Headline: Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring.
[b]"LONDON — This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t.
The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago.
The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and anxiously, as a test of how the delta variant behaves in a society with relatively high vaccination rates. And now people are asking if this could be the first real-world evidence that the pandemic in Britain is sputtering out — after three national lockdowns and almost 130,000 deaths.
Public health experts, alongside the government, predicted that cases would be rising in Britain at this point, perhaps even exponentially.
The highly contagious delta variant of the virus, first detected in India, accounts for almost all new cases here. On July 17, the number of new day cases reached 54,674, the highest since January.
Two days later, dubbed “Freedom Day” by the press, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government ended almost all government mandates in England for mask-wearing and social distancing. Pubs are serving pints at the rail and night clubs have reopened with maskless youths packed on the dance floors. Viral defense is now a “personal choice.”
And so some of the best infectious-disease modelers on the planet warned that 100,000 new cases a day this summer could be expected.
But the trend since then has been on a sharp decline.
Scientists have theories. Maybe it’s the sunshine? There was a week-long heat wave."[/b]
One thing we can count on is that this will become yet another political football in which the politicians and the objectivists will use it to prove that one side is right and the other side is wrong. Then if the trend does shift to a big spike in infections, they will pretend that this didn’t really happen at all. Or if admitting that it did, it is still the other side that caused it.
You can take that vaccine, and stick it. Anywhere but in your arm.
Besides, I already had covid. I wasn’t even aware, but a test revealed it. Apparently it came and went without my notice. And I’m supposed to get an experimental vaccine that utilizes a certain potentially toxic protein instead of the normal vaccine shit, for a virus so powerful I didn’t even notice I had it? Besides, now the nimrods in charge say, even after being vaccinated, you still have to keep wearing face blankets and adhering to quarantine… the whole point of the vaccine was to return society to normal.
Yeah, that isn’t happening. It’s not going back to normal. Because we’ve been in a weird parallel reality time-stream for a good couple years now and everything is growing a little bit weirder day by day as we approach the apocalypse and the world un-ravels.
Yeah well they did the opposite in the US. And the CDC is recommending that even vaccinated people need to keep wearing their masks because of “new data”. This is a pretty weird virus. Vaccinated people are releasing, apparently, as much of the virus as people who are unvaccinated and currently ill with it… Pretty weird, especially considering the fact that viruses never transmit asymptomatically in the first place, let alone in the asymptomatic and vaccinated… It’s like it was designed or something as a test-bed for bioengineering un-naturally contagious viruses that are able to silently propagate to the point of critical mass before enough symptomatic people start showing up to draw people’s notice… in a lab, or something. Like a coronavirus lab. Like the one 10 feet down the street from where the first cases started appearing. Weird.
No one is saying that. What they are saying is that vaccinated people can still get infected.
It’s not a weird virus its just that you are completely ignorant.
A vaccine is a second line of defence and only works once the virus starts to insinuate inside the tissues.
Anything can carry a virus and can stay on surfaces for up to nine days. This is perfectly normal.
As you ought to be aware vaccinated people can still get ill. That means that they can carry and spread the virus.
Its pretty fucking simple really.
The rest of your post is so fucking stupid its pointless commenting on it, because you are just not “receiving”.
Here you come off [to me] as an intertwining of perpetualburn [above] and Joker [on other threads].
In other words, as the objectivist who actually looks forward to the day the world finally unravels in one or another apocalypse.
Let’s try this…
Do you believe that your argument here reflects the optimal or the only rational manner in which to think about the covid vaccination? Do you believe that if others don’t share your own point of view here that they are [necessarily] wrong? Do you believe that the conclusions you have reached here reflect what you construe to be a core Self. The one and the only real Parodites?
Finally, do you agree that given new experiences and access to new information and knowledge, you might well change your mind about all of this and come to accept instead a very different set of conclusions?
Then we can move on to why your own experience with the covid-19 virus might have been very different from the 197,031,700 experiences that others have had with it around the globe. In particular, the 4,209,350 who have died from it.
For me, with beliefs of this sort, it always comes down basically to three things:
1] the accumulation of expereriences in your life that predispose you to believe one thing rather than another
2] the assumption on my part that there does not appear to be an argument or evidence able to establish what all rational men and women are obligated to believe about the afterlife
3] the length in the gap between what someone believes about the afterlife and what they are actually able to demonstrate [even to themselves] is in fact true about it
My own parents were not overtly religious and I was in and out of street gangs – or, rather, what we called a “gang” back then – as a kid. To the best of my recollection, religion never, ever came up among us. Either in or out of the family.
But then I fell under the spell of Reverend Deerdorf at the Protestant Community Church. I came to be rather fanatic about the Christian God. I then knew there was an afterlife.
At least for about 6 months. But then the dots I connected the afterlife to was an actual entity: A God, the God, my God.
Again, there is [so far] no way I can understand how you connect the dots here to a Goddess that is clearly not like the God I worshipped and adored. Nature as a whole is to me simply too amorphous, ambiguous, intangible, formless, indeterminate to bring it all down to a commitment to a Goddess, the Goddess, my Goddess.
Or in understanding how you make a distinction between where the Goddess ends and you begin.
I’m just always wary about beliefs that seem to ask someone to choose to avoid, to steer clear of, to keep away from things that actually bring them pleasure in life. To sacrifice them in order to prove what to whom? Especially when the pleasure you feel does no harm to others. And in fact can even bring them pleasure too.
“Unlike other religious traditions that have advocated celibacy, prohibited all sexual expression outside of marriage, and encouraged married couples to limit or restrict their sexual behavior, Pagan religions often reflect the permissiveness of the 1960s-era sexual revolution in regard to extramarital sexuality, homosexuality, swinging or non-monogamous relationships, fetishes or BDSM, use of contraceptives, and abortion. Although many adherents of Paganism adopt lifestyles consistent with mainstream liberal society, those who choose alternative lifestyles generally are accepted within the Pagan community with no need to hide or apologize for their lifestyle choice.”
So, while you note there is no one-size-fits–all Pagan philosophy/agenda here, what still fascinates me most is how you seem to go against the grain here and worked out your own path with and through the Goddess “in your head”. And though you focus here on an intuitive/visceral leap of faith…that is seen by me as well as rooted in dasein. In other words, that had your life been different there would be no Goddess at all. Unless you do believe that this is all basically fated from the beginning.
Just out of curiosity, do you connect this in any way to having been born blind? A need perhaps to make this part of your life more understandable and acceptable if you can intertwine it in a “bigger picture”…a sense of reality where everything has a reason when it is understood as a part of nature?
I ask this because I often thought that way myself about many things when I was a kid being raised in the belly of working class beast…barely making ends meet from week to week. I am now convinced that was the primary motive for my having come to God for the answers.
Anyway, the bottom line [mine in other words] seems to revolve around any empathy that we might be able communicate and sustain in the way of an actual virtual friendship. One based on my being able to come closer to your frame of mind or you coming closer to mine.
About what I’d expect from one of my Stooges here. His whole point being to side with anyone that I take an exception to.
Why?
Not sure. The irony is that in regard to things like religion and most political issues, we share the same prejudices. That’s why he reminds me so much of Karpel Tunnel.
But for his own reasons [rooted in dasein] he seems to have taken a rather visceral dislike of me. In part I think it revolves around the exception I take to his arrogance. Whether in reacting to Maia here or to Ierrellus on his own thread, he seems ever driven to heap scorn on those who refuse to share his own point of view.
Thus his own reference to “fake ideas”. Fake being synonymous with ideas other than his own.
Sure, I can come off much the same with my cracks about chickenshits and fulminating fanatics and Kids and pinheads. But that’s basically just me engaging my polemicist persona. I just like to wield words as swords from time to time. All entangled in this:
“He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest.” John Fowles
But even I don’t fully understand why I have came to embody this. Back again to dasein. After all, I’m no less entangled in all of the hopelessly problematic implications of it myself.
For me, it comes down to my intuition. But what feels right to me, needn’t do so for anyone else. I don’t think anyone can prove the existence of an afterlife, because of evolution and natural selection. Early humans who were sure of an afterlife would be slightly less determined to stay alive.
At school we had Christian assemblies, which is the nearest I’ve ever come to that. Though there was no attempt of any sort to indoctrinate us. In fact, I believe it’s the law in the UK that assemblies in schools have to be Christian based. So basically this just involved a couple of hymns, and a very short talk by one of the teachers. We also had a nativity play before the Christmas holidays.
I don’t make any distinction between where the Goddess ends and where I begin. I’m part of nature, therefore I’m part of the Goddess. All of nature is connected to every other part, and works as one harmonious whole, evolving towards ever greater complexity and consciousness.
My decision to embark on a period of spiritual purification was mine alone, and I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone else to do it. My life was stuck in a rut and I needed to change it. Romantic encounters, such as they were, were not particularly bringing me any pleasure anyway, and quite a lot of emotional upset.
Yes, it’s true, a lot of Pagans have a very liberal attutude towards sexuality (as parodied and massively exaggerated in the Wicker Man). I think I’ve described before my first forays into organised Pagan groups, such as Wicca, and how I eventually came to realise they were not my path. Most of the current Pagan movement is a modern revival, taking in elements from all over the place, but I was always drawn to something more ancient and, to me, more authentic. In my experience, rituals are far more effective and powerful if one practices self discipline. I certainly wouldn’t criticise other Pagans for having a different view, though.
I’m sure that being blind has influenced my life and beliefs in all sorts of profound ways. It has certainly given me a sense order, for example, or a desire for it, anyway. What I know is that I’ve been very lucky and blessed in my life, in all sorts of ways, and I feel a very strong wish to give something back, and once my period of purification is complete, I’m sure I’ll know what that is.
I like to think that I’m a pretty empathetic sort of person and I’m always happy to discuss pretty much anything, including frames of mind.
For me, intuition – “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”; “a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning” – is, in turn, rooted in dasein, in the life we lived. So, again, had your life been very different [for any number of reasons] your intuition about the afterlife or nature or the Goddess might have been very different. On the other hand, my own frame of mind is, in itself, not excluded from the, at times, disturbing implications of that.
Disturbing however only when you have come to take it as far as “I” have: to a “fractured and fragmented” sense of reality in the is/ought world. Never being able to pin down with any degree of certainty if my own value judgments aren’t just the precarious, problematic embodiment of this:
Or spiritually.
All I can do then is to seek out the opinions of those who do not think and feel like this at all. To either yank myself up out of the hole I’ve dug myself into, or to bring someone down into the hole with me. Someone I can at least empathize with.
Trust me though: no one wants to yank me up out of it more than I do. I just can’t figure out a way to not think as I do now. And it’s certainly not for lack of trying.
To the best of my own recollection, my public education did not involve any real degree of religious teaching. Let alone indoctrination. The closest we came to it was in the Pledge of Allegiance:
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
And there was no mistaking which God that was.
Nope, it was only when I met Reverend Deerdorf that God became more than just something that popped up in the background from time to time.
I’ll just have to accept that “here and now” I am simply not able understand how it must be to think like that. With the Christian God there is clearly this: “I and Thou”. With the Goddess as you experience it, it all basically just collapses for me. In my head, nature is all entangled in the profound mystery of existence itself. In the staggering vastness of “all there is”. And, given the infinitesimally tiny speck of existence that “I” am in the vastness of this No God world, there’s no way that “here and now” I can connect the dots between nature and myself when I grapple with such things as my own sexuality. Instead, I tend toward the assumption that those who are able to do so do so because psychologically they have come [re dasein] to need to. It’s what compels some to find a font – religious, spiritual, philosophical, political etc. – they can anchor their Self to.
Unless of course I’m wrong. But how can I possibly determine that given all that I do not understand myself about the existence of existence itself. Though, clearly, this is more a concern for some than others.
And, it may well be that even you yourself will never get much closer to understanding it any better. But, again, I can only respect this because I respect both your intelligence and your commitment in digging down as deep as you can possibly go in thinking about these things below the surface. And, after all, you bring no harm to others. Plus you accept that it is but your own journey. You’re not out to claim it should be the journey of others as well. And I respect that most of all.
There’s a part of me of course that is able to understand this. Being disciplined in a world that seems ever intent on tugging you in so many different directions can clearly be advantageous in any number of contexts. If you can feel grounded and are able to stick to it, sure, I can see where that might be an important goal in someone’s life. But [for me] it always comes back to how far this frame of mind is taken. Why something that is so clearly pleasurable and so fundamentally rooted in nature itself? And, again, just out of curiosity, if you were to weaken and engage in something sexual…how would the Goddess react? I’m trying to imagine myself inside your head, groping to understand what the reprecussions of that might be. With most Western religions there’s Judgment Day. And with No God religions like Buddhism there is reincarnation and Nirvana. But what of you and your Pagan beliefs. How “for all practical purposes” are your behaviors, if not judged, intertwined in actual consequences for sustaining the discipline or abandoning it?
With the Goddess, is there anything at all like a Catholic going to confession and speaking to a Priest…God’s representative on Earth about transgressions. Sexual or otherwise. This just really mystifies me.
Well, if we are still actually in touch here three and a half years from now, that ought to make for an interesting frame of mind to discuss.
“That is a very calm and reasoned reaction to a collection of fake ideas.”
I’m perfectly calm dude.
I think you’re a couple of low-IQ nimrods and nothing I say is going to make any difference, to be honest. The COVID virus spreads in unusual ways, compared to other viruses, and there are objective reasons to believe it was manufactured. Asymptomatic spreading is extremely rare, whereas COVID seems to specialize in exactly that. It’s unusual, eerily similar to bioengineered gain of function virus test profiles, and this has been widely noted. That’s not even conspiratorial at this point, it is mainstream. There’s certain well documented patterns viruses follow after jumping species, and covid, should we assume it made the jump to our physiology from bats, did not follow any of these patterns.
You’re part of a little cult. The COVID cult. So you be a good little boy, shoot that exogenous protein based vaccine into your body like a good little boy, and go get your free hot dog or whatever your state legislature is promising you.
I had covid. It’s nothing. And I smoke four packs of cigarettes a day. I’ve had common-colds that hit my lungs worse. And the few who do get really ill from it, there’s a variety of drugs that effectively save your life but, because they were encouraged by Trump, they got anathema’d so we’d rather you just die on a ventilator that doesn’t do anything because the virus isn’t causing a lung issue, it’s causing an issue with oxygenating the blood. (Which explains why such a heavy smoker as me can get it and basically have no effect. Its not mucking up your lungs, it’s fucking with your body’s oxygenation of the blood, a process unrelated to lung function.) But those drugs are ‘fake ideas’ right, so fuck saving countless lives, because the big bad orange man encouraged use and manufacturing of those life-saving drugs; can’t have that. We gotta maintain the illusion that covid’s an apocalyptic bubonic plague, so let’s just stick people on ventilators that don’t do anything so we can pump the numbers of the dead up on the news and scare everyone! Fuck off.
Sorry I irritated you (sculptor, not that iambiguous isn’t also a cunt) by informing you that your little cult leader Foucault seriously wrote an essay defending sexual child predation as a morally liberating and good thing. After seeing how many people attacked me on this site for attacking Foucault on that, (and implicitly defending his thesis) including you: well, I see where we all stand. You’re all more beneath me than even I thought, and I’m hella narcissistic. But this is beyond narcissism. You really are just less than me, and less than anyone else who has a connection to reality even one step ahead of your own quite limited and deranged perspective.
Personally, I think you’re braindead and have no desire to communicate with either you or sculptor. What do you think of that? Bunch of fucking losers. Your posts on this forum read like random Markov chains Iambiguous, I recommend just purging your entire existence on this site. Don’t fucking talk to me again. I have literally nothing to gain from you, and you have nothing to gain from me because you’re a fucking idiot. You want to wah wah and exclaim I’m spreading fake news to curtail any real argument with me: NAH. I laid out what I had to say right here, it isn’t fake news. You two are the fake motherfuckers. Fuck off. Fucking close minded die-hard think-you’re-on-the-right-side-of-history types make me fucking nauseous. So like I said, don’t bother trying to talk to me unless you grow the fuck up and stop being such a little pissant, because I’m sick of wasting my time trying to talk to the fucking borg collective. I have other things to do. Like finish this bottle of jameson and pop this oxy. Seriously: fuck off.
And to re-emphasize: take that fucking vaccine, and stick it up your fucking ass. Three times. Cuz’ that’s how many jabs they’re saying you need now.
I’m gonna go bet back to work coding my neural net and tweaking my algorithm to actually do something in the world. Have a nice day dipshit. Either you, Iamb. or Sculptor, doesn’t really matter to me. Two names for the same thing.
My advice would be to not worry about it, and just go ahead and base your decisions on your intuition anyway, without trying to second guess yourself. Your intuition exists for a reason, and it’s to tell you what’s right for you. I know how easy it is to get oneself into a rut, and, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m very happy to describe some very simple grounding rituals for you to try, if you want to. I’m a great believer in practical solutions to problems, rather than just talking about them, and if you want to yank yourself up out of that hole, all it takes is the right frame of mind. I certainly wouldn’t suggest trying to drag someone else down there with you, though.
I could never believe in the existence of a god, such as the Christian god, that exists outside of nature. Or indeed of anything that exists outside of nature. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
If I were to weaken and engage in something sexual, I would simply be very disappointed in myself for my lack of willpower. There is certainly nothing equivalent to confession of sins or anything like that. Anyway, as I said, I’m happy to discuss pretty much anything about my life, but on the subject of sexual matters, I think I’ve said as much as I want to, now.
I’m more concerned, in fact, about maintaining the morning exercises that I’ve set for myself, which are sometimes very difficult to do, for all sorts of reasons, including time. I told you some time ago that I have no natural diurnal rhythm, not being able to see the sun, so unless I keep to a very strict exercise schedule, at the same time every day, I just go completely out of sync, and it makes me feel like crap, with no energy or motivation. It was fine at school, where we had a very structured day, including gym every morning, but since leaving I had struggled to maintain such a schedule in my own life, at least for more than a few months at a time. That is, until three and a half years ago, and I’ve been very good since then, and I can’t describe how much better it has made me feel.
Yes, in the best of all possible worlds, this is the best of all possible advice. Then it just comes down to the actual situation – set of circumstances – that you find yourself in. In other words, things can unfold in your life such that your own intuitive sense of things can be challenged. What once seemed like the right thing to do no longer seems to resonate at all. Again, though, that all depends on the extent to which your life basically stays the same week in and week out. For some even year in and year out. It’s not for nothing that the covid pandemic threw some people for a loop. Still, based on our discussions so far, you think about this differently than I do. So, it finally comes down to finding a path that brings you the least dysfunction in life. Yours won’t be mine. But why should it be.
The hole I’m in however revolves more around the philosophical assumptions I make about the nature of human identity itself. The part where I am “fractured and fragmented” in regard to value judgments. The part where it seems reasonable to me to construe my own existence as essentially meaningless and purposeless. The part where it will eventually tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. The part, in other words, that has less to do with circumstances. After all, my current circumstances bring me an enormous amount of satisfaction and fulfillment. On the other hand, if I can convince someone that my philosophical frame of mind is something they can not only tolerate but embrace, that allows me to experience empathy. To sustain an exchange in which we share something that is important to me.
Unless of course they are able instead to facilitate me in yanking myself up out of the hole. It might be a Pagan or a Christian or a Buddhist or one of any number of moral, political and/or spiritual paths.
As for the grounding rituals, yes, by all means, if they work for you they might work for me. So please send them. Here or in an email.
For the Christians though nature is simply understood from a different perspective. And I am not able to think of things like this in terms of “never” anymore. You just don’t really know what new experiences you can have that might change your mind. There are only things that seem very, very unlikely to me. Here and now. Even your understanding of nature itself is ever and always subject to change. Or, rather, will be if you come to think more like me. If nature…in all of the many ways it can impact your life…starts pummeling you with one calamity after another, well, who knows where that might take you.
Well, I only focused there because in a previous exchange [to the best of my recollection] I was groping to grasp how you think of yourself as intertwined in nature through the Goddess and you brought up the example of your seven year commitment to celibacy.
But no problem…we can steer clear of it. My main point though is that we only have so much control over the variables in our lives that bring us to such commitments. You might meet a man next week or next month that you fall head over heels in love with. That can reconfigure everything you think about sexuality here and now.
But this is just the way I think about things like this. Not at all as most others do.
Ever and always the gap between you explaining this to me as someone who was born blind and me understanding it as someone who was born sighted. Sense perceptions configured into descriptions that are buried deep in the at times bewildering interaction of genes and memes. Is there something that you can substitute for the Sun like a source of heat that you can experience without a need for vision?
As best as you are able to describe it, what does “out of sync” mean given your own unique frame of reference? How is that communicated with or through the Goddess? Is it more physical or psychological/emotional?
I’m curious as to how what you experience here is similar or different from what I experience in doing my own deep breathing/relaxation exercises. Or what those who meditate or practice yoga experience. For me though there is no spiritual element at all. I don’t feel connected to anything more than how my mind and body reacts to the exercises themselves.
Well, as I said, I believe in finding practical solutions to problems, rather than talking about them.
I’m not going to describe in detail what I do in ritual, as it would not be suitable for someone who has not had years of experience. Instead I’ll give you something very simple. Go outside to a secluded spot and kneel on the ground. Imagine the energy of the earth being drawn into your body, and do this every day at the same time, for 15 minutes. Think of a specific change you want to make in your life, and as you’re doing the ritual, imagine that change has already happened, in detail.
No, heat doesn’t work, as we’ve discussed before. Light, especially the sun, regulates your diurnal rhythm through vision. Being out of sync means that I will fall asleep, and wake up, at any time of the day or night. Unless I keep to a very strict schedule, including exercise every morning at the same time.
As always, the best way you can experience something is to do it. So let me know how you get on with the ritual. The key to success is sticking at it.
Yes, but in finding practical solutions to problems, I’m still back to this:
A frame of mind that is different from yours. A frame of mind that is different from almost everyone I bump into here.
Then it comes down to a commitment to explore it in order to [perhaps] close it. Or to just abandon it altogether. And for any number of personal reasons no less rooted in dasein.
Okay, I’ll try that. And the change I most want to make in my life is to think myself into believing once again that my own existence is not essentially meaningless and purposeless; and that it is not tumbling over [around one or another corner] into the abyss that is oblivion – nothingness – for all of eternity.
Either that or to find someone able to share my own truly bewildering understanding of a fractured and fragmented sense of identity in regard to what I construe to be the most important philosophical/existential question of all: how ought one to live?.
I’ll come back in a week or so and try to encompass the experience I had in attempting it.
Can you give me examples of important changes that occurred in your own life in doing this?
Again, I am clearly in way over my head here. It’s just a frame of mind I don’t have access to. Perhaps the closest sighted people can get to it is in experimenting with “altered states”. Think William Hurt in the Altered States movie: isolation tanks, drugs.
