Emily Oster: The Broken Child. The Missionary

Stop being a missionary, Emily. And then, once you climb off that perch, we'll talk about "amnesty."

This story is about “pandemic amnesty.” It is another preamble to the upcoming article about my interview with Charles Eisenstein. I decided to break things down into separate topics instead of sending a War and Peace about everything in the universe (which is what our interview turned out to be, given the intellectual inclinations of both Charles and myself.)

Photo: https://mdash.mmlafleur.com/emily-oster-interview

By now, everyone and their dog has heard of Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University and a self-identifying “data-based parenting expert” who has published a rather inept and insulting article in the Atlantic, calling for what sounds to me like very selective “pandemic amnesty.”

Indulgences for patricians

From her ivory tower—where she hangs out with other like-minded establishment-approved wobblyfolk—Emily asks to pardon the clean establishment-minded people like herself who didn’t know because they mocked any readily available data that contradicted their dogmatic beliefs. She asks to pardon the clean folk for having done various foolish things like terrifying their own kids into screaming, “Social distancing!!!” when faced with a possibility of human contact—and traumatizing the formerly-known-as-resilient children possibly for life.

(A side question for those who aren’t afraid to look into the abyss: What do you think will happen when these poor kids—turned by their misguided adults into walking cases of  neurosis—grow up and take managerial positions? I say, let’s all enjoy any remaining joy while we still have a chance because when those damaged children come of age, we’ll all need a lot of help!) 

Notably, in her asking for patrician indulgences, Emily still doesn’t want to in any way associate with the horrible unclean. She doesn’t want anything to do with the vermin whom the establishment-minded people like herself had thrown under the bus—and then applauded the bus driver enthusiastically as he was going back and forth a few times over their screaming bodies, flattening their bodies and their unworthy, “wrong” and “dangerous” views, old normal and all.

Screams from under the bus

Just Mindy 🐊 @just_mindy

This video is in response to the @TheAtlantic article about “pandemic amnesty” and it’s a much watch. This man is so right on.

Mathew Crawford @EduEngineer

@ProfEmilyOster @TheAtlantic Hundreds of thousands died. Nursing home patients were left to rot in their own feces. Willful lies were told to suppress treatment. Doctors are still under attack if they did not go along with it.

roundingtheearth.substack.comRTE Roundtable Talk #16: Attacks on Independent PhysiciansFeaturing Dr. Brian Tyson and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden

Wittgenstein @backtolife_2023

Reminder - November 2020: Melbourne security guard chokes a teenager unconscious and carries him out for not wearing a face mask.

BBC Yorkshire @BBCLookNorth

This is the moment a 73-year-old woman was arrested after taking her mum, 97, from a care home to look after her. She said she wanted to care for her mother, who has dementia, at home. Read more: bbc.in/3k98lPb

"But We Didn't Know." Oh, Professor, We Beg to Differ.

Trish the Dish @TrishtheDish_7

@ProfEmilyOster @TheAtlantic We weren’t right because we were lucky. We were right because we kept our whits about us, didn’t panic, and looked at the data. That’s not luck. It’s actually incredibly insulting that you say it’s luck. You could’ve looked for the same things I did on outdoor transmission

𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗠𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 🐊 @txsalth2o

There’s only two options: A- Average citizens who were looking at the raw data from day one are much smarter than the experts and journalists Or B- the experts and journalists knew the truth and intentionally mislead the public There is no middle ground.

Two Weeks to Flatten Freedom and Dignity

But Emily, poor damaged Emily, still doesn’t get it—and on my end, I feel simultaneously indignant from here to the moon that people like Emily are in positions of influence, while being dangerously unqualified—and really bad for just how divorced from reality and sensory-deprived the poor broken Emily is, in her stupid ivory tower.

Poor Emily. Poor dangerous Emily.

(Here is my letter to establishment intellectuals from July 2020.)

Grow Some Balls: A Sour Letter to Establishment Intellectuals

To my senses, Emily is a classic case of arrested emotional development, a broken child who grows up to be a dangerous adult—a puffy-cheeked managerial servant of the Machine, a narrow-minded “successful” missionary with an axe who goes around and axes everything that doesn’t conform to the algorithm—sincerely so, albeit it does help that axing the dissidents is also really good for her (yes, a pun) missionary position.

By the way, despite the fact that I wholeheartedly despise and mourn the horrors that have been going on in the past thirty months—with a silent approval by Emily—the fascism, the medical murder, the censorship, the attack on wholesome health, the lies, the segregation, and the overall degradation of courteous behavior—I feel sincerely bad for her, the broken child by the name of Emily—and for the millions of other Emilies. Multigenerlational trauma is a real thing, and we are living it.

How do I say precisely what I feel? Perhaps like this: I think that Emily’s choices are horrible, and I wish she weren’t such a toxic influence—but do I respect her soul, and I feel bad for her. I am actually not a big fan of open letters (they are a good way to blow off the steam but talking directly is far more productive for healing)—so I actually wrote to Emily and offered her to come on my podcast if she wants, and talk heart to heart. I doubt she will have the balls to do it. She is, after all, a missionary, and I think she only knows how to talk to people who agree with her, from a positon of power, in the capacity of a manager suckling of the Machine. But if I am wrong about this assessment, and she has the balls to talk heart to heart, I will talk to her fairly, with full respect her soul. After all, in order to get anywhere near “amnesty,” we need to start the process of healing somewhere… and it starts with honesty.

The suckling of the Machine

Here are some examples where Emily, seemingly feeling that the “unvaccinated” are some kind of naughty children or dirty beasts, upon which she is authorized to act in the capacity of the modern missionary, shares her strategic thoughts:

ProfEmilyOster @ProfEmilyOster

Shaming people who haven't gotten vaccinated is not likely to work at this point (or ever). What will? Individual family pressure: Maybe Vaccine requirements for things you want to do (domestic air/train travel, work, sports events): Yes. We can have these without shame.

ProfEmilyOster @ProfEmilyOster

@BAMayer427 To be clear: I'm not suggesting we say "you do you" to the non-vaxxers. The other side here is vaccinated people who continue to see unvaccinated relatives, which I think is a more complicated choice with multiple reasonable solutions.

ProfEmilyOster @ProfEmilyOster

@JuliaRaifman Yes. I'd add vaccine mandates to this list, as well.

ProfEmilyOster @ProfEmilyOster

My unpopular opinion of the day is that I think we may be reaching the limits of fear-based vaccine motivation. And there are downsides to continuing to sow fear among those who are already afraid. What might work? -Full FDA approval -Employer mandates

(Why is Emily not suggesting making manufacturers legally liable, opening up their data to the public for transparency, or holding open, honest, data-based debates with the scientists who have arrived at different conclusions about the safety of the injections? Well, perhaps such heretical thoughts simply don’t visit her mind—or maybe, it is just obviously very bad for her career, and she is not willing to commit a career suicide.)

What is data, anyway?

In the interview with Charles, we talk about how people who have access to different sets of data tend to “accept” the data that emotionally appeals to them and “invalidate” the data that “does not feel right,” typically because it is not accepted by their echo chamber.

Peer pressure is a powerful convincing and blinding force, and thinking from the inside takes a strong spine.  Some people just haven’t yet grown a strong enough spiritual spine to be able to ignore the peer pressure — and "evaluate the data" based on the data alone, regardless of whether it "looks right" in the echo chamber-flavored light. 

So, Emily is a self-identifying data-based parenting expert. For a second, let’s step away from COVID and look at how Emily handles the data on, say, the benefits of breastfeeding. To paraphrase her, it comes out to something like this: “Yes, there is data that shows that breast-fed children have higher IQs and don’t get sick as much—but I don’t think it’s right. Probably a correlation at best.” Am I seeing emotional bias?

And here’s is how Emily handles the data showing harms from the electromagnetic radiation (also paraphrasing): “There is data showing a link between cell-phone usage and brain tumors but it doesn’t feel right, so I suggest we put this question to rest and focus on other things instead.”

Quote (note the confidence):

A paper from a team in Sweden has again concluded that the use of cellphones and cordless phones increases the risk for tumors, most specifically glioma, a type of usually malignant brain tumor.

In this study, mobile phone users were 30 percent more likely to develop gliomas. Those who used phones for 25 years or more were 200 percent more likely.

This team has considered the same questions, and reached the same conclusion, before. And it’s not the only one. The International Agency for Research on Cancer cites mobile phones as a “possible” carcinogen.

In the end, it is simply extremely unlikely that there is any link between cellphones and brain tumors. We can, perhaps, put this debate to rest and focus on the actual danger of cellphones: using them while driving [emphasis mine].

The missionary position

Emily is a face of our algorithm-based civilization: arrogant, accomplished within the parameters of the “system,” Machine-approved, sensory-deprived. Not a bad person at all—but a person who has never been taught to be free from the inside—and so she takes the shape of whatever the “trusted” authority figures tell her and incentivize her to believe. She is painfully unoriginal, this Emily.

She is also endearingly sincere in her cluelessness—dangerous, yes, but also sincere, like somebody who is sincerely trying to give you poison “for your own good.” She is like those college-educated Soviet folks in the 1950s who graced the peasants with their really bad, “scientific”—and mandatory— farming instructions. She is of the wobblyfolk: sweetly aggressive, presumptuous, arrogant, insecure, machine-dependent—but not intentionally evil at all, just very lost and disconnected from her biological and spiritual compass.

I imagine that if the CNN were to tell her tomorrow and then keep telling her for a year—in the same business-as-usual, hypnotic manner—that Fauci is a criminal, and that she should listen to the “antivaxxers” because they are the new prophets—she would probably change her tune in a heartbeat. That’s the problem with the wobblyfolk —a great enthusiasm for being dominant within the set parameters—but no emotional spine, and no original ideas!!!

She is like an overly medicated domestic pet who, if let out into the wild, would freeze in terror and confusion, having no idea what to do with all this chaotic freedom. Emily, poor Emily, is a product of multigenerational trauma—and for that, I feel a lot of compassion—but if it were up to me, I would not allow her anywhere close to any position of power due to a lack of necessary qualifications.

Emily is the abused and the abuser. Her city-pet-like sensory deprivation is a product of societal abuse—and a horrible thing to live with—but she is also an abuser herself even though, according to her echo chamber, she is merely “following the science.”

Emily comes from the intellectual tradition of missionaries who—oddly enough—believe that their understanding of the world is soooooo superior that they have God- and science-given authority over other people’s bodies and souls. That their dominance over others is good for the dominated.

Emily is a missionary. God help us.

Final thoughts

Here is the problem. When we think about past historical atrocities—the massacres, the genocides, we imagine that the collaborators of the past danced with some kind of a special evil. But the truth is, they were not in any way special. They were just regular people with broken senses who, step by step, floated farther and father from their souls, which turned them into wobblyfolk. They were just regular people who were so desensitized by the propaganda of their time to their own ability to relate to fellow human beings that they became collaborators and enablers of various horrors. Gradually, then suddenly.

And so, the difficult task before us is to heal the senses somehow and to revive our impenetrable spiritual power. The big villains (who are very few among us) depend on the massively broken senses of regular people to feed their powers. If regular people, en masse, connect to their souls, the big villains will lose their power. The problem is that right now, collectively, we are nowhere near being healed. It’s a mess. It’s a multigenerational mess, and most people are broken.

There is so much propagada in this world, so many flavors, so many incentives to do what’s easy and wrong, to many ways to betray ourselves and “the other”—but we have the choice to do what’s right. And then again. And again. And then our senses start straightening out.

So, when it comes to forgiveness, Emily has not earned it yet—but I pray for her healing. I really do. I would love a world in which Emily is courageous. She needs to do her part. She needs to stop being a missionary—and grow a pair.

Anatomy of Forgiveness

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