It’s unfortunate when someone you otherwise agree with turns out to have an opinion you don’t share, but it’s also inevitable. Because people are all different. You can’t realistically expect to align with someone on every point. I disagree with basically everyone I know and love, about something. And that’s alright. It’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t make them horrible people. It can be an opportunity for self-reflection and critical thinking, if you just relax and let a million years of spectacular brain-complexity evolution do its thing.
Of course, the more things tally up on the “wrong” side of the ledger, the more difficult it can get to convince ourselves that it’s fine. Enough things on that side of the ledger and you generally find that those people aren’t even in the bubble of “know and love” anyway. They’re scary kooks you’ve ended up associating with for some reason. And that’s alright too. It’s a delicate balance we all need to work with, in one way or another.
Did you think I was talking about someone I knew? Nah. I was talking about this entertaining bit of comedy from the witty and inventive mind of JP Sears, who has long been a satirist of the … I want to say extreme left? Or whatever vegans and essential oilers and yoga people and the more unbearably Karen-y SJWs are. He’s been doing it all along and it was funny.
And it still is! What worries me a little is the tone of the people in the comments on this video, and how emboldened they are. But you know, never read the comments I guess.
JP hasn’t crept right (or if he has, he’s always been there and this is a symptom of the normalisation and enabling of the right and it’s all way too subtle to be worth analysing), because he’s still sending up a very small and practically fictionalised segment of “blue pill” culture. There is no functional difference between the two extremes. They’re both pills and you’re taking one or the other completely uncritically.
Let me see if I can summarise it.
So, you “believe everything the [leftist] media tells you.” You’re going to stay at home, protect yourself, and let the economy tank. You happily relinquish your liberty and rights to free assembly, you submit to government tracking and control, and you trust politicians and shady for-profit organisations to decide what you should do because they know better than you do about your own body and you don’t believe in taking responsibility for your own actions. That’s definitely how it looks from the outside.
On the other hand, if you “believe everything the [right-wing] media tells you,” you’re fixing to get back out there just as we’re starting to learn about this pandemic. You’re ignoring the WHO (fine, they have their problems) and the vast majority of doctors, nurses and emergency responders. You’re doing exactly what the politicians and corporate nobility want, and jump-starting their money machines by going back to contagion-risking business as usual. JP doesn’t need to satirise this because it’s already a satire of itself. That’s how that looks from the outside.
Aren’t we all, ultimately, responsible for the consequences of our own actions? And aren’t we all, ultimately, going to make decisions based on input from some authority or other? What do you think our psyches are actually formed by? I’ll give you a clue, it’s sociocultural input.
Everyone thinks they are the only independent and responsible thinker in a world filled with frightened sheep. Everyone takes a pill.
Oh, and if you’re opposed to “mandatory vaccinations” I have some bad news for you. You’re probably all fired up about this video and won’t want to listen to the “expert”. Well, that sucks.
The flu vaccine is not mandatory, not even in vaccination-happy Finland. I doubt the covid-19 vaccine will be mandatory but I guess there’s still a lot more to learn about the virus so maybe it can be wiped out this way. In either case, I’m sure a lot of people on the left and the right will want it. They didn’t make SARS or swine flu vaccinations mandatory, although I seem to recall that I voluntarily went in for a flu shot around the time of the swine (or possibly avian) flu. I may have been about to go into chemo and surgery, and didn’t want to risk a case of the flu interfering with that, short-term. It was my choice.
There are some vaccinations we’re “forced” to give our kids – you know, for one-off diseases we’re doing our best to eradicate – but the flu is so seasonal and changeable that you can’t give a baby a single shot and make them and the community safe for life – at least this is my understanding, which in turn is the level of knowledge on which I am basing my decisions and I take responsibility for the consequences of that.
So they’re voluntary. Shit, even tetanus shots are voluntary.
Remember when “the government is controlling us with vaccines” was an X-Files plot? Or fringe lunacy of the contrailest kind? Well, here it comes. Into the mainstream. Along with the 5G conspiracy.
Maybe we just let all this run its course. Take the warning labels off everything and let the stupids die. Because this is embarrassing.
Hatboy's Hatstand 
By far the most disappointing thing I’ve witnessed in the past couple of weeks is a British author I rather admire going off the rails on Twitter about how the lockdown is terrible and paving the way for a fascististical ecological policy … like … that would be bad? If we took the environmental benefit of this horrible event and carried some of it forward so maybe we don’t drive ourselves (heh) to extinction?
Like I say. Unfortunate, but not the end of the world. And an opportunity for reflection rather than more mindless reactionism.
A-men brother. I have found very little value in the science-denying resistance to any of these measures. But I’m fighting my own battle here with my family, one of whom IS living with a COVID denier. They say they’re taking it seriously, but at the same time they want my mom to have a totally voluntary move right in the middle of it.
But it’s as you say, we all take in the information we choose to believe. I would just add that some of us are better at figuring out what to believe. What basic principles should drive that information.
And it isn’t politicians. I’m not staying home because of the politicians. I did this before our governor mandated it. I will keep doing it as I see fit as he opens the state up again, has started to already, too soon in the opinion of science.
I will do it until we, you know, ACTUALLY flatten the curve. And that, my friend, IS basic science.
Same as why we haven’t done takeout or anything out other than groceries. Minimize risk. If everyone followed that, we’d stop the spread faster and flatten the curve faster and be done with all this BS faster.
So the way I see it, I’m doing my part to get us out of this nightmare. Far more than the resisters are. And it IS the same old offenders, the anti-vaxxers, the right-wingers, the climate deniers. So they already get the side-eye.
The only way I can be doing the wrong thing is if scientific consensus is wrong, is deceiving us. And if that’s the case, we’re all fucked. So why bother going down that rabbit hole?
Starting at the end, because EX-ACT-LY.
What if the conspiracy theorists are right? What if the Plandemic video is all true? What if the majority of scientists and doctors and educated experts on the planet are part of a plot to turn us into cattle?
Fuck, we’re either all dead, or the plot will succeed and we will become cattle. What’s the alternative? What are any of these stupid fucks actually proposing? What do we do? There’s nothing.
Exactly and I can see the pointless futile frustration in it. If this doesn’t get better soon, I’m already seeing in my own otherwise pretty level-headed parents, it’s going to get bad again because the old prediction about “success will look like an overreaction” will deadass come true. A lot of people won’t follow this approach a second time. They did it this time, apparently, because it was “new and fun”, but now they’ve seen it’s not actually that fun and they miss getting together, they’ll rebel. It will all be for nothing.
Me, I’m in a happy position where I can operate remotely and am pretty okay with it. Yes, even I miss going out and meeting friends and doing all that stuff. It sucks that an assortment of parties have had to be cancelled. I’m all in for the gradual and careful lifting of these restrictions. Fuck it, I want to go to Australia in a month and visit my family. But that’s vanishingly unlikely to happen.
Yes, I’m in a lucky position and I know a lot of people are hurting way more than I am. I get the place of frustration and superiority that I think JP was coming from in his video. It stings a bit because this time his brilliant satire is aimed a bit closer to my own behaviours and thought processes. I accept that. I don’t hate him because of it. I think ultimately he’s going to take care. I am worried that a lot of the demonstrably awful people he’s given a voice to will not, but I’m also selfishly relieved that many of them seem to be in the US. I’m just sorry that you, and a lot of other folks I care about, also are.
Absolutely. I’m glad I had this very compelling reason to switch to a working-from-home model and that I’m not driving so much anymore. It should not have taken a global pandemic for this to occur. And there is nothing I can do about the international borders and airlines, that is out of my league to deal with. I can only accept. Protesting won’t help. If I thought they were wrong, you’d better believe I’d be complaining, but otherwise … ehh.
But I don’t think they’re wrong. I think it’s the right call. I feel like it would be selfish to complain.
Then again, I feel that way about people who complain about taxes as well. Shit, I complain about taxes, and I get annoyed when I need to pay extra, and I do what I can within the system to pay a fair amount (which the mega-wealthy, we all know, do not). But I accept that it’s selfish to complain. I know how much I have benefitted from the Finnish government’s aid. And will continue to benefit. When I see people complaining about it, I think “good, I hope they raise your taxes specifically, you’re a selfish braindead cunt.”
It’s an angry time right now.
Quite right.
completely off topic cause i’m in FB Jail.
Again? You’re incorrigible.
And I should promote this. #AllWheelOfTimeAllTheTime
So I was already thinking about this Sears guy again last night, trying to sleep, and then my desire to post something more was set aflame by my boss sharing an article about the “cost-benefit analysis” (what we do) of Australia’s COVID response. Basically it showed that by the metrics we use, the worst-case pandemic scenario cost less in the value of life (yes we have a valuation for that) than the loss in GDP Australia suffered, by a large degree.
I mean, so much to say there. In brief, the GDP will be back, the economic hit doesn’t affect the same people the loss of life does, “opening up again” likewise…profits to the top, death to the workers. SSDD. I did respond, in more detail.
But it got me thinking more about all the pressure from all directions, even good people like my boss (his mind and heart really are in the right place politically), and this Sears guy. Not having watched his video because I refuse to give it traffic, but your summary:
“So, you “believe everything the [leftist] media tells you.” You’re going to stay at home, protect yourself, and let the economy tank. You happily relinquish your liberty and rights to free assembly, you submit to government tracking and control, and you trust politicians and shady for-profit organisations to decide what you should do because they know better than you do about your own body and you don’t believe in taking responsibility for your own actions. That’s definitely how it looks from the outside.”
So, I don’t think this amalgam represents any human being in America. I’ll stick with America because it’s what I know. First thing I know is the media isn’t leftist. Fuck’s sake, did anyone pay attention to how Bernie was treated the past year?
The economy would “tank” less if we all did the responsible thing only briefly. Instead we have this mess of a system where the country and the states can play off each other, and everyone is gaming the politics for their own benefit. There’s no central authority to be found anywhere, and to pretend we’ve been sheep for one is ridiculous given that.
Trump has sent 3 different messages. He keeps whining about politics and inciting riots, in his “private life” side. His administration pretends to be taking it seriously with federal guidelines to shut down until certain key metrics are met (correct ones), but that is not done with force. They’re just guidelines. And then the third, middle path, is leaving everything up to the states.
So I ask Mr. Sears, what authority am I following like a sheep again? I’m doing what *I* think is right in these times, even though I’m doing much of what he whinges about.
But I digress, the economy tanking? What, the stock market? It tanked for a while, but bounced back 50% and is irritatingly hovering now despite the pain in America. And also fuck the stock market. What else does he mean? Enclosed spaces where we might crowd together? It makes sense to do that right now? I mean honestly. I would do what I’m doing without government telling me what to do, in fact I kind of am. But really, was there a way we wage slaves could save the economy and ourselves? No, there wasn’t. Corporations won’t help keep us safe. So we have to stay away from work, by and large.
Free assembly? I wonder if there’s any conditions where he would see that’s a silly “right” to insist on. What if there was a dirty bomb exploded in NYC? Would it be acceptable to make people stay away then? Only a moron who doesn’t know the horror of this virus would whine about “free assembly” right now. Work is one thing, going to a movie? Come on.
Government tracking and control? That’s what the Republicans are doing now, with the new Patriot Act expansion. Now they want internet tracking. You don’t get to foist that on the LEFT. We are 100% opposed to that. So now we know he’s an idiot, like so many who used to be on the left and realized beating on the left was more profitable. I won’t name the names this time, but Hatboy knows who is on my list with that one. Anyway, fuck that point, it’s a lie. We don’t want government tracking and control.
Reposting, “you trust politicians and shady for-profit organisations to decide what you should do because they know better than you do about your own body”
Actually from what I can tell, they don’t. They’re far too concerned on that economy tanking shit you mentioned before. Even the good ones. And fuck, did anyone see the Michigan Supreme Court overruled the governor trying to extend the stay at home order? Talk about shady. And you know, it does appear a lot of people don’t know what’s best for their own body, so that’s a weak point anyway.
“and you don’t believe in taking responsibility for your own actions.”
Responsibility would be staying home to limit the spread of this virus. So no, another point fully rejected. When you gather and scream and wave guns in the middle of this, it’s not just your body that might suffer. Are you going to take responsibility for those other 3 people you gave COVID to? No, you’re not. So fuck you. We ARE the responsible ones. You can’t take responsibility for irresponsible actions.
“That’s definitely how it looks from the outside.”
To a lunatic. And fuck how it “looks”. What about how it IS.
I’ll read the Riddlespawn thing later, very busy day but had to vent this.
Great comment, thanks for posting it all here, let me attempt to do it justice.
First, let me preface by saying that the Sears video made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t want to knee-jerk at it by being immediately damning or critical. Like with the Planet of the Humans documentary, I felt that yes, there was a lot I could disagree with there, but nothing was served by just dismissing it. The best way, as you’ve done here, is to confront the narrative being put forward, and address it with facts.
It made me uncomfortable, because I have laughed at Sears’s take-downs before. I felt they were pretty harmless, but in truth they were just attacking people I didn’t agree with which made them fair game. Coconut oil, vegans, all that. It was funny. But once you start with the red pill (literally), it doesn’t matter if you’re being satirical. It’s impossible to tell anymore and the right don’t care.
So yes, I was attempting to frame my own response and police myself. Probably too much. I found it, on a shallow level, to be amusing, but on every deeper level it was scary.
I haven’t heard much myself. I wonder how New Zealand is going.
Over here we’re sending our kids back to school and it’s worrying. We have a “here’s the latest set of orders” meeting with management tomorrow at work (remotely) so we’ll see what they have to say.
All this is just by way of a tangent though. Carry on.
Full agreement from me.
I do think he’s a good guy, but you know me – I have some pretty right-wing family and friends who I also think are good people. I can only fall back on my usual hope, which is that when the time comes for actual action, these good people prove me right instead of wrong. We’re inching closer, I think, to that day – and nobody saw it happening in quite this way. The universe’ll surprise you.
Yeah, to clarify, this was the person he was pretending to be – and playing it as straight and deadpan as his coconut oil guru or his toxic relationship coach character. I don’t think that person exists either – all the leftists I’ve seen are way more conscious of this shit[1] – but I was outlining the two extremes. There was the ultra-rightist contard response, and the ultra-leftist libtard response. And I guarantee you this: it might be a convenient delusion or strawman for the sake of ideology, but the red pill right do characterise the left like this. I was merely giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying that really was how it looks to them.
[1] I mean give me a break. You think we’ve forgotten the Patriot Act and “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”? You think we’ve changed our position on that? There’s a very clear line between cooperative efforts to save lives (it’s what the leftist libtard progressives seem to be doing all over the world), and allowing yourself to be tagged like a sheep and your every movement tracked. Also let’s not forget that the government doesn’t need to put a fucking chip in you. You have a mobile phone, you don’t have privacy. The government can find out anything it needs to about you. And you carry it around and fill information into it voluntarily.
Oh, I don’t think it does either. But for the sake of their ideology, is it what they see?
Oh yeah, the media is centre-right at best at this stage. And it’s aimed at a ten-year-old’s critical level, so the dumb-dumbs can absorb any poisonous misinformation they choose, and the intellectual literati will loftily ignore it.
Yeah. When I see criticism of “sheeple” doing what the “government” says, I see people with no empathy criticising anyone who is attempting to uphold pandemic amelioration practices, vs. going back to work so these sociopathic fucks can get their nails did. Fuck them.
The “government”, and corporations, are desperately trying to get us to go back into the slaughterhouse. It’s going to be difficult not to. Because everyone wants to be the 25% of workers who live free when capitalism finally runs down. Nobody wants to be the 75% of workers who throw themselves into the gears in order to run it down.
That may be a slightly tortured metaphor. I mean refusing to return to “normal”, and losing your job, thus forcing society’s hand in terms of looking after human beings instead of tending to resources. It’s going to take a lot of people refusing, and being dreadfully punished. I’m not strong enough to be one of them, and I wouldn’t blame anyone else for not being strong enough.
Oh my sweet summer child[2], you know I agree with you there.
[2] Heh, sorry, been watching more Daniel Greene videos lately.
Yes, pretty much exactly what I was saying just above. Agreed.
Yep.
Oh right, you mentioned that. I don’t know that I’d heard of the expansion but of course, any disaster is going to make a totalitarian regime tighten its choke-hold. Especially a disaster that risks a lot of morlocks coming out into the light for a bit, blinking and looking around and wondering why the eloi have all the nice fruit.
Damn it, I was hoping to avoid reaching that conclusion with Sears. But when he straight-up took the red pill, and I saw the response, it was hard to ignore.
*nod*
Again, you know I agree.
I felt I was too deep to honestly say how it is. But all I was trying to do was address the way the leftist was being characterised in this video. Whether or not the people doing the characterising really believed it, or were just projecting or fantasising … I mean I never really believed a coconut oil enthusiast or a vegan believed the shit Sears went on about before, either, but now I know how those groups must have felt when he mocked them and got a lot of obnoxious agreement-comments on his videos.
Sure no worries, hopefully it’ll be a bit of nice light relief for you. But the blog is here for you to express your thoughts, and if this is where your thoughts are right now then this is the topic we’ll focus on.
Never mind, I just looked back in on Sears’s channel and he has ads made by himself suggesting “common sense” alternatives to “political correctness” because political correctness “stifles creativity”. He’s done.
So sad when the fall happens, but yeah that looks like confirmation. And I have to add, the right-wing worries at least as much about political correctness as the left, just over different ideas. Just like big government. They LOVE them some big government in your doctor’s visits.
Of course at the same time, on the face of it I’m sure the “be kind instead of PC” ideology is fine – if you’re already a good person. There’s no actual change in your approach involved. And I’m sure Sears wouldn’t be running around campaigning for a white homeland under the guise of kindness. But you just know that this message is a sweet, sweet siren song to neocon chuds who want to use racial or homophobic slurs and then excuse themselves by saying they a) don’t commit violence, b) have minority friends, c) donate to representative charities.
There is exactly one sort of person who finds political correctness hard to achieve, and difficult to reconcile with being kind. One.
Well and furthermore, political correctness is most accurately an authoritarian term, where the government requires all citizens to be politically correct, as in not questioning the authority. Saying things in a way that doesn’t hurt another human’s feelings is not “political correctness”, as you imply. It’s just not being a dick on purpose.
Exactly! It’s not even a thing progressives insist on. It’s a sensationalised fallacious interpretation of it – a strawman, basically.
If someone saying “that term is an offensive way of referring to this whole culture” is stifling your creativity, have a fucking good hard look at what you’re trying to create.
Also also, the “Karen / Boomer is the new n-word” crowd are actively advocating for political correctness. And they can go fuck themselves.
Agreed on all these recent comments, and that’s an excellent example of right-wing PC. Or at least conservative PC, since not all Boomers identify as right-wing. But they ARE conservative in nature.
Exactly. Both sides have ways of muzzling the opposition. But you don’t see us railing against the whole concept of political correctness as a result.
This reminds me of another point that I saw recently, about how only a selfish and manipulative person will call other people “selfish”, as a way of making them feel bad for asserting themselves. Genuinely kind people don’t call other people selfish (even if they are being selfish!). Well, same goes for genuinely kind people not needing to clap on about how kind they are and how that makes their “jokes” okay.
And don’t even get me started on these motherfuckers quoting Carlin.
But I didn’t mean to blow up the comments. That’s all from me for now.
Well I disagree with that point. Donald Trump is selfish, and I regularly think that of him and many others. Because it is obvious. And because selfishness angers me as someone who wants all to have the best outcome practical, not just the “worthy” few.
But maybe in personal interactions, the projection is more likely to kick in and be revealing?
I can think of daily examples of how I am sure I am not selfish despite thinking of others that way. Especially in these times.
No, I mean exactly, we all know there are selfish people. But using “stop being so selfish” as a weapon against someone, a kind person doesn’t do that.
There’s also the very real possibility that there’s no point in using it against an actually selfish person, because they’re selfish – they won’t care if you call them out. They’ll just get huffy.
Yeah that’s the primary reason I wouldn’t say it hoping to get any result…and really I never say it or comment it. Because selfish people don’t care that they’re selfish.
Wow, looking back on this, that was a pretty epic rant.
It was a good one!
Signpost, for anyone interested:
18 months or so later, and the vaccine still isn’t mandatory but it has been linked to quite a number of social perks that are increasingly denied to the unvaccinated.
And J.P. Sears has gone full-blown fascist clown and is finally appearing on some radars.
A Fascist with Jesus hair…it’s really disconcerting.
White (ginger) Jesus kind of checks out though!
HEY! You’re not a ginger! You can’t call a ginger ginger!
That comment made me immediately go and watch Prejudice by Tim Minchin on YouTube. Although I still believe the correct technical term is Ranga. I’m sure Hatboy will back me up on this, since we had the same childhood, so to speak.
Ranga was indeed the go-to for my circle.
Correct term? I make you hereby an honorary murrican! XD
Glad I spurred you to enjoy that masterpiece, I consider my joke worthwhile!
I always felt slightly betrayed by Tim Minchin’s primary choice of the word Ginger. He’s a Perth boy, after all….. but CCGS, which might explain it….
Yeah, and he was never going to get traction in the Eastern States, let alone overseas, with Perth slang. Take it from someone who knows ;-D
That’s capitalism in action, I guess. Sigh. Ranga still a far superior term. From someone whose genetic material spawned an auburn prince….