Joining the Dogpile
Emily Oster- and her article- aren't worth our brain cells or feelings. But...
I like being a late adopter. I get to know I’m enjoying something probably due in little or no part to peer pressure, I’m getting a version with the bugs hammered out, usually much less expensive, etc. In nearly all things, I have been the last among my friends to do X.
At least among the substacks I read personally, by my calculations I will be at least among the last people to waste ink on piling onto Emily Oster’s ridiculous article in the Atlantic in which she makes vague calls for “amnesty” for all the “honest mistakes” we made during COVID because “we knew so little.”
Oh, not amnesty for YOU, dear reader. Amnesty for herself and her tribe: “We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation [that’s YOU!] while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge [that’s EMILY and her FASCIST FRIENDS!]”
I have seriously been debating whether or not to write this article all day. Most people finding an excuse to post about it are focused on the weird, vague, confused nature of exactly what Emily is asking for a “general amnesty” for. It mainly seems to be a plea to not be mean to Emily and her friends for being vile pieces of garbage that collaborated in the greatest act of global tyranny in two generations. The amnesty mainly seems to be a blanket social “get out of jail free” for her fee-fees from all of us that suffered hardship, damage, humilation, personal destruction, despair, and death at the hands of people who “knew so little” but wielded so much power.
I’m mad at myself for writing this. I don’t want to give Oster a single breath or thought or pixel with her name on it. I hate that the scores of people rightly excoriating her ridiculous non-mea-culpa, myself included, are contributing to the tens of thousands of clicks that her bullshit article wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed. I hate that my content marketing background immediately made me think about how profitable the outrage that her complete bullshit evoked is.
Therefore, I’m going to try to waste as little as possible of my time giving Oster any more oxygen than I absolutely have to. So, first some boilerplate so that my feelings are completely clear, and then a more substantial attempt to actually add something new to the discussion beyond buying another ticket on the “fuck this thundercunt” ride:
My feelings about this situation are exactly the same as when I wrote this about CCP spy Leana Wen,
Because Oster and Wen are the same exact creature: vaguely-credentialed media creatures who wielded no actual bureaucratic rank and claim no direct scientific authority pertaining to COVID who use their vague status as “public-facing Expert” to opine in the sort of femininely-polished media style of Smiley Face Fascism. She’s a Live, Laugh, Love, Die Infidel blogger with nothing more valuable to say than me who used her platform to ride the coattails of the Inquisition that continues to burn through modern society across the globe. They’re talking heads whose expert knowledge is being talking heads, and they found themselves uplifted into the roles of regional high priestesses of their particular corners of legacy media to serve up rhetorical red meat to Covidian chimps looking for dopamine doses to calm their nagging doubts about bashing in other chimp’s brains with rocks.
I have more contempt for even mentioning their name than I do for war criminals like Fauci because Fauci and Company have done things we can actually arrest, try, and (fingers crossed!) hang for, which makes them worth talking about. Oster and Wen barely exist as physical humans: they are notional smiling devils that exist solely as memes that manipulate human emotions.
“You'll never understand, Wayne. You and me, we're not even the same species. I used to be you, then I evolved. From where you're standing, you're a man. From where I'm standing, you're an ape. You're not even an ape. You're a media person. Media's like the weather, only it's man-made weather.” - Natural Born Killers
Fauci and people like him can only be destroyed by bringing some form of real world justice down upon him, whether the court or a conveniently placed falling rock or tiger pit or tragically stray bullet. Oster, Wen, and the various “COVID celebrities” don’t exist in any meaningful way in the real world. They can be destroyed utterly as ideas if everyone could- impossibly- be convinced to ignore them. They only have the power they are granted by attention, and it doesn’t matter at all whether the attention is love or hate. Which is why I hate writing this.
So, in summary: fuck Oster and her amnesty, fuck unearned forgiveness, fuck reconciliation. Our continued hate isn’t keeping us too busy to focus on fixing the things your cult fucked up, like permanently dumber and unhealthier kids, global misery and poverty, and the march of tyranny. We can continue wanting to see you fed to hyenas while we do the other shit. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, you smiling vampire.
/end boilerplate. Now I attempt to contribute something remotely interesting to this discussion.
And here’s the interesting thing: I find pre-emptive calls for “reconciliation,” or “forgiveness,” or “amnesty” by the guilty to be endlessly fascinating. When I can get past my frothing rage at another Covidian trying to get away with playing a willing role in vast evil, the behavior is by itself a really interesting thing.
Oster (and people who do this kind of thing) make it clear in her diatribe that she doesn’t believe she did anything, you know, wrong. She isn’t worried about concrete “consequences”- her article doesn’t beg to be kept out of jail or not sued for damages or fired. She’s clearly, despite writing this, secure in her place in the clerisy and that nothing truly bad will happen to her, or this article would have used very, very different words.
When I put on my interdisciplinary psychology hat- it looks like a human brain with a raccoon tail coming off the medulla oblongata, and it needs a chin strap so it doesn’t slide off the top of my head- what I see here is someone who is terribly upset that she isn’t facing any concrete consequences for the things that she’s done and that people hate her anyway.
These read like the words of everyone who ever sat in my office who we both knew did bad things to other kids, or their own kids, or random strangers, and weren’t ever going to face consequences for it, who had no reason to talk about it because there was nothing they needed to convince or persuade me. Oster, like them, has a functioning conscience buried under layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of bullshit that realizes that, even though the system will never come down on them, everyone hates them for what they did and they can’t bear it.
This is a confession begging for unearned forgiveness. Someone who is as capable of internal anguish as the rest of us who wants to have their cake and eat it too, so she can carry on being a cheerful brownshirt without the nagging feeling that she hurt other people and ought to pay the price.
I hope she hears the angry tweets and posts and comments and yells in the street cursing her name for years to come. I hope it nags her every time she cashes in on her smug scribblings.
I hope it eats at her for a long, long time.
I hope she chokes on that cake. And while I try to go about my business having some semblance of hope for the future, I will walk and chew gum and despise her at the same time.
Enjoy the clicks, Emily. Every one is a hate note from us to you.
Cherish them.
I wouldn't be upset if we stayed this upset every day until the trials were over.
Maybe Emily knows people on the "We were paid to spread propaganda" list. Heck, maybe she's even high enough on the totem pole to be on the list herself.
The clever Ms. Oster--oops, *Dr.* Oster--first became loathsome to me a few years ago when she expended a great deal of her expert brainpower on *proving* that drinking in moderation during pregnancy was perfectly safe for women, because God forbid they might have to give up a little wine for nine months in the interest of doing everything within their own power to try to have a healthy child.
This is again a demonstration of why well-aimed hatred is a necessary emotion.
That which is convenient to her, or does not inconvenience her is the main engine of her self-presentation as a person of scientific rigor (she's primarily a statistician).
May she rot utterly, cell by cell, in a slow and malodorous decay, and may it be done in our lifetimes, amen.