Posted On: Wednesday - November 9th 2022 5:51PM MST
In Topics: Music Americans Kung Flu Stupidity
In last Friday's post Forgive and Forget? Peak Stupidity discussed an article by one Emily Oster in The Atlantic magazine that suggested we do both. Though she noted she had been partially against some of the PanicFest-excused policies (she thought the schools should have been reopened earlier), she was definitely one of the Panickers during the time in question. That likely explains why she wants to forgive, or more likely, BE forgiven by US.
Her conclusion goes along the lines of "we all make mistakes. I made some. You probably did. We didn't know!" To wrap up our conclusion of that post, Peak Stupidity doesn't care who made what mistake and who knew what, as far as their OWN decisions for THEMSELVES went. When it comes down to supporting government coercion of others, that Emily Oster doesn't seem to understand why we not only won't forgive and forget, but why we SHOULD'T forgive and forget.
Commenter Dieter Kief linked us to another article on the subject, this time from one Naomi Wolf* from her Substack account - A Lost Small Town: Running Errands in the Wake of Emotional Violence, USA. This one is quite a bit more aligned with my way of thinking. Mrs. Wolf** but the writer is still missing the same main point.
I'm not going to rebut anything much from the article. This one is worth reading because it does show the anger of even this ctrl-left woman at what the PanicFest did to her small (very White) town on the Hudson River in NY State. However, it's the woman's point of view, meaning that it's all about feelings - principles can go straight to freaking hell for people like this (women, but especially lefty women). Here:
But meanwhile, I forgive them. I have to. Because otherwise the rage and sorrow would exhaust me to death.There's a whole lot more of that. Yes, if you care about social interactions, which are important, you may have felt like you had a Social Disease. I know Peak Stupidity has played this song (from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) before, but let's just break for 3 minutes and 43 seconds to listen to Elton John expound on Social Diseases. (At the beginning, the dog is in the audio, not outside your house, just so ya' know.)
I forgive my neighbor who froze when I hugged her.
I forgive my other neighbor, who told me that she was making homemade soup and fresh bread, and that I could join her to have some, if I was vaccinated. If I was unvaccinated, however, she explained, someday she might consent to walk outside with me.
Yeah, OK, from this track, it sounds like half-century-ago Elton John would not have had a problem with people Social Distancing from him. I did feel like half-century-ago Elton John*** a bit during the PanicFest. Were you freaked out by my not wearing a mask in the grocery story like every other single soul in the store was? I don't care now, and I didn't care then either, even when I wasn't high on tequila.
With close relatives, yeah, it could have caused some anguish, but luckily we didn't run into much of this. (Even though one was totally down with the vaccines, she did not try to proselytize to us and, more importantly, she got the concept that if we weren't vaxxed, that shouldn't be a reason for us to stay away from her.) As for friends, well you can pick your friends at least. You can un-pick them too, but, again, I was in good shape as all were of roughly the same mindset - "this is some bullshit, man!"
I can understand that one's hurt feelings from people family, friends, acquaintances, and co-workers from their stupid beliefs in authority during this time could be unforgivable. I especially would agree with regard to those who told me how "selfish" I was being by not listening to and obeying the authorities. The knew better, see? Maybe after a solid apology and "I learned a lot from this about listening to the government and so-called experts ..." I would forgive. Without even an apology, nah, I wouldn't. They'd just be up for more of this the next time around.
Another thing I don't forgive is the humiliation of entire populations as authorities did such obviously stupid and useless gestures as making people stand on stickers on the floor of a store, requiring face masks to be worn in the swimming pool (downright dangerous, that one), and arresting a little surfer girl out in the waves off the beach in Spain. This is a real Totalitarian/Communist thing, making people do stupid stuff just to show that you have the power. That's highly unforgivable.
What both the articles Peak Stupidity has discussed so far are missing is the principles of the matter. It was enjoyable for me to flout the rules of the Kung Flu PanicFest. I had no problem with nasty looks or remarks. It's the coercion by governments, schools, business, all down with the PanicFest narrative that I hated. Precedents have been set. I don't forgive any of the authorities that pushed the Totalitarian programs on us, especially including trying to require experimental gene therapy "vaccines" and preventing people from making their own decisions on how to handle this virus.
Will anyone responsible every be arrested and go to jail? Ha, no, it's not like they trespassed on the Capitol grounds of the Regime. The Hail to You blog, which has covered the PanicFest very thoroughly, was more hopeful about it, or at least the subject of this article was - A “wild” Corona-Reckoning may be coming in 2022-2024, Matthew Peterson of the Claremont Institute predicts. I'd say probably not, the way the political scene is nowadays.
These kinds of posts are good for some comments with opinion and anecdotes. I'd like to know who are the types of people (i.e., how were they involved with this PanicFest) that you won't forgive. Forgetting is out of the question - this whole thing was the biggest boon for Peak Stupidity since the blog opened shop in late '16.
PS: Writer Naomi Wolf does have some good stuff a the end of the article that mentions the people hurt or killed by the vaccines. However, since her article is about forgiveness, I gotta say that it would be pretty hard for this guy to forgive Naomi Wolf for being a Feminazi and destructive lefty for most of her life. This article doesn't quite help me on that score.
* I first thought of Claire Wolf - she was a Libertarian Prepper type living in the Pacific NorthWest. I have not read much from her in a long time, which is probably my fault. I looked at her wiki bio just now. It had 2 quotes by her, and, for some strange reason, her best one was left out. It went "America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." That quote was from a book of hers from 26 years ago, so ...
** About THIS Mrs. Wolf. I took about 5 minutes to read up on her. The first 95% of the bio on wiki is simply disgusting. For most of her life, this lady was the perfect model of Feminist Stupidity (3rd wave, I am told) even having organized her very own #MeToo scam at Yale University. She's been a member of the ctrl-left for many years, until she finally got her mind straightened out the last 2 years by the PanicFest.
*** Actually, I guess that'd be Bernie Taupin, who wrote all the lyrics for those Elton John songs, but most readers wouldn't know who he is.
Comments:
Moderator
Thursday - November 10th 2022 9:37PM MST
PS: "All the girls love Alice, they say..." There are a lot of great songs on that album.
Al Corrupt
Thursday - November 10th 2022 7:06PM MST
PS
Between social disease and Alice Bernie must have had a hell of a year.
Between social disease and Alice Bernie must have had a hell of a year.
Moderator
Thursday - November 10th 2022 6:38PM MST
PS: Thanks for the links, Mr. Smith. I could not view the shark video on Newsweek for some reason, but I'll try on another browser later.
First Chapter of the "Risk Savvy" book: "Are People Stupid?". Duh-uhhh.
I guess you could call all ferrous metals "green" because Rust Never Sleeps.
First Chapter of the "Risk Savvy" book: "Are People Stupid?". Duh-uhhh.
I guess you could call all ferrous metals "green" because Rust Never Sleeps.
Adam Smith
Thursday - November 10th 2022 6:11PM MST
PS: Great news, everyone!
"Grade 10.9 carbon steel bolts are safe, especially from fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes" and "they are considered to be green because they can be recycled and are an environmentally friendly material."
https://www.nickelalloysonline.co.in/blog/grade-10.9-bolts-vs-stainless-steel-bolts.html
Who knew? ☮
"Grade 10.9 carbon steel bolts are safe, especially from fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes" and "they are considered to be green because they can be recycled and are an environmentally friendly material."
https://www.nickelalloysonline.co.in/blog/grade-10.9-bolts-vs-stainless-steel-bolts.html
Who knew? ☮
Adam Smith
Thursday - November 10th 2022 1:37PM MST
PS: Check this out...
https://www.newsweek.com/mako-shark-video-leaping-boat-new-zealand-1758162
Also, I have three new okra blooms today.
Hope you all have a great day! ☮
https://www.newsweek.com/mako-shark-video-leaping-boat-new-zealand-1758162
Also, I have three new okra blooms today.
Hope you all have a great day! ☮
Adam Smith
Thursday - November 10th 2022 1:35PM MST
PS: Greetings, gentlemen,
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-we-knew-in-the-early-days/
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (.epub)
https://tinyurl.com/mryc3x2c
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (.pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/yz3r4dh8
A Plague Upon Our House (.epub)
https://tinyurl.com/cvte2c2v
Thanks, Dieter! ☮
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-we-knew-in-the-early-days/
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (.epub)
https://tinyurl.com/mryc3x2c
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (.pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/yz3r4dh8
A Plague Upon Our House (.epub)
https://tinyurl.com/cvte2c2v
Thanks, Dieter! ☮
Moderator
Thursday - November 10th 2022 2:17AM MST
PS: Alarmist, I don't know where your place is in Florida, but it looks like that last hurricane for the season is a tropical storm at most now, up against the central east coast of your State. I'm glad for that.
Mr. Kief, thank you again for the literary survey on the topic at hand. On this part "It is part of the forgiving process to say excuses. - This too is very Christian, btw. - ", by "excuses" do you mean "explanations" or apologies? In other words, one can forgive only if the "sinner" has seen the error of his ways?
Mr. Kief, thank you again for the literary survey on the topic at hand. On this part "It is part of the forgiving process to say excuses. - This too is very Christian, btw. - ", by "excuses" do you mean "explanations" or apologies? In other words, one can forgive only if the "sinner" has seen the error of his ways?
Dieter Kief
Thursday - November 10th 2022 2:05AM MST
PS
Forgiveness is a thing Mod. - this is - for very good reasons - part of the (thoroughly principled!) Christian mindset (- see Joseph Henrich:The WEIRDEST People in the World). To - gn - hail, see - this tradition implies (necessarily!) both of those basic ways to act - they are of the same origin - and the same value and they .s.t.r.e.n.g.t.h.e.n. one another. Seen from the philosophy angle: (to make this here extremely short) you have to add: They balance each other out too (they enlighten one another and they thus strengthen one another).
What Adam points out and the Alarmist and you Mod. above: It is part of the forgiving process to say excuses. - This too is very Christian, btw. -
- Protestant (btw. today is Martin Luther's birthday...10. 11. 1483)- - -protestant Denmark, I said, was good at that (The EXTABLADET for example, did publicy ask its readers for forgiveness and said explicitly that they were sorry for having been too long strictly playing with the governments Covid-delarations (I've written about that at Mr. Hail's Blog in extenso at least 2x - (and mentioned it here too)).
The principled side of the Covid-affair implies that the statistical aspect of such big public health events is crucial for a good outcome.
H. G. Wells (yep - he wrote War of the Worlds and Time Machine) once famously remarked, that stat skills 'd be up there with reading and writing when it comes to modern time literacy - the specific literacy necessary to understand properly what's up in mass societies as ours. And that is true - .a.t. .l.e.a.s.t. for the more sophisticated part of the public discourse.
So - let's praise these men: Mr. Hail and his most detailed blog!, Gerd Gigerenzer (book: Risk Savy!) (the pedagogic genius amongst the lot) - Walter Krämer and Peter Pflaumer from Dortmund University, to Norman Fenton (!!), Statistician To The Stars Matt M. Briggs (the philosophically best (if a bit chaotically) versed amongst the statisticians, I praise Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and the Brownstone Institute's Jeffrey Tucker**** who catapulted the GBD into the global sphere, - I praise Ivor Cummins@fatemperor - they all got this stuff quite right just because they understood right away how important a methodically sound statistical approach to that Covid-stuff would be.
Lately statistician Katharina Schüller joined the enlightened stat-pack in Germany with some very decent and sharp even remarks. Oh - Johan Giesecke and Anders Tegnell: The coolest stat cats of all, because they acted early on big style - and were later joined by Governors Christi Noem and Ron DeSantis (and - via Dr. Scott W. Atlas (see his great Covid book not least about Covid and the methodologically sound approach: A Plague Upon Our House) - even the otherwise confused (and oftentimes confusing, sometimes (in the case of Sweden not least...) destructive Donald The Elephant in the Porcelaine Shop -Trump seemed to have listened to Atlas from some point in time on...
Well known German economist Stefan Homburg did risk quite a bit by - on twitter! - joining the enlightened stat-crowd (his book Covid GeTwitter (a wordplay: Covid-TwitterThunder in English is also very insightful and - - - Homburg - as a single person with no power than his reputation and his knowledge and - presence, did much to change the German discourse about Covid in the right direction, not least by applying his statistical knowledge in a perfectly clear and calm (sometimes even: fun!) way). One well educated, bright and civilized man - and Twitter and a few youtube talks and Austrian Red-Bull-ServusTV, which gave him a stage at times - that was all it took him to very sucessfully fight the onslaught of mass-errands. An interesting case for further investigations, btw.
The most important statistical insight had Michael Levitt (he is also of great social skills and sided early on with Ivor Cummins (the prototypical irish pub bear - even higher social skills than Levitt... the social genius of the intellectual Covid wars) - but together, Levitt and Cummings were one powerhouse. They dug the Diamond Princess (lots of bright minds failed that - one more interesting point, btw.) -
- Levitt discovered the statistical nature of the Covid-outbrakes, so to speak; namely: That they are not exponential, but follow the self-restricting Gompertz-curve. Technically speaking, this was the Big One Insight in statistics, that - hopefully - will go into the Covid take-away basket with the few Cvoid-isnights that should definitely be remeberd in the future:
You could make this basket quite nice and handy:
No. I - - - In an emergency: Hold on to what you know (here: the basic insights of epidemiology: Tegnell, Kulldoff, Bhattacharya, Gupta all emphasized that - öh - principle, Mod.).
And No. 2:Have an eye on methodically sound stats. You have to, since we are dealing here with great numbers.*
**** google Brwonstone:
What We Knew In the Early Days ⋆ Brownstone Institute
(*for whom it may concern - satirically, ironically etc:
Don't listen to cryin' senoritas / Watch the parking meters! (the Bard, of course)
Forgiveness is a thing Mod. - this is - for very good reasons - part of the (thoroughly principled!) Christian mindset (- see Joseph Henrich:The WEIRDEST People in the World). To - gn - hail, see - this tradition implies (necessarily!) both of those basic ways to act - they are of the same origin - and the same value and they .s.t.r.e.n.g.t.h.e.n. one another. Seen from the philosophy angle: (to make this here extremely short) you have to add: They balance each other out too (they enlighten one another and they thus strengthen one another).
What Adam points out and the Alarmist and you Mod. above: It is part of the forgiving process to say excuses. - This too is very Christian, btw. -
- Protestant (btw. today is Martin Luther's birthday...10. 11. 1483)- - -protestant Denmark, I said, was good at that (The EXTABLADET for example, did publicy ask its readers for forgiveness and said explicitly that they were sorry for having been too long strictly playing with the governments Covid-delarations (I've written about that at Mr. Hail's Blog in extenso at least 2x - (and mentioned it here too)).
The principled side of the Covid-affair implies that the statistical aspect of such big public health events is crucial for a good outcome.
H. G. Wells (yep - he wrote War of the Worlds and Time Machine) once famously remarked, that stat skills 'd be up there with reading and writing when it comes to modern time literacy - the specific literacy necessary to understand properly what's up in mass societies as ours. And that is true - .a.t. .l.e.a.s.t. for the more sophisticated part of the public discourse.
So - let's praise these men: Mr. Hail and his most detailed blog!, Gerd Gigerenzer (book: Risk Savy!) (the pedagogic genius amongst the lot) - Walter Krämer and Peter Pflaumer from Dortmund University, to Norman Fenton (!!), Statistician To The Stars Matt M. Briggs (the philosophically best (if a bit chaotically) versed amongst the statisticians, I praise Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and the Brownstone Institute's Jeffrey Tucker**** who catapulted the GBD into the global sphere, - I praise Ivor Cummins@fatemperor - they all got this stuff quite right just because they understood right away how important a methodically sound statistical approach to that Covid-stuff would be.
Lately statistician Katharina Schüller joined the enlightened stat-pack in Germany with some very decent and sharp even remarks. Oh - Johan Giesecke and Anders Tegnell: The coolest stat cats of all, because they acted early on big style - and were later joined by Governors Christi Noem and Ron DeSantis (and - via Dr. Scott W. Atlas (see his great Covid book not least about Covid and the methodologically sound approach: A Plague Upon Our House) - even the otherwise confused (and oftentimes confusing, sometimes (in the case of Sweden not least...) destructive Donald The Elephant in the Porcelaine Shop -Trump seemed to have listened to Atlas from some point in time on...
Well known German economist Stefan Homburg did risk quite a bit by - on twitter! - joining the enlightened stat-crowd (his book Covid GeTwitter (a wordplay: Covid-TwitterThunder in English is also very insightful and - - - Homburg - as a single person with no power than his reputation and his knowledge and - presence, did much to change the German discourse about Covid in the right direction, not least by applying his statistical knowledge in a perfectly clear and calm (sometimes even: fun!) way). One well educated, bright and civilized man - and Twitter and a few youtube talks and Austrian Red-Bull-ServusTV, which gave him a stage at times - that was all it took him to very sucessfully fight the onslaught of mass-errands. An interesting case for further investigations, btw.
The most important statistical insight had Michael Levitt (he is also of great social skills and sided early on with Ivor Cummins (the prototypical irish pub bear - even higher social skills than Levitt... the social genius of the intellectual Covid wars) - but together, Levitt and Cummings were one powerhouse. They dug the Diamond Princess (lots of bright minds failed that - one more interesting point, btw.) -
- Levitt discovered the statistical nature of the Covid-outbrakes, so to speak; namely: That they are not exponential, but follow the self-restricting Gompertz-curve. Technically speaking, this was the Big One Insight in statistics, that - hopefully - will go into the Covid take-away basket with the few Cvoid-isnights that should definitely be remeberd in the future:
You could make this basket quite nice and handy:
No. I - - - In an emergency: Hold on to what you know (here: the basic insights of epidemiology: Tegnell, Kulldoff, Bhattacharya, Gupta all emphasized that - öh - principle, Mod.).
And No. 2:Have an eye on methodically sound stats. You have to, since we are dealing here with great numbers.*
**** google Brwonstone:
What We Knew In the Early Days ⋆ Brownstone Institute
(*for whom it may concern - satirically, ironically etc:
Don't listen to cryin' senoritas / Watch the parking meters! (the Bard, of course)
The Alarmist
Wednesday - November 9th 2022 11:40PM MST
PS
The stickers, distancing, ... pretty much all of the COVIDIAN NP. kind of reminded me of the infamous Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. One false moce or word, and
“NO SOUP FOR YOU !!! “
The stickers, distancing, ... pretty much all of the COVIDIAN NP. kind of reminded me of the infamous Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. One false moce or word, and
“NO SOUP FOR YOU !!! “