{I’ve removed this first link as potentially severe problems with the data, that I did not initially notice, have been brought to my attention.}
Barring schoolhouse doors revealed our willingness to sacrifice children on the altar of infection control.
Not surprisingly, we achieved the sacrifice (learning loss, & shorter, poorer, & less healthy lives) but did not get the infection control.
Jay Bhattacharya talks with Tom Woods.
Martin Kulldorff talks with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson.
Covidocratic tyranny metastasizes in Australia.
President Ronald Reagan noted, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. … It must be fought for, protected and handed on [to our children] to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like … where men were free”.
“Show me your papers” is only ever merely the beginning. Vaccine passports, the limiting of certain rights to only those who are vaccinated, the freedom of movement and the ability to travel unimpeded, the ability to remain gainfully employed and to provide for one’s family–by their very nature, the restrictive systems being adopted by the Australian government, our various states, and many of our country’s business leaders are inherently discriminatory, for they will, in no uncertain terms, serve to exclude members of our community from participating fully in our society.
If it hadn’t been for the texts, I would have forgotten that I was under house arrest. I didn’t get my second jab in time to avoid quarantining after my holidays, so I was required to sit in the house for nearly a week doing a stream of overpriced Covid tests and waiting days for the results.
At the start of the week, it was hard to remember. Everything seemed normal. I was at home. The world outside was busy. “I’ll just pop out for a coffee,” I would think to myself, and start down the stairs, before remembering.
On the second or third day, a real-life, honest-to-God quarantine inspector showed up. He was an unhurried fellow with a clipboard and a high-vis vest branded “Test and Trace”. But his arrival concentrated my thoughts. I started to make an extra effort to police what I was doing. Whenever I found my feet taking me absent-mindedly towards the door, a new, police-state superego would kick in to remind me that it was risky. Soon, I had stopped trying to leave.
Freedom day arrived. I left the house triumphantly to go to the shops. But for a few days, although everything seemed normal, it wasn’t. Every time I opened the door to leave my own house, a little voice said: “Wait a minute. Is that a good idea?”
Just like that, my brain had internalised a miniature police state, installing an automatic second-guessing machine that made everything in my day just a little more questionable and difficult. Eventually, the feeling wore off. Scale this up to the size of a country and I fear true normality is still some years away.
The lockdowners have apparently set up a website for the purpose of screenshotting the social media feeds of unvaccinated people who died of Covid, and grave-dancing over their demise.
Choice involves toleration of risk, and risk does not always play out the way a person hopes. But that’s the price of a free society.
I won’t link to this filth, but I will note that it’s currently making the rounds among the Neckbeard types. One wonders if they would express similar glee at AIDS victims who had unprotected sex and contracted the disease, because it’s functionally the same sort of tasteless and craven behavior.
University of Oxford professor Charles Foster rightly worries that lockdowns are a cancer that devours human agency. Two slices:
Relationships cannot be maintained purely electronically. To suggest that they can is to endorse a pastiche of the complex human person and to ignore what we know about what real relationships entail. For embodied animals, physical proximity and touch matter. Communication is about very much more than the conveying of information – or at least about very much more than conveying the sort of information that can be transferred in language. Much of our most eloquent communication is non-verbal: many of our most important cues are subliminal – lost over the phone, over social media, or on a screen. We need to be hug and be hugged; we need to exude and sniff pheromones. It takes years to become an expert in the use of these subtle, inchoate modalities. It takes, it seems, only months to be dangerously de-skilled.
…..
Though horrible things may happen if autonomy is made a god, horrible things certainly do happen if it is allowed to decay in a society or in any individual. That decay, all the evidence suggests, is one of the symptoms of lockdown.