As I consider the evidence, I think we are observing more than just the mundane banality of evil. I think we are observing the consequences of the last gasps of Imperial Pax Americana play out in real time before our eyes. American imperialism is quite literally running out of gas, teetering on the edge, awaiting some push (from BRICS? From the CCP?) over the knife’s edge towards dollar-based fiat currency collapse and imperial decline such as the British empire saw during the 20th century.
Here is the thesis. The rise and fall of empires is not driven by failures of leaders, or the madness (or senility) of presidents, kings and emperors. The longevity and durability of empires are self limited by the accumulated weight and inefficiency of their own bureaucracies. And, in turn, these bureaucracies are the consequence of a million tiny cuts, each rationalized as being in the best interests of the empire and its citizens. The United States is dying under the weight of the administrative state, abetted by a lazy and corrupt two party political system which cares more for the preservation of its own privilege than for the Constitution and Nation-state that it ostensibly serves.
I have now seen enough to regret that that I had two COVID vaccines and a booster. I accepted these jabs because I trusted the public health authorities. I will not accept any more boosters. I am not alone. In the past six months, I have spoken to at least six friends who vote Democrat--all but one of them told me that they will not accept any more boosters and that they are concerned about risks associated with the vaccines.
I follow about ten well credentialed doctors online, including Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCoullough, who raise these concerns and many others. I've seen highly disturbing evidence that many smart doctors have been shut out of the conversation for three years (and they continue to be kept out of the conversation on legacy news outlets). We did not have a real or meaningful national conversation on the risks of these vaccines compared to the risks of COVID regarding many age groups. I saw the Great Barrington Declaration disparaged for mere political reasons, not medical. Our public health authorities told us that the vaccines were extremely safe, but now I'm not convinced of that.
Our public health authorities told us many things with the utmost confidence that have now been proven untrue. And although this is anecdotal, I've seen far too many videos of young healthy people collapsing, many of them dying. Over the past several years, I saw many numbers regarding the COVID risk of death that failed to break out the numbers of those who were obese, elderly and with comorbidities, failing to separate those from those of us who are healthy or young. I found out that many hospitals were conflating death with COVID with death from COVID, thereby inflating COVID death numbers.
Prior to vaccination, I was in very good health prior to getting vaccinated, very unlikely to die of COVID, even unvaccinated. I had an adverse reaction after my 2nd vaccination and it continues to affect me (inflamed toes). I know that I was also at some risk of harm from COVID, but as I write this, I believe we have been manipulated and lied to in many ways and that I have no meaningful way to be assured whether I was at more risk of harm from the vaccine than from the disease. Maybe someday we will know for sure.
The historically wretched track record of Big Pharma for lying to us in order to make $ multiplies my concern and frustration. Everyone will have their own opinion on this topic. I'm not suggesting to anyone else what they should do, but no more boosters for me.
The evidence comes from the original double-blind, randomised control trials, that led to the approval of both Pfizer and Moderna by regulators worldwide. Malhotra explains, ‘In a reanalysis of the original trials with the Wuhan strain, eminent scientists essentially found you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event – for example hospitalisation, disability, or a life-changing event – than you were to be hospitalised with Covid. That means, in essence, the mRNA vaccine should likely never, ever have been approved for anybody in the first place.’
"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"
Why would Jonathan Haidt be so full of doom and Gloom. Maybe because of the dozens of cases of Woke malfeasance in the science departments of universities, as described by Lawrence Krauss:
I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.
Excerpts:
“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”
. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.
You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.
One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.
On October 29, the newly minted MacArthur “genius” posted the results of a widely discussed survey project on Twitter, saying simply: “More than a third of white students lied (about their race) on their college applications.” Kendi went on to claim that about half of the students who chose dishonesty falsely identified themselves as Native American—presumably to benefit from affirmative action programs—and that “more than three-fourths” of all students who lied about their racial background were accepted to colleges they applied to. As any academic should, Kendi duly linked his source, which I also provide here.
The backlash to Kendi’s comments was immediate, and, frankly, rather predictable. As Oliver Traldi details for Quillette, and as Jerry Coyne does for the popular blog Why Evolution Is True, conservative and heterodox intellectuals pointed out that Kendi’s claim about white students seeking to benefit from affirmative action logically debunks the main thesis of his scholarly work. Founder and former editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald not only questioned the objective accuracy of Kendi’s data, but also noted that his argument “negates every core contention about American society on which his career is based.” Journalist Alex Griswold described Kendi as having “blown up his life’s work,” noting that Kendi would “have to delete” his tweet, which, in fact, he did.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
