. $$$$$$$$$
When the date passes in which the doomsday cult was *certain* the world would end, the doomsday cult carries on. Same thing here.
I ask true believers if they still believe in Santa Claus.
Testimony to marketing skills.
As I recall from some decades ago, some Japanese business people were fascinated by the ability of American businesses to sell inferior products. They set about studying the formulae.
Now we have this jabmad fad (our society is so susceptible to fads) and the resultant burgeoning of globalist coffers.
The land of merchants utterly subdued by the merchants’ comprehensive, omnipresent marketing campaign. Every masked face is an ad for their profitable toxins.
I still maintain that the script/plot for the Scamdemic was hatched in Davos by a bunch of drunks viewing The Three Stooges, “Pest Man Wins”
I’m reminded of the story from England some months ago about the woman with COVID who spent a month in a medically induced coma only to (supposedly) be save people by a dose of viagra. Later she said something like “Thank goodness I was vaccinated! Imagine how much worse it could have been!” There might be a few things worse than a month in a coma, like being burned at the stake, and death, but… Really?
We just spent a long weekend with my daughter and her partner. Both of them are vaccinated and boosted: both came down with Cov-2 and are now unwell.
The three of us are unvaxxed, and have been testing negative for the whole week: despite sharing a house and car, and eating together for three days.
Absolutely bizarre!
The craziest thing has been that the people who've failed this logic test the worst have been the self identified intellectual crowd. The vast majority of them actually believe they're the smartest guys in the room - and often they have the degrees and pedigree to reinforce their self image.
I am not vaccinated and had a pretty unpleasant experience with COVID. It lasted 12 days and it took me three weeks to recover. I got it from my daughter, who is vaccinated (forced to for her job), and her experience was pretty much the same, as it was for the other vaccinated people we know who got it. Everyone was out of commission for a month with the same symptoms, vaxxed or not. My family, some of whom refuse to associate with me in person, have shut up about vaccinations as the be all and end all finally, especially after my brother and his wife got a mild case after their boosters. He had refused to attend my mom’s birthday in December if I was there. They are lifting the mandates here next month and many people, vaccinated, of course, are freaking out. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Awesome. Hah. My sister--a trained lawyer and supposedly smart--did this EXACT thing. I didn't bother pointing out the logical problems with her assertion. Also, get this, she said that at least her infection wasn't as bad as her reaction to the vaxx injections! Dudes and chicks, you can't make this stuff up.
Apply this logic to everything statist ideologues do and you can explain modernity. Poverty, education, healthcare, all of it.
Are the vaccinated getting more severe sickness or are they just whiners?
Everybody I know unvaxxed with Omicron in the past 2 months has had a cold. And with my man, it wasn't even a man cold. I guess the "get unvaccinated" advice would be insensitive.
went through this exact thought experiment with my ex wife a month ago. she’s triple vaxxed and caught covid only a few weeks after the booster. I asked if she now realizes the vax was bunk and she won’t relent that it was worthless. she’s lost, but no skin off my back. I tried to help she wouldn’t listen.
I was vaccinated and still got Wuhan about 5 months after two Pfizer shots. Everything said by gato malo is spot on. Everyone said it would be worse if I hadn’t been vaccinated. I said how do you know that? I said I didn’t catch Wuhan until after I was vaccinated. I went a year and a half around the public but didn’t catch it but I did after being vaccinated? You probably had the Delta Variant. How would they know that? Well, that’s what’s going around now. I said my test just said CoVid positive and nothing about Delta. Was there a secret code or test I didn’t know about? Suffice it to say it’s all BS.
Logic is irrelevant at this point. The answer to the “what would convince you” question would be “death” (hard to ask a dead person if they’re convinced now-see tombstone meme), or “my symptoms were so much less severe than the unvaccinated”, based on personal anecdotal evidence (from physicians I know). It truly is a massive snake-oil salesman, sleight-of-hand. Fascinating and terrifying in its pervasiveness.
And even worse, people who are in the cult actually sound proud and virtuous when they talk about their experience of having covid - no self-awareness at all.
That tombstone is no joke. There was a case in the USA where the relatives of someone who was fully vaccinated but still died from CoViD basically said exactly what is on your mock tombstone. I'm still trying to dig up the link
I read in a Spanish newspaper that the vax was more effective if taken in the morning. Yes, you are reading right. This is how we rock.
The next step could be: my mother died of Covid because she got the 6th booster at the wrong time of the day.
A Pandemic of Deceit
Where Is The Pandemic? According To The BC Government Records Hospitalizations and ICU admissions in BC During the Covid-19 Pandemic Did Not Increase Compared to the Previous Years
https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/where-is-the-pandemic-according-to?utm_source=url
All these years of conditioning people to make arguments based on 'how you feel' versus facts and data has really paid off, and has been accelerated 2020 and on. The whole point of all these non-sensical measures and contradictory messaging is precisely to erase the concept of critical thinking, logic, and all other scientific means of proving something. All can be shot down with 'oh yeah- you'd FEEL different if you got C19!" If we continue with 8 more years of this, we will definitely have a cross between technocracy and idiocracy.
The unfalsifiable claims, as you point out, the totally childish 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' application by politicians (and it's opposite). That is - 'we locked down and did better than country X, therefore the lockdown worked'. Which by itself would never be accepted in ANY field of work. At which point you go to multiple countries where they did the OPPOSITE, and ensure they had the opposite outcome. They did not. And so, as ELGATO did months ago, you repeat this across dozens of jurisdictions, look for correlation between stringency and outcomes via XY scatter plot and correlation coef. Then you see complete lack of correlation in this case.
My experience has been that once you push 2 or 3 layers down into their lack of logic, the believers simply change subject or give you the 'would have been worse', 'overwhelmed', whatever lets them back to believing their governments.
I used to debug and troubleshoot mobile devices in the field before mass production. If you had a problem, you take 100 sample devices, repeat the problem reliably, then apply a proposed/suspected solution to 50 of those devices. Then take all 100 back to the field, and ensure that if the problem arises, that it is, only seen on the 50 unmodified devices. To be thorough, you then take the repair solution out of the 50 modified units, and apply it to the other 50 - again to ensure the problem stays with the unmodified devices. I.e. your 'fix' 100% repairs all 50 units, and the problem only ever stays those without the fix. Can't be done with people of course, but they didn't even bother to attempt a double-blind study since the unblinded the whole placebo group.