Footnote 18: presumed guilt by association, stunning levels of ignorance on display, and a few reflections on civil discourse and etiquette
Last Saturday, I had a conversation with an acquaintance who isn't jabbed, and we were 'asked' to leave the room by a 70+ woman who feared for her triple-jabbed husband's life. O tempora, o mores.
So, last Saturday this happened: our elder daughter is participating in a pre-first communion course, hence my bi-weekly predilection for posting stuff on Saturday mornings (now you know). I typically find a quiet room in the convent where these courses take place, open my computer, and type.
Not so this weekend, for I ran into another parent who for a variety of reasons is very frustrated with her existence right now, with Scandinavia in general, and with the odious dehumanisation of ‘the unclean’ in particular.
So, I lent her an ear and we had a nice, quiet conversation going when an elderly woman entered who informed the two of us that we’d had to move elsewhere within 30 minutes ‘for we’ve booked the room’ (for a Portuguese-language parish group reunion, no less). So, my conversation partner and I said something like, ‘sure, we’ll leave in time’, and carried on.
My acquaintance, who moved to Scandinavia from the Global South many years ago and left a few years later (for Portugal, until her family moved back to Scandinavia) was quite exhausted by the above-mentioned topics. So, I didn’t open my computer and lent her an ear, for I felt she needed this.
We began talking, and my acquaintance didn’t hold back after like, well, two minutes and began complaining about the shallow hypocrites all-around, her in-laws, and the like, relating personal stories from her all-vaxxed in-laws.
And at that point, that elderly woman inserted herself into our conversation, without any of the appropriate niceties, such as, ‘excuse me’ or the like. No, that septuagenarian simply said:
My husband is in a high-risk group, and I must ask you to leave.
So much for Charity, consideration, nuance, and the like, I thought.
My conversation partner and I gave her a mouthful, including information about the inability of the gene therapeutics masquerading as ‘vaccines’ to actually, well, prevent (re-) infection, transmission, and the like, such as, say, the impossibility of getting infected in time periods under some 2-3 hours of being in the room with a symptomatic person. Mind you, meither my acquaintance nor I were symptomatic, I’ve had Covid recently, which bestows upon me natural immunity, but such ‘facts’ don’t matter anymore.
Eventually, we left the room, sat down two rooms further down the corridor, and continued our conversation.
As an utterly absurd afterthought, that elderly couple also went to Church afterwards and spent another 45 or so minutes singing and praying with some 40-odd other people.
You know, I so long for someone of the Covidian cultists to actually being able to have a conversation, however brief, that’s not utterly incoherent and replete with logical fallacies.
And while I’m at it, why not wish for the Moon?
Would you, my dear readers, share likewise moments in the comments?
I don't know if it's the way I look but whenever someone has started to go off about masks and so on, I've simply stated in a very flat voice: "They don't work the way you think."
19 out of 20 looks at me as if I was trying to sell pork in mosque or something.
The True Believer, especially it they are the kind of person who treats others as were they an audience, generally launches into a hectoring diatribe about the virtue of, well summarised "it everyone just did what they were told there wouldn't be any problems".
And then they stare at you, triumphantly. Now, the play can unfold one of two ways: you either challenge them with facts which they react to by screeching, calling your sources ignorant (without you having named your sources, no less) and going off on tangential rants about taxes, climate change, racism, the slovenly youth of today and whatnot. (As a raconteur ranter by nature, I can sympathise with the impulse but decorum must come first, yes?)
Or, you simply say: "I'm not telling you that you're not allowed to wear a mask (or whatever), I'm telling you that you have no right at all do demand others do it, or that others isolate themselves when they aren't sick, or that people are forced or pressured to accept to be injected with an unknown experimental substance."
The above is condensed and (s)lightly dramatised of course; real conversation is never so neat as it is presented in "And the I said xxx, and she said yyyy, and don't you know the next week she got sick!"-anecdotes. Ahhh, the beauty of narrative discourse theory in action!
"My husband is in a high-risk group, and I must ask you to leave."
The appropriate response is, "So why aren't you encouraging him to supplement with vitamin D?