I'm Sorry You're An Asshole, Part 1
Being Totalitarian Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
What else should I be? All apologies What else should I say? Everyone is gay What else should I write? I don't have the right What else should I be? All apologies
-Nirvana, “All Apologies” (lyrics Kurt Cobain, RIP)
For the three of you (which are probably only one of you and two sock puppet accounts to run coint for the FBI or something) that don’t also read the Bad Cat (or the half-dozen or so other OG stacks that have mentioned this), I’m going to start by putting this out there:
Pictured here: At least this doesn’t pretend to be an apology.
I’ve said a few times that I strive to find things to talk about, within a very well-populated sphere, that offer something different from better-established, high-quality stackers (or at least elevates me above the white noise of pointless gossip about the same shit).
Lots of people have had a lot to say about the above tweet. For those of you new to the show, I have a particular contempt for Leana “I’m Literally A Chinese Spy” Wen, who I do actually believe is a CCP spy (or at least agent provocateur). Wen tweeted this a couple days ago and her former disciples, nut cutlets all, had an absolute conniption. I’m not going to show you a bunch of screenshots of her outraged mob turning on her, mainly because I’m not on Twitter and can’t view more than the first half-page of something without being blocked by a pop-up asking me to join Twitter which will happen the same day I’m vaccinated; you can see for yourself.
It isn’t my point.
I’m also not going to get into whether or not Wen’s position as a “journalist” and social media influencer entitled her to any “authority” to guide policy simply by saying things that would get her particular troop of chimps hooting and jumping and flinging shit.
Because this also isn’t my point.
The following things are my point, and no one opining about the validity or lack thereof of Wen’s latest oral excretion seems to be bringing up:
Media Darling Doctor Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: Dangle Freedom as “Carrot” to Force Vaccinations. “…If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms you have. Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway…” April 3, 2021.
CNN medical analyst suggests life 'needs to be hard' for unvaccinated Americans. "It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated," Wen, the former Planned Parenthood president, said. "Right now, it's kind of the opposite." July 10, 2021.
CNN's Leana Wen: The Unvaccinated Should Not Be Allowed To Leave Their Homes."You have the option to not get vaccinated if you want," said the doctor. "But then you can't go out in public." September 10, 2021.
There are a lot more of these over the past two years (TWO YEARS!). Search for yourself.
It’s also worth mentioning- regardless of where you fall on this specific issue that I’m not going to litigate here- that Wen is the former head of Planned Parenthood, where she stated:
This is not simply someone who made bullshit predictions, analyses, omens of doom, or preached what “the Science” said only to say “now the science says this” and suffer no consequences for getting to throw around falsehoods in exchange for adoration and paychecks. Wen went as hard on masks as she did on lockdowns and vaccines, only to say in December 2021 that masks were “decorative face coverings” with no health value.
Here’s the important part: Wen said that. She DIDN’T say, “I used to say, ‘masks work,’ and now, because ThE sCiEnCe HaS cHaNgEd, masks don’t work, I’m just following the science, etc. etc.,” she simply said one day that up was down and the next day down was up.
No explanation. No justification. (Okay, she prefaces a lot of sentences with “in light of Omicron,” but never EVER references previous statements.)
By the Light of Omicron!
Bee tee dubs, this is what authoritarian states (like the one that Wen’s family claimed political asylum from to move to the United States) do: inform you of changes to the narrative without justification, because justification implies that they owe you something, and they don’t, because you are nothing. Insert exhausted 1984 quote about Eastasia. (I’m officially fully tired of the same four 1984 and CS Lewis quotes about totalitarianism. I still have a tiny bit of Solzhenitsyn in me but that’s only because he said he wanted to stay and cuddle.)
No apologies.
Here’s the other important corollary: Wen wanted, based on her previous position, for some pretty bad shit to happen to a LOT of people that were not a public health threat to anyone and who had committed no crime. “Make them miserable,” remember?
She didn’t just pretend to speak for “the Science.” She did a lot of speaking for “the Policy.”
So, do we still deserve to be made miserable, you thundercunt, or don’t we?
If you’re now comfortable doing whatever you want in public, regardless of the vaccination or mask status of the peasants around you, do those people deserve to be punished for having defied you previously when you WERE afraid?
Should life be “made hard” for us because there was any epidemiological basis for your totalitarian fantasies, or simply because we disobeyed them/you?
Wen’s followers (who I guess aren’t anymore) are pissed because she betrayed the narrative and changed her mind; not because of what the implications of the past and present narrative having both existed are. (If it was justified then, why isn’t it now? If it isn’t now, was it justified then?)
Politicians (and she is one, even if she doesn’t hold elected office) love saying their “thinking has evolved,” and that’s nice- thinking is allowed to evolve. Mine certainly has over the 30-odd years I’ve had a fully-conscious brain. But I’ve never held any meaningful power to impact the lives of others through my evolving opinions and beliefs.
But thoughts and opinions, by themselves, don’t exist in the outside universe. Once they do, you’re accountable to them, even if you don’t hold them anymore. That accountability can be as simple as saying, “it was wrong of me to suggest that people be stripped of their fundamental rights because of incorrect assumptions about public health. Those positions were incorrect.” Otherwise, you exist in a magical, liminal state where you are always right- I was right then, and something-something-something and I’m right now, too, with a completely different position.
If you, like me, are or ever were in the population subset that Wen thought the government should “make life hard on,” who might “enjoy freedoms” with no strings of obedience attached, and you have a functioning brain, no part of you should be celebrating Wen’s change of heart. Wen’s public announcement that COVID theatre had become inconvenient enough for she and her family that she didn’t want to play anymore was by no means a conversion or actual change of position. This was not a “Come to Jesus” moment where Wen suddenly realized that it was all a terrible lie: it was simply a cynical piece of hyena shit with a deeply-ingrained authoritarian fetish simply saying, “I don’t feel like doing this anymore. It doesn’t matter what I said before or how it impacted you. I’m powerful enough to do what I want, and you aren’t. What are you going to do about it?”
As many of you know from my comments elsewhere, I don’t forgive people who don’t apologize first. This is not because I think I’m morally superior or want to hold people to an impossibly unrealistic standard. The reason is simple: without an actual demonstration of insight that what you did was wrong, I have no reason not to believe that you will do it again every time, given the chance.
My personal, working definition of an apology is as follows: 1) an admission that an action was wrong or incorrect. 2) a demonstration of awareness of WHY it was incorrect. 3) a pledge to not do, or try one’s best not to do, the faulty thing in the future, and to correct the damage done, if possible, by the original injury. Anything less is hollow, insincere, or just plain bullshit.
These, by the way, are also the only kinds of apologies I offer. My belief system considers it a matter of honor to apologize, ACTUALLY apologize, when you’re wrong, because not doing so means your internal self remains in discord between word and deed and this saps your power in every aspect of your life.
People who wished- or actually exerted- authoritarian harm on anyone who resisted their COVID narrative have a very big apology to make before anyone with any sense should allow them back into their lives. This isn’t about being loving, or forgiving, or kind- it’s about allowing an abuser into your house.
People like Wen deserve no quarter, no refuge, no sanctuary. Let them die of loneliness, cut off from their mainline drugs of bestowed authority and attention. It’s no less than they wished on you.
Watch the people in power for the ones willing to state, on record, that a previous statement was factually incorrect, illegal, or just plain wrong. Not just the part where “their thinking evolved” but the part before that beautiful evolution where BEING INCORRECT required the evolution. Watch for ANYone who calls themselves your leader in any capacity for how they behave when they are objectively wrong or self-contradictory. The ones you can trust, the ones worthy of your respect and honor (and votes) are the ones who can acknowledge it.
…yeah, I know. Me either.
If I were your neighbor, I would seek you out every morning and hang over the fence to hear what you think. Because what you say is EXACTLY right. No forgiveness or forgetting without the acknowledgement that you were wrong, because you did or thought this, and You will NEVER do it again, or at least try. I agree Leana Wen is a CCP spy, that we are suffering to live in our midst, but she is also a cunt. (no apology, sometimes you need a word like that for some people).
That she continues to be on twitter after her misinformative posts shows just how thoruoghly the intelligence agencies have final control over twitter, facebook et al, .
Obviously I've been permanently banned from Twitter, but I do hope someone here still has privileges and will retweet your essay all over the twitterverse.
Personally, I hope you don't mind, I am going to retweet it all over Gab and Gettr. And of course, it is not just Wen. It is all of them that pushed for masks, lockdowns, psuedo vaccines, etc. I do wish the rest of us would take up the practice of shunning again. I think it would go a long way to show people that they cannot just whitewash what they did, and that actions have consequences. Because there NEED to be consequences. And I am waiting for ANYONE to experience any CONSEQUENCES.
I will take the liberty of taking something in her tweet out of context and agree with her:
"...but if you want to drive a car, that endagers others"
I am a friend of a car vaxident victim who, 11 months ago, had head trauma as a result and may lose her hearing at any random moment, and is currently on massive steroids to hopefully get sight back in one eye, after a guy plowed into her parked car, totaling her car, 3 other parked cars, damaged a parked semi that he partially ran under which stopped him, and totaled his car. The last thing the guy remembered was getting the shot 30 minutes prior.
So yes, I agree with her driving cars endangers others.