Another polite request concerning Covid-19 demands by misinformed public idiots

At a minimum, the zealots should quit pretending that their pro-Fauci cult is one of the "good" cults, because peace and joy is not their intended aim

The latest from the Johns Hopkins Institute of Economics (see page 43):

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best.

Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.

Years from now—and there need be no recriminations between neighbors at that point, only learning, though it would be asinine to bet on that outcome—it will become clear just how many people’s lives were ruined by the U.S. Covid-19 lockdowns while the very wealthy, including the Ivy League schools, grew significantly wealthier. This will require a nationwide reckoning with the fact that corporate media began functioning as state media sometime during the Trump presidency and have now fully embraced that role; even some my closest friends resist this one, which, while understandable, is frustrating.

I admit that I am constituted to not enjoy life as most people define it, and the few things I could so about that, I choose not to. But there is no real incentive to do that anymore. I don’t know what I should become invigorated about even if I change my internal environment for the better. I don’t know what kind of society I am supposed to plan for.

Why? Apart from the ebb and flow of my own moods and successes, among the main reasons I’m basically just inching toward a non-natural death and doing my best in that span to provide a pet with a rewarding life is a media that systematically serves bad information to the public. That is so dangerous and wrong on so many neon-bright levels that if I need to explain why, you didn’t actually read this far in the post and just started in the fucking middle. I like having access to reliable information about the world, and the Wokish—essentially the latest brownshirts of the state—are intent on supplanting all of that with their keening bullshit and galactic stinking ugliness. The corporate running media is a total loss, but it would be an extreme outlier were this not the case. Lunacy and lies are everywhere.

But another big reason I’ve grown to detest society, though not everyone in it, is the insistence by large numbers of imperious and ridiculous people that none of us even participate in that society thanks to germs. That morbid, credulous, vastly self-overrating faction of civilization believes that all inaction, on their strict terms, is lethal, yet no degree of action is never enough.

All of this accords with the boundless hunger for ruin and despair fomented by Wokish people. They harvest stories of declared right-wingers dying unvaccinated in ICUs, pretending to be somber in retweeting this death-porn but clearly getting off on it. They actively await the day they can be the first among their friends that one million Americans have died of or with Covid-19. These pro-maggot types could just as easily focus on deaths from heart disease and cancer and accidents, but where's the finger-waggling novelty in that?

Then I guess do your fucking job better, Craig MD MPH?

Thousands of iPhone-armed, mostly autodidactic Staatschutzkorps soldiers with nothing better to do, along with a hefty sprinkling of anticompetent medical doctors, are now aiming for the Mons Olympus of cancellation quests in the form of Joe Rogan. You know that when Neil Young is pissed about something, the proper response is to laugh in the face of Neil Young, who in effect has been dead since the end of the twentieth century anyway. Lynyrd Skynyrd did.

Here's Rogan's response. Notice what he says about the not-so-subtly shifting definition of "Covid misinformation." Notice that he is correct, and that fuckheads like Occupy Democrats are wrong.

If you are hearing from any subspecies of Internet or on-the-ground harpy that you are endangering others by not loading up on vaccines and booster shots, you should feel free to tell them to fuck off in any case, but you can do so while also demonstrating to them that they are wrong. Given their manifest level of hatred for everyone and everything, it's hard to take their claims of concern for others seriously, but that's one of countless potential sidebars.

As of the end of November, fully vaccinated people accounted for a quarter of Covid-19 cases in a 22-state, three-metro-area study. Because Omicron has come to predominate among active variants, that number has surely grown significantly.

And according to this article from today, none of the vaccines used so far seem to prevent against Omicron variant transmission. They may help ease symptoms once you get it, but that protection wanes pretty quickly anyway. That means that not getting a booster at this point amounts to a personal assumption of disease risk, nothing more.

Also keep in mind that, as of late December, "40% of people who catch Covid-19 never develop symptoms, a number that jumps to >60% among young adults. More than 80% of symptomatic cases are mild." So only about 12 percent of people who catch Covid-19 experience something serious—and that's without accounting for both modifiable (e.g., weight, drug or alcohol abuse) and non-modifiable (e.g., ethnicity, age) risk factors. And with the Omicron variant becoming predominant, that 12 percent has to be well down into the single digits by now.

You would never know any of this from the insane screeching on Twitter, much of it from MDs. Here you will find what can only be described as an online cult—people whose profile photos include masked faces to affirm their devotion to an unseen but to them very real Deer Leeder. Through a combination of self-loathing and attention-whoring, the more prominent members of this cult voraciously seek out pain and do their best to force everyone else to feel it, too. It is blindingly obvious, not deniable in any way, that the folks sucked most strongly into this misinformation- and disinformation-driven campaign to throttle people allegedly spreading counterfactual ideas have nothing good going on in their lives. While I can empathize with this idea, I have no desire to limit the happiness, freedom, and opportunities of other people. And if for some reason I did, I wouldn't be relying on propaganda from a completely untrustworthy government to do it.

What the President of the United States says in this video—"You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations”—is, as Matt Taibbi put it, "pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation." Why hasn't Twitter called Joe Biden out for this, even if he can no longer comprehend any words lobbed in his direction? (Note also in the video description Politifact’s attempt to water down the zinging bullshit factor in Biden’s jabbering.)

For most people, Covid-19 is simply not a disease to be seriously worried about. If you bristle at hearing that, it’s your own fault for choosing untrustworthy sources if information or maybe being born with an above-the-neck wiring problem. Clearly, it is not something to demand society be shut down over, and not a reason to demonize people who choose evidence-based paths as this shit goes on forever.

People have long been catching an impressive range of pathological viruses and microbes from other people. They will keep spreading sicknesses, and most people not already pretty much dying will survive them. No one ever bitched at me pre-Covid-19 for not getting a flu shot despite the reliability, prevalence, and lethality of seasonal influenza. (It's telling that the Covid-19 nuts never seem to mention the flu at all, other than to insist, in rote, mechanical fashion, that COVID IS NOT THE FLU!!!)

I am not advising people against getting any of these vaccines; the fact that they suck and are in fact part of a government plot (relax; it’s not the only one against us) doesn't make them dangerous, even if Pfizer only laughs at the possibility of a serious legal sanction in these United States. But if you believe that other people should get boosters at this point to limit the spread of Covid-19—remember, I am not talking about illness severity here—you have an uphill evidentiary battle in front of you if you want to make a cogent, let alone convincing, case. And that case should include precise information, a link to the source, a description of why you trust the source, and a coherent acknowledgment that you understand that some of us have more robust immune systems that others, and that noting this is another non-example of “eugenics.”

I don't really have to make a case for myself, but I will anyway. Because I can't stand anyone I don’t know and assume they might try to bite me, I am about the most obedient social-distancer in God’s gloriously septic, acne-scarred, suppurating creation. I have come to deeply resent the need to eat food, because I have to leave the house in order to get it, and eating it seems like a dubious act because all it does is ensure that I have to be here for at least another day. (Note: That's an imperfect way to gauge your own life expectancy.) Misanthropes don’t do much for the active promulgation of civilization, but we tend to not spread infectious diseases because we tend to avoid people (except for the ones who are so hateful they become serial killers, and even most of those fellows mask up on the job).

Meanwhile, I have no doubt whatsoever that many of these dutifully vaxxed-and-boosted may be presuming themselves overly safe against infection, and are boozing it up and bumping uglies for lack of any other pleasures in the world. And I encourage pleasure. But if you are among these people, accept the cold reality that your officious and "public-health-conscious" self poses a far greater risk to society than someone forgoing a feeble vaccine but otherwise being mindful of how respiratory viruses are actually spread.

I would also wager an ample sum that at least a quarter of Twitter Covid-cultists are themselves not even fully vaccinated, let alone trying to avoid spreading germs in other ways.

I don't get out much in general, but I like to be able to go out in public without constant immersion in unnecessary low-grade panic. Boulder is among the dumbest and most fucked-up cities in the country when it comes to people and their own goddamn bodies, but if I'm not seeing groups of them walking around masked outside, I'm hearing their harried and fallacy-powered conversations about Coivid-19 in the junk-food aisle. Speaking of which, the Dollar Tree across the street just became a $1.25 store, so now it's 100 percent Food Bank junk food for me, even if the price of gas to get there probably cancels out the advantage.