Old Guy On The Block
Reflections On The Sound of Silence
Meanwhile, on social media, the blocking continues.
Unless it is just me, I think the blocking is getting worse. It is more frequent and occurs with fewer interactions. How many responses until this person, indoctrinated into the narrative, blocks me? This is to be expected as on their end it is, doing the same thing, arguing with someone who disagrees, and getting the same result, us not coming around to their way of thinking, is insanity. Best to either cut to the ad hominem or to block. Oftentimes, they do both at the same time, most likely to generate the most amount of flaccid outrage. Trigger and do not allow them the ability to respond.
I also own that I may be losing patience with those I converse with. I can only be called ignorant so many times before I may get “short” with people. Just this last Friday, I was called “potatoes for brains,” which makes sense, since I am half Irish. Over the weekend, I was called other names.
When I call “ad hominem,” they say “no, it’s not ad hominem, it’s just an insult.
What do you think ad hominem is?
I’m sure you have seen the memes of “when is an insult just an insult.” I think in the context of friends, it is just an insult because you’re not arguing anything, you’re just “giving them shit,” because shit needed to be given.
If I started a post and stated to my general feed, “You all have s for brains.” That would be an insult devoid of an ad hominem attack. On X, since I am usually writing in response to something, it is in the context of a debate or argument. So any response to that response, as insulting as it is, is within the context of a debate, whether formal or informal.
It is sad that public debate among strangers breaks down quickly into “insulting one another. or in the context of debate, ad hominem. It’s not that I am against insulting people. I do it all the time in private context among friends, but because I know so little about the people I debate with online, I think it is ridiculous to debase myself down to the point of attacking people’s motives and traits. This is why it is pragmatic to attend to the arguments they make rather than speculate on their reasons for doing so.
This past week on Facebook, another amputee said on his Facebook feed, <It’s that time of year again to get Covid boosters and the flu shot.> He said <we should do our best for our health.> That is paraphrased because he muted or deleted the conversation.
Come to think of it, probably the best thing I could do on these posts I disagree with is to take screenshots of them, because there is a high chance I will never see them again. Thread no longer accessible.
What did I say to get me muted?
Did I call him all sorts of names? Did I use an appeal to experts or a bandwagon logical fallacy? Did I state “you guys do this or that too,” calling hypocrisy on the other side?
No.
I told him that there are many ways to attend to one’s health. One of them is getting informed consent for any interventions taken. That means questioning things like vaccines.
What I received from him was a number of anecdotes that I believe actually happened, but there are a number of different narratives about how they reached that point. In other words, the story behind what happened to these people he dealt with and what actually happened were different.
This guy who posted is a great guy, very compassionate, very empathetic, and I believe does make a difference in many people’s lives. He certainly made me feel like I wasn’t alone when I first became an amputee. And it’s because I respect him that I wasn’t going to lie to him, or let the “sleeping dogs” propaganda lie.
He stated that one of the people he visited in the hospital got sick at the beginning of COVID before any treatments were available. So I asked follow-up questions. Before COVID, what would they have been diagnosed with?
How did the person know they had “Covid?” The determination for Covid at the beginning of 2020 was someone presenting symptoms synonymous with Covid and also testing negative for the flu. The problem with this is that “before Covid” only 30% of upper respiratory disorders had known sources. So a 70% chance you could test negative for the cold/flu.
Mainly during Covid there were two things at the beginning…symptoms synonymous with the cold/flu and treatment consisting of a new protocol which led to bad outcomes for many patients. Isolation. Designer drugs. Sedation. Intubation. That was the protocol during COVID.
Intubation was an accepted practice because it meant closing of a system that could very well end up transmitting more COVID. Also, the person in question was having trouble breathing. After all, COVID is a novel, terribly deadly virus. Fear is a powerful motivator, even by those who are medical professionals. Get told often enough that those sniffles and that cough are “deadly,” and pretty soon it is deadly.
I know he probably did not like the reinterpretation of what his anecdote was. But imagine if someone believed everything they experienced…how would they view a haunted house they paid to go into. Their reality would be that many people gravitated towards a house filled with serial killers or monsters, where, in reality, they went to a place where people dressed up like serial killers to scare people.
The second anecdote was that in order for him to visit hospitals and do the work he does, handing out materials to new amputees, he is required to be vaccinated. This is fine for him as he has signed a contract to provide valuable information to other amputees. In a hospital setting, he is doing great work in helping people who are otherwise depressed about their recent limb loss. For me, it would be a deal breaker, though, to get mandated vaccinations, as vaccines do not work. And any assertion that they work is an estimate predicated on models.
Using their logic, after my amputation, I have not gotten sick with a cold since my amputation. Thus, limb loss is the reason I no longer get sick. What a ridiculous notion. I could even rationalize reasons why limb loss would lead to better health outcomes. There is less real estate to prevent infection, right? The body at rest doesn’t have to burn as many calories, preventing infection since there is less body mass in which to prevent infection.
On to Anecdote #2.
His second anecdote was to state that the reason why vaccination is needed is that it is required to visit hospitals as an amputation resource. The argument makes no sense. You should get vaccinated because otherwise you will be restricted from doing certain activities, like joining a volunteer organization and attending to new amputees in hospitals?
The answer here is to remove the restriction, not take the intervention.
Finally, he stated another similar issue with a recent COVID-positive person who suffered from the symptoms of “Long Covid.” The problem with this is it is another case of “Covid by PCR,” when in truth the symptoms they could be experiencing are from a variety of similar diseases other than “Long Covid.”
Let’s take a look at, for instance, brain fog. One of the 200 symptoms that are part of “Long Covid.” Before 2020, here are some of the sources of brain fog:
Lifestyle factors
Poor sleep
Stress, anxiety, and depression
Poor diet and dehydration
Lack of exercise:
Excessive screen time:
Health conditions
Long COVID (Wait, how can this be, AI listing this as the first health condition source of Brain Fog?!?)
Hormonal changes:
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)
Autoimmune diseases:
Chronic pain:
Infections:
Fibromyalgia
Diabetes
Medications
Chemotherapy
Sleeping pills and sedatives
Other medications: Certain
Of course, now most people will simply jump to “Long Covid.”
And so, instead of addressing these responses, he blocked me. I’d probably block myself as well because I had been refuted three different ways to Sunday. No doubt he probably views me as a “lost cause.” Someone who is one of them “antivaxxers.”
I guess the mainstream media, public health, and other entities can simply repeat the word “Long Covid” enough, and it becomes true, even though there has been no link between this constellation of more than 200 symptoms and Covid, other than they came down with the symptoms after 2020.
And so came the silent treatment.
Shutting people who disagree down is a fairly effective way of dealing with others. Or is it? While I agree that people who harass others should be blocked and that people should be able to block others for any reason, what will the unintended consequences be? If the end result is simply being blocked from friends and family who disagree, then it’s a sad outcome, but reasonable.
But, if the end result goes from silencing others and then mandating they participate in certain interventions, this is a bridge too far. Then it becomes essentially a demand someone made to me on Facebook, “Shut up and get the vaccine.”
No.
I don’t silence others. I don’t view what they say as “dangerous misinformation.” It is propaganda, that much is sure, and I call it such, but I am not calling for it to be silenced. Bring it on. You bring it, I will call it out for what it is, fear and panic propaganda meant to edge us into doing what it is the government wants us to do.
But if in addition the government funds these propaganda campaigns, that is overreach. And it is a sad reality of what we went through since 2020 concerning Covid. Taxpayer money funded the propaganda, which motivated the fear to coerce many to take an unneeded experimental injection. So at first there was Funding. There was Fear, and finally forcing others into taking certain interventions.
interesting how people get side tracked by 'the recent thing'. I kinda like Trump's Wuflu. For me, the whole thing was a kind of flu that obviously people had messed with. Very few people realize that in the year of the scam, there was barely any flu activity - doctors in CA retested people who were diagnosed with wuflu, and found out they had had regular flu strains. This whole thing was a scamdemic indeed. A theatre play to mask what the governments are doing, and those that direct the governments. The uppeties behind the scene.
In many ways, the covid experience is much like that of the USS Iowa’s turret explosion. What was said on last night’s nightly news shows erased all that was discussed at work the day before, as if there was no memory of it in all but a few.
Since covid, there are no other diseases, no other possible cause for the common symptoms assigned to covid. The facts you cite, 70% of upper respiratory infection are of unknown cause, that many many many things were known to cause “brain fog” (you forgot my three favorites, caffeine deficiency, caffeine overdose and hangovers) and all other symptoms of long covid. Yet, few recall any of this, for being told other causes apparently erases what they once knew. Though, it could be that I give them too much credit by assuming they knew this at one time. Someone told me that covid was the first pandemic of their lives. To their credit, once I pointed out a few they did state that they were unaware of these, but they still refused to reconsider their stance based upon the false belief that covid was the first pandemic of their life time.