An important qualification to a recent outburst about static political and philosophical stances
Which of course almost no one really maintains, and it's not always a good principle anyway
In a recent post mainly about the hypocrisies, grifting, ignorance, and hatred baked into the agendas of various noisy figures who, however implausibly, have become identified with competitive distance running, I wrote:
During the George W. Bush administration, I was against for-profit foreign wars, for same-sex marriage, for the legality of abortion and marijuana, against the mammoth expansion of the surveillance state, in favor of revamping the healthcare system to scrap private equity and phase out HMOs, against the institutionalization of bad science, and against censorship. (I was never against private gun ownership.)
Some people from those days think I have slid to the right. In addition to passing twice on the chance to vote for Donald Trump, I am against for-profit foreign wars, for same-sex marriage, for the legality of abortion and marijuana, against the mammoth expansion of the surveillance state, in favor of revamping the healthcare system to scrap private equity and phase out HMOs, against the institutionalization of bad science, and against censorship. (And I couldn't even dream about being against private gun ownership in 2023.)
That’s how much I have changed, with the caveat that I am now loath to advocate for policies that make it easier for people to visit anyone with a prescription pad.
Something started bothering me about this almost as soon as I posted it, and it wasn’t that I realized I was wavering of any of these statements. It was that in emphasizing that I have retained the same views over time, I might have been broadcasting the idea that these are therefore unassailable views.
Maybe I didn’t come across as an absolutist in this post. But because I often write about things I don’t believe merit wiggle room, it may have seemed that I consider all of these social issues morally settled, and that while people are free to disagree, those people are wrong to do so, however cheerful their dissent.
This was not the point of the passage, which was merely to convey that I find it curious, and dismal, that everyone who agreed with me in decades past thinks I am the one whose fundamental politics, or views, have changed. For better or for worse, they haven’t.
And I don’t feel that my views are unassailable at all. The easiest example concerns the ugliest topic for everyone: elective abortion.
I have two somewhat discrete drivers of my stance: The idea that personal autonomy overrules other concerns, and the fact that ultimately this isn’t something I as a man should get to decide.
I freely admit that abortion constitutes the ending of a life or a potential life. Late-term abortions are thankfully rare, but anyone who thinks a woman 30 weeks into a pregnancy isn’t carrying a baby is playing semantic games.
I will even grant that a newly developed blastocyst is a life in progress. Call it a small, delicate baby if you want. No matter the words applied, I have always gotten past the difficult realities of abortion by considering that very few abortions are performed at a stage in which pain or its comprehension are physically possible, and that in any case it’s all over quickly. It’s nothing I have ever enjoyed thinking about any more than the most ardent Baptist.
But there is no way I can expand this to a universal, because it fails to take into account realities worth pondering because others bring them to the debate. Take the case of the couple why has been trying for years to have a baby, with the woman conceiving but suffering a series of miscarriages, which has to be one of the most awful things in the human experience.
Someone like this—and I have known many women like this, as I’m sure you have—may not have the right to deny anyone else an abortion. But I can certainly appreciate why she might not be so cavalier about abortion even if convinced that it entails a minimum of conscious in utero suffering.
There are also those who see abortion categorically as murder, a malicious act in any manifestation. These people are unlikely to ever budge and are not going to go away. Maybe they are especially sensitive; many in this category are nonreligious. Some people are moral absolutists when it comes to anything pertaining to the unborn. They have their reasons. They are honest, and I respect that.
Everything I stand for at some level maps on to the right to freely express oneself in ways that don’t intrude on others; the right to resist other people’s bullshit no matter the source or the cost of the resistance, and in the process to get to the truth; the right to hold leaders accountable though words for what they promise and do; the right to copulate with stolen watermelons until they explode1; and the right to live in a world where people don't easily get away with killing people for fun or profit, be it with weapons or biomedical experiments.
And everything I have been condemning with increasing vehemence and despondence in recent years violates these principles in one or more obvious ways. The vehemence is a result of watching people who consider themselves wise and analytical rise up in defense of lie after obvious lie, and the despondence has flowed from the futility of the vehemence.
I’ve always accepted that a certain, relatively tiny number of humans—Bill Gates is my go-to example—are psychotic and despotic monsters, control freaks with the barest sheen of benevolent intent. And I can stomach the fact that these people are capable of fooling a lot of decent people, because most people are easily fooled in predictable ways.
What covid and Wokish lunacies have revealed is far harder to deal with: You can point out to people exactly how they have been fooled, show them videos of people lying repeatedly and without remorse, show them hard source data and screen shots establishing the catastrophic duplicity of the media, and most of them just don’t care, no matter how dumb this makes them look.
Here’s one specific point of frustration. This was in The Washington Post yesterday:
Let’s pretend we* have no idea where this coronavirus actually came from, since a lot of Americans are still stupid enough to believe it came from the wild. Or that Anthony Fauci didn’t direct millions of dollars toward the Wuhan lab aimed at exactly the kind of gain-of-function research of which C-19 is a demonstrable product. Set aside all that for now.
Who out there thinks that it is even possible to accelerate the safety testing of a product when elapsed time, always multiple years, is a required variable? Who thinks that “Operation Warp Speed” is anything more than a label for “We aren’t testing this, we’re just gonna inject it”? Concerning a new form of biotechnology, at that.
For anyone who thinks the mRNA shots were adequately evaluated for safety, please consult a calendar. Note the date that C-19 emerged, then note when the first shots were given. Perform a subtraction operation, and the result will be a difference of months.
It is not possible to assess the long-term effects of anything in a short time frame. I don’t know exactly whom I’m addressing with this, but unfortunately it’s probably more people than I realized before. Oh, and the FDA didn’t want the data from what little testing the drug companies did conduct released for seventy-five years.
That this triggered seemingly no suspicion in tens of millions of minds is unfathomable, given the consequences. And it’s not the only recent large-scale citizen reaction that has left me almost stunned.
In the 1990s, I completed a little over two years at a now-demoralized medical school in New Hampshire. In the second half of my first year, I was supposed to take a biochemistry course, but I wound up skipping it because the school offered the option of taking an advance exam, with a sufficiently high score substituting as credit for the course. I got the highest score of the handful of people who sought to “place out” (I was surprised more didn’t jump at the opportunity.
At one point in my life, I apparently understood molecular genetics well enough to impress Ivy League grad-school biochemistry professors. That’s why I believe I was right over a year ago to be alarmed at the shots and the specific potential they bear for causing novel forms of lethal mayhem. And all the evidence since—which most of you aren’t seeing, either because you aren’t looking for it or don’t click on the links I embed here—establishes that the shots will wind up maiming or killing far more people than they would have saved even had they prevented transmission and infection.
I keep barking about how “they” are planning the next pandemic event and what the general mechanics of enforcement will look like, and “they” just keep rolling out the advance publicity. Why? Because most people are hopeless idiots and would rather retain good standing in their morbid online clubs and cults than face the possibility that people they trusted and in some cases voted for really don’t care how many Americans die because they only serve a tiny number of masters, most of them not Americans.
When I ask people who argue with me that the shots are safe, I start by asking them if they know what mRNA does in the body. Almost none do—some think it manufactures an antigen called a spike protein, which is close. I also ask them if they know what needle aspiration is and the various potential consequences of the fat droplet carrying the mRNA traveling to places other than the muscle tissue where it’s supposed to stay, and whether they have looked at any of the studies showing both mRNA and its translation products in remote tissues and generating inflammatory responses.
I ask them if they know how the blood-brain barrier deals with this molecule, and how aspiration and migration of mRNA might directly connect to neurological syndromes. Since they know their immunology, I ask them what they think of the implications of a shift toward IgG4 antibody production in multiply jabbed persons in terms of being able to ward off future infectious illnesses across the microbial spectrum.
With the conversation going smoothly as ever, I then ask them why the mainstream media were—and remain—rabid about publishing (exaggerated) covid death totals, but have said nothing whatsoever about the alarming rate at which Americans are now dying for officially unexplained reasons. Or about any of the other above items of putative extreme interest.
I’m kidding. I rarely if ever get anywhere close to this point. When I am dealing with people who consider anyone in government or media reliable, I am in effect talking to retards—people who say, “I trust the science!” but won’t learn any science whatsoever and are proudly hostile in their cluelessness; people who believe that filing a VAERS report is no different than signing a Change.org petition and that VAERS data is meaningless, something only fools refer to despite the U.S. healthcare system having invented it specifically to detect problems in vaccines while controlling for background noise.
I am no medical expert, but many of the same people who used to ask me to decipher or debunk media reporting about illnesses and medications now prefer to trust proven, paid liars like Rachel Maddow. Why, I will perhaps never know, because if I was ever reliable in this area, that hasn’t changed.
Something in the world at large may have changed, though.
These people are deluded or lost altogether—on this, the nature and progress of the Ukraine war, the fraud-powered digital economy, rampant inner-city crime driven largely by the machinations of BLM, the impending shrinkage of the pool of Medicaid recipients, BlackRock et al. buying up U.S. homes at furious rates solely to rent them out at unaffordable prices, the orchestrated etiology of recent mass shootings (and the nationwide bail reduction for—and decarceration of—violent criminals), the parafaggotries and metaperversities pervading the country’s learning-free public schools (and the associated derogation of normal gay and trans people), anti-feminist “feminists,” racist “anti-racists,” mentally and morally compromised public intellectuals and media darlings, institutionalized anti-Asian discrimination, Justin Trudeau’s unannounced but obvious gender transition, the American government’s preening and categorical indifference to it all; everything—and I am tempted to despise rather than pity them or appeal to them in any way.
But that doesn’t help. I hate the major players and the entire game, but not the NPC enablers. We’re all just maneuverable, vaguely cognizant meat.
We could, however, at least start yelling at the right people in greater numbers instead of at each other.
Anyway, I wanted to write this as soon as I recognized where my mild anxiety over that late-March post was coming from, but I’ve been distracted by too many other things, some in the blogging pipeline, others aimed at trying to escape the inertia flourishing in most crannies of my life even if I can barely justify trying. But no matter how harshly I frame my contentions, very rarely am I trying to convey “This is how things are” over “This is what I believe and how I got here.”
Two men stand in front of a watermelon patch, late at night, from which a third has recently fled.
Two pairs of brogans went along the rows.
You ain't goin to believe this.
Knowin' you for a born liar I most probably wont.
Somebody has been fuckin' my watermelons.
What?
I said somebody has been...
No. No. Hell no. Damn if you aint got a warped mind.
I'm tellin' you...
I don't want to hear it.
Looky here.
They went along the outer row of the melonpatch. He stopped to nudge a melon with his toe. Yellowjackets snarled in the seepage. Some were ruined a good time past and lay soft with rot, wrinkled with imminent collapse.
It does look like it, dont it?
I'm tellin ye I seen him. I didnt know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers. Then when I seen what he was up to I still didnt believe it. But yonder he lay.
What do you aim to do?
Hell, I dont know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I don't see what he couldn't of stuck to just one. Or a few.
Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailer in a whorehouse.