Belatedly acknowledging that many Americans are angry about having been subjected to 32 months of destructive lockdowns/school closures, mask mandates, testing and injections (“LSMTVs”), The Atlantic recently published a short essay by Emily Oster, a college professor who urges that “we forgive one another for mistakes made during the past 32 months.”
She’s part of the intellectual class of grandiose narcissists is all. The entire world revolves around her feelings and over fed ego. Her essay was simply a virtual signal to all those in academia, that suffer the same egomania as herself. She’s telling them, hey, even though we were dead wrong about the shamdemic by every verifiable measure, we’re the good people here, we’re the smart people. We deserve amnesty, because we did what we thought was right,and that’s all that matters. Unfortunately, all she did was stir up the emotions of the rational masses. Stirred up all the bad memories for those that got destroyed over these last 3 years. Her essay was actually just what we needed, it’s allowed us to put a new spot light on the all the hateful, hurtful, rhetoric these coronamaniacs spewed with there righteous indignation.
"She’s telling them, hey, even though we were dead wrong about the shamdemic by every verifiable measure, we’re the good people here, we’re the smart people."
I don't think she's acknowledged being all that wrong. Wrong about some details, sure. But note that she's still pushing gene therapy. She seems to think they got a few things right, a few things wrong, and it's all kind of understandable.
"Hey, even though it wasn't a good idea to beat you into a coma last month, I'm still a loving husband. A great provider. I did what I thought was right at the time. Here's some amnesty chocolates. Just don't burn the roast again, honey."
That’s true, poor choice of words. She’s definitely not outwardly acknowledging doing anything wrong. But I do think inside she knows they were wrong, and this was her way of telling all her ilk, hey we did what we thought was right, and we don’t deserve any of the scorn we are now receiving for it. Since more and more people have awakened to the scam and are angry. I can’t fathom any other reason for this tone def essay. Unless it was a total troll job just to get clicks. I also read an interesting substack written by a feminist that lays out a theory she did it because of the massive exodus of suburban moms to the Republican Party over the school closings and forced masking and jab mandates. It was an interesting theory, basically she’s trying to get them back over on her side, because that was the past and we now need to work together to save abortion rights.
I'm not exactly sure *why* she wrote it. But I know *who* she wrote it for: for people from her own (rarified) social circle, and definitely not for you and me. So, what exactly is she trying to communicate to that social circle? It's possible that feminist on Substack was right, though it's hard to tell for sure.
I think Mark nailed it, it's a "trial balooon." TPTB like to float these things out there to sort of take the temperature / read the room and see what the response is, so they can work out just how much they can get away with in the future.
Are they receiving scorn? I guess a lot of them are realizing they damaged relationships more than they realized. Not just with the bourgeoise in flyover country so many of them despise either.
This is a very good point. Sure, she moves in rarified circles. But there was that study (I believe by MIT) that found that the most "vaccine-hesitant" (God, I hate that term) group were the PhDs. Oh, it's only a minority of PhDs, of course. But still. Enough that Ms. Oster probably knows a few people whose friendship and/or collaboration she used to value, and with whom she now either has no relationship, or has a rather strained relationship. Maybe she's trying to somehow work it out, but without actually making amends?
Has she gotten personal feedback on her communication platforms? I don’t FaceCrap or twitter. I would love to know the degree of scorn she has received or is she incommunicado now? I know how I feel about it and what I would say. But others are saying it so well. I just want to slap her around and remove her children from her. Just sayin’.
I understand the sentiment, but I have to push back. Removing children from obnoxious (but not obviously abusive) parents would set a very dangerous precedent. People much more powerful than you may just decide that you're sufficiently obnoxious to have your children (if you have them) taken from you. And that applies to pretty much everyone else as well. Now imagine the chilling effect.
No way ,what happened and it is still happening ,is not in the past .Can the countless dead be brought back to life ?More dead are added to the corpses every day .My brother was murdered in a hospital that is supposed to be a place of healing ,Now if you go there with a flu you are lucky to come back alive .MY brother was killed for money ,he had a price on his head ,called a bounty .Doctors with credentials a mile long warn of the poisons in all vaxxed bodies and the coming wave of death . The harm done is with us now and long into the future .My mind and well being will never be as it once was .Relatives and friends treated each other like the worst enemy ,breaking up family and friendships ,as happened to me and many others to this day .We all know or should know by now the remdesivir ,ventilators and withholding safe . and effective treatment like invermectin is leading to death and it is done right now .Forgiving means asking for more of the same .
I live in France and we went through the same horror here, including a president who declared he wanted to “shit on the non vaccinated until the end” (it is the real meaning of the verb he used “emmerder”).
I will never forgive and never forget! Politicians, pseudo TV experts, artists. No one!
I was sooo disappointed in France. I've lived in a number of countries (one temporary contract and temporary visa after another; it wasn't exactly fun). At some point (about a decade ago), I spent a couple of years in France. It was the best country I'd ever lived in! I was not happy when my contract ended, forcing me to leave. And then they/you elected "Napoleon," and he pulled off this crap. Damn. I was really, really disappointed. More so than with other countries, not so much because other countries were less repressive, but because I had higher expectations for France.
I recall expressing my opinion about France's reaction to the lockdowns, etc, by early on saying "this is the country, these are the people who, BY HAND, brought down the Bastille and caused the destruction of the French monarchy. Surely THESE people will be the ones in Europe to STOP this Covid insanity!"
Unfortunately, we in America are no better, and have evolved into something our founding fathers warned us would happen. We are now "voting" for the oppressor we prefer, thinking we are making a difference. How many of those who both developed and forced this deadly jab will ever be brought to account? How many self-righteous believers who willingly joined the brown shirts and believed all those who refused were to be ostracized, cancelled and lives ruined ever admit they were too willing to sacrifice freedom and liberty? Will they admit they were wrong and beg their cancelled friends and family for forgiveness? Most likely few, and they will happily vote again for those who pushed this poison on the world. Freedom and liberty lost and thrown into the dust piles of history because too many did not value it over tyranny.
Look who owns the Atlantic and it all makes sense. Oster is just another globalist shill.
What we have all endured over the past 3 years is one of the largest cases of Narcissistic abuse ever. For those not familiar with it, look up the many books on Amazon on NA and on tactics of emotional manipulation/mind control. Also Richard Grannon on youtube has excellent stuff on NA. He was very clever during the scamdemic to never actually mention it by name while describing what was going on.
The latest phase of their abuse is Gaslighting...ie pretending it didn't happen. Narcissistic abusers specialize in 'Crazy Making'. Don't fall for their trap and NEVER fight them. That just gives them emotional supply. They're emotional vampires and feed on any form of attention.
You MUST go gray and disconnect from them in every aspect of your life.
I think her effort is mostly attention-hunger and virtue-signalling. There's no contrition, and no awareness of the tremendous harms she and her tribe demanded. She might, however, be conscious of political backlash that's been building. Maybe she's hoping to help Democrats in the upcoming elections.
That was the one saving grace of the masks. It was very easy to see who the truth allies were vs the brainless virtue signalers. While our area did not stay 'locked down' long, the mask mandates went on for over a year in my county. Although MOST stores and venues did not enforce it. So a lot of us just refused to wear them (except in dr offices. I take my mom to her dr appts and grudgingly comply as she does need to see the dr.) and faced the stink eye from the brainwashed. Even today, you can see a smattering of folks still wearing masks in public!
Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022Liked by Mark Oshinskie
What gets me is when she says at the outset, "We didn't know. "
Simply put, you didn't know because any dissenting voices - and there were plenty - were censored!!
I know many people who toed the party line because of who they listened to, and any dispute was some right wing tinfoil hat conspiracy. The powers that be in the mainstream media determined what they would hear and they didn't listen to anyone else.
Oster didn't write this essay for us. She wrote it for people like herself, who disagreed with her on a few details. (Note that she's still promoting gene therapy.)
It's also important to make a distinction between (1) people who had (or at least claimed to have) relevant expertise, (2) decision makers, and (3) people who had neither but pushed for one or another set of policies, despite not having any formal decision making power. The first two groups absolutely do need to be held accountable, at least professionally (and possibly criminally, depending on just how egregious it was). The last group (to which most of us belong) is trickier. What are you going to do about Emily Oster? She wrote some pretty idiotic tweets, and has now produced an idiotic essay, but that's not a crime, is it? For those of us in the third group, it mostly came down to how much trust we had in the authorities and whether we bothered to look for alternative sources of information.
Now, ask yourself this: why would you look for alternative sources of information? If you happened to have relevant expertise, then you might have been able to see that the policies being pushed were completely idiotic. But what if, like most of us, you lacked any such expertise? You might be a naturally suspicious person, but probably, it was simply because you kind of expect the authorities to lie to you. I know I do (I grew up in a post-communist country, and so I have pretty extensive experience with that sort of thing). But the thing is, people like Emily Oster don't. She's a rule follower, and she's been richly rewarded for it. Probably, her entire social circle consists of people very much like her. So, it simply never occurred to her just how deeply the rot ran. (To be honest, I was surprised by the extent of the rot, too. And I never trusted those people to begin with!) And even now, she hasn't noticed the rot. She's just noticed some "mistakes," especially those that affected her and her family directly (such as school closures), but she thinks those are just details, and lookee, we shouldn't get so mad about a missed little detail here or there, right? So, that's why she wrote the essay. And she probably considers people like you and me to be nutjobs to be neutralized.
A quintessential Head Girl (h/t eugyppius). High-IQ midwit, totally well-meaning earnest rule follower. Capable of imposing a stunningly ruthless tyranny from behind a softly smiling mask (intended). The best part, she's sincerely lost to the immense suffering of her own making.
You're right! But the problem is that there are literally millions of people like that. As a practical matter, you cannot hold millions accountable, much as you might want to.
Yes, I know. But it does color my opinion of them. My focus has been on volunteering, donating, door knocking for county legislature candidates who are against mandates and who have publicly said they will never support something like this in the future, and the county exec candidate who actively fought mandates while on the legislature. As it's the local races that we have all learned matter most when it came to most of this stuff. Our state, other than a ~4 week shut down, had no mandates, but left it up to cities and counties to do what they wanted. Our county was pro mandates. Can't control what others do or think, but I can work for sane candidates. We'll see if all this work was worth it tomorrow.
I'm in Europe, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you! When the US goes crazy, its craziness often spreads due to the massive international influence the US has. So, here's to hoping that saner candidates prevail tomorrow. :-)
These "apologies" are starting to bubble to the surface and all at the same time. This is not a coincidence. Clowns like Oster don't just "think this up" on their own. They are tasked to float these trial balloons by PR firms to gauge public sentiment.
This is just the opening salvo in a PR campaign we will likely see over and over again. Most likely this represents testing the rhetoric to determine which phrasing is the most persuasive and effective for gaslighting the population.
It is a disgrace to even be having this discussion at this time. But what else would you expect from narcissistic scumbags?
Further, the perpetrators do not get to decide anything about "sorry" , it is the victims who determine when and if forgiveness is appropriate.
I am personally engaged on a regular basis with numerous victims of various Covid medical murders, for but one example, and I can assure not one of these individuals is thinking about "sorry" they are all seeking justice for the murder of their loved one. I can further attest to the fact that universally they are repulsed by this notion at this point in time.
This is not even an apology, it is more gaslighting. The only thing that should be discussed right now is justice for the crimes that were committed across all sectors of society.
These crimes are still being committed on a daily basis. Millions were killed and millions more have had their lives permanently marred.
'Sorry' ain't gonna cut it.
This notion of "sorry" has gotten to the point of being pathological. To even suggest such a thing at this point is a disgrace and an insult to the millions who have had their lives destroyed forever and the millions who were killed.
Forgiveness of the criminals who have destroyed the lives of an entire generation of children can in fact be problematic. I don't believe we should even be in a conversation about "forgiveness" at this point- we need justice.
Without that these ghouls will do this again and again- they are already planning on it.
"Oops we killed 15 million people and implemented a mass surveillance control grid. Will you please forgive us? If you do, we will give you extra mealworm cupcakes."
I'm of the opinion that there were no mistakes made. This was deliberate and calculated.
I've worked in healthcare for nearly 25 years. I am not a clinician but I'm surrounded by them daily. To see them eschew everything they've learned and known over the course of their careers was appalling to say the least. The only explanation for this is either malice or profound incompetence. Neither of which is very comforting. I subtlety questioned some of them in the hopes a lightbulb would go off in their brains, but to no avail. In regard to the ridiculous three-feet tall plastic barriers with one-inch gaps in between the panels, I said "would you converse with an active TB patient with the same protection in place?" "No" was the answer. Really? This was the plague to end humanity and that was enough protection?
I was also horrified at seeing the population willingly comply with lockdowns and mask mandates. I was sure no one would stand for such a thing. Boy, was I wrong. Thinking about it for any length of time still sends chills down my spine. These are measures we've never undertaken for anything else and were so absolutely foreign to us, yet way too many acted as if this was all normal operating procedure. We have been advised at at any time in the past (at least I haven't) to mask to prevent any airborne communicable infection. A question to ask mask advocates is "we were never advised to do this before, so are they lying now or were they negligent in the past?"
Don't even get me started on the egregious and invasive "vaccine" mandates, some of which still stand and have been given blessing by the Supreme Court (healthcare workers). It is akin to rape and is completely unacceptable.
This has been and continues to be a heinous conspiracy. I don't say these things lightly and I don't want them to be true, but I can come to no other conclusion. I truly believe there will be no formal accountability for these awful monsters who perpetrated this crime against humanity. However, moving forward, laws and even perhaps Constitutional amendments need to be put in place so that they never happen again.
Those plastic barriers (in small stores they’re all branded Coca Cola) drive me to distraction…they’re still in use everywhere where I live but every time I use or watch others….everyone is leaning around them! Good point on to and Measles is more transmissible than Covid yet it wasn’t in use for measles outbreaks….
You are spot on. I thought it was a joke, initially. The measures and lack of PPE were so lacking in longterm care, I figured, yep, this is about par for the crooks at the "CDC". I thought, wait til the drs set these bureaucrats straight. Never happened. All medical and healthcare decisions came from business management, not the DON or medical director. Then I got angry over the 3rd world level PPE we were given (while staff were dancing in full PPE in empty hospitals, claiming they were overwhelmed). Then they actually BROUGHT flu positive people into the nursing homes to deliberately infect the elderly, and kill them off. Prior policy had always been quarantine, no visitors, no admissions til flu passed. They kept elderly people in their rooms for months on end. No HIPPA protection for the unvaxxed, our names were posted in the lounge, and we were forced to submit to twice a week PCR testing, test results left in the lounge for all to peruse. LOL. I thought, people won't stand for this, they will take their elderly out of here. Nope, not ONE. Even evil "Admiral Levine" moved his mother out of a facility into a hotel before sentencing PA nursing home residents to flu exposure. Hubby had surgery last fall, local TV channel claimed the hospital he was in had 26 "Covid cases", and the ICU was overwhelmed. Hubby asked nurse how many were in the hospital, her response? ONE. Hubby told her what he had just seen on the "news". She laughed, and said their ICU was closed, she had been floated out to the surgical floor. She said the staff laugh about the TV media lies about their hospital all the time.
Excellent analysis as usual Mark. I always look forward to your thoughtful pieces.
“Covid intervention damage was just misapplied earnestness.” I want to talk about this sentence.
I have a lot of conversations with people about what this Covid ‘thing’ is really about. There’s some selection bias in that I have a circle (I hope it’s not an echo chamber) of friends who hold similar views to my own. Like your own experience, some people who were friends or at least people who might enjoy conversations with me and me them no longer are.
But I also engage with people who disagree with me. I try to have rational conversations that lead to better understanding. I try to present the arguments that support my position but I also attempt to understand what drives others to hold alternative views. I am starting to see those who disagreed with me for the last two plus years adopt similar (to the jersey switchers) approaches to the crumbling narrative. In short, a “they did the best they could given what they knew” post justification.
For all the reasons set out countlessly we know that this is nonsense. But it is the soft middle ground to which people would prefer to retreat when the game is up. It’s better than the alternative which is to admit that the entire Covid theatre was intentional.
Let us not allow the excuse of ill judged good intentions or simple ignorance or incompetence become established in society because it most definitely was not this. Whether it was eugenics or ongoing preparation for the transition to centralised control of the world is a topic for another time but it absolutely was not unintentional.
Was it just the people at the top? No, that excuse is not going to fly either. There has been expedient complicity through multiple societal tiers throughout the entire period. As an example, qualified doctors who parroted the well worn “safe and effective” advice to innocent patients could not have been ignorant of this untruthfulness. I use this example from my own personal experience after extensive, polite, interrogation of doctors. These discussions have been instructive since they ultimately proved that they would hold the corporate line despite their personal beliefs. If a doctor can live with this betrayal of conscience how much easier can it be for all of the other incentivised bureaucrats, advisors, activists, politicians and media to do the same.
This is and always has been intentional and it is nowhere close to being over.
That's a really thoughful comment, from top to bottom. Yes, Oster is just saying what others have been saying, "e did the best we could,..." It's plainly false but it allows them to feel smart.
People who don't have major regrets about going along didn't see people they knew suffer terribly from this scam. They had their money and their kids were employed and they weren't socially involved enough to be bothered by staying home and watching TV.
Yes, we knew. The CMO of Italy came out very early and stated that the average age of people dying of Covid was 86 and had 3 or 4 comorbidities. THEY KNEW, but seized the opportunity to cause destruction unseen in world history.
But I will assign just as much blame to people (in Canada, that was most of them) who just rolled over and joined the terror. It is the responsibility for individuals to seek the truth wherever it can be found, but they put on the brown shirts of the government-media propagandists and did so gladly. They joined the mob and I can never see them as anything else ever again. They were not made into monsters, they were revealed as monsters.
Amnesty is for groups who have committed crimes. Admit the crimes, apologize deeply and acknowledge every type of mistake openly, offer us some form of compensation, and take ironclad steps to ensure this cannot ever happen again. Then I'll think about amnesty, but not before.
Even Italy didn't lose more than 0.5% of its population to covid, however "generous" you want to be when labeling covid deaths. In three years. Due to the years long gaslighting we forget how non pandemic this plandemic was in terms of deaths.
"They were not made into monsters, they were revealed as monsters."
That somber fact deserves much reflection and repetition. The worst part of the whole contrived scam is not the discovery of the depths of the ineptitude and avarice of our politicians and "experts" -- we should have already seen that coming -- but witnessing the eagerness with which so many of those around us embraced the mob hunger to burn us at the stake for daring to question those so-called experts.
Your distinctions are valid. I thought about parsing those words but many readers don't finish longer stuff. I thought this was long enough already and that refinement wouldn't have justified the extra words.
Please, Mark, never hold back on the extra words. I feel certain that most of us would prefer to read more from you rather than less. (Well, I would anyway, so that must mean everyone else would too, right?)
about ten years ago, an alcoholic acquaintance of mine (not a close friend, just a loose business acquaintance) went on a bender and harassed me for weeks with whining phone calls about the train wreck her life was and begged me to let her stay at my house. i stopped taking her calls, and then she left a long, tearful phone message saying "... we BOTH made mistakes, let's let put it all behind us..." i had nothing to apologise for, and her attempt to dissolve her own responsibility in the waters of "shared remorse" told me pretty much everything i needed to know. i never called her back and haven't heard from her since.
emily oster's plea reminded me of this. emily's apology is not sincere. she (and those she's speaking for) do not comprehend what they have done, are unwilling to face it, and will not change their ways. they cannot be trusted to set policy, give advice or make assessments on anything of importance. the only ones worthy of respect will be those who understand and accept this. the "emilys" should humbly resign from their professional positions or be fired.
Sky, I had a wicked step-mother whose idea of apology was something along the lines of, “I’m sorry YOU took [whatever she’d said or done] the wrong way”. In other words, not apologizing for anything she’d said or done, while at the same time accusing the victim of taking it wrong 🙄
and so she kept doing it over and over again... since you put it in the past tense, i'm guessing she's out of your life now. what a relief.
i'm no fan of the blame game. i prefer taking responsibility. sometimes it is true that there's some responsibility all around and then it's time for everyone to apologise and try to do better in the future. but people like emily and that step mother of yours are just dodging their own responsibilities by shifting it onto their victims. they won't change, so we don't owe them another chance to harm us.
That was her modus operandi the many years we were cursed w/ her presence & yes, the old bag gave up the ghost several years ago, much to our delight. She was absolutely toxic on the front end of our lives when we were kids & then @ the end when she turned our dad against us.
I don’t like blame games either, & altho there have certainly been times I’ve been mad in what I considered righteous indignation, I can usually see my own culpability in a situation when I calm down. And make heartfelt apology
A key difference is that bender-friend didn't try to kill you with genotoxic poison, isolate you for standing up for yourself and locking down you and your children, stripping you of employment.
Same narcissistic personality, just one with a larger soapbox.
Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022Liked by Mark Oshinskie
I want justice, retribution and assurances that none of this will ever be tried again. It will never happen. Emily, the mandaters, the “experts”, the media and Hollywood shills deserve ostracism from civil society.
Seeing that this essay came from The Atlantic, one of the worst of the worst for real covid truth, I'd guess that its really the Atlantic asking for forgiveness with Oster as their mouthpiece. Number six in your list says it all. They aren't sorry for anything. I still read that the Peoples Republics of Canada and California want to bring back mask mandates and I'm sure, more shot mandates. They've learned nothing and aren't looking for truth.
Oster was selected by the elite class to write this as a trial balloon. Don't forget the Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs who was known to spend copious amounts of time with Ghislane Maxwell.
She’s part of the intellectual class of grandiose narcissists is all. The entire world revolves around her feelings and over fed ego. Her essay was simply a virtual signal to all those in academia, that suffer the same egomania as herself. She’s telling them, hey, even though we were dead wrong about the shamdemic by every verifiable measure, we’re the good people here, we’re the smart people. We deserve amnesty, because we did what we thought was right,and that’s all that matters. Unfortunately, all she did was stir up the emotions of the rational masses. Stirred up all the bad memories for those that got destroyed over these last 3 years. Her essay was actually just what we needed, it’s allowed us to put a new spot light on the all the hateful, hurtful, rhetoric these coronamaniacs spewed with there righteous indignation.
"She’s telling them, hey, even though we were dead wrong about the shamdemic by every verifiable measure, we’re the good people here, we’re the smart people."
I don't think she's acknowledged being all that wrong. Wrong about some details, sure. But note that she's still pushing gene therapy. She seems to think they got a few things right, a few things wrong, and it's all kind of understandable.
"Hey, even though it wasn't a good idea to beat you into a coma last month, I'm still a loving husband. A great provider. I did what I thought was right at the time. Here's some amnesty chocolates. Just don't burn the roast again, honey."
That’s true, poor choice of words. She’s definitely not outwardly acknowledging doing anything wrong. But I do think inside she knows they were wrong, and this was her way of telling all her ilk, hey we did what we thought was right, and we don’t deserve any of the scorn we are now receiving for it. Since more and more people have awakened to the scam and are angry. I can’t fathom any other reason for this tone def essay. Unless it was a total troll job just to get clicks. I also read an interesting substack written by a feminist that lays out a theory she did it because of the massive exodus of suburban moms to the Republican Party over the school closings and forced masking and jab mandates. It was an interesting theory, basically she’s trying to get them back over on her side, because that was the past and we now need to work together to save abortion rights.
I'm not exactly sure *why* she wrote it. But I know *who* she wrote it for: for people from her own (rarified) social circle, and definitely not for you and me. So, what exactly is she trying to communicate to that social circle? It's possible that feminist on Substack was right, though it's hard to tell for sure.
I think Mark nailed it, it's a "trial balooon." TPTB like to float these things out there to sort of take the temperature / read the room and see what the response is, so they can work out just how much they can get away with in the future.
Are they receiving scorn? I guess a lot of them are realizing they damaged relationships more than they realized. Not just with the bourgeoise in flyover country so many of them despise either.
This is a very good point. Sure, she moves in rarified circles. But there was that study (I believe by MIT) that found that the most "vaccine-hesitant" (God, I hate that term) group were the PhDs. Oh, it's only a minority of PhDs, of course. But still. Enough that Ms. Oster probably knows a few people whose friendship and/or collaboration she used to value, and with whom she now either has no relationship, or has a rather strained relationship. Maybe she's trying to somehow work it out, but without actually making amends?
Has she gotten personal feedback on her communication platforms? I don’t FaceCrap or twitter. I would love to know the degree of scorn she has received or is she incommunicado now? I know how I feel about it and what I would say. But others are saying it so well. I just want to slap her around and remove her children from her. Just sayin’.
I don’t do facecrap or Twitter either, but I do know she got “ratioed”. She got some “likes” but FAR more comments that said OH NO , NO WAY IN HELL.
I understand the sentiment, but I have to push back. Removing children from obnoxious (but not obviously abusive) parents would set a very dangerous precedent. People much more powerful than you may just decide that you're sufficiently obnoxious to have your children (if you have them) taken from you. And that applies to pretty much everyone else as well. Now imagine the chilling effect.
I agree with you, but I think Janet's comment may have been facetious. Wasn't removing our children from us what THEY wanted to do?
No way ,what happened and it is still happening ,is not in the past .Can the countless dead be brought back to life ?More dead are added to the corpses every day .My brother was murdered in a hospital that is supposed to be a place of healing ,Now if you go there with a flu you are lucky to come back alive .MY brother was killed for money ,he had a price on his head ,called a bounty .Doctors with credentials a mile long warn of the poisons in all vaxxed bodies and the coming wave of death . The harm done is with us now and long into the future .My mind and well being will never be as it once was .Relatives and friends treated each other like the worst enemy ,breaking up family and friendships ,as happened to me and many others to this day .We all know or should know by now the remdesivir ,ventilators and withholding safe . and effective treatment like invermectin is leading to death and it is done right now .Forgiving means asking for more of the same .
I live in France and we went through the same horror here, including a president who declared he wanted to “shit on the non vaccinated until the end” (it is the real meaning of the verb he used “emmerder”).
I will never forgive and never forget! Politicians, pseudo TV experts, artists. No one!
I was sooo disappointed in France. I've lived in a number of countries (one temporary contract and temporary visa after another; it wasn't exactly fun). At some point (about a decade ago), I spent a couple of years in France. It was the best country I'd ever lived in! I was not happy when my contract ended, forcing me to leave. And then they/you elected "Napoleon," and he pulled off this crap. Damn. I was really, really disappointed. More so than with other countries, not so much because other countries were less repressive, but because I had higher expectations for France.
It would not be surprising if someday we learn politicians across the west have been winning elections like Biden in 2020 for a long time.
It is the case. See what’s happening in Brazil, what happened in Ukraine in 2014… The CIA is behind it all.
Yes, RE Brazil: I recently saw a tweet... "Congratulations to Klaus Schwab for winning the Brazil elections."
How unjust would it be if this were true for politicians like Macron and Trudeau:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/french-politician-ex-presidential-candidate-jean-lasalle-says-covid-vaccine-nearly-killed-claims-macron-others-faked-vax-status/
The “elites” got saline. Most of them anyway. Same thing for journalists and most doctors.
I recall expressing my opinion about France's reaction to the lockdowns, etc, by early on saying "this is the country, these are the people who, BY HAND, brought down the Bastille and caused the destruction of the French monarchy. Surely THESE people will be the ones in Europe to STOP this Covid insanity!"
I was wrong.
Well, the French Revolution was not a people’s revolution.
The bourgeoisie of the time used the people to end the monarchy and grab the power.
It is that bourgeoisie that is still in power today.
When we know this, the fact that most of the French people behave as sheep is not surprising.
Unfortunately, we in America are no better, and have evolved into something our founding fathers warned us would happen. We are now "voting" for the oppressor we prefer, thinking we are making a difference. How many of those who both developed and forced this deadly jab will ever be brought to account? How many self-righteous believers who willingly joined the brown shirts and believed all those who refused were to be ostracized, cancelled and lives ruined ever admit they were too willing to sacrifice freedom and liberty? Will they admit they were wrong and beg their cancelled friends and family for forgiveness? Most likely few, and they will happily vote again for those who pushed this poison on the world. Freedom and liberty lost and thrown into the dust piles of history because too many did not value it over tyranny.
Again...another outstanding piece.
Look who owns the Atlantic and it all makes sense. Oster is just another globalist shill.
What we have all endured over the past 3 years is one of the largest cases of Narcissistic abuse ever. For those not familiar with it, look up the many books on Amazon on NA and on tactics of emotional manipulation/mind control. Also Richard Grannon on youtube has excellent stuff on NA. He was very clever during the scamdemic to never actually mention it by name while describing what was going on.
The latest phase of their abuse is Gaslighting...ie pretending it didn't happen. Narcissistic abusers specialize in 'Crazy Making'. Don't fall for their trap and NEVER fight them. That just gives them emotional supply. They're emotional vampires and feed on any form of attention.
You MUST go gray and disconnect from them in every aspect of your life.
Amen!
Oster: Hey neighbor, I think we need to let bygones be bygones.
We: So, you’re gonna stop shooting my dogs and trying to run over my cats in the street?
Oster: Nah, I didn’t say that. I just think we oughta, you know, forgive each other.
We: But I didn’t do anything.
Oster: Yeah, I know. But you *could’ve* done some stuff to me - even tho you didn’t.
We: So you’re gonna stop shooting at my house, and trying to get my company to fire me?
Oster: Oh no - I’m still gonna keep doing that. Just stay inside, and don’t post any misinformation.
Good one Fred!
I think her effort is mostly attention-hunger and virtue-signalling. There's no contrition, and no awareness of the tremendous harms she and her tribe demanded. She might, however, be conscious of political backlash that's been building. Maybe she's hoping to help Democrats in the upcoming elections.
That was the one saving grace of the masks. It was very easy to see who the truth allies were vs the brainless virtue signalers. While our area did not stay 'locked down' long, the mask mandates went on for over a year in my county. Although MOST stores and venues did not enforce it. So a lot of us just refused to wear them (except in dr offices. I take my mom to her dr appts and grudgingly comply as she does need to see the dr.) and faced the stink eye from the brainwashed. Even today, you can see a smattering of folks still wearing masks in public!
What gets me is when she says at the outset, "We didn't know. "
Simply put, you didn't know because any dissenting voices - and there were plenty - were censored!!
I know many people who toed the party line because of who they listened to, and any dispute was some right wing tinfoil hat conspiracy. The powers that be in the mainstream media determined what they would hear and they didn't listen to anyone else.
Oster didn't write this essay for us. She wrote it for people like herself, who disagreed with her on a few details. (Note that she's still promoting gene therapy.)
It's also important to make a distinction between (1) people who had (or at least claimed to have) relevant expertise, (2) decision makers, and (3) people who had neither but pushed for one or another set of policies, despite not having any formal decision making power. The first two groups absolutely do need to be held accountable, at least professionally (and possibly criminally, depending on just how egregious it was). The last group (to which most of us belong) is trickier. What are you going to do about Emily Oster? She wrote some pretty idiotic tweets, and has now produced an idiotic essay, but that's not a crime, is it? For those of us in the third group, it mostly came down to how much trust we had in the authorities and whether we bothered to look for alternative sources of information.
Now, ask yourself this: why would you look for alternative sources of information? If you happened to have relevant expertise, then you might have been able to see that the policies being pushed were completely idiotic. But what if, like most of us, you lacked any such expertise? You might be a naturally suspicious person, but probably, it was simply because you kind of expect the authorities to lie to you. I know I do (I grew up in a post-communist country, and so I have pretty extensive experience with that sort of thing). But the thing is, people like Emily Oster don't. She's a rule follower, and she's been richly rewarded for it. Probably, her entire social circle consists of people very much like her. So, it simply never occurred to her just how deeply the rot ran. (To be honest, I was surprised by the extent of the rot, too. And I never trusted those people to begin with!) And even now, she hasn't noticed the rot. She's just noticed some "mistakes," especially those that affected her and her family directly (such as school closures), but she thinks those are just details, and lookee, we shouldn't get so mad about a missed little detail here or there, right? So, that's why she wrote the essay. And she probably considers people like you and me to be nutjobs to be neutralized.
A quintessential Head Girl (h/t eugyppius). High-IQ midwit, totally well-meaning earnest rule follower. Capable of imposing a stunningly ruthless tyranny from behind a softly smiling mask (intended). The best part, she's sincerely lost to the immense suffering of her own making.
Yes, but it is the people who brainlessly complied who gave the power to those who abused it.
You're right! But the problem is that there are literally millions of people like that. As a practical matter, you cannot hold millions accountable, much as you might want to.
Yes, I know. But it does color my opinion of them. My focus has been on volunteering, donating, door knocking for county legislature candidates who are against mandates and who have publicly said they will never support something like this in the future, and the county exec candidate who actively fought mandates while on the legislature. As it's the local races that we have all learned matter most when it came to most of this stuff. Our state, other than a ~4 week shut down, had no mandates, but left it up to cities and counties to do what they wanted. Our county was pro mandates. Can't control what others do or think, but I can work for sane candidates. We'll see if all this work was worth it tomorrow.
I'm in Europe, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you! When the US goes crazy, its craziness often spreads due to the massive international influence the US has. So, here's to hoping that saner candidates prevail tomorrow. :-)
We seem to be multiplying crazy these days. Might just be our #1 export..... :-)
These "apologies" are starting to bubble to the surface and all at the same time. This is not a coincidence. Clowns like Oster don't just "think this up" on their own. They are tasked to float these trial balloons by PR firms to gauge public sentiment.
This is just the opening salvo in a PR campaign we will likely see over and over again. Most likely this represents testing the rhetoric to determine which phrasing is the most persuasive and effective for gaslighting the population.
It is a disgrace to even be having this discussion at this time. But what else would you expect from narcissistic scumbags?
Further, the perpetrators do not get to decide anything about "sorry" , it is the victims who determine when and if forgiveness is appropriate.
I am personally engaged on a regular basis with numerous victims of various Covid medical murders, for but one example, and I can assure not one of these individuals is thinking about "sorry" they are all seeking justice for the murder of their loved one. I can further attest to the fact that universally they are repulsed by this notion at this point in time.
This is not even an apology, it is more gaslighting. The only thing that should be discussed right now is justice for the crimes that were committed across all sectors of society.
These crimes are still being committed on a daily basis. Millions were killed and millions more have had their lives permanently marred.
'Sorry' ain't gonna cut it.
This notion of "sorry" has gotten to the point of being pathological. To even suggest such a thing at this point is a disgrace and an insult to the millions who have had their lives destroyed forever and the millions who were killed.
Forgiveness of the criminals who have destroyed the lives of an entire generation of children can in fact be problematic. I don't believe we should even be in a conversation about "forgiveness" at this point- we need justice.
Without that these ghouls will do this again and again- they are already planning on it.
"Oops we killed 15 million people and implemented a mass surveillance control grid. Will you please forgive us? If you do, we will give you extra mealworm cupcakes."
No thanks.
Couldn't agree more Allen, they're not sorry. Karma is a bitch, we don't forgive 911, and yes this is worse than Watergate!!!!🤬LETS GO BRANDON
You have so eloquently said everything I most profoundly feel and believe. Thank you so much, Allen.
PR test balloons indeed. These factotums are devoid of any real humanity and will never be sorry.
Yep, we need Nuremberg and the Mossad and a total "deNazification" (yes, that's a thing), to ever be able to work together as a society again
Totally agree. No forgiveness without contrition. Which will not be coming. So.
No justice, no peace.
No amnesty. Only accountability will do.
amnesty is ours to give, and not theirs to demand or even beg
Thats cultural appropriation, Mark 😂
I'm of the opinion that there were no mistakes made. This was deliberate and calculated.
I've worked in healthcare for nearly 25 years. I am not a clinician but I'm surrounded by them daily. To see them eschew everything they've learned and known over the course of their careers was appalling to say the least. The only explanation for this is either malice or profound incompetence. Neither of which is very comforting. I subtlety questioned some of them in the hopes a lightbulb would go off in their brains, but to no avail. In regard to the ridiculous three-feet tall plastic barriers with one-inch gaps in between the panels, I said "would you converse with an active TB patient with the same protection in place?" "No" was the answer. Really? This was the plague to end humanity and that was enough protection?
I was also horrified at seeing the population willingly comply with lockdowns and mask mandates. I was sure no one would stand for such a thing. Boy, was I wrong. Thinking about it for any length of time still sends chills down my spine. These are measures we've never undertaken for anything else and were so absolutely foreign to us, yet way too many acted as if this was all normal operating procedure. We have been advised at at any time in the past (at least I haven't) to mask to prevent any airborne communicable infection. A question to ask mask advocates is "we were never advised to do this before, so are they lying now or were they negligent in the past?"
Don't even get me started on the egregious and invasive "vaccine" mandates, some of which still stand and have been given blessing by the Supreme Court (healthcare workers). It is akin to rape and is completely unacceptable.
This has been and continues to be a heinous conspiracy. I don't say these things lightly and I don't want them to be true, but I can come to no other conclusion. I truly believe there will be no formal accountability for these awful monsters who perpetrated this crime against humanity. However, moving forward, laws and even perhaps Constitutional amendments need to be put in place so that they never happen again.
The whole thing was cloaked under compassion and saving lives from the start. But I realized it was evil. Not loving at all. Full of lies and cold.
It must be very hard and lonely to work in the medical field and to possess a logical mind and functional conscience.
You have my respect.
Those plastic barriers (in small stores they’re all branded Coca Cola) drive me to distraction…they’re still in use everywhere where I live but every time I use or watch others….everyone is leaning around them! Good point on to and Measles is more transmissible than Covid yet it wasn’t in use for measles outbreaks….
And they are filthy.
Needle rape...
TQ for sharing! I'm in education (but not in front of a class) and to my horror and astonishment noticed the exact same compliance.
You are spot on. I thought it was a joke, initially. The measures and lack of PPE were so lacking in longterm care, I figured, yep, this is about par for the crooks at the "CDC". I thought, wait til the drs set these bureaucrats straight. Never happened. All medical and healthcare decisions came from business management, not the DON or medical director. Then I got angry over the 3rd world level PPE we were given (while staff were dancing in full PPE in empty hospitals, claiming they were overwhelmed). Then they actually BROUGHT flu positive people into the nursing homes to deliberately infect the elderly, and kill them off. Prior policy had always been quarantine, no visitors, no admissions til flu passed. They kept elderly people in their rooms for months on end. No HIPPA protection for the unvaxxed, our names were posted in the lounge, and we were forced to submit to twice a week PCR testing, test results left in the lounge for all to peruse. LOL. I thought, people won't stand for this, they will take their elderly out of here. Nope, not ONE. Even evil "Admiral Levine" moved his mother out of a facility into a hotel before sentencing PA nursing home residents to flu exposure. Hubby had surgery last fall, local TV channel claimed the hospital he was in had 26 "Covid cases", and the ICU was overwhelmed. Hubby asked nurse how many were in the hospital, her response? ONE. Hubby told her what he had just seen on the "news". She laughed, and said their ICU was closed, she had been floated out to the surgical floor. She said the staff laugh about the TV media lies about their hospital all the time.
Excellent analysis as usual Mark. I always look forward to your thoughtful pieces.
“Covid intervention damage was just misapplied earnestness.” I want to talk about this sentence.
I have a lot of conversations with people about what this Covid ‘thing’ is really about. There’s some selection bias in that I have a circle (I hope it’s not an echo chamber) of friends who hold similar views to my own. Like your own experience, some people who were friends or at least people who might enjoy conversations with me and me them no longer are.
But I also engage with people who disagree with me. I try to have rational conversations that lead to better understanding. I try to present the arguments that support my position but I also attempt to understand what drives others to hold alternative views. I am starting to see those who disagreed with me for the last two plus years adopt similar (to the jersey switchers) approaches to the crumbling narrative. In short, a “they did the best they could given what they knew” post justification.
For all the reasons set out countlessly we know that this is nonsense. But it is the soft middle ground to which people would prefer to retreat when the game is up. It’s better than the alternative which is to admit that the entire Covid theatre was intentional.
Let us not allow the excuse of ill judged good intentions or simple ignorance or incompetence become established in society because it most definitely was not this. Whether it was eugenics or ongoing preparation for the transition to centralised control of the world is a topic for another time but it absolutely was not unintentional.
Was it just the people at the top? No, that excuse is not going to fly either. There has been expedient complicity through multiple societal tiers throughout the entire period. As an example, qualified doctors who parroted the well worn “safe and effective” advice to innocent patients could not have been ignorant of this untruthfulness. I use this example from my own personal experience after extensive, polite, interrogation of doctors. These discussions have been instructive since they ultimately proved that they would hold the corporate line despite their personal beliefs. If a doctor can live with this betrayal of conscience how much easier can it be for all of the other incentivised bureaucrats, advisors, activists, politicians and media to do the same.
This is and always has been intentional and it is nowhere close to being over.
Que tengas un buen fin de semana Mark.
Thanks, Soy.
That's a really thoughful comment, from top to bottom. Yes, Oster is just saying what others have been saying, "e did the best we could,..." It's plainly false but it allows them to feel smart.
People who don't have major regrets about going along didn't see people they knew suffer terribly from this scam. They had their money and their kids were employed and they weren't socially involved enough to be bothered by staying home and watching TV.
Somos amigos. Hasta la victoria siempre.
well said, TQ
Yes, we knew. The CMO of Italy came out very early and stated that the average age of people dying of Covid was 86 and had 3 or 4 comorbidities. THEY KNEW, but seized the opportunity to cause destruction unseen in world history.
But I will assign just as much blame to people (in Canada, that was most of them) who just rolled over and joined the terror. It is the responsibility for individuals to seek the truth wherever it can be found, but they put on the brown shirts of the government-media propagandists and did so gladly. They joined the mob and I can never see them as anything else ever again. They were not made into monsters, they were revealed as monsters.
Amnesty is for groups who have committed crimes. Admit the crimes, apologize deeply and acknowledge every type of mistake openly, offer us some form of compensation, and take ironclad steps to ensure this cannot ever happen again. Then I'll think about amnesty, but not before.
The most terrifying aspect of the scamdemic was how 99% of the people rolled over and became mini tyrants.
True. It's disturbing how many people who thought thay were well-informed didn't know sh*t.
And, Italy has a disproportionately high population of smokers.
Well, maybe not anymore...
It still does
Even Italy didn't lose more than 0.5% of its population to covid, however "generous" you want to be when labeling covid deaths. In three years. Due to the years long gaslighting we forget how non pandemic this plandemic was in terms of deaths.
"They were not made into monsters, they were revealed as monsters."
That somber fact deserves much reflection and repetition. The worst part of the whole contrived scam is not the discovery of the depths of the ineptitude and avarice of our politicians and "experts" -- we should have already seen that coming -- but witnessing the eagerness with which so many of those around us embraced the mob hunger to burn us at the stake for daring to question those so-called experts.
Oster didn't really define her terms. Amnesty is not the same as forgiveness. Anger is not the same as argument.
I still see her pressing a dimple into her cheek, though, and saying "Whoopsie! Sorry! Can we still be friends?"
Your distinctions are valid. I thought about parsing those words but many readers don't finish longer stuff. I thought this was long enough already and that refinement wouldn't have justified the extra words.
Please, Mark, never hold back on the extra words. I feel certain that most of us would prefer to read more from you rather than less. (Well, I would anyway, so that must mean everyone else would too, right?)
Ask her to define “woman”
🤣🤣
The retard isn’t a biologist.
about ten years ago, an alcoholic acquaintance of mine (not a close friend, just a loose business acquaintance) went on a bender and harassed me for weeks with whining phone calls about the train wreck her life was and begged me to let her stay at my house. i stopped taking her calls, and then she left a long, tearful phone message saying "... we BOTH made mistakes, let's let put it all behind us..." i had nothing to apologise for, and her attempt to dissolve her own responsibility in the waters of "shared remorse" told me pretty much everything i needed to know. i never called her back and haven't heard from her since.
emily oster's plea reminded me of this. emily's apology is not sincere. she (and those she's speaking for) do not comprehend what they have done, are unwilling to face it, and will not change their ways. they cannot be trusted to set policy, give advice or make assessments on anything of importance. the only ones worthy of respect will be those who understand and accept this. the "emilys" should humbly resign from their professional positions or be fired.
Sky, I had a wicked step-mother whose idea of apology was something along the lines of, “I’m sorry YOU took [whatever she’d said or done] the wrong way”. In other words, not apologizing for anything she’d said or done, while at the same time accusing the victim of taking it wrong 🙄
maddening narcissist cleverness.
and so she kept doing it over and over again... since you put it in the past tense, i'm guessing she's out of your life now. what a relief.
i'm no fan of the blame game. i prefer taking responsibility. sometimes it is true that there's some responsibility all around and then it's time for everyone to apologise and try to do better in the future. but people like emily and that step mother of yours are just dodging their own responsibilities by shifting it onto their victims. they won't change, so we don't owe them another chance to harm us.
good that you're free of that toxic relationship.
That was her modus operandi the many years we were cursed w/ her presence & yes, the old bag gave up the ghost several years ago, much to our delight. She was absolutely toxic on the front end of our lives when we were kids & then @ the end when she turned our dad against us.
I don’t like blame games either, & altho there have certainly been times I’ve been mad in what I considered righteous indignation, I can usually see my own culpability in a situation when I calm down. And make heartfelt apology
Good Lord, once when I told my NA husband "You need to say you're sorry", he actually said "You're sorry".
In front of the therapist.
I hope he’s an “ex” unless the therapy eventually helped!
Sounds like MY stepmother!
Wicked witch of the west
A key difference is that bender-friend didn't try to kill you with genotoxic poison, isolate you for standing up for yourself and locking down you and your children, stripping you of employment.
Same narcissistic personality, just one with a larger soapbox.
Good riddance to the bender-friender
absolutely ! that mentality in people who have power takes the problem to a whole new level, and it also feeds that mentality in their followers too.
The pen is mightier than the sword
Use both wisely
I want justice, retribution and assurances that none of this will ever be tried again. It will never happen. Emily, the mandaters, the “experts”, the media and Hollywood shills deserve ostracism from civil society.
Seeing that this essay came from The Atlantic, one of the worst of the worst for real covid truth, I'd guess that its really the Atlantic asking for forgiveness with Oster as their mouthpiece. Number six in your list says it all. They aren't sorry for anything. I still read that the Peoples Republics of Canada and California want to bring back mask mandates and I'm sure, more shot mandates. They've learned nothing and aren't looking for truth.
Oster was selected by the elite class to write this as a trial balloon. Don't forget the Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs who was known to spend copious amounts of time with Ghislane Maxwell.
It's a big club...and we ain't in it....
The club has "no need" for so many humans.