I’ve been opposed to the covid madness from the very start. I’ve tried to use the small voice I have to instill some reason in people, or at least find people who agreed with me when I felt that I was alone.
I must admit, my psyche took a huge blow in 2020 when I was forced to challenge my already low faith in the reasonableness of people. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand it.
The theory of group or mass formation seems to be the best explanation. Mattias Desment’s recent book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism is decent, though it’s not perfect. He explains the concept excellently, but he makes many odd tangents and it seems to ultimately be a book attacking what he calls a mechanistic worldview.
Interested in the subject, I read the much earlier book that Desment cites, Mass Psychology by Gustave Le Bon. But I found this book to be unsatisfying. It reads more like some kind of mysticism rather than a psychology book.
So, I then read the book on the matter from history’s most famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
This book heavily cited Le Bon but did a much better job where Le Bon failed in explaining why this happens.
Now, I’m not an avid Freud reader, and may not fully understand all the weird sexual stuff he goes on about. But this short book does an excellent job, I think, especially in the first few chapters, of helping to understand why smart people become dumb in big groups.
Anyway, let’s get to it and take a look at my early posts on covid.
My very first post on covid was on March 10th, 2020. In it, I made three assertions.
I believe the first one may have been wrong to some degree, though with some truth.
It seemed to turn out that a lot of people either already were, or shortly after this post, became quite afraid of coronavirus. However, the element of truth here is that I believe the fear is largely overblown due to political signaling. What I mean by that is that the masking and the like that eventually followed, was mostly done by people to look like they were doing the “right” thing, and obeying the rules and not “killing grandma”. And in a lot of ways, it was a group or mass formation event in which people became increasingly irritable and irrational… that is, much of it was ideological instead of legitimate fear. Still, I think it eventually became evident that many people truly fear(ed) the virus.
The quarantines, or “home isolation agreements” I was discussing here specifically were from this New York Times article and were local to New York City, but it would be true for the more widespread lockdowns that were soon to follow as well.
My second assertion was on the money, and the evidence has been mounting to prove it.
Though of course, “ineffective” may have been an understatement.
My third assertion was sort of tongue in cheek, but I think it’s also correct. Literally doing nothing at all would have been superior to the compounding destruction that was caused.
In my next post, on March 13, I simply expressed pure libertarianism, as is my schtick.
But I can also see some of the stress I was feeling at the time. I had already long known that people worship the government and imagine that they can magically fix anything (including the problems the government itself caused in the first place), but that was abstract. Here I was seeing it in a concrete way everywhere around me.
“The government can protect us from a global respiratory virus outbreak,” was an absurd belief that it seemed like everyone and I mean it really seemed like everyone had taken on.
Anyway, the issue in this post was the government barriers that were hindering the availability of coronavirus tests. The private sector was ahead of the government, but as the government botches everything, they only got in the way. The usual solution provided by the masses? More government, of course!
Yup, that’s statism.
My most profound, yet important statement of the era. Profound? really? Yes, sadly.
This is when I started to truly feel alone. I had used Facebook a lot in those days. I mingled in tons of political groups across the spectrum. And what I was finding was that across the spectrum, people were joining the mass. It was around this time that I was laugh-reacted out of a "libertarian” group for making this exact statement. The replies were non-stop “killing grandma”, “you only care about profit” nonsense. And they were serious, and they laughed because they thought I was a lunatic and knew I was alone.
I started feeling like Principal Skinner. Was I really the crazy one?
And did they ever? The economy is still devastated.
A prediction that is no doubt becoming true. (Here I was saying South Korea set a good example in testing, not necessarily in anything else)
Here was a more immediate prediction, however it may have actually just been a joke. The policy may have actually already been in place.
But the clipped screenshot was a prediction from someone in one of those groups in which I used to partake. I already knew the person’s numbers were absurdly high, but most people didn’t. 3% death rate? ridiculous.
On March 17th, I wrote a much more substantial rant on the matter for the first time.
It’s my usual extreme libertarian rhetoric (which is the correct rhetoric by the way).
But this post is interesting in that it was the first time I truly argued for “the other side” of the debate on lockdowns.
As we’ll see, the common narrative of the mass became that it was “lives vs. money”
NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was hugely popular among the mass, said something along the lines of “if we save one life it will be worth it”. And this was it, the “correct” viewpoint of the mass, that there were literally zero negative consequences of the idiotic covid policies in their minds. That is, outside of minor inconveniences like people wanting to “get their haircut” or “go to Applebee’s”.
If you opposed lockdowns, it was said that you were so selfish that those things were all you cared about. What’s funny is I believe we later learned that those complaints were projections of the laptop and ruling classes.
Meanwhile, the working class was having their livelihoods stolen from them, though they didn’t care for many of them were a part of the mass and they were being paid by the government to not work with inflationary handouts anyway.
But even if you do only put economics on the other side of lockdowns, you still have lives there.
What’s worse is that in the end, the lockdowns didn’t save any lives anyway. So the ironic reality was that lives really were on only one side of the debate, but it was the other side.
During this time, to help my understanding, I searched for experts who were being reasonable. We were told that “all the experts agree” but did they really? I could see that it was darn near unanimous among government “experts”, but government experts are the worst experts!
It seemed especially true in the corporate press (CNN, NBC, ABC, etc.), but they were selecting experts to promote based on their agreement with the authoritarian response.
And the same is always true within the government. Government science is a pyramid scheme where money flows from top to bottom. If you want in on that money, you need to do the research the higher-ups, i.e. the Faucis, want you to do, and find the results they want you to find.
This is all part of the mass formation. Scientists are not above it, as no human is. All humans are biased, and all humans want to protect their own illusions.
Still, it really didn’t take long at all, interestingly enough, to find experts who had the same concerns as me. And I’m talking real credentialled experts from prestigious institutions.
One of the first I stumbled upon was Dr. John Ioannidis, a physician-scientist and professor from Stanford with a background in evidence-based medicine and epidemiology. Something of a super-star in science before covid, he wrote the single most cited scientific paper ever in 2005.
His article in StatNews published on that same March 17 seemed to shake things up a bit. Here I simply quote him:
And this is where I really started learning a lot about epidemiology.
He estimated a 0.125% infection fatality rate for covid, with an upper range of 0.625%. This was way below the pushed narrative, and much closer to seasonal flu.
That didn’t make people very happy.
When people have beliefs, especially ones they’ve acted on, they become naturally less interested in the trueness of those beliefs and more concerned with protecting their illusions.
In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that this is because people are guided first and foremost by their intuition and then rational thought comes later, but only if it helps serve the purpose of the goals they’ve already established with their intuition.
This helps to formulate masses or “hive minds” as he calls it, where people join groups to help protect those illusions.
I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, and hopefully well enough. It’s been a while since I read that book, and as I write this, I’ve decided I’m going to re-read it.
Anyway, back to Ioannidis.
Yeah, so he put a thorn in things, or a fist in the hive mind. A real credentialled scientist who said “whoa! hold up!”
Well, THIS article is just one example of the pushback he received.
In it, the writer tells us that Ioannidis’ recent work on covid infection-fatality rates was “sloppy”. That’s according to his “colleagues”.
One scientist is even quoted as calling his work “horrible science”.
But the only reason they said this, in my view, was because they were angry that their illusions were being shattered. It was believed that the death rate from covid was somewhere between 3 and 10%, and that’s a big part of the reason we responded the way we did.
“Pretty much no one with statistical acumen believes these studies,” he said. As time went on though, more and more studies performed by others found similar results. And in the end, Ioannidis was proven correct as demonstrated by his meta-research on the subject becoming peer-reviewed and published by the World Health Organization and is basically the scientific consensus on the issue at this point. Said paper finds the infection fatality rate globally to be 0.23% overall and 0.05% for people under 70. Not too far off the mark.
The next day, I professed my pessimism about the economy. As it would stand, officially, I was incorrect on this as unemployment topped out around 15%.
I like this bit. Osterholm’s quote was a perfect description.
This failure to allow companies to provide testing is particularly interesting given the ease the vaccines went through for emergency use.
Though there is a big difference in lobbying influence between Pfizer and um… Co-Diagnostics, is that the name of the company?
But seriously, all the government needed to do was just step aside and allow them to do it. The government wasn’t even capable of that.
Yeah, I hear ya, 2020 self.
This was quoted from Ioanidis.
And here is where the complete flips started happening literally on a daily basis.
The point of this post was to point out that Andrew Cuomo said on March 19th that a lockdown was not going to happen
…And on March 20th Andrew Cuomo ordered a lockdown.
Everyone who lived through it remembers that March 2020 seemed like the longest month ever. Each day seemed like an eternity, but this went pretty far.
As I said, Cuomo was arguing semantics, telling NYC Mayor De Blasio that his wording was the issue. He even acknowledged he knew people didn’t mean it in whatever way he was telling them it sounded like.
The fact is, with Cuomo at the helm, people had no idea what to expect next. He was erratic in his rule. Still, the corporate press propagated that the opposite was true in their bizarre worshiping of that monster. Here are a couple examples from Forbes Magazine about his “leadership skills”: 1, 2 if you feel like taking a look.
Fortunately, unemployment didn’t reach quite as high as I suggested.
Here I discuss Japan, which is one of the more interesting countries during the pandemic. Everyone wanted to talk about Sweden, but what about the country right next door to where the virus originated?
Japan didn’t put much effort into testing for covid, and very importantly they didn’t lockdown like much of the rest of the world. Though they did shut schools, and of course they wore masks… And in fact, they did some localized lockdowns, just not the whole country or as draconian like the West.
You may remember Japan was expected by the media and their “experts” to have a surge in covid deaths that would “spiral out of control”, mostly because they weren’t following the “science”.
CNN was a huge pusher of this authoritarian messaging, promoting the voices that wanted the government to do more.
Doom was right around the corner!
Yes, some of this was supposedly due to a lack of testing, according to the experts CNN interviewed.
But CNN really wanted to tell its audience what the real problem was:
They tell us, yeah they’re taking away some travel freedom, but it’s not good enough…
CNN decries that “compliance is not actively monitored”. The media entity wants more state compliance and citizen monitoring.
Too little too late!
And as you can see “Carrying on” with life was “startling”. Really, startling images? Of people looking at fucking flowers…
You can’t tell me CNN isn’t propaganda.
They wanted people to be scared of freedom.
As it would turn out, doom never came for Japan. Their worst numbers didn’t come until the vaccine became widely available.
So how could this be? Were the experts wrong? No of course not! It was the masks! The experts knew they’d be fine because of the masks they wear, and that’s why they said that all along (and not the things they actually said).
Then CNN became big pushers of mask-wearing. Why? I’m glad you asked. I’ll show you.
In early March, CNN told the truth about masks:
And not just that they don’t work… They demonstrated a deep understanding of what widespread mask wearing actually accomplishes:
It should be no surprise that they eventually promoted the psychological tools and the clearly fake science behind them.
Moving on…
I believe this post was correct.
I don’t remember ever seeing the data on this. Though I’m pretty sure I was right that the Senate was regularly tested. To be fair to myself, I think I was being sarcastic about the media not ignoring the data.
Adding to the “other side” of the debate on lockdowns.
No one ever did explain this to me. Why was 20% of anyone in the hospital with no symptoms to begin with?
Was it that they were there for other reasons and happened to test positive? Were they there as part of some insane plan to keep the virus from spreading (outside of the hospitals where the most vulnerable people are)?
What we do know is that by definition, they were “hospitalized” even though they weren’t actually sick; and were infected with the virus. They were therefore counted as “cases” and “hospitalizations” even though they weren’t sick from covid at all. If you didn’t already realize that the numbers (cases, hospitalizations and deaths) were meaningless, then you should have realized it by March 23 2020.
And what I mean by “meaningless” is that it doesn’t follow to say something like “covid is really bad because of how many people are in the hospital with it” They’re in the hospital with NO SYMPTOMS. Logically the same follows for what I would like to call asymptomatic covid deaths, people who died WITH covid but actually from other causes. Yes, they still get counted.
Same point here. “Hospitals were overrun with mildly symptomatic patients”.
Think about that. Italy’s hospitals being overrun was one of the MAIN REASONS people believed they needed to freak out about covid!
China? “Eh,” a lot of people said. Shit happens there all the time. A few cases in other Asian countries? No big deal.
Italy, though, that’s a Western country and it got bad because hospitals couldn’t keep up. Well, they couldn’t keep up, NOT entirely because covid was bad, but because people went to the hospital when they didn’t need to (probably because of local media fear-mongering).
Now, it looked like it could happen here too maybe. And then infections started popping up in New York.
This was a seriously important accelerator of the insanity.
The corporate press and government propaganda used Italy’s overwhelmed hospitals to terrorize people in the US.
This is ultimately what let the entire Western world into lockdown.
And they were overrun with mildly symptomatic patients the whole time!
And here are some more points about overcounting. I was absolutely right about this then, despite narrative campaigns saying it was some kind of conspiracy theory. Anyway, I’ll highlight the important stuff.
My Facebook page is just a little one with only a few hundred followers, and I don’t often get too many comments outside a handful of people who read many of my posts.
But here’s a post where I attempt to put covid numbers into context with a well-known existing disease, flu.
You don’t have to read it, but here it is:
Anyway, tell me my numbers are off if you think so, but I want to talk about Linda.
I don’t know where Linda came from, but she commented on this post, and she demonstrates a perfect example of what is discussed in Jonathan Haidt’s book as well as the literature on mass formation.
“Where did you get this info?” Easy. As I said in the post, the CDC. So I reply with the links. But why did she ask that even though I told her the source? Because she WANTS it to not be true. On some level, she hopes I don’t have an answer.
Her second question—which is actually a statement with a question mark after it—makes a bit of an illogical assumption since the CDC is a US entity… but ok. What she’s doing is trying to rationalize the number. She knows the point I’m trying to make: that covid isn’t THAT bad when you put it into context.
She doesn’t like that point, but as dumb as she may appear, she’s intelligent enough to gather that that is what I’m doing. Why doesn’t she like that point? WHY does she care if a complete stranger on the internet said something wrong (in her view)?
It’s because she wants to believe her illusions with emotional fervor. She, like other normal humans, desires constant repetition that the illusions are real, and therefore unanimous agreement among everyone. This is because she lacks REAL belief—that is, she can’t confidently defend her views in her own mind (at least on some subconscious level).
Someone challenging her views makes her irritable and irrational. She feels the need to fight the perceived threat.
Why do people WANT to believe the illusion that covid is the worst plague ever? I think it’s because they were duped and they don’t want to admit it to themselves. They turned their lives upside down for what? Because they’re a fool. I really believe that on some deep unconscious level, that’s what they’re acting on, and it was already true by the end of the first month.
This is where Freud comes in. His Group Psychology book is the only thing from him I’ve ever read, but it is a really good primer on mass (group) formation.
Her last question brings it home. One of the constant repetitions of the narrative shapers of the time was that “covid is not like the flu”. She certainly heard/read that many times and took it to heart.
Why does she “hope” anything about what I’m saying? This is an emotional attachment to some stranger’s sub 500-follower Facebook page’s post. Why would any emotions be incited in her?
Though it’s not really hope that she’s feeling. It’s anxiety. She’s worried that I might destroy her illusion. “I hope that doesn’t happen” is really what’s being said.
Let me give an odd analogy:
I drive a Kia. That’s a fact, who cares? Let’s say some random stranger on the internet says I drive a Honda. It’s not true, and I know it. I also don’t really care. I have no emotional attachment to this. I might correct him, but I’m not going to be like “I hope you’re not telling people I drive a Honda.”
The reason is that I KNOW that my ownership of a Kia is a fact that’s verifiable by my own observations. This person’s questioning of that fact means nothing to me.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about a belief that I cannot verify—i.e. something that down on the subconscious level, I don’t really believe. Rather, I want to believe, then I might get uncomfortable. My illusion is being challenged.
Look, just read those books. Haha
People defend their illusions with nonsensical argumentation and fallacies. Some people are far more adept at it than others. Linda isn’t very good at it. And this is actually a GOOD thing! It likely means Linda is a pretty decent person. It’s someone who is very skilled at lying to themselves that you have to watch out for.
Anyway let’s see her next comments.
“Okay. I knew those numbers were too large for just the US.”
Linda! Every number in the original post WAS just for the US. She is confirming to herself that her intuition was right after I demonstrated that it was wrong!
I added the world numbers in my answer to help her out. But her reading comprehension is failing her, and this is on purpose. She’s protecting her illusions.
Then she closes it out completely by saying the numbers are “immaterial” and “there’s nothing to compare it to yet.” What does this even mean?
The point of the post was to put the pandemic into perspective. She’s so driven by the illusion-protecting narratives that she has read: “flu and covid can’t be compared” that she can’t see anything else.
She’s decided that the context that I’m giving can and should be ignored because “we’re not done with this virus.” Linda, we’re not done with the flu either. There’s no relevance whatsoever whether we’re done with either virus.
She doesn’t want perspective. She doesn’t want grounding. She wants to be insane.
People have tried to make the case that the emotions they have are because “misinformation is dangerous” and can cause more covid deaths because people aren’t freaking out enough. (Never mind the fact that they are almost always the ones spreading misinformation.)
This is nonsense. They don’t care about other people. They care about their illusions. Do you really believe that Linda thinks my little Facebook page is going to overcome the government and CNN et al in its influence?
And that’s always the case with those who want to ban free speech. It’s always for “safety” on the surface but deep down it’s to protect illusions and censor people who disagree with them.
Anyway, enough about Linda.
I was going to go at least through March, but I sure posted a lot back then. So for now, I’m going to end with this post here with Kathy Griffin.
While the point of this substack post was to brag about how right I’ve been. It’s also been about how wrong other people were.
Kathy Griffin was one of the wrongest.
She is a leader in what many have called Trump Derangement Syndrome. Possibly the single worst case of the ‘disease’.
She obnoxiously tweeted this to get at Trump. He said testing was going well, I guess.
Anyway, she apparently had an abdominal infection of some sort with symptoms that don’t really sound like covid.
What really happened in the hospital is unknown but the fact that she didn’t get a covid test makes sense. I’m sure she demanded one, but at that time they were scarce.
So she’s almost right. Testing wasn’t really going so well. Availability was low and it was mostly the government’s fault. Still, I bet if the doctors actually believed she likely had covid, they would have tested her for it.
But she was completely wrong to make a spectacle of it. I just picture Carrot Top Karen stressing out hospital staff, demanding they ignore all other patients but herself. “I have covid! I’m famous!” But who-knows.
Anyhow, the inspiration for this post was this article.
It proves me (and the likeminded) right, very right.
Uh oh. That’s not good. And that assumes the official covid death numbers are not an overcount.
But remember it was always “lives vs. money” or “lives vs. profit”. And being against the lockdowns makes you an evil, selfish grandma killer!
As a matter of fact, the so-called “experts” that this same media (US and British in this case) hardly warned of this.
“suggesting from the beginning”? That sure isn’t what I remember. Why didn’t we hear from Prof Dingall back then?
Because, of course he is yet another person who goes against the narrative the media were pushing.
Here is an interesting interview of him I found from elder.org (not the BBC or anything else you’ve heard of that forms the narrative).
In other words, I think this Sociology professor is saying that the media and public became irrational and supported things that were never backed by science.