Russell Roberts's Blog, page 175
February 15, 2022
Some Covid Links
Canada’s Covidocracy, along with strongman Justin Trudeau, grabs more power.
Kate Wand decries this latest power grab by Canadian strongman Trudeau.
A British Columbia judge has ordered a man not to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine with his 11-year-old son or to share information on the vaccine with the boy. The man and the boy’s mom separated in 2016 and share custody of the boy. She wants to have the son vaccinated. The father doesn’t. The judge sided with the mother.
“Canada appears to be governed as you would expect of Wisconsin if California’s snotty political class were exiled to Madison. This puts generally nice, compliant people under the rule of an especially self-regarding and contemptuous gang” – so begins this new essay by Jacob Sullum. Here’s his conclusion:
“Two years after the world first heard about covid-19, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a huge extension of state power over people’s lives and the erosion of individual freedoms,” the Democracy Index 2021 observes about conditions around the world. That loss of liberty inspired waves of popular but disconnected protests in country after country among people seeking the return of liberal norms and respect for their personal choices. Now, improbably, those protests may be coming together under a maple leaf and a #HonkHonk hashtag.
David Harsanyi laments “the ugly vilification of ‘freedom.’” A slice:
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently set out to explain why the word “freedom” has become a “useful rallying cry” for protesters in the trucking convoy. Freedom, it added, “has become common among far-right groups, experts say.”
It’s worth noting here that the addendum “experts say” is perhaps the laziest scam run by contemporary political journalism. It is little more than columnizing by proxy, or what Kyle Smith calls, “opinion laundering.” Journalists scan the websites of think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities to find some credentialed ideologue who will repeat every tedious bit of liberal conventional wisdom the reporter already believes. While we may need experts to explain quantum computing or synthesize complex mathematical data for us, we hardly need them to smear political adversaries. Reporters are already aficionados in that field.
Take Gary Mason, a national affairs columnist at the Globe and Mail, who contends that truck-protest supporters such as Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre “have weaponized” the word “freedom” — a “word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the U.S.”
The problem isn’t merely that Mason insinuates that anyone using the rhetoric of liberty is on the “far right,” or that he doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference between negative and positive liberties. Mason takes the authoritarian position — shared by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who says that protesting truckers hold “unacceptable views” — that speech is no longer a genuine liberty if it is used for allegedly “selfish, malicious purposes.”
CNN correspondents will derisively note that while concerns regarding Covid mandates may have sparked the Canadian trucker protests, they have now “devolved” into “anger” over “too many government restrictions and they want their freedom back, whatever that means.” This reminds me of the habit journalists have of placing the phrase “religious liberty” between quotation marks to insinuate that the idea is either misleading or a loaded term (never do we see the same done for “social justice” or “women’s rights” or any other similarly debatable phrases). They know well what it means. They simply don’t appreciate the freedom in question.
Frank Grimes Jr. tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The [Canadian] government knows I went to Ottawa from monitoring my cell phone data, and my social media posts. They know I donated to GiveSendGo because they took possession of an illegally hacked stolen donations list. And are threatening to take my money because I want control of my body
Sonia Elijah reports on a Freedom Convoy developing in Israel.
Now turn to March 2020 and ask yourself what happened. Not to tell you all ‘I told you so’, but I told you so. It’s now becoming plain that the Big Government, ‘let’s copy communist China’ response to this pandemic was a disaster. The cure was so much worse than the disease that we (or at least the younger generation) will be feeling the effects – to be clear the effects of what the ScoMo’s and Justin Trudeau’s of the world did, not the effects of the virus – for decades and decades. Take the December 2019 WHO playbook on how to deal with viral pandemics, based as it was on a century of data and analysis, and throw it out the window in one month in a panic – unless you’re Sweden with its chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell who insisted on following that ‘no lockdowns’ playbook and who should, but won’t, win a Nobel Prize for being correct on just about everything bar early stuff around aged-care homes. Now from the start I was part of a small sceptical Australian group largely centred around this wonderful Speccie publication who publicly objected to the ‘lockdown on steroids’, heavy-handed and despotic government response to Covid that amounted to the worst incursion on all of our civil liberties in a century.
Was this omniscience on the part of this small group of heretics like me? Of course not. We read the data. We didn’t for a second think that a coterie of public health doctors, many of whom were pretty third-rate academically, had a monopoly on best policy or ‘the Science TM’. To a large extent, our first principles were sceptical of government generally getting things right. Why believe that ScoMo and his National Cabinet, aided by a Pravda-like ABC and legacy media, together with a doctorly caste of public health types, would get things right? I mean that question seriously. Posed like that, at the time without knowing more, I’d have put the odds at well under 50 per cent. Throw in the fact that some of the best medical academics and epidemiologists in the world formulated and distributed the Great Barrington Declaration that disputed the lockdown playbook nearly point by point and tell me again why you’d put the Big Government response’s odds above one in three? Then ask yourself this follow-on query: ‘If a democratic government completely screws things up by being despotic and heavy-handed for over a year and a half, can the politicians that took us down that path ever – and I mean ever – admit they screwed up?’ To ask is to answer. Ditto the whining ‘not on my watch’ journalistic caste who behaved incuriously, with no scepticism, largely like cheerleaders for heavy-handed policing and despotic politicians.
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Here’s the thing. Being sceptical of government’s ability to get things right is not limited to left-wing governments. It applies to all governments, even supposedly right-of-centre ones and even ones who outsource their thinking to an incestuous, illiberal caste of public health supremos.
Vinay Prasad tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The saddest thing about COVID19 policy is to watch the zero covid/ mask 2 year olds/ pro vax passport/ pro booster mandate for college kids supporters believe their policies help vulnerable communities, when it does the exact opposite:
Serves entrenched interests.
It’s welcome news that Washington, D.C., is dropping its indoor mask mandate in most places, but it’s beyond cruel at this point that the one group that is left out of this easing of policies will be schoolchildren. As I have written before, no segment of the population has sacrificed more relative to the risk Covid presents to them than children have. At this stage, there is no conceivable argument for forcing children to remain masked all day, a practice that has always been questionable, but remains even less defensible at a time when cases have plummeted and vaccines are broadly available enough to have ditched the mandate in other indoor spaces.
Writing at UnHerd, Jacob Siegel asks an important question:
Given that we now know that these public health decisions are not rooted in The Science, the crucial question remains: Why did tens of millions of people willingly give up their freedoms and embrace the ever-changing dictates of such transparently incompetent and undeserving authorities?
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 11 of the original, 1982 edition of Dominick Armentano’s superb but regrettably neglected volume Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure:
[T]he weight of the general evidence is that the firms indicted under the antitrust laws were not abusing consumers, and that the laws have tended, instead, to protect competitors and reduce efficiency throughout the market.
DBx: Pictured here is Sen. John Sherman (R-OH), the protective-tariff-loving politician whose name adorns the world’s first national “antitrust” statute.
February 14, 2022
Tyranny Isn’t Excused by Good Intentions
Here’s a letter to someone who tells me, quite believably, that she’s sorry that she took her brother’s advice to check out my blog.
Ms. W__:
You’re unhappy with my linking favorably to Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s new column in which she writes that Canada is “no longer a liberal constitutional state. A coercive Ottawa rules over daily life.” And you conclude that I “and others who write like O’Grady criminally exaggerate” whenever we “imply that vaccine mandates are tyranny.” In your view, “Mr Trudeau is the farthest thing from a tyrant. He’s a good man wanting to protect Canada’s populace from a danger regardless of how many Canadians happen to be in agreement with him.”
I strongly disagree with you. Forget that vaccinations do little or nothing to stop the virus’s transmission. Forget that the public-health authorities who you hold in high esteem agree that vaccines quite reliably protect vaccinated persons from suffering severe consequences from Covid. Forget that there are real risks of vaccination borne by each vaccinated individual (however small or large that individual might assess these risks to be). And forget that it looks increasingly likely that there are effective treatments for Covid.
Instead recognize that tyranny does not miraculously disappear simply because the tyrant expresses – or even possesses – good intentions. As the long-ago American jurist James Coolidge Carter wisely observed, “Even tyranny may be beneficent in its aims, but never in its results, and the attempt to compel a community of men to do right by legislative command, when they do not think it to be right, is tyranny.”*
Beware: To excuse unprecedented state coercion today deployed to achieve what you regard as good is to ensure that you’ll tomorrow be a victim of such coercion, for tomorrow persons with whom you disagree will feel justified by the precedent that you today endorse to use tyranny to achieve what they regard as good but which you regard as evil.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* James Coolidge Carter, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), page 217.
Some Covid Links
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes that Canada is “no longer a liberal constitutional state. A coercive Ottawa rules over daily life.” Here are three more slices:
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared last month that truckers protesting his Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Ottawa hold “unacceptable views,” he accentuated the real reason the drivers decided they had no choice but to go to the streets. Their government, headed by the Liberal Party, has become decidedly illiberal.
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Note that Mr. Trudeau didn’t say that blocking the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is unacceptable. Rather, he declared truckers’ ideals beyond the pale.
Intolerance is ugly. But for Mr. Trudeau, who proudly backs Black Lives Matter, it’s OK in this case because it’s the politically correct variety: He’s denouncing the opinions of a bunch of yahoos.
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Mr. Trudeau likes to invoke “science.” Yet the virulence of the virus is waning, natural immunity is up, and by the prime minister’s own estimates some 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated. If there were ever any reasons for extraordinary government measures to protect public health, they too have faded.
On Tuesday Alberta Premier Jason Kenney lifted his province’s proof-of-vaccination requirements. “Now is the time to begin learning to live with Covid,” he said. “These restrictions have led to terrible division.” Saskatchewan did the same earlier last week, and Ontario has said it would move in a similar direction.
Meantime, Mr. Trudeau is claiming police powers as if the nation were in the grip of catastrophe. No wonder already simmering resentments about federal overreach have boiled over.
Canada is advertised as a modern democracy that respects pluralism. This implies differences of opinion peacefully coexisting on a variety of subjects from assessing health risks to raising and educating children to political philosophy. Individuals, even when in the minority, retain rights to free speech and assembly.
Yet in practice Canadians who oppose big government increasingly find they are living under a woke, progressive majoritarianism that believes it owns the truth. Dissidents are hounded out of the public square and even the prime minister cancels contrarians without batting an eye.
The reach of Canada’s administrative state rivals that of its southern neighbor. Ottawa and the provinces have their own versions of health departments and agencies staffed with “experts” who wield enormous power yet don’t answer to the electorate. On both sides of the border, chief medical authorities are referred to as “top doctors,” but that’s a misnomer. They’re more likely to be top bureaucrats, people like Anthony Fauci, who has been at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
Sean Collins reveals the propaganda war on Canadian truckers. Two slices:
Almost every story in the US media about the Canadian truckers comes with a now-obligatory reference to ‘swastikas’ and ‘Confederate flags’. NPR’s lead stories in recent days have claimed that the protests are ‘rooted’ in extremism, and that its organisers have expressed ‘anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and conspiratorial worldviews’. A CNN reporter said the protests were reminiscent of the 6 January riot at the US Capitol: ‘And just think of the language. I know it sounds familiar to you. A threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.’ Politico warns that the truckers’ convoy has become ‘a magnet for far-right grievances’ in the US and globally.
In playing up a supposed threat of swastikas and Nazis on the rampage in Canada, the US media have allied themselves with Justin Trudeau’s propaganda war. Canada’s prime minister has denigrated the truckers as ‘a few people shouting and waving swastikas’. The people of Ottawa ‘don’t deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner or a Confederate flag’, Trudeau said during a debate in the House of Commons on Monday night. But, as anyone who has watched the videos coming out of Canada can see, truckers and their supporters along the highways and in city streets have been waving red Maple Leafs, the Canadian national flag. Protesters in Ottawa wear them as capes. Against this sea of Canadian flags, the New York Times reports ‘at least two’ swastikas have been sighted.
Thankfully, there have been some reports on the ground in Canada that are not just repeating Trudeau’s slanders. An excellent one comes from Rupa Subramanya, Ottawa-based columnist for the National Post. ‘I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks’, says Subramanya, ‘and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist’.
Indeed, from Subramanya’s reporting, or simply from watching some video interviews with truckers you can find online, you can tell right away that these are people with legitimate complaints. The truckers are understandably upset about how Trudeau’s vaccine mandates and other Covid-related restrictions have threatened their jobs and have made their everyday lives miserable. If there is one word that is repeated by the truckers and their supporters it is ‘freedom’ – freedom from mandates, freedom to live their lives and make their own decisions about their health. It’s an uncomplicated demand, one that people have called for over centuries.
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The Biden administration has thrown its support behind the hapless Trudeau. Earlier this week US Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg urged their Canadian counterparts to crack down on protesters and ‘resolve this situation’. The Biden team is also raising fears that the Canadian truckers could inspire a US copycat. The Department of Homeland Security has warned that a convoy of protesting truckers was planning to travel from California to Washington, DC, potentially disrupting the Super Bowl this weekend and President Biden’s State of the Union address on 1 March.
In the days to come, we can expect to hear more about unruly, violent, racist protesters promoting ‘hate’ – not only in Canada, but in the US and Europe, too. But in this growing conflict between the elites and masses there’s only one side promoting ‘hate’. That’s the political class in the West, who hates it when working-class people express their own opinions. The propaganda war is just beginning.
el gato malo reports on the CDC’s stubborn insistence on endorsing what amounts to child abuse.
We started out with “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” If nothing else can be said in favor of this plan, credit must be given for how well it was explained. Pictures like this were clear enough. With my university-level education in math and physics, I understood that the area under the curve was expected to remain equal under both alternatives: the one with and the other without “precautions” (as the label in the diagram euphemistically refers to life under communism). The peak of the curve would be lower, at the cost of the epidemic being extended in duration.
While the plan might or might not work, it is possible to state the premise without contradicting laws of logic or common sense. The flattening plan does accept that nearly everyone will eventually be exposed and the contagion will exhaust itself. If the plan enables some people to delay their exposure, up to a point, that could buy doctors some time to better learn how to treat them. Or perhaps a miraculous vaccine will be introduced that would create sterilizing immunity and halt the outbreak in its tracks enabling those who had delayed to avoid infection entirely.
And doctors did learn how to treat the disease, but treatment is actively fought by the medical establishment. The FDA – the drug regulator in the US – tweeted you should only get treated for covid if you are a horse. Even today, you can get banned from social media for suggesting that it is possible to treat the disease. So any possible advantage in developing a treatment was wasted.
While the plan was clear, it was not guaranteed to work. Subtle effects could undermine the simple story told by the picture. Perhaps everyone staying at home will not help because people will get infected at home. Or perhaps too many people must leave home because essential critical infrastructure workers such as marijuana dispensaries must remain open to keep society running.
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Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”
Fraser Nelson praises Sweden. Two slices:
The problem with lockdowns is that no one looks at whole-society pictures. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team from Imperial College London admitted this, once, as a breezy aside. “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression,” they wrote in a supposed assessment of lockdown, “which will be high.” But just how high? And were they a price worth paying?
As Sweden abolishes all domestic Covid restrictions, it emerges with one of Europe’s lower Covid death tolls: the rate is 1,614 per million people, just over half the amount of Britain (2,335). Given that our [Britain’s] death tolls were comparable at first (both among the worst anywhere), it’s hard to argue that there’s some demographic force which meant Covid was never going to spread in Sweden.
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Swedish schools kept going throughout, with no face masks. Sixth-formers and undergraduates switched to home learning, but the rest of Swedish children went to school as normal. That’s not to say there weren’t absences as the virus spread: it was common to see a third, at times even half of the class absent due to sniffles or suspected Covid. But there were no full-scale closures and, aside from some suspicions about minor grade inflation (the average maths grade sneaked up to 10.1, from 9.3), there is no talk in Sweden about educational devastation.
Jordan Peterson tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
We’ll be paying the bills for a two year lockdown for twenty years
(DBx: Peterson is correct that we’ll be paying the bills for this manmade devastation of society for a long time, but I believe that he’s far too optimistic about the amount of time that such repayment will require.)
When writing the @gbdeclaration in Oct 2020, we knew that politicians and media might be hostile, but we wanted the public to know that many public health scientists disagreed with school closures and other Covid restrictions. Thank you all for listening!
A future variant of Covid-19 could be much more dangerous and cause far higher numbers of deaths and cases of serious illness than Omicron, leading UK scientists have warned.
As a result, many of them say that caution needs to be taken in lifting the last Covid restrictions in England, as Boris Johnson plans to do next week.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 94 of Joseph Henrich’s 2020 book, The WEIRDest People In the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and and Particularly Prosperous (footnote deleted):
As in nearly all societies, individuals don’t consciously design the most important elements of their institutions and certainly don’t understand how or why they work.
DBx: Is there wisdom about human institutions that is more fundamental than this bit of wisdom? I can’t think of any. And yet this foundational piece of wisdom is very often ignored. To win office, most politicians promise voters that they – politicians – understand just what ails society and, if given enough power and obedience, will intervene to successfully ‘solve’ the ‘problems.’ Too many voters, eager to believe in the dogma of secular salvation centered on the use of coercion by the state, delight at these false promises. Destruction ensues, and is more or less proportionate to the amount of intervention.
February 13, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
What makes UIC worth noticing, however, are the punishments it imposed. At first, it said that Kilborn’s sensitivity training would be mandated only if four semesters of his recorded classes indicated a harassing classroom environment. Despite exemplary performance reviews, he was declared “ineligible” for an announced, across-the-board 2 percent pay raise. Then UIC said he would have to undergo sensitivity training after all. An eight-week diversity instruction regimen would involve 20 hours of course work, five “self-reflection” papers, weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity “trainer” and supplemental molding by the trainer.
Could those who concocted this sentence ever recognize their kinship with the moral purifiers of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge? Or of Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Or the Stalinist interrogator Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel “Darkness at Noon”? If so, would UIC’s unconscious emulators be discomfited by the resemblance? Unlikely.
Today, bureaucrats parasitic off academia’s scholarly mission outnumber actual scholars. These threat-discerners, diversity-planners, bias-detectors, sensitivity-promoters, sustainability-guarantors and other beneficiaries of today’s multibillion-dollar social justice industry are doing well during the nation’s supposed apocalypse.
People on the left have always been inclined to address poverty and other ills with government benefits, without much worry over their preferred programs’ notable, unintended consequences. From the push for higher minimum wages to the implementation of a federal paid-leave program, they often overlook the ways in which these policies generate potential losses of work hours (or even lost jobs), lower wages, and reduced prospects for promotion (especially for women). Lately, people on the political right have joined the same chorus to demand counterproductive proposals.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains that Facebook’s “monopoly” (so called) was never destined to last.
David Henderson reflects on a new poll of prominent economists who were asked about price controls.
Michael Derchin praises Justice Stephen Breyer for his efforts long ago to deregulated airlines. A slice:
Since deregulation, average domestic round-trip real airfares have plunged about 60%, to $302 from $695. Load factors—the percentage of seats filled on each flight—stood at 84% just before the pandemic, compared with 55% before deregulation. In the early 1970s, 49% of U.S. adults had flown. In 2020 the share was 87%.
“Seattle’s Soda Tax Has Been Great for…Beer Sales” – so reports Baylen Linnekin.
The Cincinnati Bengals will play against the Los Angeles Rams, in Los Angeles, in today’s Super Bowl – played in a very expensive stadium for which taxpayers paid not one cent. Here’s more from Eric Boehm:
But the most remarkable thing about the stadium, which opened in September 2020, isn’t its very-SoCal design elements or the packed schedule of high-profile events to be held there.
It’s that the billion-dollar stadium was built without public subsidies. In terms of public policy, SoFi Stadium might be one of the most important stadiums in American history—a venue that points toward a future where billionaires who love sports, rather than taxpayers, serve as patrons of professional athletics rather than rent-seekers.
Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi take us inside “the woke indoctrination machine” at work in some elite private schools. Here’s their conclusion:
No longer are private schools focused primarily on teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of Maoist China’s Red Guards.
The danger, however, goes far beyond private schools. The same framework called diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and justice has gained influence in public education, universities, corporate workplaces, the federal government and the military. For the sake of our children and our nation’s future, it must be dismantled.
Some Covid Links
Roger Severino updates us on the latest Covid-justified eruption of authoritarianism. A slice:
On February 7, the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin that sounds more like a plot from a dystopian sci-fi novel than a sober assessment of America’s enemies and their capabilities. The bulletin begins by stating, “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM).” Note that the DHS is not here talking about speech actually coordinating or inciting violent terrorist actions. Such conduct is clearly criminal and is discussed elsewhere in the bulletin. Rather, the DHS makes clear that purely lawful speech and opinion is now the number one contributor to the current threat environment and cites “misleading narratives” regarding Covid-19 as a leading example of this terroristic threat.
The DHS defines Covid “misinformation” as being “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm,” and defines Covid “malinformation” as being “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Under these definitions, you can be guilty of contributing to terrorism without any bad intent or by disseminating known Covid facts if you omit what the DHS considers proper context.
Fear is so much easier to incite than to dispel. We were reminded of that when the prime minister announced what is likely to be the imminent end of the last remaining restrictions on normal life in England. The farrago of public criticism was, by the standards of recent hysteria, mercifully small but it still had the intended effect on public discourse. Because it was now likely to happen earlier than first predicted, the removal of those last rules was described as “premature”.
Even though the original planned date had never been anything more than an estimate based primarily on how severe the omicron variant turned out to be, it had now taken on the sanctity of a revealed truth which must not be contravened. This analysis was taken seriously by the media and thus inevitably by a significant proportion of the population.
More specifically, and damningly, the announcement was derided as a “political” decision, rather than a “scientific” one. Well yes, of course it was a political decision in the strict literal sense of the word, because it was a decision made by elected political leaders which is the way, at least for the moment, we still do things in a democracy.
What this meant was that it took in a much wider set of considerations that impacted on society and the economy than the (rapidly diminishing) effects of Covid which were the specific focus of those scientists – whose advice had now presumably been placed in a broader context than it was at the height of their influence. But what the scientists who queued up for their broadcasting appearances were implying was itself very “political”.
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There is now a proportion of the population which is, in effect, refusing to leave the imprisonment which it concluded was the only safe refuge. What is more, many people are arguing that nobody should be released until some undefined state of absolute safety for everyone (even the seriously ill or vulnerable) can be guaranteed. This demand is both logically impossible and morally unacceptable and yet – in the bizarre state of mind that has been induced over the past two years – it is being seriously entertained.
We know how we got here. By a brilliantly sustained orchestration of opinion-forming techniques that was so blindingly successful that it took even its designers by surprise. What needs to be discussed now as a matter of urgency is just how dangerous the result has been. What happens when people become truly terrified – so fearful that they are prepared to sacrifice much of what makes life worth living? They become obedient, docile and passive – which was the whole point of this programme after all. If that passivity – that relinquishing of free will – persists long enough, they become incapable of making individual choices, of taking initiative, of inventing brave advances that might alter their own condition and that of others.
David Cohen explains how Jacinda Adhern turned New Zealand “into a hermit kingdom.” Two slices:
I’m Kiwi-born, with British citizenship. But planning a trip to catch up with friends and family in the UK never used to be such a big deal. That was before the advent of “Fortress New Zealand”, which has seen my country almost completely separated from the outside world for nearly two years now.
Except for a brief, ill-starred travel bubble with Australia, my archipelago in the South Seas has been in the gulag ever since the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced a snap closure in the early weeks of the initial Covid wave.
It has left politicians – including former prime minister Sir John Key – despairing at how our country has been turned into a “hermit kingdom”. But a hermit kingdom with newfound attitude, too, if the thousands of protesters who this week brought parts of Wellington, the political capital, to a standstill are anything to go by.
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But there has always been another team milling in the shadows, the team of one million, the expatriate Kiwis stranded abroad who have paid a heavy price for their home country’s Covid elimination strategy.
On a per capita basis, New Zealand has one of the world’s biggest diasporas. The nation makes much of its bona fides as a stickler for international law and protocols, but Fortress New Zealand has been one of the few places not to allow citizens to return home as a birthright. Instead, intending returnees have taken their chances with a lottery system that has seen most applicants unable to secure a ticket.
Ben Marlow reports on the straw-man’s vicious stomping throughout Hong Kong. A slice:
With the zero-Covid zealots in Beijing pulling the strings, Hong Kong has just introduced its harshest measures yet in response to the worst outbreak of the virus across the territory. It threatens to turn the streets into something from a zombie apocalypse B-movie, virtually drained of human life.
Shopping centres, restaurants, grocers and markets are now on a list of public places where visitors must register with an official contact tracing app and have proof of vaccination.
Fines for not following mandatory testing orders have been doubled to nearly $1,300 (£955). All hairdressers and places of worship were forced to close for a fortnight from Thursday.
No more than two households are allowed to meet in private; and the most punitive of all perhaps for any medium-sized company or above – no more than two people gathering in public.
In the words of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, this is what a “dynamic Covid strategy” looks like, despite restrictions being more draconian now than when they were first introduced nearly two years ago.
Amy tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
One of the most frustrating parts of the pandemic response is the Left sanctifying middle class privilege as though it’s a moral virtue
Being able to WFH & get your shopping delivered does not make you a better person
You’ve spent 2 years outsourcing your risk to poorer people
Mark Stephen Nesti decries mask mandates. Two slices:
The requirement to wear masks is seen by many as one of the less arduous regulations we have faced. Compared with the psychological effects of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, it doesn’t look a huge imposition.
However, therein lies the problem. I am convinced that face masks, not least because they seem so innocuous, are much more psychologically harmful than we might think.
We know human communication involves much more than speaking, hearing and listening. Psychologists have spent decades studying the importance of what they refer to as non-verbal communication.
Evidence confirms that our gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice and even the way we move and walk, convey huge amounts of information. Sometimes this communication is carried out consciously, but more frequently it takes place without our knowing.
Our bodies, and most importantly our faces, can’t help but express our hates, desires and loves.
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The psychology of totalitarian regimes, as Erich Fromm wrote about in 1942 in his book Fear of Freedom, is always centred on undermining the individuality and uniqueness of human persons.
Masks have also been used to generate fear, and this fear has led to many suffering chronic anxiety. This reaction is quite easy to understand. We associate masks with threat and danger, the sort of thing surgeons and nurses wear in the operating theatre. Masks tell us in no uncertain terms that there is something very wrong and worrying out there.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 216 of Steve Landsburg’s wonderful 1997 book, Fair Play:
A good way to decide whether someone’s values are attractive is by looking at them in a mirror. When somebody tells you that it’s immoral for sellers to seek high prices, ask him whether it’s immoral for buyers to seek low prices.
February 12, 2022
Some Covid Links
Stoking panic, as Fauci and other public health leaders did, had a purpose — to manipulate human behavior. The breach of ethics is monumental and will require a reckoning.
“Our good friend was only 44 and had no idea he had stage 4 colorectal, liver, lung, and lymphatic cancer. He fought as long as he could but none of us were ever able to see him in his final days in the hospital. Final months really. One visitor per day. Today is his birthday.” – Dave (@Dave31952257)
“My vaccinated Dad wasn’t able to go see his vaccinated Mom (my Grandma) last Mother’s Day because of a ban on “non-essential” travel between Quebec and Ontario. She died 2 days before the ban was lifted. Her brother was killed by Nazis. Lest we forget.” – Adam Millward Art, Montréal, Canada (@nexusvisions)
“My aunt died in an empty hospital in Amarillo from breast cancer in late 2020. She was so scared of the virus she didn’t go to the doctor until her breast literally started to atrophy and she collapsed. No visitors. I had to help her son sneak in to see her and we were kicked out.” – razumikhin (@cw_cnnr)
“I’m afraid to let my family members [be admitted] to the hospital. Not afraid of covid at all, we’ve all had it, but worried about having family isolated and no one to advocate for them.” – Donna H, Pleasant Grove, Utah (@Donna_H67)
el gato malo is less than impressed with Canadian strongman/weakman Justin Trudeau.
Jacinda seems not to have got the memo. Last summer she notoriously locked down her country again after one man was found to have Covid in New Zealand. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been him. Now, even Australia, which has been one of the strictest, harshest, countries during Covid, has started to lift regulations. And New Zealand?
Well, Ardern has announced yet another batch of regulations for her countrymen. New Zealand seems almost hooked on the stuff. The international media once again went doolally for Ardern when she gave a press conference announcing fresh lockdowns and saying that this meant that her own wedding was off. How much she seemed to care! How much her face crumpled as she talked of the plight of her countryfolk! How selfless she was even to cancel her own nuptials!
What people should have said was that New Zealand’s prime minister had clearly become a mad person. There was no reason to do this performative caring. There was no reason to sacrifice the opportunity to get hitched. The rules were the problem, and getting rid of them should have been the priority.
Instead, everyone got swept along, yet again, on an ocean of Ardern ardour. And on it seems this will go. What will come of New Zealand? Perhaps it will remain always stuck in the summer of 2020, never allowing anyone in or out. Those of us who once went there will tell of it to our grandchildren who will listen in awe to tales of this remote island people who voluntarily cut themselves off from the rest of the world.
…..
In an effort to persuade the population to get vaccinated, Trudeau did everything he could to defame those who disagreed with him. This extended to him dismissing anyone hesitant about taking the vaccine as being (guess what?) racist, misogynistic and more. Trudeau had no evidence for any of this, but this is the modern way of excommunicating any person or group of people. Say that they are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobes and you have successfully un-personed such people.
Unfortunately for Trudeau, many Canadians can see through this playground antic and are not persuaded by it. Specifically, Trudeau found that his vaccine demands had riled Canadian truckers.
There is no special reason why truck drivers (one of the most isolating professions in the world) should have to display vaccine passports in order to do their work. But Justin decided that they had to, or their livelihoods would come to an end.
Gloriously, last month, thousands of truckers drove in convoy to Ottawa. As they arrived there for their protest, Justin decided to pretend he had a headache. Or rather he said that he had met someone who knew someone who had once danced with someone who had Covid. And so the prime minister was doing the reasonable thing and self-isolating.
The truckers stayed. At present they remain in Ottawa. Officials have looked into how to criminalise them. They have even looked into criminalising the thousands of Canadians who gathered at the roadsides to show their support. The Ottawa police are now actually stealing the truckers’ fuel and other necessities in an effort to make the protest go away. But the truckers aren’t budging.
There is no reason why Trudeau should not make peace with the truckers. Any more than Ardern should not start to walk back from isolating her island nation.
But the problem is that when you have presented yourself as the most moral person in the land – the most feeling, the most understanding – and portrayed all your critics as Nazis, it is hard to move to ground we might once have called common. So there Justin is, like Ardern, holed up in a problem entirely of his own making.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are “unproven,” and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them—an approach that threatens public health and science alike.
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But there is a broader point here: the brokenness of the criteria that political authorities and Internet platforms use to determine acceptable opinion. With a handful of largely politically motivated exceptions—the scientific backing for mask mandates, for instance, amounts to scarcely more than artificial laboratory studies and cherry-picked epidemiological comparisons, with scant if any support from randomized controlled trials—medical regulatory agencies consider RCTs the only acceptable source of evidence. Though RCTs are immune from certain classes of bias, though, they can be poorly designed in other ways and are hardly infallible. Moreover, RCTs are expensive, labor-intensive, and typically beyond the reach of researchers without institutional backing, for often wholly artificial reasons—such as pettifogging ethical oversight requirements imposed by institutional review boards, and a ban on human challenge trials that could allow conclusive randomized testing of disease treatments with drastically reduced expense and time.
As blogger Scott Alexander has pointed out, the phrase “no evidence,” frequently used to dismiss potential alternative Covid-19 treatments, is one of the most overused in science communication, applied both to assuredly false statements and to those that are likely true but simply lack sufficiently authoritative proof. Critical thinking about medicine or any topic requires weighing multiple sources against one another and distinguishing between degrees of certainty, not ruling out all sources of evidence but one and equating “unproven” with “false.” The approach to health information increasingly taken by public officials, reporters, and social media—under which any statement is “unproven” and must be assumed harmful, barring some definitive pronouncement by public health authorities to the contrary—is thus not only authoritarian but also damaging to public health and science as a whole.
Latest from Neil Ferguson and Imperial estimates Omicron as intrinsically 70% less severe than Delta.
Quite a difference from their 16th Dec report to SAGE: “We find no evidence of Omicron having different severity from Delta.”
No mention of why they got it so wrong before.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders presiding over the Salem Witch Trials were never held accountable for their brutal misguided conduct. Most did not even apologize.
France has its own Freedom Convoy. A slice:
The context is the yawning gap between a caste-like political elite and the general public. While the British political elite has unraveled with ‘partygate’ and other scandals, the French presidency has maintained a tight formation, strengthening the vaccine passport at the very moment when other countries are abandoning it. The constitutional court obligingly rubber-stamped the latest vaccine passport even though it violated its own conditions set for the previous version. Weekly demonstrations in almost every sizeable French town and city have fallen on deaf ears, as was a petition against the vaccine passport that gathered more than a million signatures in a matter of days.
The convoy’s official spokespeople say the aim is to gather in a picnic ground outside Paris and ask political leaders to come and meet them for a dialogue. They say it is peaceful and not about a blockade. But this doesn’t mean that no one will enter Paris: Parisians are hosting reception committees for the arrivals, and on Telegram chats convoy members appear to be looking for beds for the night in the city.
The European political elite is lining up against the convoy. The French secretary of state for European Affairs said that the participants were “irresponsible”: “it’s not the convoy of liberty, but the convoy of shame and egotism”. He dismissed the event as “the umpteenth episode of antivaxxers” that include “conspiracy theorists who think that the vaccine is inserting chips into the arms of people”. The prefect of Paris police has prohibited all demonstrations between Friday and Monday, threatening the organisers of any demos with imprisonment and 7500 euros fines.
Meanwhile, Belgian authorities have banned all ‘demonstrations with motorised vehicles’, to block the Brussels stage of events.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 246 of Thomas Sowell’s November 19th, 2001, essay in Capitalism Magazine – an essay titled “Contradictory Notions of Fairness” as this column is reprinted (under the title “Thanksgiving and ‘Fairness’”) in Sowell’s 2002 collection, Controversial Essays:
Politically, there are few ideas more potent than the notion that all your problems are caused by other people and their unfairness to you. That notion was the royal road to unbridled power for Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot – which is to say, millions of human beings paid with their lives for believing it.
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