Counter-Currents
Image courtesy of Bybyk on GoodFon.
2,584 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
Don Quixote is one of the most influential works of fiction of all time. Written in two parts by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in the early seventeenth century, the book tells the story of the comedic adventures of a bumbling knight, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Driven mad by his obsession with romantic stories of knightly chivalry, Don Quixote decides to become a Knight-Errand, put on an old suit of armor, and set off in pursuit of his ladylove, Dulcinea del Toboso, who is nothing more than an idealized figment of his imagination.
Don Quixote constantly finds himself in absurd, farcical situations as a result of his relentless pursuit of his conception of the ideals of knightly chivalry. His numerous mishaps throughout his travels include mistaking an innkeeper and prostitutes for a lord of a castle and fine ladies, challenging random strangers to battle over trivial misunderstandings which he interprets as affronts to his honor, and even charging at windmills, believing them to be giant, long-armed beasts, hoping to prove his valor in battle.
The character of Don Quixote and his misadventures served as the origin of a word used to describe this particular kind of foolishness. The word “quixotism,” translations of which can be found in a number of languages, denotes an over-commitment to romantic ideals, often resulting in reckless and irrational action in pursuit of such. More simply put, quixotism means idealism without practicality:
Quixotism (/kwɪkˈsɒtɪzəm/ or /kiːˈhoʊtɪzəm/; adj. quixotic) is impracticality in pursuit of ideals, especially those ideals manifested by rash, lofty and romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality.
While the fictional character of Don Quixote served as the inspiration for this word, if there were ever a real-life individual who embodied the folly of quixotism, it would be the naturalist and documentary filmmaker Timothy Treadwell. As a nature lover, Timothy had a deep infatuation with bears in particular. He spent 13 summers in a row, starting in 1990, camping in Katmai National Park in Alaska, where he would observe and record footage of the various species of bears which inhabit the Alaskan wilderness.
Timothy became well-known in both the media and environmentalist circles for his activism and the videos he made of bears during his stays in Katmai National Park. However, he also received criticism from park officials and the broader naturalist community for putting himself in danger and disturbing the wildlife in order to do this. Timothy said that he hated human civilization and felt at peace living in the forest among the bears. He never brought a weapon or even bear spray with him on his expeditions, and refused to set up electric fences around his campsites. Timothy stated that he would never use a weapon against a bear, even if he was attacked, but felt confident that this would never happen, as he believed he had a spiritual connection with the bears and that they were misunderstood creatures.
In the summer of 2003, Timothy again spent the summer in Katmai National Park, as he had every summer for the 12 preceding years, although on this occasion he was accompanied by his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. They stayed until October, which was later in the year than usual for Timothy. By that time, the bears were hunting more aggressively as they prepared for their winter hibernation. On October 6, the pilot who was supposed to pick them up found their campsite abandoned, save for a bear chewing on what appeared to be human remains.
While it has never been released to the public, an audio recording of Timothy’s last moments as he was being mauled to death by a brown bear has survived. Despite his vow to never use a weapon against a bear, he can reportedly be heard pleading with Amie to attack the bear. Since Timothy refused to carry any weapons, Amie was forced to attempt to use a frying pan to frighten the bear off. Needless to say, this proved ineffective in preventing the bear from ripping Timothy limb from limb before it turned its attention to Amie and did the same. (A highly acclaimed documentary film about Treadwell’s life and death was made by the German director Werner Herzog in 2005, Grizzly Man.)
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
What better word to describe Timothy Treadwell’s specific brand of stupidity than quixotism? His starry-eyed dream of living in perfect harmony with wildlife in an everlasting bond of mutual love and understanding blinded him to the facts of nature. A wild animal is just that. He abandoned all practicality in pursuit of naïve idealism. He might have been able to delude himself into thinking he had a deep spiritual connection with the bears of Katmai National Park, but the bears themselves saw Timothy as nothing more than their next meal.
It’s not only individuals who are susceptible to the folly of quixotism. This phenomenon can manifest itself on a society-wide scale as well and have a profound impact on politics. Many of the blunders committed by the twentieth century’s Communist regimes can be attributed to quixotic thinking among their ruling parties. For example, during the so-called Great Leap Forward in Mao’s China, all economic reality was ignored in favor of Maoist ideological purity. Production quotas for essential commodities such as grain and steel were calculated not according to economic feasibility or necessity, but in a desperate attempt exceed the output of the capitalist countries, thus proving the superiority of Communism.
This resulted in the over-reporting of production out of fear of not meeting the quotas and exporting too much grain to the cities, which left the countryside famished. The over-production of steel proved useless due to its low quality and a lack of demand. Estimates of the death toll caused by the results of the Great Leap Forward range between 15 and 55 million. Some deaths occurred as a result of disease, forced labor, or execution, but the vast majority were due to famine. Despite people dying of starvation by the tens of millions, Mao continued to export grain abroad and refused any international aid, all in an attempt to maintain the appearance that China was well on its way to achieving the Marxist fantasy of the workers’ utopia.
In today’s world, the phenomenon of quixotism is having a major impact on the West’s political trajectory. Last year, Harold Robertson published his now famous article titled “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.” Robertson writes of how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) laws such as the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action programs have eroded the United States’ human capital, decreasing the efficiency of the complex systems which the country relies on to function over the past six decades. The quixotism of the American ruling class, whether motivated by naïve egalitarian delusions or malignant anti-white hatred (or a bit of both), is jeopardizing the continued status of the United States as the global superpower.
Quixotism is easy to spot when it’s others falling victim to it, but it’s much harder to recognize in oneself. As a Right-winger, it’s quite easy for me to see quixotic thinking on the Left for the foolishness that it is. It’s a lot harder to look inward and recognize when my side of the political spectrum is guilty of the same. Upon self-reflection, I find that we on the Right fall prey to quixotism just as often, if not more so, than the Left. I can think of three segments of the Right that have engaged in quixotic wrongheadedness over the past decade or so. I’m not a fan of the political compass as an accurate model to describe political views, but if I were to use it here, one of these segments is from the top right quadrant, one is from the bottom right, and one is between the two.[1]
The first is what we normally refer to as either “mainstream conservatism” or “classical liberalism.” These labels are somewhat misleading, since mainstream conservatism doesn’t conserve anything and classical liberalism is nothing like the liberalism of the nineteenth century, but is rather the progressive liberalism of 30 years ago. The proponents of what we call mainstream conservatism tend to be boomers who want to go back to the 1980s, while those who identify as classical liberals tend to be Generation Xers who want to go back to the 1990s. Nonetheless, I’m just going to merge these two groups under the banner of “conservatism” for the purposes of this essay, since I don’t think there is a significant difference between the two.
In the present day, conservatism exists mostly as a reaction to the political trends of the past decade or so, and has the goal of bringing back the perceived normalcy of a few decades ago. Conservatives stress the importance of individual rights, personal responsibility, and meritocracy in response to the rise of identity politics and cancel culture, or “wokeness,” as this has come to be known.
Their response to anti-white policies in law, education, and the business world, or even just the general anti-white animosity in the culture today, is to say that we should treat everyone as an individual and not consider race to be of any importance for the identity of an individual or society as a whole. They apply similar criticisms to other identity-based political movements such as feminism and LGBT. Conservatives are always quick to point out that the Left is guilty of the same prejudice they claim to be against, just in the opposite direction. It’s become a cliché at this point that conservatives will say that the “woke” should follow the advice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and judge others by the content of their character rather the color of their skin.[2]
Conservatives often argue that equality of opportunity should be the goal rather than equality of outcome. They advocate a purely meritocratic system which, in theory, would give everyone the equal opportunity to rise to the top, but wouldn’t necessarily result in equal outcomes. Their answer to the unequal outcomes between various demographics is that reliance on government handouts has prevented certain demographics from attaining an equal degree of success, and that they can increase their standing by taking on a greater degree of self-reliance.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right here
Conservatives argue that ideas should form the basis of society rather than heredity. They advocate for civic nationalism while opposing ethnic nationalism. They believe that the unifying force of society should not be shared ancestry, but a shared set of values, such as those found in the Constitution of the United States. They argue that anyone can integrate into a country regardless of his background if he adopts the values and culture of said country. They of course make an exception for the State of Israel.
The fatal flaw of conservatism, or at least its present-day iteration, is that it is fundamentally an egalitarian universalist ideology which seeks to hold back the inevitable consequences of said egalitarian universalism. The state which Western countries find themselves in in the 2020s is a natural result of the belief system which they adopted in the years following the Second World War. The fundamental principles underlying “wokeism” had already been firmly established by the 1980s and ‘90s, the decades which conservatives wish so desperately to recreate. We were already on the trajectory to where we are today back then. Now, we’re just further along.
The problem is that conservatives refuse to accept this reality. They continue to desperately hold on to these values even as these same values are the driving force behind their own disenfranchisement. For example, conservatives say that we shouldn’t place value in any sort of collective racial identity and that we should see everyone as an individual. A supermajority of those who identify as either conservatives or classical liberals are white, while a supermajority of non-whites and other alleged victim groups ally with the Left. Even if conservatives don’t want to identify as white themselves, these other groups will most certainly identify them as such.
Race and sex are biological realities which will inevitably impact the average outcomes of those of all the various demographic backgrounds in society. Both the Left and the mainstream Right deny this reality. The Left explains it away as a function of systemic discrimination, thus giving us woke politics. Conservatives don’t really have any answers and are left pleading for this reality not be taken into consideration at all. Those client groups which form the left’s coalition have zero incentive to do this, however, because their ability to collectivize under such identities is the main source of their elevated political power and social status.
The quixotism of conservatives, the vast majority of whom are white, is that they disempower themselves politically by refusing to acknowledge and pursue their own group interests in order to remain true to a set of principles which in no way benefit them. Their principles only serve to give them a feeling of comfort and self-righteousness. They yearn for the calm and stability of previous eras in which they felt comfortable, but they don’t want to rock the boat by confronting the harsh realities which brought us to where we are today. Thus, they are reduced to hoping that it all just goes away.
To get an idea of just how impotent conservatism really is, consider this: They constantly advocate for a purely meritocratic system which doesn’t account for race, gender, or sexuality at all. The problem is that legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as similar legislation found in other countries, essentially makes that illegal. These laws require companies to engage in discrimination in favor of “protected groups” lest they be struck with massive lawsuits. In order to obtain the meritocratic system which conservatives say they want, these laws would need to be abolished. Yet, they would never have the courage to suggest such a thing. On the contrary, they are constantly lauding the virtues of Martin Luther King Jr., the icon of the Civil Rights Movement, as a role model.
Sam Francis fittingly described conservatives as beautiful losers. They don’t want to actually succeed politically as much as they want to show how principled they are as they lose. Conservatism is like a country which dismantled its entire military in order to show how peaceful it is, and then complains that a rival country is being mean when they invade. They are continuing on their decade- long losing streak on account of their quixotism. Their principles have been proven to destroy that which they seek conserve, yet they continue to hold on to them, not wanting to leave their political comfort zone.
I’m sure most reading this have long since learned this truth about conservatism. We can all see that the mainstream Right has held onto these naïve ideals far past the point of all practicality. Unfortunately, however, the Right’s quixotism is not limited to the stale and dreary mainstream.
Notes
[1] I don’t mean to imply that every adherent of the movements I will discuss holds the positions I’m going to criticize. However, these are positions which either a sizeable portion of or prominent individuals associated with these movements have argued for.
[2] This is an incorrect interpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a brief quote from a speech that he didn’t even write himself. In reality, he supported affirmative action and reparations. He most certainly would be on the side of the “woke” today.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
17 comments
Fine article.
The fatal flaw of conservatism, or at least its present-day iteration, is that it is fundamentally an egalitarian universalist ideology which seeks to hold back the inevitable consequences of said egalitarian universalism.
I would specify this further and say that the fatal flaw of contemporary conservatism is that it is an ideology at all, that is, it is described by a set of notions. And these notions are un-attached to a named pre-existing and recognizable demographic.
Progressivism is also an ideology, a set of notions, but progressives have succeeded in making these notions co-extensive with named pre-existing and recognizable demographics. For a long time, to be Black, to be Jewish, to be lgbtwtf, to be Hispanic is to be a Democrat. Adherence to the party that embodies Leftism functions as an ethnic religion for these groups, like Buddhism is for Tibetans. And of course the glue holding these essentially incompatible groups is their common hatred for Whitey.
US conservatism is clearly a White project, which is the real reason the Left hates it. But the tragic reality is that the conservatives themselves refuse to admit it, much less embrace it. So in the end, all they are is talk. And not at all beautiful losers. And traitors to the only named pre-existing and recognizable demographic that supports them.
We could cite many examples of this phenomenon. Two that stick out in my mind were done by President Bush. His first one was pressuring banks to give loans to blacks who couldn’t afford them to begin with. This caused the financial meltdown of 2008. Even when the news first reported on it, the media was vague about what really caused it. He really wanted more blacks to be homeowners. The second one was when he marched in solidarity for George Floyd. Most Americans probably don’t remember that. Most white Americans can’t afford to say that they don’t have any sympathy for George Floyd. He may have gained brownie points with the left, but some people, a few anyway, started to see that some conservatives really aren’t that different from Democrats. I’m under the impression that some Republicans think that we can somehow turn this around, that all the races will get along if we just work together and put our differences aside. I remember the Timothy Treadwell case. He was warned repeatedly about the dangers of Alaskan brown bears. He published a book about his time with the bears. He would also encounter bear hunters in airport terminals in Alaska before they would start a guided bear hunt and try to start arguments with them.
I do not know anything about Timothy Treadwell, but, noting that every human (and not only human) being should die anyway, maybe to be eaten by a bear is not the worst kind of death, at least it is better than to slowly die of cancer or to suffocate in a basement of the house, destroyed by Russian missiles.
It would certainly be an exciting way to go.
He has chosen his way of life, he surely knew something about bears, and should be aware about risks and the possible death.
I’m sorry to stay on the case of this Treadwell, but he’s so emblematic of the degradation inflicted on the white race, particularly the Northern Europeans: here’s a young man with all the attributes of Nordic beauty, but who, inside, is a chaos of dysfunction and mental illness. Refusal to grow up (his mania with bears came from his refusal to leave his teddy bear) , asexual , neither homo nor hetero , his fake girlfriend being an annoyance , and she was about to leave him; unproductive and still neither married nor with children, but dedicating his whole life to his antics with the bears (did he really love them? No, they only served to feed his pathological need for attention).
I love animals and I don’t consider them to be inept wild beasts, and the rangers reported that (although there was no spiritual bond between Treadwell and the bears as this idiot believed), the latter had shown incredible patience and benignity towards him during all these years. And alll the bears with which this nutjob had interacted died later, as their hibernation process had been disrupted.
I think that Christopher Johnson McCandless, protagonist of the film INTO THE WILD, is much more stupid than this Treadwell. I have some sympathy to Tredwell, something like I have to women, who protected apes in Africa, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. Remember, that Fossey was killed for his activities protecting the gorillas.
That film was so painful to watch! I thought he was such an unsympathetic character, although I developed sympathy for him by the end. He was rich in thumos.
I don’t have any sympathy for these types of Yo-Yos at all. For that matter I cannot for the life of me see why some of “our guys” revere Theodore J. Kaczynski as anything other than a highly-disturbed individual. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
🙂
Kind of reminds me of the stupid lady who kept Travis the Chimp for a home pet and it ended up eating her best friend’s face and fingers off in 2009 when he saw her holding an Elmo doll.
🙂
Watching the film Planet of Apes (older, not newer version) I always wonder why the filmmakers have portrayed gorillas as evil, and chimpanzees as nice and good, when in reality the chimpanzes are aggressive apes and gorillas are not. By the way, the chimpanzees are only apes who have developed some rudimentary warfare skills like scouting, ambushes, and “special operation forces”, of course on the animal level.
Very well stated. It resembles castration.
There are things causing personality issues in men which I have not seen mentioned on Counter Currents: the majority of Western women have not practiced natural (now called ‘attachment’) parenting, since before Victorian times. The outcome of this has been shown to be less independence in adulthood, not more. Divorce has made this multiple times worse, since divorce is a trauma, and trauma is one of the few things to affect personality other than genetics.
Vaccines also affect personality, since they induce minor brain damage, particularly in males.
Are you saying that vaccines cause autism or sterility or something?
I am not intending to be critical. I don’t support vaccine mandates by any means unless we are talking about highly lethal or crippling diseases.
Most people are just too young to remember things like polio and when children actually went deaf or blind from diseases like measles and scarlet fever. I actually got measels twice (very rare) and had to be packed in ice at the country hospital. My Dad said I was convulsing and the doctor told him that it was a very close call. My Grandmother, born in 1911, was a registered nurse.
In my opinion, Covid was no more lethal than influenza, which is to say that the flu is rarely documented in the laboratory, unlike Covid, but it kills a lot of older people and always has. For that reason it is a good idea to get vaccinated against them if one is in a high-risk group. I get an annual flu shot and have not had influenza since the 1980s (not a guarantee) and I assume Covid will be the same way.
I remember the Swine Flu panic in 1976. It was H1N1 like the 1918 pandemic. Unlike 43 million Americans, I decided NOT to get the jab believing (correctly) that the pandemic was hype. I never got the flu in any case. It turns out that there were a small number of bad batches of vaccine and 362 people ended up with Guillain-Barre syndrome, but probably many elderly people were saved. However, vaccine technology has improved remarkably since that time.
There were also a few bad batches of the oral Sabin polio vaccine when it was first introduced. Almost everybody had this in the 1960s in school, and the result is that the disease has almost been eradicated worldwide. You pretty much can’t get a medical track record better than that. Even setting a broken bone carries substantial statistical risk, but doing nothing is out of the question.
I am old enough to have the substantial scars from the smallpox vaccine, another horrible disease that has been globally eradicated ─ but the pathogen still exists locked away in military laboratories lest someone weaponize it at a time in the future when nobody any longer has an immunity to it. We simply do not have memories of what life was like in these earlier times when these diseases were widespread. That is a good thing as long as we remember our history.
Why the 1918 influenza pandemic was so lethal is still studied today. Modern mortality figures give the numbers between 40 and 100 million worldwide.
Tens if not scores of millions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe also died of Typhus between 1914 and 1945. The etiology was first identified in the laboratory by Dr. Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute, who won the Nobel Prize for his 1909 discovery that the typhus pathogen was spread by lice and fleas. And while a reliable and inexpensive vaccine remained elusive, sytematically delousing Polish shtetls, war refugees, and Mexican migrant workers proved to be an intrusive but highly-reliable measure.
At the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic, most country doctors had never taken any real laboratory training or even looked through a microscope. Modern medicine has changed very much since those times, usually for the better.
🙂
Hi Scott 🙂
I probably should have shut my big mouth (I have been feeling especially chatty recently), but just can’t help talking about vaccines! My husband has gotten so fed up with me that I’m now banned from talking about vaccination unless it is ABSOLUTELY PERTINENT to the conversation.
When I became pregnant with my son, I decided to do some research into the subject, since I wasn’t going to just trust the medical establishment after the Covid debacle. What I found was that I had been lied to (and almost certainly vaccine-injured myself).
Vaccination is based on a flawed understanding of the immune system. It overstimulates the humoral response and bypasses the cell mediated response. It does not create true immunity, and denies us protection against certain cancers which recovery from the acute childhood diseases provides. The vaccines contain many incredibly toxic ingredients to which the body has evolved no defense – you are injecting them directly into the bloodstream. One of those is aluminium, which is present in vaccines in enormous quantities and is not required by the body. It is added as an adjuvant – it irritates the humoral system into producing antibodies (as it is cheaper than just adding enough antigens). Being a potent cation it affects the zeta potential of the blood, leading to micro clotting. The surfactants in the vaccines partially dissolve the endothelium in the brain allowing it to accumulate there. There are many studies showing links to autism: see Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies for a compilation. Why do cases of sudden non verbalism in children occur days after vaccination but never, ever, in the days before? (See VAERS) It is statistically impossible for the vaccine not to be implicated. Why would the severity of autism decrease after the removal of the organomercury compound thimerosal (still present in the influenza jabs) but the frequency of lesser types such as Aspergers increase? Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies is a good summary.
‘Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History’ by Dr Suzanne Humphries shows that the fatality and prevalence of disease had reached modern lows before the introduction of any vaccines, thanks to improved sanitation, diet and working conditions. For example, vitamin A deficiency is a risk factor for difficult measles. I am distressed to hear that you had to go through it twice, but were there not hundreds of thousands of children in your cohort who survived and did not even see a doctor?
That book also explains how deadly the original smallpox vaccination campaign was and how people protested against government mandates. Have a look at this article for more: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-smallpox-pandemic-response-was?utm_source=publication-search
Polio is a fascinating historical case study, as discussed in ‘Vaccines, Autoimmunity and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness’ by Thomas Cowan MD. The vaccine was actually causing poliomyelitis because the injection was damaging the nerves and allowing circulating polio virus to enter the central nervous system. Also occurring concurrently was DDT poisoning through sugarcane, which causes exactly the same symptoms as poliomyelitis.
Something else that should be publicised is that vaccines (especially the DPT vaccine) are responsible for Sudden Infant Death syndrome.
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-century-of-evidence-that-vaccines?utm_source=publication-search
It is huge and interesting topic, although upsetting to know how many defenceless White babies are being injected without their parent’s informed consent. I have been typing furiously in bed next to my own son, trying to remember what have read, so I apologise for any bad writing. There is so much else I could say but the other authors I have linked say it better.
I hope that I haven’t been disrespectful – you have lived through more than me – and I noticed that we tend to agree on other things.
“I hope that I haven’t been disrespectful – you have lived through more than me – and I noticed that we tend to agree on other things.”
Not at all, Wifewaffen. I would have responded sooner but Ye Olde Internet provider goes on the blink regularly.
The point that I want to make is that these diseases do carry substantial risk and nobody wants to be the unlikely one who goes deaf, dumb or blind because, for example, Mom wasn’t vaccinated and caught something highly preventable while pregnant. Apparently Autism is one of the outcomes of Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) and yet people are worried about the vaccines, the risks of which are equivocal at best.
I am not trying to be cheeky here. I caught what they called the “hard measles” (not the three-day kind) twice while a toddler and had to be hospitalized and I can even remember it. There was no measles vaccine available then, but measles deaths are mostly with children under five years old. Apparently 25 percent of measles patients have to be hospitalized. Most people only get it once in their lifetime (lucky me ─ I got it twice but without any brain damage).
In 1980, there were 2.6 million measles deaths worldwide out of about 20 million cases. In the USA, the case mortality is only about 0.3 percent. By 2014, with global vaccination programs, deaths were only about 73 thousand. But vaccine paranoia is now changing that for the worse.
Take polio. I am not old enough to remember this as a thing. Polio is highly infectious before symptoms even occur, and 75 percent of people recover without even realizing that they had been very sick, although they may be infectious for weeks.
FDR is believed to have contracted polio while visiting a Boy Scout camp while on a Campobello vacation at the age of 39. I am guessing that the Scout camp didn’t have the best fecal-oral hygiene compared to what the Roosevelts were used to, but the disease mostly affects children. In about 1 percent of unluckly cases, the disease damages the nervous system leading to deaths and other complications. Paralysis is more likely in adults and occurs in one in 75 cases, compared to one in 1,000 cases for kids.
Since my Grandmother was a registered nurse, my Mother does remember people in iron lungs stuck away in basements and closets at the hospital. The deaths from polio in the early 1950s in the USA were thousands per year. That does not count the other March of Dimes-tier complications.
Before the Salk jab (1952) came out on an industrial scale in the mid-1950s, polio rates in the USA were 25 thousand to 58 thousand annually, with thousands of deaths. The annual number of polio cases fell from 35 thousand cases in 1953 to 161 cases in 1961. The Salk vaccine was safe and had been from 60 percent to 90 percent effective, depending on the type of polio strain, and involved two jabs and a possible booster. The Salk vaccine used an inactivated polio virus (IPV) which made it very safe but it is not impossible to get a bad batch and that in fact happened leading to a about 260 vaccine-related cases.
In 1961, the Sabin oral polico vaccine (OPV) came out. This is the one that my generation remembers. The Sabin vaccine was highly effective and simple to administer. We were given a tasty sugar cube in school. By 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States when the Amish were vaccinated, and today polio has been eradicated worldwide except in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Mullahs teach that the White man is sterilizing them.
Because polio has been virtually eradicated worldwide, they no longer use the Sabin oral polio vaccine because it used an attenuated polio virus that in very rare cases could propagate the disease, especially in Third World toilet countries without indoor plumbing. So today if one has to be vaccinated for polio, they use the safer and enhanced jab version with the inactivated virus. The oral vaccine with the attenuated virus caused about 4 polio cases per million vaccinated. This is unacceptable today because the disease has been nearly eradicated.
I’ll restate the point that I’m trying to make: People have simply forgotten the severe complications of these real diseases and are not properly weighing the risks against the vaccines.
My niece is an anti-Vaxxer. She has five or so kids and is health conscious but this is not something that I can understand if one weighs the risks properly. I try not to be the crazy uncle who preaches National Socialism at every Thanksgiving dinner or family reunion. I consider myself a skeptic and never bought into the Covid lockdown crisis, but I’m not an anti-Vaxxer.
I don’t see any difference in Covid outcomes between cities with Democrap officials and a clueless Negress Chief of Police like Phoenix that heavily enforced the lockdowns ─ without necessarily discouraging the BLM riots ─ versus nearby metropolitan towns with MAGA officials where they did not enforce the lockdowns.
They didn’t excessively enforce them in Red State Idaho either, although my parents locked down anyway and got vaccinated because they are very elderly.
I got the Covid vaccine and at least two boosters because I always get annual influenza shots anyway, and can’t remember getting the flu for decades, which is a big plus ─ and besides, I was in the “endangered demographic.” Senior citizens have always died from influenza; unlike Covid-19, they just don’t track influenza like it was the next Black Death.
However, I truly resent that my employer made getting the Covid shot a condition of employment. I could have understood this if it were a more serious disease like smallpox or whatever. But they clearly did not know what they were doing and only sought to justify the loss in productivity from the earlier lockdowns. My lockdown productivity actually increased by not having to manage a long commute, providing that my Internet didn’t glitch.
🙂
Hi Scott 🙂
I appreciate you looking out for me. I understand that there are risks with my choices, but I am confident that I am on the right path. Something that being in this realm has taught me is to not make fear based choices and to do lots of reading instead.
I really think you would enjoy looking through those books and websites that I have mentioned. I will look into your figures and stories. It is always great to hear from people who have lived through these things.
This is basically post Révolution tranquille Québec. French Canadian leftists who can’t defend themselves against the mean Canada. Québec thinks it can win by being nicer and more virtuous than the federation. Beautiful losers. (I am séparatiste)
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment