When You're In A Hole, Stop Digging

Evidently, I'm not smart enough to know what I read over on Claire's blog the other day:

"I hadn't even read Aesop's attempted takedown of me before I started writing this comment, but wow. He thinks I set up an idiotic either/or when I clearly stated in the post that that either/or was just the beginning of a conversation about other options AND when the main point of the post was to ASK READERS for other options and viewpoints??? 

Jeazy peazy, someone didn't bother reading before blarting."

First, let's summarize where I agree with Claire:

Her either/or absolutely was, as she said, idiotic. D'accord.

We'll come back to that in a minute.

And yes, she was asking for input on the following question:

"The question: What will you do -- or what do you think you and your neighbors should do --if the unvaxxed, or the previously"fully vaxxed" but now insufficiently boostered, are forbidden to access basic life needs? I'm thinking groceries especially."

Firstly, contrary to her assumptions, I read every word in her piece. Secondly, there are two problems with her pique in response to what I wrote back: 

1) It was an exact answer to her very question, which I had obviously read, and without any trouble understanding same.

2) When the author asks a question, and then posts their own answer to that very question, they own that answer. You can't walk it back, or feign faux surprise that someone thought you actually meant what you said, when the words you're quoting are literally and explicitly your own.

So unless Claire meant to illustrate how little thought whatsoever she's given to her own  question (which she nonetheless describes having discussed with her unidentified friend for some good time):

"We went back and forth, coming to no particular conclusions,..."

then she absolutely owns her answer to her own question. Which was

"Fully vaxxed and boostered friends or black marketeers will make food runs for us and we'll continue to quietly refuse to bow to Faucism no matter what pressures are brought to bear."

Riiiiiiight. And food-pooping unicorns will sprinkle cheeseburgers, surf and turf platters, and haute cuisine box meals over the homes of all the sincere boys and girls too, I suppose. This answer has all the seriousness of a conversation with a 3-year old girl having a tea party with her dolls and stuffed animals. When that's your answer to "What will you do...?", you can't come back and gaslight me or anyone else for being so gauche as to take you at your word, and noting in reply that such a proposition is farcical and idiotic. It would be different if she'd posted both answers as two other people, without making any suggestion herself, but that's not what she posted. My apologies for understanding the ridiculousness of her reply so succinctly and rapidly, but there it is. It's her reply to her own question. And it's frankly childish and preposterous, prima facie. If you're going to call something a "think piece", might one suggest doing some first?

We took that for granted as bog-obvious, but tasked for the observation now, we shall belabor the point.

Show the class where and when you've noted any spirit of solidarity present in America between the vaxxed and the unvaxxed? Show all work.

What evidence leads anyone to presume that any such "food runs" will be blithely tolerated by TPTB, their teeming hordes of Karen Vaxxhole minions, or the erstwhile Jell-O Sheriffs at the local foodmart? Once again, show all work.

What experience in smuggling food long-term, in any appreciable quantities, leads Claire to believe random folks will do that any better than they'll wash their hands during flu season?

I ask this because the average American consumes nearly a ton of food per year. That's over 5 pounds a day, per person. So who do you - anybody out there - know, who's vaxxed, that will happily sneak a family of four 20 pounds of food, day in and day out, indefinitely? Where are they going to put it? How will they buy it? How will it be handed off? IAN007, but I'm guessing putting 140 pounds of groceries for the week in a dead drop isn't going to cut it, unless your tradecraft expertise includes a vault of galleons from Gringott's Bank, Ron Weasley's flying Ford Cortina, and Harry Potter's Cloak Of Invisibility. So for those of us not mentally living in Harry Potter World, howzat gonna work, exactly, IRL? Once again, show all work.

Now tell me how it's going to work for 100M of us.

And in what universe do "black marketeers" operate pro bono? So, needing ducats to pay for their efforts, in perpetuity, are you independently wealthy enough to pay the 1000 or 10,000% mark-ups for a box of corn flakes, and everything else? And what about the bien peasants unable to afford such custom? "Let them eat cake"?

You're going to "continue to quietly refuse to bow to Faucism", all right. Delirium and coma will set in after a couple of weeks of extreme hunger, and after three to four weeks, the only sound you'll issue will be naught but the escaping gasses of decomposition, and the munching of thousands of ants and maggots on your festering corpse.

Well-played, Claire, but you'll understand if no one decides to follow your starvation/enforced hunger strike right off the cliff to Fiddler's Green.

Now, had you identified that plan as the fool's errand it so obviously is, we might have left well enough alone.

But then you propped up Feather-brained Friend's answer, and knocked it strawman silly faster than Mike Tyson in his heyday. 

(Which, for the TL;DR crowd, amounted to 

"1. Attack the innocent 

2. Something 

3.Declare victory!").

We know there are more than two answers, we saw her bleg for other options, but that doesn't change the fact that her answer and the other one were the only two she bothered to present in answer to it.

But wait, there's more!

Later, in comments and responses to her OP, Claire comes out and says

"And no, I'm not going to respond "rationally" to Aesop because he didn't respond rationally to me. There's no point engaging with someone who's already demonstrated that he'll simply misrepresent my position no matter what I say."

Claire, please -

I linked directly to your OP. I'm quoting you here in context, and verbatim. There's no way to misrepresent what you said, I simply took it for granted that you are fluent in English, weren't having a stroke when you were typing, and were sober.

So by all means, be the island of sanity and bon homme in contrast to mean old ogre Aesop. But FFS, try engaging with your own question "rationally". If only for the novelty of that approach.

My rational response was that your answer was recockulous. So was Unidentified Friend's. If I'm at a bar and the bartender throws a punch at me, I'm not going to go back tomorrow and wear a disguise and sneak in, or have someone smuggle me drinks, and I'm not going to attack everyone else at the bar. Those responses are the essence of your answer to your question, and your friend's answer to it.

My answer is I'm going after the guy that swung. Let me know where I lost you in that, and I'll try and simplify it further, if such is humanly possible.

And then (talk about "burying the lede") Claire finally stumbles upon something sensible in her own comments at 7:23 that day:

"And certainly an attempt to deny food to any segment of the population merits an armed and violent response."

Well, hallelujah! Mirabile dictu! Strike up the band! Where was that clarity and laser-like focus when you were concocting the entire post on the topic? Why couldn't you come up with something so simple in all that time back-and-forthing with Unidentified Friend?

In pure redneck eloquence:

"Shit howdy ma'am, if that ain't the most dad-blamed OBVIOUS answer there ever was, I don't know what is!"

TPTB already told millions of us we couldn't work last time around. They aren't sending out CARE packages, and the free fiatbux dollars have dried up. So not working, sooner or later, particularly in Lockdown 2.0, necessarily means not eating, doesn't it?

If Almighty God sends manna from heaven in the nick of time, that'll be a fine thing, but absent miraculous intervention, more lockdowns, more "othering", and more turning Vaxx-decliners into Vaxx Jüden is a train whose boxcars either unload at the showers, or one we refuse to board, and the range goes hot in both directions.

So if you can eventually figure that out, just like I can, and so can any well-rounded 4th grader, why be so reticent to say that up front, and even make that obvious truth the title??

Anyone that tries to starve me can count on the ultimate calorie-reduction plan: The Winchester/Federal Diet. Anywhere between 55 and 230 grains of lead, and their weight problem will be permanently solved.

And that includes Karen, and her government @$$-kissing supermarket management team. Quite possibly served hot, over a barbecue of flaming place of business. Just to remind folks of what the stakes are.

If you think you or your commentariat can improve on that, have at it. My earlier suggestion in reply has the added benefit of disincentivizing becoming a kleine Nazi for The Man, in return for an extra ration of Soylent Green.

But FFS, stop trying to paint me not being wishy-washy, and coming out and saying the obvious truth, as "irrational", when even you can finally come to the exact same position (kicking and screaming, but still...). And quit tippie-toeing around what this is going to come down to, of pure necessity.

You want to contribute? Come up with a plan to shorten the inevitable violence that's going to come, and stop fueling irrational wishes that there's some way to balkanize the country to avoid it altogether. You nor anyone else will paint a white stripe through the middle of a conflict that varies from house to house in a neighborhood, and even room to room in the same household. Civil wars are the bloodiest wars, and family squabbles are always the worst knock-down drag-out curb stomps that ever are. Quit imagining there's a way to sugarcoat that. And wrap your head around the truth you can barely bring yourself to utter without stupid amounts of prompting from the studio audience.