Maaan, all due respect and all that but I'm here to point out you're raging.
Not here to discuss the pros and cons, raging is sometimes fun, sometimes highly effective, but it sure does one thing most every time: it distorts your outlook. I know you asked for additional stuff for the list of horrors, but I'd like to talk you into toning i…
Maaan, all due respect and all that but I'm here to point out you're raging.
Not here to discuss the pros and cons, raging is sometimes fun, sometimes highly effective, but it sure does one thing most every time: it distorts your outlook. I know you asked for additional stuff for the list of horrors, but I'd like to talk you into toning it down a little, because there's a real risk of losing credibility by going to unwarranted extremes. And we don't want that.
The very first sentence is alienating for the reader, sounds like an opening to a clichéd moral harangue: "oh, we are all so crap, why ain't we better??". Granted, there are many ways in which a circumspect thinker may choose to ascribe agency to a society, and the way you do that will have a large impact on what the phrase "a society dedicated to iatrogenocide" will end up meaning, but you know, the ordinary understanding of 'dedication' and 'society' does suggest the meaning that all or most people want to see a significant portion of their fellows killed off by some weaponised disease. Including your readers, most of whom, after all, are likely to be members of society.
Let's check out the claims.
As for weaponised batshit leading to the plague, your first point, I have no quarrel, that seems by far the likeliest explanation... but it does matter a great deal whether it was an accidental or intentional release. I think human greed, short-sightedness, ignorance and narcissism is in plentiful supply to explain an accidental spill. Which, if my memory serves me right, had been happening with tedious regularity already at all high-grade bio-weapons facilities forever, even before this unfortunate incident.
Your second point - could you explain a little (or point me at the article where you covered this bit)? Is this about Ivermectin? I've heard about people who recovered with it very quickly, but also people who still ended up on plastic lungs and then recovered with the protocol treatment - or did not. I still think motivated self-interest coupled with narcissistic attitudes to consequences, responsibility and luck are quite enough to explain what happened. Is it comforting to posit a cabal of evil geniuses who are behind it all? Is it even scarier to think that a large bunch of bog-standard humans with a pinch of rather boring sociopaths are quite capable of bringing about the mayhem we've witnessed?
Point the third: hospitals use the wrong protocols because of the profit-orientation of pharma companies, the unhealthy relationship between them and medical research and government as a whole, and because they are told to. This does not tell us that "the best-trained medical professionals are so blinded by ideology that they cannot transcend failed paradigms", for a number of reasons. Firstly, most hospitals are not staffed by "best-trained medical professionals". Secondly, almost everyone is blinded by ideology, we already know that, and those who think they are not should be particularly cautious: there are specialised, more sophisticated ideologies going around that are designed to make them think so. (Check out Zizek's amazing movie, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology on this subject). In addition, when paradigm-shift occurs, very few people ever "transcend" the old one - adherents of the old paradigm typically need to die out for the new paradigm to come to dominance.
I'll pass on point 4: I don't have the skills to check the statement, and don't care to make the heavy investment of time and attention to get them. My sense of things suggests (and has been suggesting for 25 years or so) that vaccines are a pretty risky bet, and the stuff I read (partly thanks to you) about non-specifi long-term side effects rings true, but again, I can see this as a stochastic process without any real perps apart from a small bunch of ridiulously rich folks greeding way too much the way they have always done.
As for the mainstream media (no. 5), firstly, the gossiping of low-grade mercenaries has never been a reliable source of information, but secondly, there are (a small minority of) dedicated and idealistic journalists who daily weigh the balance between doing unwholesome work for the essentially misleading global news business and hardly being read by anyone at all: the mainstream media does not have to lie every single day to make its contribution to keeping the general population dazed and confused: in fact, a tendentious mixing of truth with disinformation works better.
No. 6: come on, the Chinese didn't do all that badly: their draconian isolation methods reduced the impact, I'm pretty sure :)
No. 7 (the spectre of surveillance capitalism): I think it is overstated, and on purpose (you know, keep them dazed and confused and helpless) - in actual fact, the strongest support for the notion that digital profiling is accurate and effective comes from the marketing blurb of social media companies - not a reliable source at all.
Your claim no. 8, is just exaggerated and when you say " incapable of logic, reason, common sense, and critical thinking" you actually seem to mean "disagree with you on important stuff". You know, all of these things (logic, reason, crit thinking) are matters of degree. There is a massive epidemic of learned helplessness - particularly in the 'North' - the centre of the global machine, what Ivan Illich called the "A-deal regions" - but even there, people mostly don't really want to follow malevolent orders (that notion is an attractive tool for feeling superior, and for laying the blame firmly on others). They are misled by a very complicated social arrangement and the powerful few who are invested in maintaining it into thinking that they are pursuing their self-interest in an enlightened fashion - while in fact they are essentially following orders, or, rather, mostly behaving in a manner that is predictable and profitable for their oppressors, who are, of course, also actively engaged in promoting those patterns of behaviour.
Let me pass mostly on US politics, I live elsewhere. Looking at it from here, "system-critial leftism" is not extinct in the US, although it is mostly the luxury pursuit of a small minority who do not communicate well with outsiders.
The last thing hurts me the most: you know the term "rebel alliance" comes from a massive for-profit media franchise of several decades standing that teaches mythological thinking to generation after generation in a highly effective manner? You know that Star Wars is not an accurate representation of human affairs, right? Maybe the reason people in their right minds (i.e. people critical of the current setup - post-industrial networked capitalism, as a first approximation) don't want to 'take power' as you put it is that they realise that it would not do them any good. The very institution of government as we know it is ripe for replacement. Meaningful action is often less than spectacular, but my bet is with becoming as autonomous as possible while participating in and building autonomous human networks. For a literary vision that actually features human beings instead of superhuman (and subhuman) puppets, I cannot recommend Cory Doctorow's Walkaway enough.
Maaan, all due respect and all that but I'm here to point out you're raging.
Not here to discuss the pros and cons, raging is sometimes fun, sometimes highly effective, but it sure does one thing most every time: it distorts your outlook. I know you asked for additional stuff for the list of horrors, but I'd like to talk you into toning it down a little, because there's a real risk of losing credibility by going to unwarranted extremes. And we don't want that.
The very first sentence is alienating for the reader, sounds like an opening to a clichéd moral harangue: "oh, we are all so crap, why ain't we better??". Granted, there are many ways in which a circumspect thinker may choose to ascribe agency to a society, and the way you do that will have a large impact on what the phrase "a society dedicated to iatrogenocide" will end up meaning, but you know, the ordinary understanding of 'dedication' and 'society' does suggest the meaning that all or most people want to see a significant portion of their fellows killed off by some weaponised disease. Including your readers, most of whom, after all, are likely to be members of society.
Let's check out the claims.
As for weaponised batshit leading to the plague, your first point, I have no quarrel, that seems by far the likeliest explanation... but it does matter a great deal whether it was an accidental or intentional release. I think human greed, short-sightedness, ignorance and narcissism is in plentiful supply to explain an accidental spill. Which, if my memory serves me right, had been happening with tedious regularity already at all high-grade bio-weapons facilities forever, even before this unfortunate incident.
Your second point - could you explain a little (or point me at the article where you covered this bit)? Is this about Ivermectin? I've heard about people who recovered with it very quickly, but also people who still ended up on plastic lungs and then recovered with the protocol treatment - or did not. I still think motivated self-interest coupled with narcissistic attitudes to consequences, responsibility and luck are quite enough to explain what happened. Is it comforting to posit a cabal of evil geniuses who are behind it all? Is it even scarier to think that a large bunch of bog-standard humans with a pinch of rather boring sociopaths are quite capable of bringing about the mayhem we've witnessed?
Point the third: hospitals use the wrong protocols because of the profit-orientation of pharma companies, the unhealthy relationship between them and medical research and government as a whole, and because they are told to. This does not tell us that "the best-trained medical professionals are so blinded by ideology that they cannot transcend failed paradigms", for a number of reasons. Firstly, most hospitals are not staffed by "best-trained medical professionals". Secondly, almost everyone is blinded by ideology, we already know that, and those who think they are not should be particularly cautious: there are specialised, more sophisticated ideologies going around that are designed to make them think so. (Check out Zizek's amazing movie, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology on this subject). In addition, when paradigm-shift occurs, very few people ever "transcend" the old one - adherents of the old paradigm typically need to die out for the new paradigm to come to dominance.
I'll pass on point 4: I don't have the skills to check the statement, and don't care to make the heavy investment of time and attention to get them. My sense of things suggests (and has been suggesting for 25 years or so) that vaccines are a pretty risky bet, and the stuff I read (partly thanks to you) about non-specifi long-term side effects rings true, but again, I can see this as a stochastic process without any real perps apart from a small bunch of ridiulously rich folks greeding way too much the way they have always done.
As for the mainstream media (no. 5), firstly, the gossiping of low-grade mercenaries has never been a reliable source of information, but secondly, there are (a small minority of) dedicated and idealistic journalists who daily weigh the balance between doing unwholesome work for the essentially misleading global news business and hardly being read by anyone at all: the mainstream media does not have to lie every single day to make its contribution to keeping the general population dazed and confused: in fact, a tendentious mixing of truth with disinformation works better.
No. 6: come on, the Chinese didn't do all that badly: their draconian isolation methods reduced the impact, I'm pretty sure :)
No. 7 (the spectre of surveillance capitalism): I think it is overstated, and on purpose (you know, keep them dazed and confused and helpless) - in actual fact, the strongest support for the notion that digital profiling is accurate and effective comes from the marketing blurb of social media companies - not a reliable source at all.
Your claim no. 8, is just exaggerated and when you say " incapable of logic, reason, common sense, and critical thinking" you actually seem to mean "disagree with you on important stuff". You know, all of these things (logic, reason, crit thinking) are matters of degree. There is a massive epidemic of learned helplessness - particularly in the 'North' - the centre of the global machine, what Ivan Illich called the "A-deal regions" - but even there, people mostly don't really want to follow malevolent orders (that notion is an attractive tool for feeling superior, and for laying the blame firmly on others). They are misled by a very complicated social arrangement and the powerful few who are invested in maintaining it into thinking that they are pursuing their self-interest in an enlightened fashion - while in fact they are essentially following orders, or, rather, mostly behaving in a manner that is predictable and profitable for their oppressors, who are, of course, also actively engaged in promoting those patterns of behaviour.
Let me pass mostly on US politics, I live elsewhere. Looking at it from here, "system-critial leftism" is not extinct in the US, although it is mostly the luxury pursuit of a small minority who do not communicate well with outsiders.
The last thing hurts me the most: you know the term "rebel alliance" comes from a massive for-profit media franchise of several decades standing that teaches mythological thinking to generation after generation in a highly effective manner? You know that Star Wars is not an accurate representation of human affairs, right? Maybe the reason people in their right minds (i.e. people critical of the current setup - post-industrial networked capitalism, as a first approximation) don't want to 'take power' as you put it is that they realise that it would not do them any good. The very institution of government as we know it is ripe for replacement. Meaningful action is often less than spectacular, but my bet is with becoming as autonomous as possible while participating in and building autonomous human networks. For a literary vision that actually features human beings instead of superhuman (and subhuman) puppets, I cannot recommend Cory Doctorow's Walkaway enough.
But love ya! Keep up the good work! :)