Well this is kinda patronising, esp as it is on Charles's blog - talking about someone rather than to them? I am sure you will have some points to make - I hope they are made with compassion and understanding and not arrogance. I think for a lot of us who were DEEPLY traumatised, cancelled and excluded by the incumbent corrupt govts all …
Well this is kinda patronising, esp as it is on Charles's blog - talking about someone rather than to them? I am sure you will have some points to make - I hope they are made with compassion and understanding and not arrogance. I think for a lot of us who were DEEPLY traumatised, cancelled and excluded by the incumbent corrupt govts all around the world over covid/vaccines/having an opinion/being different etc, there is a natural revulsion/grief at the thought of letting those same people back in - so much so that we are willing to give it to almost anyone but them. You say 'how the focus on "sovereignty" and bodily autonomy / vaccine paranoia during the pandemic acted as the gateway drug to Right-libertarian ideology and Trump-ism' - even in your words, paranoia, "sovereignty", you insinuate some craziness, some abnormality, some extremism - maybe for some it is true it tipped them over an edge - but it is NOT paranoid to want to have control over one's body and what goes into it, to want to have one's opinions and personal research/anecdotal evidence respected and listened to - and not everyone who stood up for themselves went to far-right ideologies and extremes, as you might be suggesting. Can you imagine? I'm in NZ and like Australia, Canada, and Austria, things were far worse for us than many other places where you could still act fairly normally - our once-peaceful, inclusive, intelligent, non-violent country suddenly became military-policed with neighbours ENCOURAGED to dob in their friends and family to the police and govt depts! We couldn't get a haircut, go to the grocery store, go outside to the beach or nature, be with friends or family as they died.
We just could not believe that this outrage, this complete authoritarianism was happening. One of the most damaging things that can happen to a human being is to be completely shunned, ignored and thrown out of the tribe, family, community, world! If you weren't one of these you can't possibly know how it was for so many. So there is a LOT of hurt and a desire for anything but THAT to happen again. Forgive us if we don't play into the mainstream's clever handbook of how intelligent, good, well-balanced people should behave. Yet we are here and stronger. I have found Charles to be well-balanced in his opinions - and open to new thoughts. Yes I'm standing up for him because I'm standing up for myself here too. We were grasping at straws to have anyone hear us, include us, respect us...so many people's lives were ruined and we were watching it with horror, a feeling of complete powerlessness! We were demonised at the very least - made to feel like lepers/idiots (who have been proven right on so many counts now) - by our own families who suddenly didn't see the people they knew and loved any more because society/the authorities told them we were bad people! I'm sure you will have observed this in your works...but please don't tar us all with this same brush because again, you patronise us - some of us react more strongly because we have such a sense of moral justice (CE and myself included), a good moral compass that knows what looks like fairness - and we feel for all those who were hurt and are still hurting. We are not thrilled with the choices before us in terms of political candidates - but for many of us we sense that someone like RFK (much as I detest his Israel stance), will not force us to put crap into OUR bodies, or vaccinate our children - he really does actually care about the health of people...can you not see that that is where so many of us come from? If we had better options we would take them. I can feel my charge as I write this but it is still with many of us due to the ongoing censorship and BS that continues to play out. We know what's on the horizon for humanity if something doesn't radically change!
Here's the thing...everyone has bits of good/bad in them - things we like and appreciate, things we don't. I don't see Charles as a Trumpist at all. He is looking for the best, he is putting out possibilities into the field, he is endeavouring to let go of cynicism and encourage open-mindedness and potential. Thank you for reading if you have come this far. I'm sure someone will come in and take apart what I have written - I haven't had time to be clever about it, more nuanced perhaps but I just felt to jump on and respond. May love, kindness and tolerance be visited upon us all in these times of exciting change and evolution...
Thank you so much, Martine! I'm totally there with you. A quote comes to mind, I think from poet Marianne Moore,(I may be wrong) that brings me back from going down the the dark path of blaming and vilifying others, "The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself. "
Thanks for writing this Martine, I could have written the same. Talk about a failure of empathy and tendency to project (what I see in Daniel Pinchbeck's comments re 'paranoia' and 'sovereignty')
On Facebook, Daniel mentioned that he avoided getting the MRNA injections . I just checked again to see if I had remembered correctly, and yes, the comment is still there, in the midst of an argument about Putin and RFK Jr. The exact quote is “I avoided the nRNA vaccine so my hippocampus should be fine! Thanks for your concern.” Daniel, can you now remark on what seems like a big contradiction in your logic and the logic of your accusations of paranoia in those who chose bodily sovereignty and suffered for it? I had to leave the city where I’d worked as a musician for over 30 years because of my “avoidance” of these injections, and start all over.
I was in NYC during the lockdown, and still don’t know a single person who died of Covid. I do know three people who died suddenly within the previous year—-a former student of mine, very talented and in his twenties, who died in his sleep; a former colleague of mine who was also much younger than me, who died in unclear circumstances, and an uncle who was about to retire from farming, and died of a heart attack the day after his doctor diagnosed him with heartburn. These are people I knew directly and for many years, but once-removed, that number is far, far higher. I think most people can attest to similar experience in the past few years, making it, along with many troubling statistical studies, something that goes far beyond anecdotal. Evidently you had some similar fears, or you wouldn’t have “avoided” the injection yourself. Yet somehow, those of us who are tuned into the larger political implications of this complete inversion of public health principles, and are searching for ways to bring some sanity back into policy making, in a highly charged and imperfect atmosphere, are dangerous?
But I think I kind of get it, now—-he got “A“ vaccine, therefore, he is still “on the side of science.“
Look, I sympathize with the sentiment of wanting to trust, doctors, experts, agencies, and so on. It’s a tough leap to make, that the preponderance of institutional medical advice can be that consistently and systematically wrong, let alone, dangerous, let alone able to deceive/self-deceive on such a grand level. I read the essay Daniel linked in his comments here, and I actually find myself agreeing with maybe 85%, almost 90% of what he says. For instance, I agree that the dangers of Trump presidency are quite self evident, in that those backing him are aligned with the intent to govern in a technocratic and dystopian fashion. Peter Thiel, etc. I doubt very much that Charles Eisenstein is not aware of that.
Where I step off from Daniel’s way of seeing this is when he calls people like Charles Eisenstein, Glenn Greenwald, Russell, Brand, Matt Taibbi… Turncoats. To call someone a turncoat is quite incendiary. That is war talk. When you do that, you were aligning yourself with the kind of establishment thinking that wants to rid itself of all opposition. Hillary Clinton just did an interview in which she proposed the prosecution of people spreading misiformation information, as she defines it. When you align yourself with that kind of thinking, that kind of intent by calling people “turncoats,” you are actually calling for them to be prosecuted… Imprisoned, punished, etc.
Daniel, with the growing powers of technocratic surveillance and control that you yourself express worry about, calls like this are really no joke.
So anyone who disagrees with you, or with the central version of the truth that you yourself profess to have many problems with, you seem to be almost enthusiastic about having them eliminated as threats. Which is the very definition of the kind of totalitarianism that you are worried about. It’s the kind of bullying that does happen in totalitarian states, that you decry.
I’ll be honest, it’s this kind of divisive thinking that makes me feel quite certain there is no political solution at stage in our history. Charles joined with RFK Junior‘s campaign in the hope that a political solution was still possible, and , it seems to me, although I don’t know him, kept that hope alive. as a matter of principle and practice, trying to keep optimism alive.
But it seems clear to me, from the overt calls for censorship, prosecution, assassination, and hate… And these are sometimes very direct… in Daniel’s comments on Charles previous post. I read him saying that, “Charles deserves hate.”—-that whatever happens after the election, and whoever wins, the main concern for the average person, and for fair minded people trying to go about their lives, whether Democrat, leaning or Republican leaning or somewhere beyond or in between, is going to be figuring out how to deal with the flavor of tyranny or totalitarianism that gets brought in. The other main concern is going to be how to deal with the insane levels of back and forth hate, which will likely lead to ever more violence and social disruption. Add in the potential of war on some pretty scary levels, and Charles‘s message is exactly the elixir we need to be drinking. It’s either that or Kool-Aid mixed up by the systemic manipulation of naturally occurring ideological factions.
The whole rotten corrupt unwieldy system needs to collapse and fall - out of the ashes! There is always chaos before a paradigm shift and that's where I believe we are at....we just have to ride the waves, keep our cool and extend love and tolerance - the tremendous division is exactly what the establishment wants - they're warmongers after all! We must hold the vision of 'the beautiful new world we all believe is possible' (thank you Charles...)
Also, apologies for grammer mistakes etc in this long diatribe—I narrated it into my ipad and then went back quickly trying to fix things without much time
Question for Daniel should he care to answer, and anyone else who agrees with the gist of what he says:
Should dissenters like Charles have potential criminal charges brought against them for spreading “propaganda” as Hilary proposed in her recent interview with Rachel Maddow?
What are your thoughts on that? I’m trying to get a read on what kind of thing to expect from left wing thought leaders such as him, under a Harris administration, especially if things ramp up on the Russia Ukraine front and the feeble anti-war movement grows in the US in response.
I wanted to be clear that the article I’m referring to in the above post is not the one Daniel links in the comment to which we are replying. I just looked through that and it is full of fallacious assumptions and deep misunderstandings . Atrocitious and insulting.
So, the one and done, which was then discontinued. No boosters. Meanwhile, younger family members going to college in various dem-heavy states have had to stay current (meaning get multiple mRNA shots) just in order to attend and get their careers started. And mRNA ptoducts are just getting started—big Pharma wants to use them for practically everything despite people like us, and like Daniel, prudently avoiding them.
Just curious about folk who felt “cancelled” when Covid happened…I feel the same about body autonomy but I can also understand how fearful most people were about this disease(whether it was “real” or not doesn’t matter to me…what if it WAS real?) and how awful they felt that neighbors and community members were refusing to do something that was relatively simple, out of what seemed to some people an uncaring, selfish egoism. And some people did refuse to mask for those reasons! Humans can be awfully insensitive. However, at the same time, I found a lot of pro-mask folks seemed unable to understand the fundamental need for autonomy, especially those whose lives were hard and stressful to begin with. So what is going on? We are all misunderstanding the needs of each other(at least a good portion of us) and assuming motives that are often not quite on the mark. We are fearful of each other, certainly, and not without reason…lots of injustice happens every day everywhere it is true. Horrid, terrifying things. Mostly I am sad that the anti-Covid folks couldn’t be more compassionate to those of us who were simply scared stiff, for a pretty good reason! Getting angry at scared people for wanting to stay safe is not a practical solution to peace. And scared people can get very defensive and judgemental, which also doesn’t help foster peace. What fosters peace and good will?
i agree with your comments...rubbing things in people's faces, with glee, self-righteousness or anger when they are clearly insecure and feeling vulnerable is equally insensitive and unkind. And does't help heal the divide...any 'steps toward' is what we can all practise.
Sounds like you are in a narcissist abuse pattern with Charles and RFK sorry . If Charles is supporting Trump or even excusing him, his moral compass is long gone.
The idea that RFK Jnr or Eisenstein will mentor or influence this 78 year old malignant narcissist is self-regrading fantasy on their side. RFK Jnr may not even get a security clearance due to his multiple affairs (blackmail risk). They are being used. Or manipulating themselves for power and money.
What about the trauma to women who cannot now get abortions, even if raped, or the victims of incest in MAGA led states, even if they might die, or their fetus is in distress? The women that MAGA Christo-nationalists and Peter Thiel say (or imply) should not be allowed to vote, that JD Vance says are worthless if they do not have children? ... You must believe there was no real health crisis in which people were dying. I did not experience Covid as a trauma at all, but as something we needed to go through to protect others. And I had school age children who did school from home. We were fine.
Well this is kinda patronising, esp as it is on Charles's blog - talking about someone rather than to them? I am sure you will have some points to make - I hope they are made with compassion and understanding and not arrogance. I think for a lot of us who were DEEPLY traumatised, cancelled and excluded by the incumbent corrupt govts all around the world over covid/vaccines/having an opinion/being different etc, there is a natural revulsion/grief at the thought of letting those same people back in - so much so that we are willing to give it to almost anyone but them. You say 'how the focus on "sovereignty" and bodily autonomy / vaccine paranoia during the pandemic acted as the gateway drug to Right-libertarian ideology and Trump-ism' - even in your words, paranoia, "sovereignty", you insinuate some craziness, some abnormality, some extremism - maybe for some it is true it tipped them over an edge - but it is NOT paranoid to want to have control over one's body and what goes into it, to want to have one's opinions and personal research/anecdotal evidence respected and listened to - and not everyone who stood up for themselves went to far-right ideologies and extremes, as you might be suggesting. Can you imagine? I'm in NZ and like Australia, Canada, and Austria, things were far worse for us than many other places where you could still act fairly normally - our once-peaceful, inclusive, intelligent, non-violent country suddenly became military-policed with neighbours ENCOURAGED to dob in their friends and family to the police and govt depts! We couldn't get a haircut, go to the grocery store, go outside to the beach or nature, be with friends or family as they died.
We just could not believe that this outrage, this complete authoritarianism was happening. One of the most damaging things that can happen to a human being is to be completely shunned, ignored and thrown out of the tribe, family, community, world! If you weren't one of these you can't possibly know how it was for so many. So there is a LOT of hurt and a desire for anything but THAT to happen again. Forgive us if we don't play into the mainstream's clever handbook of how intelligent, good, well-balanced people should behave. Yet we are here and stronger. I have found Charles to be well-balanced in his opinions - and open to new thoughts. Yes I'm standing up for him because I'm standing up for myself here too. We were grasping at straws to have anyone hear us, include us, respect us...so many people's lives were ruined and we were watching it with horror, a feeling of complete powerlessness! We were demonised at the very least - made to feel like lepers/idiots (who have been proven right on so many counts now) - by our own families who suddenly didn't see the people they knew and loved any more because society/the authorities told them we were bad people! I'm sure you will have observed this in your works...but please don't tar us all with this same brush because again, you patronise us - some of us react more strongly because we have such a sense of moral justice (CE and myself included), a good moral compass that knows what looks like fairness - and we feel for all those who were hurt and are still hurting. We are not thrilled with the choices before us in terms of political candidates - but for many of us we sense that someone like RFK (much as I detest his Israel stance), will not force us to put crap into OUR bodies, or vaccinate our children - he really does actually care about the health of people...can you not see that that is where so many of us come from? If we had better options we would take them. I can feel my charge as I write this but it is still with many of us due to the ongoing censorship and BS that continues to play out. We know what's on the horizon for humanity if something doesn't radically change!
Here's the thing...everyone has bits of good/bad in them - things we like and appreciate, things we don't. I don't see Charles as a Trumpist at all. He is looking for the best, he is putting out possibilities into the field, he is endeavouring to let go of cynicism and encourage open-mindedness and potential. Thank you for reading if you have come this far. I'm sure someone will come in and take apart what I have written - I haven't had time to be clever about it, more nuanced perhaps but I just felt to jump on and respond. May love, kindness and tolerance be visited upon us all in these times of exciting change and evolution...
I wouldn’t take apart anything you said. I’m with you 100%.
Thank you so much, Martine! I'm totally there with you. A quote comes to mind, I think from poet Marianne Moore,(I may be wrong) that brings me back from going down the the dark path of blaming and vilifying others, "The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself. "
Thanks for writing this Martine, I could have written the same. Talk about a failure of empathy and tendency to project (what I see in Daniel Pinchbeck's comments re 'paranoia' and 'sovereignty')
On Facebook, Daniel mentioned that he avoided getting the MRNA injections . I just checked again to see if I had remembered correctly, and yes, the comment is still there, in the midst of an argument about Putin and RFK Jr. The exact quote is “I avoided the nRNA vaccine so my hippocampus should be fine! Thanks for your concern.” Daniel, can you now remark on what seems like a big contradiction in your logic and the logic of your accusations of paranoia in those who chose bodily sovereignty and suffered for it? I had to leave the city where I’d worked as a musician for over 30 years because of my “avoidance” of these injections, and start all over.
I was in NYC during the lockdown, and still don’t know a single person who died of Covid. I do know three people who died suddenly within the previous year—-a former student of mine, very talented and in his twenties, who died in his sleep; a former colleague of mine who was also much younger than me, who died in unclear circumstances, and an uncle who was about to retire from farming, and died of a heart attack the day after his doctor diagnosed him with heartburn. These are people I knew directly and for many years, but once-removed, that number is far, far higher. I think most people can attest to similar experience in the past few years, making it, along with many troubling statistical studies, something that goes far beyond anecdotal. Evidently you had some similar fears, or you wouldn’t have “avoided” the injection yourself. Yet somehow, those of us who are tuned into the larger political implications of this complete inversion of public health principles, and are searching for ways to bring some sanity back into policy making, in a highly charged and imperfect atmosphere, are dangerous?
Please comment.
He got the Johnson vaccination IIRC. That's not an MRNA one.
But I think I kind of get it, now—-he got “A“ vaccine, therefore, he is still “on the side of science.“
Look, I sympathize with the sentiment of wanting to trust, doctors, experts, agencies, and so on. It’s a tough leap to make, that the preponderance of institutional medical advice can be that consistently and systematically wrong, let alone, dangerous, let alone able to deceive/self-deceive on such a grand level. I read the essay Daniel linked in his comments here, and I actually find myself agreeing with maybe 85%, almost 90% of what he says. For instance, I agree that the dangers of Trump presidency are quite self evident, in that those backing him are aligned with the intent to govern in a technocratic and dystopian fashion. Peter Thiel, etc. I doubt very much that Charles Eisenstein is not aware of that.
Where I step off from Daniel’s way of seeing this is when he calls people like Charles Eisenstein, Glenn Greenwald, Russell, Brand, Matt Taibbi… Turncoats. To call someone a turncoat is quite incendiary. That is war talk. When you do that, you were aligning yourself with the kind of establishment thinking that wants to rid itself of all opposition. Hillary Clinton just did an interview in which she proposed the prosecution of people spreading misiformation information, as she defines it. When you align yourself with that kind of thinking, that kind of intent by calling people “turncoats,” you are actually calling for them to be prosecuted… Imprisoned, punished, etc.
Daniel, with the growing powers of technocratic surveillance and control that you yourself express worry about, calls like this are really no joke.
So anyone who disagrees with you, or with the central version of the truth that you yourself profess to have many problems with, you seem to be almost enthusiastic about having them eliminated as threats. Which is the very definition of the kind of totalitarianism that you are worried about. It’s the kind of bullying that does happen in totalitarian states, that you decry.
I’ll be honest, it’s this kind of divisive thinking that makes me feel quite certain there is no political solution at stage in our history. Charles joined with RFK Junior‘s campaign in the hope that a political solution was still possible, and , it seems to me, although I don’t know him, kept that hope alive. as a matter of principle and practice, trying to keep optimism alive.
But it seems clear to me, from the overt calls for censorship, prosecution, assassination, and hate… And these are sometimes very direct… in Daniel’s comments on Charles previous post. I read him saying that, “Charles deserves hate.”—-that whatever happens after the election, and whoever wins, the main concern for the average person, and for fair minded people trying to go about their lives, whether Democrat, leaning or Republican leaning or somewhere beyond or in between, is going to be figuring out how to deal with the flavor of tyranny or totalitarianism that gets brought in. The other main concern is going to be how to deal with the insane levels of back and forth hate, which will likely lead to ever more violence and social disruption. Add in the potential of war on some pretty scary levels, and Charles‘s message is exactly the elixir we need to be drinking. It’s either that or Kool-Aid mixed up by the systemic manipulation of naturally occurring ideological factions.
The whole rotten corrupt unwieldy system needs to collapse and fall - out of the ashes! There is always chaos before a paradigm shift and that's where I believe we are at....we just have to ride the waves, keep our cool and extend love and tolerance - the tremendous division is exactly what the establishment wants - they're warmongers after all! We must hold the vision of 'the beautiful new world we all believe is possible' (thank you Charles...)
Also, apologies for grammer mistakes etc in this long diatribe—I narrated it into my ipad and then went back quickly trying to fix things without much time
Question for Daniel should he care to answer, and anyone else who agrees with the gist of what he says:
Should dissenters like Charles have potential criminal charges brought against them for spreading “propaganda” as Hilary proposed in her recent interview with Rachel Maddow?
What are your thoughts on that? I’m trying to get a read on what kind of thing to expect from left wing thought leaders such as him, under a Harris administration, especially if things ramp up on the Russia Ukraine front and the feeble anti-war movement grows in the US in response.
I wanted to be clear that the article I’m referring to in the above post is not the one Daniel links in the comment to which we are replying. I just looked through that and it is full of fallacious assumptions and deep misunderstandings . Atrocitious and insulting.
So, the one and done, which was then discontinued. No boosters. Meanwhile, younger family members going to college in various dem-heavy states have had to stay current (meaning get multiple mRNA shots) just in order to attend and get their careers started. And mRNA ptoducts are just getting started—big Pharma wants to use them for practically everything despite people like us, and like Daniel, prudently avoiding them.
same in NZ - it's beyond disgusting
ah that explains a lot!
Thank you for this. I'm with you as well.
Just curious about folk who felt “cancelled” when Covid happened…I feel the same about body autonomy but I can also understand how fearful most people were about this disease(whether it was “real” or not doesn’t matter to me…what if it WAS real?) and how awful they felt that neighbors and community members were refusing to do something that was relatively simple, out of what seemed to some people an uncaring, selfish egoism. And some people did refuse to mask for those reasons! Humans can be awfully insensitive. However, at the same time, I found a lot of pro-mask folks seemed unable to understand the fundamental need for autonomy, especially those whose lives were hard and stressful to begin with. So what is going on? We are all misunderstanding the needs of each other(at least a good portion of us) and assuming motives that are often not quite on the mark. We are fearful of each other, certainly, and not without reason…lots of injustice happens every day everywhere it is true. Horrid, terrifying things. Mostly I am sad that the anti-Covid folks couldn’t be more compassionate to those of us who were simply scared stiff, for a pretty good reason! Getting angry at scared people for wanting to stay safe is not a practical solution to peace. And scared people can get very defensive and judgemental, which also doesn’t help foster peace. What fosters peace and good will?
i agree with your comments...rubbing things in people's faces, with glee, self-righteousness or anger when they are clearly insecure and feeling vulnerable is equally insensitive and unkind. And does't help heal the divide...any 'steps toward' is what we can all practise.
Sounds like you are in a narcissist abuse pattern with Charles and RFK sorry . If Charles is supporting Trump or even excusing him, his moral compass is long gone.
The idea that RFK Jnr or Eisenstein will mentor or influence this 78 year old malignant narcissist is self-regrading fantasy on their side. RFK Jnr may not even get a security clearance due to his multiple affairs (blackmail risk). They are being used. Or manipulating themselves for power and money.
What about the trauma to women who cannot now get abortions, even if raped, or the victims of incest in MAGA led states, even if they might die, or their fetus is in distress? The women that MAGA Christo-nationalists and Peter Thiel say (or imply) should not be allowed to vote, that JD Vance says are worthless if they do not have children? ... You must believe there was no real health crisis in which people were dying. I did not experience Covid as a trauma at all, but as something we needed to go through to protect others. And I had school age children who did school from home. We were fine.