Russell Roberts's Blog, page 289
April 8, 2021
Bari Weiss on the Great Awokening
Bari Weiss talks with Good Fellows about the irrationality now rampant in the academy and in the media.
Some Covid Links
“The Brooklyn Variant of the Coronavirus: Fuggedaboutit.” A slice:
There are many deviant and unprecedented aspects of the Covid religion, starting with the fact that for the first time in history, healthy, asymptomatic people of all ages were “quarantined” and placed under virtual house arrest for long periods of time. Lockdowns and “reopenings” are also deviant and unprecedented, not to mention the fact that they constitute blatant theft of property, services, and economic, personal, and religious liberty. The infectious disease experts who have imprisoned us are lionized by the media and bedwetting politicians who claim to “follow the science.” From the perspective of an infectious disease expert, you and your family are not individuals with rights and liberties. Instead, you are germ factories, whose movement and social interaction must be severely limited.
In case you think that the use of the term imprisonment is hyperbolic, please note that the official definition of lockdown is “the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure.” A more recent form of deviance in the Covid religion is the edict that those who are fully vaccinated must wear a mask. For the first time in history, we are wearing a mask after being inoculated. For example, no one has ever worn a mask after receiving a measles, flu, or polio vaccine.
The most deviant aspect of the Covid religion is that like other barbaric religions, it involves child sacrifice. Ancient religions engaged in child sacrifice in order to appease a deity or supernatural beings. Under the Covid religion, the educational development, physical health, and mental health of our children have been sacrificed in order to reduce “cases” and appease the great deity: public health police state officials. These officials and their allies in the media constantly predict “impending doom” if children and their parents do not continue to sacrifice their freedom and social development.
The feedback mechanism of profit and loss signals whether a business is meeting the demands of its customers and workforce. If businesses that don’t use vaccine passports suddenly earn lower profits than competitors that do, customers may be demanding safer environments. The market is a discovery process that will find the most desired vaccine-passport policy.
If private enterprises are denied the liberty to set their own policies, the market can’t fulfill this function. Since the government isn’t omniscient and can’t obtain all the knowledge necessary to determine the right policy for every business, we should avoid illiberal, one-size-fits all policies that restrict economic freedom.
Nick Gillespie talks with California-based chef Andrew Gruel.
Here’s an interview with British MP Desmond Swayne.
Ramesh Thakur accurately describes lockdowns as “the opiate of champagne socialists.” A slice:
On 1 February, BBC’s India business correspondent Nikhil Inamdar reported: ‘Covid-19 has ravaged the country, shrunk its GDP, sent unemployment soaring and added to the distress of a banking sector that was already in crisis’. Actually, no, Covid-19 doesn’t possess such omnipotent powers. Rather, lockdown measures to combat the disease proved deadlier than the disease itself. Meanwhile on 23 December, Forbes published a list of fifty doctors, scientists and healthcare entrepreneurs who’ve became pandemic billionaires. Covid business has boomed for cabinet cronies in the UK and for consulting firms in Australia. Amazon, Facebook and Google increased their share of US advertising dollars to more than half in 2020. The increased time and money spent on these platforms in turn fattens the consumer data collected by them and increases their market appeal for advertisers. This just might influence their decisions on censoring lockdown-critical commentary.
Yet millions of Covidians are brainwashed enough to believe that opposition to all this is ‘right-wing claptrap’. Sigh.
Jade Norris decries the “creeping authoritarianism of the Covid-19 restrictions.” A slice:
I am seriously concerned that we may already have fallen too far down the slippery slope. The latest incarnation of this recurring authoritarian nightmare comes in the form of vaccine passports, with government propping this up as the ‘final’ way to ‘get out’ of the pandemic (I am losing count of how many of those have been posited to date). Not only would vaccine passports ignore the fact that coercion is widely regarded as bad practice in public health, it would once again leave behind the most vulnerable in society, branding many as outcasts. Groups who lack trust in authorities are most likely to reject vaccines, and coercing them to take one is unlikely to improve that trust. In 2004, Boris Johnson said that if an ‘arm of the state’ ever asked him to produce an ID card, he would eat it in front of them. But vaccine passports now seem to be a foregone conclusion, and it’s hard to see what the PM actually stands for – his ‘liberal at heart’ platitudes are just not believable. The man seems to simply be a vessel for the opinions and ideas of others. Doubly concerning, one backbench conservative MP told me last week that he has recently come to believe that government’s ‘no return to lockdown’ promise is built upon mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports.
Jonathan Sumption tells Brendan O’Neill that “lockdown is an assault on our humanity.” He, of course, is correct.
What seems to be going on is that every one is covering their backs. Ministers want to pass the buck to the scientists. They want to be able to say “What a triumph for our policies” if things turn out fine; and “We followed the science” if they turn out badly. The scientists don’t like being made to carry the can for what is basically a political judgment. They want to be able to say “These were only scenarios, not predictions” if things turn out fine; and “We told you so” if they turn out badly. Each group is trying to manipulate the other. Balanced assessments based on actual evidence are sadly missing.
There are more important things at stake than the reputation of ministers or their advisers. Human beings are social animals. Interaction with other people is not a luxury. It is a basic human need. It is also the foundation of our mental health, our social organisation, our leisure activities and our economy.
There is a breed of public health officials who are indifferent to these things. They have never reflected, at any rate in public, on what makes life worth living. As far as they are concerned, human beings are just instruments of government health policy. They will be lining up to tell us that it is dangerous to return to normal life because we cannot be absolutely sure that normal life will be risk-free. They will quote the gloomier speculations of modellers as evidence of what “might” happen if the Government stops treating us like caged animals or inert specimens in some ghastly sociological laboratory.
Bridget Phetasy rightly detests the very notion of vaccine passports. A slice:
And before you come running into my mentions waving your yellow ‘International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis’ card bragging about how many countries you’ve been in where you needed to show your vaccinations (you didn’t) and how all of us dumb, ignorant rednecks need to leave our bubble — I’m not talking about international travel. What a country demands for entry in is completely up to that country. A digital domestic passport system to partake in society is very different than needing to show physical proof that you got your yellow fever shot before you enter Uganda.
Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman on the media’s treatment of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Two slices:
It’s hard to find silver linings in this era of expanding government authority and contracting individual opportunity for free expression. But at least the media establishment can no longer pretend that its abandonment of journalistic standards was necessitated by the unique character of Donald Trump. “Resistance journalism” is now industry standard, judging by a story on Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis by the formerly prestigious television newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”
Resistance journalism is the term coined by media maven Ben Smith, who was also one of the genre’s most successful practitioners. The idea was to create compelling anti-Trump narratives unbound by the traditional obligations of fact-checking.
…..
As for the network’s comment on Mr. Kerner, CBS lawyers may someday regret letting this one become public. Rather than contradicting the substance of his message, CBS simply confirms that they had access to the facts before running their story.
The term resistance journalism is starting to seem a little dated. Perhaps it’s better to just call it propaganda.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 86-87 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s marvelous and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021) (footnote deleted):
In [Adam] Smith’s view, most decent people would recoil at the thought of superintending the private decisions of their fellow citizens. But not all people would recoil at the thought of it; some would embrace and even relish it. Which type are more likely to avoid such an authority, and which are more likely to seek it out? Smith’s argument is that the people who get themselves into such positions of power over others are often those we would least want in those positions – because they will tend to wield their power as extensively as they possibly can.
April 7, 2021
Resisting the Covidocracy
We need much more of the kind of spontaneous, peaceful resistance to the Covidocracy as you’ll see here in this short clip. It’s glorious! Watching it lifted my spirits immensely. (HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)
On the Significance of Covid-Victims’ Age Profile
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Ms. H___:
Thanks for your e-mail.
Unhappy with my recent criticism of Tyler Cowen, you defend his insistence on treating as largely irrelevant the fact that Covid-19 reserves the overwhelming bulk of its dangers for very old people. You write that in my criticism of Tyler’s stance I “dodge Professor Cowen’s very appropriate comparison of Covid-19 to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.”
With respect, I disagree.
Here’s what Tyler says on this matter: “But, ultimately when bad things happen on a certain scale – you know, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 – you don’t worry too much how many young people died, how many old people died.”
Even ignoring the reality that coronaviruses, unlike bomber pilots and airplane hijackers, aren’t sentient creatures, his comparison fails. Military invasions and terrorist attacks are far less discriminatory than is Covid in choosing victims.
Suppose (contrary, of course, to fact) that intelligence on the morning of December 8th, 1941, had revealed that the Japanese military was hellbent on targeting a significant majority of its fire power only at American retirees and wasn’t much interested in inflicting harm on the young or even the middle-aged. That is, suppose that intelligence had revealed about the Japanese-military’s targets what we have long known about Covid – specifically now, that Covid ‘targets’ 81 percent of its lethality in the U.S. at people 65 and older – surely we in the 1940s would have focused a great deal of our defensive efforts on protecting older Americans. Had government leaders ignored this feature of Japanese military strategy – had these leaders acted as if children and even middle-aged adults were at no less risk than were retirees – had these officials sent everyone equally into a fright and then indiscriminately corralled children, young adults, and the middle-aged into bomb shelters along with the elderly – history would today regard these ‘leaders’ as having acted with criminal recklessness for failing to focus protective efforts on those who were clearly at disproportionate risk.
Ditto, of course, if we had good reason to believe that terrorists are intent on aiming nearly all of their evil at retirees.
I’m sorry, but I see no merit in Tyler’s case for ignoring, when it comes to policy, the reality that a huge majority of Covid’s victims are old people and that most Americans simply do not suffer a significantly elevated risk of harm from this disease. I believe, indeed, that this fact needs to be trumpeted much more loudly and widely.
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
Some Non-Covid Links
Alberto Mingardi is understandably unimpressed with Mariana Mazzucato’s new book on industrial policy. Here’s a slice from Alberto’s review:
Mazzucato’s case for industrial policy suffers from selective history and intellectual hubris. It conveniently refrains from investigating countries like Italy that have prided themselves on enacting such a policy, while placing great faith in “visionary” intellectuals (such as herself) to foresee problems and direct resources toward solutions. Yet most problems and solutions are discovered day after day, in the messy endeavors and transactions we call markets. Intellectuals find it hard to understand how to assemble Ikea furniture, let alone what decisions have to be made to bring furniture to the stores. We the learned in economics, the social sciences, or literature are ignorant of how our own computers work and how the paint for our homes is produced. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s simply a function of the complexity of a modern society, which no single mind, not even the most brilliant, can successfully master. Here another Reagan joke is apt: “The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.” As the American proverb puts it, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” The question is surely relevant to Mazzucato’s bizarre confidence that governmental foresight is easy.
The political benefits of industrial policy are easy enough to spot. Politicians can stand in front of a subsidized factory and proclaim that it would not be there but for their intervention. They can point to the new capital and the new jobs created. They can even proclaim that these benefits will ripple out to the broader economy, thanks to the vaunted multiplier effect.
Targeted privilege has costs, however. Indeed, it often fails altogether. The history of industrial policy and state-based economic development efforts is littered with a long string of costly boondoggles that ultimately did little to benefit growth, jobs, competitive advantage or consumer welfare. Proponents will point to a few “wins” without mentioning the many “losses,” let alone providing a fuller account of all the costs—both direct and indirect—of their planning and spending efforts.
My colleague Dan Klein is very much impressed with Gregory Collins’s new book on Burke. A slice:
The melody is Burke’s liberalism in policy, within the framework of a stable polity. The book is impressive in its thoroughness on Burke on issue after issue, focusing on his words and deeds. Born in 1729, Burke was a member of Parliament for 29 years and died in 1797. Collins delves into the major issues of Burke’s career, involving Ireland, India, the American colonies, and of course France, but also many obscure issues, such as the Butcher’s Meat Bill.
Burke favored liberal policy presumptions, as rang clear in his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. But of course Burke did things that could reasonably be seen as compromises and feints, as one should expect of any politico, including a true statesman. On the British East India Company, Burke worked to open up market competition, to rein in the company’s political abuses, and to bring greater accountability, while Adam Smith advised bringing an end to its charter altogether.
Juliette Sellgren’s discussion of school choice with Lisa Snell is excellent.
GMU Econ alum Jonathan Klick reviews the evidence on the diversity of corporate boards.
David Henderson reviews Avner Offer’s and Gabriel Söderberg’s The Nobel Factor. A slice:
One of the more interesting Nobel Prize winners they discuss is British economist James Mirrlees, an adviser to the Labour Party, who was co-winner of the 1996 award for his theory of optimal taxation. His famous two results were that because of the damaging effect of income taxes on incentives, the marginal tax rate on the top earner should be zero and most tax rates should be between 20 and 30 percent. As I noted in my October 1996 Wall Street Journal article, “When Economics Rises Above Politics,” Mirrlees was stunned by his own result. “I must confess,” he wrote, “that I had expected the rigorous analysis of income taxation in the utilitarian manner to provide arguments for high tax rates. It has not done so.” Indeed.
Katherine Mangu-Ward calls for the abolition of the FDA.
Ilya Somin explores anti-Asian discrimination.
Here’s the opening of George Will’s latest column:
The essence of progressivism’s agenda is to create a government-centered society by increasing government’s control of society’s resources, then distributing those resources in ways that increase the dependency of individuals and social groups on government. Hence this stipulation in Congress’s just-enacted $1.9 trillion money shower: None of the $350 billion allocated for state governments can be used to finance tax cuts.
So, the federal government is using the allocation of society’s financial resources to state governments to coerce them into maintaining their existing claims on such resources. This illustrates how progressives try to implement a leftward-clicking ratchet.
Some Covid Links
Thanks to my friend Lyle Albaugh for alerting me to this excellent and deep analysis by Karl Dierenbach. Three slices:
We have spent years looking for an end-of-days pandemic, and, not finding one, we decided to manufacture our own. In fact, we could have done this for any bad flu season (I’ll show how later), but we chose 2020. Perhaps it is human nature that when things are going well, we look for an exit.
To be clear, COVID-19 is not a hoax. It is real and it causes real-world damage and real-world heartbreak, but it is not the killer it has been made out to be. Also, the medical profession has performed admirably with respect to direct care of patients. They learned from mistakes early on and developed treatments and protocols that have steadily reduced the deadliness of COVID-19. The speed at which vaccines have been developed is truly amazing.
Conversely, the public health response to COVID-19 has been an abysmal failure. At every turn, the effects and danger of COVID-19 have been exaggerated, and the collateral damage of government mandates and government- and media-induced panic has been swept under the rug. Official after official has turned a blind eye to once-accepted standards only to follow the virtue signaling, have-to-do-something crowd. The worst example of this tendency was last summer, when public health officials condoned mass protests as public health events.
How did we do it? How did we turn a disease that is equivalent to a bad flu into a worldwide disaster? We overreacted; we changed the way we detect viruses; we changed the way we record deaths; we tried to control the uncontrollable; we used COVID-19 as a political tool; we destroyed (literally and metaphorically) tens of thousands of lives with panic, lockdown, and restrictions; and we set in motion events that ensured the devastation will continue for years.
These are bold statements flying against the prevailing narrative. But they are also supportable with data.
…..
When New York was hit hard, all perspective was lost. Even though we’ve had flu outbreaks that caused hospitals to set up tents to handle overflow in the past, this time we made the knee-jerk assumptions that everywhere COVID-19 hit would be like Wuhan or Italy. The USNS Comfort hospital ship was sent to New York City, and thousands of temporary hospital beds were set up in fear of the coming wave, yet these assets went largely unused. The pattern was repeated across the country in places like Denver, where emergency hospital beds in their convention center never saw a single patient.
Though these measures were universally considered to do more harm than good before COVID-19 hit, in a fit of panic and an uncontrollable urge to do something, our health officials and politicians adopted lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, contact tracing, and forced masking as the frontline response to COVID-19. In one of the most devastating policy responses, we paid hospitals to find COVID-19.
In perhaps the most significant panic-fueled move, the CDC changed how mortality statistics are gathered, and COVID-19-labeled deaths became ubiquitous. Previous to the change, COVID-19 needed to be an underlying condition in a chain of events that directly led to the immediate cause of death for the death to be considered a COVID-19 death. Under the new guidelines, instead of having to be an underlying cause of death, if COVID-19 was merely a contributing factor, the death would be labeled a COVID-19 death. Thus, an Alzheimer’s patient on death’s door who was pushed that last step through the doorway by COVID-19 would now be a full-blown COVID-19-labeled death. Never mind that flu was never treated this way, and such a change made COVID-19-labeled deaths incomparable to any other mode of death; these deaths were now COVID-19 deaths. This change in record-keeping became the fuel to power long-term panic, and as we became more efficient at finding COVID-19, we also became more willing to put COVID-19 on a death certificate, regardless of its level of contribution to the death.
…..
The second argument, that the excess deaths must be COVID-19, was expressed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, when asked if he thought all excess deaths should be counted as COVID-19 deaths, responded, “Unless you can find another reason, which I can’t think of, of there being these excess deaths.” In other words, the denial of the existence of non-COVID-19 excess deaths is based on ignorance and lack of inquisitiveness.
Despite Fauci’s lack of understanding, it is quite straightforward to explain how COVID-19-related NPI’s could be the culprit with respect to a minimum of 131,200 non-COVID-19 excess deaths.
At the start of the COVID-19 crisis in America, there was intense panic. Across the country, emergency room (ER) visits plummeted, and people delayed or altogether skipped seeing a medical provider due to fear of catching COVID-19. ER doctors everywhere described seeing fewer patients, and the ones they were seeing were far worse off than typical pre-COVID-19 patients. When such delays involved acute conditions, such as heart attacks or strokes, the delays often proved to be fatal. In New York City, the effect was severe. NYC typically saw 20 at-home deaths per day pre-COVID-19, but in April 2020, that number jumped to 200.
This effect likely continued as the COVID-19 panic wore on. Constant anecdotal stories of young people dying with COVID-19, continued lockdowns and closures, mask mandates, and social distancing all continued to instill an atmosphere of fear. Under such conditions, people will hesitate to go out, they will hesitate to go to a hospital, and even a few hours’ hesitation can make the difference between life and death.
CDC statistics support these assertions. Through September 26, 2020, cerebrovascular disease deaths were up 7.2% over their 5-year average (adjusted for population growth), accounting for about 7,900 non-COVID-19 excess deaths. Ischemic heart disease deaths were up 1.8%, and heart failure deaths were up 5.2%, accounting for roughly another 8,100 non-COVID-19 excess deaths.
Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place—giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.
The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health.
The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune. The young are at low risk, and children—for whom no vaccine has been approved anyway—are at far less risk of death than from the flu. If authorities mandate vaccination of those who don’t need it, the public will start questioning vaccines in general.
Effective public health relies on trust. The public has lost trust in officials in part because they’ve performed poorly—relying on lockdowns to disastrous effect—and in part because they’ve made clear their distrust of the public.
Philip Johnston rightly decries a sad truth about the stirring-up of Covid-19 hysteria. A slice:
I wrote a few months ago that I feared we would all be carrying these things [vaccine passports] by the end of the year and I see nothing to change that forecast. This is not because they are a good thing but because the Government is in a pickle of its own making by exaggerating the threat of Covid to the point where millions are too fearful to return to normal life without some reassurance. The certificates are, presumably, intended to provide it.
Lockdownism, the ideology that now dominates public life, is no different. One of its central elements is forgetting the past, including the very recent past. Before 2020, nobody spoke about ‘lockdown’, ‘social distancing’, ‘the R-rate’, ‘self-isolation’ and so on. Yet we now talk about these concepts as though they have existed for decades – almost as though they are immutable facts about how we have always dealt with infectious disease, rather than a series of ideas dreamed up on the spur of the moment and imposed in a panic. We are encouraged to forget that things used to be different and that we used to live our lives freely, accepting that there were nasty diseases out there that might kill you if you did, but this was a risk worth taking because the alternative was worse.
Here’s Jordan Schachtel on New York State’s ludicrous vaccine-passport scheme.
“The Hammer” reacts to my most recent column for AIER. A slice:
What I do know, however, is how my intellectual and personal commitment to liberty and conservatism would handle rising tyranny, because that actually has been tested over the past year. I know that I would stand up for what I believe is right, and that I would even do it in the courtroom, at the risk of alienating myself and potentially even at the risk of my job. I know that I would continue to look at the world around me in light of those things that I know to be true – in an actual crisis, I would maintain an understanding of the nature of markets, rather than having an emotional response to the lack of supply, or “price gouging.” Faced with a loss of income, I would maintain my understanding of the dangers of national debt and inflation, rather than asking the government for handouts. Faced with a virus that I do not understand (and this only describes a period of about a month between March and April of 2020), I would maintain a solid belief that there is no problem so big that the government cannot make worse. I would not view this as somehow the exception to the rule – the problem so important that suddenly our governments become competent, that individuals with power become focused solely on the interests and needs of others, and that incentives and temptations are somehow miraculously canceled by the sheer force of my own fear.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 134 of Richard Epstein’s great 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World:
Yet time after time a worst-case analysis allows visions of the apocalypse to color judgments about the desirability of social action.
DBx: Indeed so.
And in no time during my now-long lifetime has this sad truth been as tragically descriptive as it is during the Age of Covid-19 and the rise of the Covidocracy.
April 6, 2021
A Comment on One of Tyler Cowen’s Claims at EconTalk
My dear friend, co-founder of Cafe Hayek, and former colleague Russ Roberts is (as many of you know) founder and host of the remarkable podcast “EconTalk.” Russ’s latest guest is my esteemed colleague Tyler Cowen. The topic is Covid-19 and the response to Covid. I paste below (with minor modifications) a comment that I left in the ‘comments’ section at the EconTalk site … for what it’s worth.
While Tyler is a long-time colleague for whom I have great respect, I’m perplexed by much of what he says in this discussion with Russ. Some of what perplexes me has been mentioned by earlier commenters. But what is to me the single most perplexing of Tyler’s remarks has, I think, as yet gone unmentioned. Specifically, it’s Tyler’s claim that what he calls governments’ “very vigorous response” to Covid – including the early lockdowns – were justified in order “to maintain your societal coherence.”
To lock people down, to mandate masks, to close schools, to restrict travel, and to stir up fear of Covid that is far out of proportion to the disease’s actual dangers is to shred the warp and woof of societal cohesion. Short of an actual, bazookas-blasting civil war, I can think of nothing that can have frayed and punctured societal cohesion more than the Covid responses – both the coercion and the fear-mongering – championed by most governments and pundits.
Many children are still kept from their classmates and often even from their neighborhood playmates. Families and friends were discouraged from joining together to celebrate holidays and special, even solemn, occasions. Fans were prevented from gathering together live at sporting events. (Fans were replaced by freakish cardboard cutouts.) Many sporting events themselves were canceled. In my hometown of New Orleans, Mardi Gras – a glorious, if gaudy, mass party – was in 2021 effectively canceled.
Dining out ground to a halt. It remains today at far from full capacity in many places. Unlike Tyler, I very much enjoy sitting in crowded bars and talking with bartenders and patrons. Yet such activity, at least in Virginia and DC, remains impossible.
Sitting about a month ago at a table placed beside what was once a bar within a northern Virginia restaurant, I was reprimanded by the restaurant manager for turning around and leaning in for too long to chat without a mask with a couple seated more than six feet behind me. Some societal cohesion this.
Movie theaters, concert venues, gyms, coffee shops, bookstores, retail shops and shopping malls, churches, public parks, amusement parks, beaches – places where strangers congregate for enjoyment, relaxation, recreation, worship, and often for the mere pleasure of being among others – were shut down completely for a time, and might be shut down again. Many are still in at least partial shut-down. Some will never reopen.
The Canadian government literally recommended that people stop having sex with each other and instead to masturbate. And for those who simply cannot do without the actual intimacy of partners in the flesh, the recommendation was at least to wear a mask during intimacy. What kind of deranged and anti-social freak offers such recommendations?
Very many people now regard strangers as poisonous monsters from whom unnatural distance must be kept. Passers-by steer clear of each other as people have long steered clear of mangy stray dogs. Masks hide smiles and muffle voices. We humans who communicate so much and so deftly with facial expressions are now denied this vital form of communication.
Shaking hands, back-slapping, and hugging are much-reduced.
My campus, George Mason University, remains largely deserted. Student unions and nearby restaurants that cater to young people are either quiet as mausoleums or shuttered.
Classes are conducted by Zoom. I teach – “teach” – by Zoom (or, rather, its equivalent called “Blackboard”).
People Zoom in to work. From home. Wearing pajamas.
Covid restrictions and Covid fear-mongering keep us dangerously apart. We’re not “all in this together” as much as we are altogether being driven apart from each other by unwarranted fear and by steely coercive state powers forged in the flames of this fear.
Elderly people are forcibly kept apart from their loved ones. One of my and Tyler’s mutual friends is unable to visit her dying mother in Europe.
The hand of economic nationalists to cut trade ties with foreign countries has been greatly strengthened by fears of Covid, thus threatening globalization and the peace and prosperity that it brings.
…..
Tyler objects to the practice of emphasizing the fact that Covid overwhelmingly kills very old people and poses practically no risk to the young. He doesn’t deny this fact; he instead says that it’s irrelevant.
Yet this fact is not at all irrelevant. It’s highly relevant.
First, more widespread recognition of this fact would help to better calibrate the public’s fear of Covid to this disease’s actual risks. (How is this outcome not desirable?) Second, such recognition would have prevented our indiscriminate widespread fear of each other. Efforts would have been focused on reducing risks to the elderly and vulnerable rather than on misleadingly frightening everyone to regard everyone else as vermin to be avoided rather than as humans whose company and cooperation enrich our lives.
The “vigorous” Covid response that Tyler applauds did not create societal cohesion. It sparked and is still fueling societal disintegration. The results will not be happy.
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