Comical Ollie tweets about the demise of a compadre of ours (presumably)
Posted by johnlilburne on May 26, 2023, 2:53 pm
Oliver Kamm @OliverKamm
Won’t give his name but I learnt today that a longstanding correspondent of mine (I never replied) has died of Covid. He was a 9/11 Truther & anti-vaxxer. He was past 80 and might have died anyway but I still think of him as a victim. There are real costs to conspiracy theories.
Richard Mayo @RichardPMayo Agreed Oliver. On a related note Piers Corbyn has also recently sent messages on his Telegram channel saying he is very ill in hospital. He says he has pneumonia and has refused flu and covid tests but the symptoms he described strongly suggest covid.
Ha! I forgot about all those messages Rhis sent to Kamm daring him to sue for libel so he could show him up in court. Of course he never replied, because he didn't have a leg to stand on. Even now, with no possibility of comeback, he resorts to cheap smears rather than rebutting any specific arguments. Coward.
I work in an environment where every other young patient I look after is predicted to die, and the reality is fairly close to the expectation. Since the middle of the last century death rates in children have fallen so low that something that was commonplace, a lifelong close personal experience of death, has become an infrequent experience until the far later years of life. It seems to me that as a culture we don't have systemised grief behaviours and very often folks don't know how they are supposed to deal with it.
Last week I looked after 5 people who died and I spend a lot of time thinking about infinity and our place in it, probably as a coping strategy.
I would say now, it doesn't do well to speak ill of the dead. First, as a courtesy I would be grateful for myself, but also because it does speak of a small mindset to score points off someone who has departed back into a cycle of some sort.
But.......
Just had a look on Off Guardian - one of the headline articles
Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus
starts -
"I’ve grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been in circulation, causing massive scale illness and death......."
You may disbelieve me and think that I'm an elaborate psyop but I do think that during the peak of waves 1 and 2 many people came to harm because they believed the disinformation, that there was no virus or that it was not harmful. We could have managed with public safety campaign and closing borders internationally, when I was loading up my trolley with cans two weeks before the illness was in the UK.
That didn't in part happen because of denial pushed by corporate press but also because of alternate media pushing that line and made it more difficult internationally to institute basic public health measures. Many young people died of respiratory failure because of misinformation.
I ask myself qui bono.
We were overwhelmed by a novel pandemic respiratory virus. The nhs, until then just about keeping it's head above water broke, and is still broken.
Lots of rich people made a lot of money, and are still making losts of money but.....
Denial also seems lucrative and for me one very obvious effect is the effective fracturing of any resistance to the corporatists by pushing convincing but wrong headed conspiracy. This board a case in point.
Kamm in support of imperialism pushes an alternative that is just as false and certainly more orders of magnitude more harmful. I think his comment is cheap, for the reasons I give above. However, I think in more ways than he intends, we are victims of unfiltered conspiracy.
Cheers, dan
Re: Comical Ollie tweets about the demise of a compadre of ours (presumably)
'It seems to me that as a culture we don't have systemised grief behaviours and very often folks don't know how they are supposed to deal with it.' - yup, it's another aspect of reality hidden from most people and never discussed until the time they have to face it, unprepared, silenced by taboos. Some people take solace in christian rituals but even those are largely absent from most peoples' lives nowadays. Mass media and popular culture is no help of course. You might find this guy's work helpful (I think this was the vid Rhis was responding to with his message I posted in the thread below):
'I do think that during the peak of waves 1 and 2 many people came to harm because they believed the disinformation, that there was no virus or that it was not harmful.' - I still don't fully know what to think about this, but to put the blame on disinformation for me doesn't tell the whole story. Why were people willing to believe the disinfo, and conversely to not believe the govt & even health authorities' pronouncements? It's part of a history in peoples' relation to institutions & authorities and their experience of past interactions with them. And for them their response will have a meaning & personal importance that maybe trumps the risks of getting the disease and finding out that - astonishingly - they weren't being lied to this time like all the other times before (though the authorities told plenty of other lies too).
Sorry, not expressing my meaning very well... I guess it's like if one year your field grows nothing but weeds - you could get angry at them and wage war with tools & chemicals, but it's more productive to ask what might be the underlying soil conditions that provided the ideal growing conditions for these weeds in the first place, and try to address that instead.
Thanks Ian, Interesting video. I've been doing this job for about 20 years so it was just one hard week amongst many. Rather than having time to talk, most of the cases I see are sudden death and it's families in shock who are processing death for the first time.
I try and have conversations which might console and help people process and grieve but it's clearly the wrong time to be starting that journey.
It would do us well to practice and culture death and living behaviours but I suppose that is the opposite of consumerism and is avoided for a reason.
The misinformation I am referring to is not only that from denial websites but also the government and and their ruling corporations. Lies everywhere.
So yes I understand why people rely on other sources of information which sell alternative narratives.
The victims of all these lies are us the people. My question is not whether the soil conditions for weeds exist but rather are weeds being intentionally cultivated to distract and divide. That at least seems to be the effect.
There is no proof of conspiracy required to demonstrate the evil of capital relations under capitalism. Check pharma profiteering from insulin as an example. If the debate is whether a novel virus existed or whether viruses cause disease it's a diversion.
Cheers, dan
Re: Comical Ollie tweets about the demise of a compadre of ours (presumably)
'The victims of all these lies are us the people' - agreed, and the truth still matters and is still discoverable, whether via one's own senses or via the scientific method, though there are a lot of pitfalls along the way and a lot of people desperately trying to pull you into their camp. Covid was definitely a lesson in how seductive the various narratives can be, depending how they fit into pre-existing ideologies and tap into strong feelings and sense of identity. Made clear for me the point someone made about humans being not so much a rational as rationalising species. Humbling to realise I wasn't immune to those pressures either - desn't bode well for climate change.
Respect for your efforts, with the usual caveat of not being a hero if it's burning you out. Can't imagine lasting a week in that situation, personally... Funny, 'Medical Nemesis' is next on my reading list
Medical Nemesis is a polemic and the medical establishment is an easy target. One of the privileges of working in the NHS I that the decisions I make when performing a test or a procedure are that it is intended to help the patient not that it will improve my bank balance.
I acknowledge that like Andrew Marr I would say that or I wouldnt be where I am. Its certainly true by comparison with doctors working in private systems which pay by the test.
We've already discussed a society unable to face death but I have no problem using technology to saving the life of a 20 year old with pneumonia. A week in intensive care relying on machines can return them to fruitful life of normal lifespan.
Knowing where the boundary between valuable and harmful lies is difficult but there's no way of knowing how things will turn out before you start. Safety has become a focus. In the needed downtime between clinical weeks I am a safety investigator for the organisation, of sorts. It is certainly essential to deflate one's own and others ego.
Socrates, 'the only thing that I know is that I know nothing' is my guide. As we get more expert we should find it easier to recognise and manage our own limits and medical uncertainty but this isn't always the case.
Enjoy the book. Cheers, dan
Thx, will bear those points in mind. Go well. (nm)
I've found your professional judgement about Covid to be short, sharp and to the point. I'm happy to take your word for it and always have been.
The Bridge Officers have to stop people jumping off the bridge, mostly they succeed sometimes they don't. I wouldn't touch what, in other respects, is a bit of a doss, because of that, I don't want to live with the consequences. I'm glad that you and your colleagues are. Thank you.Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Thanks Keith. Pretty hard to ignore the evidence of my own eyes.
I ended up here by accident because a biology teacher told me I should study medicine.
I came from a single parent family - my father had schizophrenia and killed himself and my mother had mental health problems.
In the enlightened times of the late 80s I got into medicine after c, and 2 e predictions for A level but with a very supporting letter from school, on a 3 c offer and with a full grant to support me thereafter.
I can categorically state that there would have been no place or career for me in medicine in the 21st century.
I'm massively privileged, understand that my vocation is a glorious socialist enterprise, Illich's 'medical nemesis' notwithstanding, and try my best despite the compromise of working in an increasingly financialised system. I met a plastic surgeon I was at medical school with last week. He can make 30k from a single private operation and was exorting me to take up private practice.
Bevan was asked how he was going to persuade private doctors to work for a public service.....'I'll stuff their mouths with gold' the answer. Pretty sure the 35% real terms paycut doctors have experienced since 2010 is targetted to facilitate the reverse.
I'll hold out until I'm 67 and then like Boxer they can boil me for glue.
Cheers, dan
Re: thanks
Posted by Keith-264 on May 29, 2023, 8:44 am, in reply to "thanks"
Ha! I got a B and 2Es instead of 2 Bs and an E; shouldn't have gone an got pissed before history paper two. In the 70s my CO in the Air Cadets (384 Sqn) told me that he was needed during the war but that his ilk were being squeezed out. It's been going on for a long time and I could see how unusual I was and how resentful people were in scruffy pseudo-professions like nursing and social work.
I wouldn't recommend higher education to anyone now, not for an arts degree, what with the dilution of standards and I got my degree from a CHE. I got a three-year holiday at the taxpayers' expense and strolled a 2:1; it's probably worth a 1st now.Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
on May 26, 2023, 2:53 pm
