Other People’s Emotions

I periodically need to remind myself of this. Sometimes, the angst gets a bit thick in a confusing way and this is the problem, es explained by Oliver Burkeman:

[Other people’s emotions aren’t ultimately your problem. This phrase winds some people up, because they worry it means carte blanche to be a jerk to others – to treat them like dirt, then saunter away, complacently reassuring yourself that you needn’t take responsibility for the emotions you just triggered. But I don’t think that’s what it means. I think it means that at the end of the day, it’s a fool’s errand to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK. Taken at face value, the information that someone is upset because you’re not doing what they wanted you to do is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. It doesn’t inherently implicate you at all. You might have good reason to do whatever you can to improve their weather in this case. But then again, you might not; it might be one of those cases where they’re just going to have to deal with it without you. As a factual matter, all callousness aside, the problem belongs to them. Allow other people to have their own problems!

And of course it turns out, time after time, that the people you thought would be furious with you… aren’t. You take some decision to use your time in a way that seems likely to invite anger or disappointment from someone else – yet the anger or disappointment never materialises. People find some other way to deal with the situation. Or they’re too wrapped up in their own troubles to be thinking of you at all. Whereupon you realise, with a start, that you were always somewhat freer than you believed to do what you wanted with your life. You only ever needed to face the consequences – and half the time, there weren’t even going to be any serious ones.

The above quote is from a mass-emailing - I don't see a link to an article. Here's Oliver Burkeman's postings.

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The Many Ways that U.S. Public Health Officials Failed Americans

Who could have predicted a few years ago that when the U.S. encountered a pandemic, the highest ranking public health officials would throw away their playbook for how to deal with a pandemic. It would be as though they forgot everything they had studied for decades. They would make shit up. They would pretend that they knew things when they didn't. They would downplay the risks of the economic shutdown (which they pushed) and exaggerate the risk of COVID. The vaccine manufacturers are hiding the raw data regarding vaccine efficacy. The current big disgraceful thing is that these same powers-that-be want to make sure that we are not getting free flowing data regarding injuries and deaths caused by the COVID vaccine. National Review has recently published this summary of many (but not all) of the failures of U.S. public health officials. The article is "When Science Is Not Science," and here's an excerpt:

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant...

When prominent virologists expressed concern that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 might have been engineered at and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Fauci and Collins helped draft, publish, and promote a letter/article refuting the lab-leak hypothesis, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” on March 17, 2020, in the prominent journal Nature Medicine. The article unequivocally stated “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Fauci and Collins would repeatedly cite the article as proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a natural origin, as if the article had been published independently of their efforts.

It is as if the U.S. has been led by a bunch of frightened high schoolers who knew nothing about pandemics. Further, the powers that be (including the public health establishment) would make damned sure that we censored all dissent, concocting a false consensus. We're hearing all kinds of rationalization now, including from Francis Collins, but it is woeful and shameful. Most Americans are voting with their feet now and not getting any more boosters. U.S. public health officials have earned this intense disrespect.

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Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant – Speech Edition

“Solving hate by banning hate speech is like solving global warming by breaking all the thermometers. All it does is make the hate harder to hear, harder to identify, harder to confront, harder to root out.” Jonathan Rauch

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Lack of Informed Consent was a Mere Technicality re COVID

Brett Weinstein is correct. Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg for offenses based on lack of informed consent.

George Carlin summarizes the overall problem in "The American Dream":

[T]hey own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . continue to elect these rich cock-suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on.

How many people got hurt and died because of the mRNA vax? Good luck finding out. The COVID-industrial complex is working overtime to keep us from finding out, as was exposed in New Zealand recently.  It's the same strategy the CDC implemented in May 2023.  No data, no problem!

Personal autonomy? Ah, such a quaint old idea. So impractical! Such flowery verbiage! We moderns no longer have the time or luxury to heed such poetry.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And we're just getting started on wiping out informed consent . . .

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