The Moderate Covid Dissident Wing

Studying this protracted, weird devolution of the West (and its neo-colonized Rest of the World) in the Age of Covid, I notice the excruciatingly small, albeit apparently growing, movement of disaffected dissidents, skeptics & critics is not a monolithic block.  It is diverse, not only in socio-economic characteristics and geographical location, but also in terms of what position and/or degree of dissidence is being described and/or advocated.

As with any spectrum, there are with this spectrum two extreme antipodal poles on either end, and there is a range between them.  On the radical extreme, we have Christine Massey, David Crow, Andrew Kaufman and Tom Cowan (about which I wrote in an earlier essay here), who not only believe the Covid virus doesn't exist, they go further and believe no viruses exist, that virology itself is a tissue of incoherence & deceit, and that the "germ theory" it was built on historically is also a tissue of lies.  On the opposite extreme, we have dissidents who merely oppose the degree and nature of lockdowns per se, but who nevertheless acknowledge there is a deadly pandemic called Covid that we need to be "careful" about to ensure we stay "safe" from -- just not to the extent of the lockdowns. 

Case in point, we have Judge Jeanine Pirro -- vaunted "conservative" and ostensible Trump supporter -- and on her FOX show Dr. Marc Seigel, a well-known Mainstream voice who regularly goes on FOX to push ever so gently against the Mainstream Narrative.  Look at this recent exchange between them:

Marc Seigel: ...if you haven’t had Covid, I would say this: the vaccine is much less dangerous than Covid is, because you get a lot of those long-term side effects from having had Covid.

Judge Jeanine: I agree, totally agree with you.  If you haven’t had it, the vaccine makes sense.  If you have, you gotta wonder what’s going on with Big Pharma.

[bold emphasis mine].

Some boldly conservative Covid Skeptics they are, right?  LMMO (Laughing My Mask Off).

Another example, somewhat subtler, is that of a doctor featured in a Mainstream paper (the UK's Daily Mail), one Dr. Renee Hoenderkamp, who says nicely dissident things like this:

Already, we are so cowed and docile that no one is asking the obvious questions such as what is the point of these restrictions currently? Are they serving any positive purpose at all?

And this:

As a GP, I do not accept that there is any valid medical reason for carrying on with any level of lockdown that overrides the multiple compelling reasons for getting back to normal.

However, when you read the article more closely, you see she is predicating this on a reinforcement of the Covid Narrative that has led to the very things she opposes:

Today, when half the population has already had both vaccine doses, there should be no danger that our hospitals will be unable to cope with the virus, even given the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant.

One (a Covid Dissident one, that is) could say they suppose it's on balance good that doctors like Dr. Hoenderkamp are voicing their concerns about the Covid lockdowns; however, months and months of exposure to one of the veritable Kings of double-talking waffling equivocation, Alex Berenson, has made me ambivalent at best, and intolerant at worst, for such mealy-mouthed jello in the face of this disastrously metastasizing monstrosity.  And before Berenson, in an entirely different context -- the problem of Islam -- I had developed an analytical argument for a multi-pronged approach to what I called "Counter-Jihad Softies" (see this ancient posting from September of 2012, for example), from robust critique to outright rejection of their attempts to "help".

More notes on a methodology for a Rational Conspiracy Theory

 

Someone who calls themself "Sound of Mind" tweeted a good question:

How can there be roughly the same amount of deaths during a pandemic as before it? The only rational conclusion a sane person can come to is there is no pandemic.

Which got me to thinking:

Another opportunity for developing a methodology of a rational conspiracy theory, which proceeds by asking critical questions, e.g.: What kind of a global conspiracy would fail to just simply manufacture sufficient Covid deaths, in order to avoid this glaring discrepancy?

 

I haven't yet developed that methodology, but one way to steer our uncertain way towards it is, as I noted, to ask critical questions about whatever putative conspiracy we are supposing exists.  One hallmark, it seems, of the irrational conspiracy theorist is not only to fail to ask such questions, but also to get prickly, if not hostile at you if you persist -- assertively yet politely -- in raising them.

It is also relevant to determine what subject matter is being framed as a "conspiracy".  The JFK assassination?  The RFK assassination?  The moon landing?  The 'Paul McCartney is dead' claim?  Here, we are concerned specifically with the full catastrophe of Covid -- a mass, messy complex of confounding factors, official corruption, and apparent lies from the Mainstream.  (Another hallmark of the irrational conspiracy theorist is to vaguely and with a desperate, almost maniacal glibness, assume any conspiracy you bring up is part of the same overarching Conspiracy.  I have yet to encounter such a conspiracy theorist who places limits on their feverish speculations in this regard.)

Then, concerning how the state of Victoria, Australia, recently locked everyone down (with their police often behaving like fascist thugs against people whose only "crime" was walking around without masks) on the basis of a mere 12 cases, I observed:

Another opportunity to make a note re: an RTC (Rational Conspiracy Theory): If it's all orchestrated, why wouldn't they manufacture 20,000 cases rather than a paltry dozen? & why not manufacture 100s of deaths while they're at it? I ask this as a conspiracy theorist myself.

 

On another note, Juanita Broaddrick asked:

Why would you hire almost 75 lawyers to stop the audit of a legal election? Democrats did in Arizona.

 

Which got me wondering:

 

Another opportunity for demonstrating hey rational conspiracy theory. If the Cabal were really that powerful they wouldn't need to go to the trouble of hiring 75 lawyers, it could just prevent the audit from even beginning.

 

And added:

 

So the rational conspiracy theory isn't about denying that there is a Cabal, it's about reasonable speculation concerning the degree of power they have. And relatively less power = the coexistence in society of non conspiracy forces to some extent.

 

That last point is one key component:  To what extent are non-conspiracy forces powerful and/or in the Mainstream?  A closely related question may be:  Can a malevolent conspiracy appear, temporarily, to have more power than it really has?  What would account for that?

 

 

The Berensonite Wing of the (still inchoate) Anti-Covid Movement

  

My phrase "still inchoate" I used many times on my old blog, The Hesperado, to refer to another movement similarly dis- (if not un-) organized: the Anti-Islam Movement -- so much so as to be virtually non-existent. 

At any rate, that's not why you called. On this blog here, I've written many essays on the inconsistency/incoherence of Alex Berenson's approach to the problem of the Covid-Industrial Complex -- an inconsistency/incoherence that tends to have an effect of reinforcing the same damned Covid Narrative we (in the  [still inchoate] Anti-Covid Movement) are trying to dismantle.  If my 4.5 readers are interested, just scroll down from this posting (you may have to figure out how to get to older postings; one way to do it is to use the handy list on the right sidebar for previous months/years – but no need to go back before the summer of 2020).  One representative posting among those would be "Getting closer to pinpointing the Problem of the Berensonite Wing".

I’d decided a few months ago to wash my hands of Alex, after I’d dissected a few instances of his inconsistency/incoherence.  More recently, one of the Twitterers whom I follow happened to retweet Alex, and I noted again his penchant for underestimating the dimensions of the problem:

Walmart today: 90-10 masked/unmasked.

This is gonna take awhile.

To which I tweeted:

Berenson consistently over the past year has underestimated the mass psychosis factor of the Covid catastrophe, & has a blind spot for any indication of conspiracy, fallaciously assuming (apparently) that if there were a conspiracy, it would have to be of ridiculous proportions.

Surprisingly, he responded to my tweet, but after spending nearly a half hour rooting around my account and his, I could not find it.  It was a very pithy, snotty retort.  He basically said “that’s because I’m on Team Reality, not Team Conspiracy”.  A glibly tendentious response that begs the question.

But typical of Alex, in nearly the next breath, a few tweets later, he was implying some sort of conspiracy.  Thus, responding to a tweet by Paul Graham --

Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking "conspiracy theories" that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now

-- Alex tweeted:

And here [Vox] secretly changes an article about the lab leak theory to make it less embarrassing. The post-publication changes places like Vox and [the New York Times] are making to articles are Orwellian in the most basic sense and need to be called out relentlessly. [bold emphasis added]

 Then Alex whips back & flip-flops with this startling tweet:

 [Mike] Yeadon is surely a conspiracy theorist; he's calling the vaccines a mass depopulation effort. I've never talked to him but I've read about him; nothing in his history suggests he'd go this route. Which suggest the pressure of explaining the vaccine fanaticism has cracked him.