“Greens love lockdowns.” Ben Pile explains. A slice:
For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true.
If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home. Moreover, there are countless reports of local authorities and the police failing to understand the regulations they were enforcing and exceeding their authority. People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus. A July survey of British people’s estimation of the deaths caused by Covid found that (excluding ‘don’t know’) they overestimated the number of fatalities by up to 10 times. A third overestimated by 10 to 100 times, and 15 per cent overestimated by over 100 times.
Keith Joyce wonders if many of his friends have been taken over by aliens. A slice:
I am starting to wonder if some similar Wyndham-style phenomenon has affected all but a very few of the population, disabling their critical faculties and making them unquestioningly, even gladly, receptive to every word issuing from ‘authority’. It is hard otherwise to explain how so many previously sensible people have believed the government propaganda and given it the status of holy writ.
There is much wisdom in this essay by Dan Hannan…
Imperial College just put out an absolutely bonkers new model of how they think Covid will evolve in the UK over 2021.
It predicts an additional 130,000 deaths in the next year *with the vaccine,* which is 20K more than what they’ve experienced in the last year without a vaccine.