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Of course, the owners of the bars and restaurants in OPEN (!!!!!) Carlsbad are far more diplomatic than yours truly. They’re calling their exercise of their property rights a “peaceful protest.” And peaceful it is. Nothing could be more peaceful than operating a business that can only succeed insofar as its patrons are pleased for having patronized it, only to come back over and over again.
Harrison Pitt defends those who openly oppose lockdowns [4]. A slice:
O’Brien has fun combing through predictions made by lockdown sceptics that did not materialise. Toby Young, editor of the Lockdown Sceptics blog, is singled out for saying: ‘There will be no “second spike” – not now, and not in the autumn either.’ Young has since graciously admitted that this summer prediction was mistaken. The same cannot be said for Neil Ferguson’s insistence [5], a full week after Sweden’s daily deaths actually peaked, that fatalities there would continue to ‘increase day by day’ — not to mention Chris Whitty’s presentation of a graph projecting 49,000 daily UK cases by mid-October (there were actually around 15,000).
To set the stage briefly, we must just recall that many of the extraordinary measures undertaken, supposedly for our own good, were done so on the basis of extrapolation and modeling, as by March (when they were imposed), there was scant data to justify “meltdown” prognostication on the ground. Nor has such data been forthcoming subsequently. PCR tests are zealously dubious on medical merits and are being currently challenged legally in Europe, lockdown regimes have fared no better in terms of results than jurisdictions with lighter or no lockdowns. No credible medical study demonstrates the efficacy of enforced “masking,” and a number of them, inveigh in the opposite direction. And comparing California’s results with Disney theme-park open Florida, or Brussels to the relatively balmy calm of Stockholm, makes the case for a resounding failure of orthodoxy.
We are being insanely flogged over and over for a pathogen that for the under 60 globally, has a 99%+ recovery rate. In fact, until you hit 80, no real alarm bells ring. Ergo, the “cure” has been egregiously more damaging (medically in terms of other illnesses ignored or sidelined; economically; educationally; socially) than the “curse.”
…..
In the quaint past we spoke of mores that civilized humans partook of, often catalogued as “obedience to the unenforceable.” But today, it’s ALL “enforceable” apparently! Get out the storm troopers and tanks. And the crazed, frenzied prognosticator Neil Ferguson, that trove of absurdities, reported being almost positively elated to find Italy too could be “locked up” Wuhan style. And then we were off to the races. Whatever cabal of puppet masters, or whatever collation of oblivious imbeciles, are calling the shots, have continued to test the limits of our servility…and depressingly, they haven’t found any.
Ways of life have been emphatically dislodged, and people seem almost “grateful” to be ordered about “for their own good.” The alternative would be that curious, uncomfortable habit of actually “thinking,” which must be avoided at all costs. Traditional institutions, schools, family, places of worship, even public sector organizations in charge of the arts, providers of non-COVID medical care, all just gave way, retreated.
Phil Magness identifies a shifting of the goal-posts for assessing the consequences of wearing masks [7]:
In the last few weeks the pro-mask arguments have curiously shifted away from “too many Americans are not wearing masks in public” and toward “they may be wearing masks in public, but it’s private spaces where most people fail to mask up.”
The polling data show that mask use is indeed low in the latter scenario, just as it shows that mask use in public is consistently at 80% or higher. This is supposed to explain why masks failed to deliver on all the promises of preventing a second wave that we heard about all summer and fall, and why we therefore needed mandates
There’s a problem with this argument though – it’s shifting the goalposts to a scenario that is neither (a) remotely practical to enforce nor (b) contemplated in any of the major models from the fall that promised to deliver huge benefits from masking up.
Both the Cambridge and IHME mask models explicitly stated that they were only looking at mask use in public, and linked all their promised benefits to public-use only. It may indeed be the case that some transmission continues due to non-masking in private spaces. But that simply doesn’t work to salvage the junk science behind the pro-masking studies we’ve been bombarded with for half a year, because it wasn’t even what they were arguing.