Tweet [1]
J.D. Tuccille decries New Zealand’s – and much of the world’s – acceleration toward authoritarianism [2]. Two slices:
Last week, with the world understandably distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, New Zealand authorities took advantage of the moment to disperse an inconvenient protest against pandemic mandates. Like Canada’s Freedom Convoy, by which it was inspired, the protest was grounded in grassroots disagreement with authoritarian policies, mixed with a little nuttiness, and had outlived its welcome. Also like its inspiration, the protest in New Zealand was forcibly shut down to the surprise of those with preconceptions about peaceful, tolerant democracies. Governments are most peaceful, it turns out, when there’s little dissent to test that tolerance and, under pandemic stresses, gloves are coming off in an increasingly illiberal world.
…..
Unlike Canada, which imposed a financial police state [3] and is still hunting wrong-thinkers [4] who dared to donate to the Freedom Convoy, New Zealand officials have so far stuck with old-fashioned head-busting. But politicians in both nations seem united in disbelief that anybody could disagree with them.
We in the Land of the Free (so called) need not look as far away as New Zealand to find Covidocratic tyranny: Here’s a tweet yesterday from the U.S. Surgeon General – a tweet that baldly exposes the Covidocracy’s authoritarianism [5]: (HT Martin Kulldorff [6])
To create a healthier digital environment and safer future, tech companies must share what they know about #HealthMisinformation [7] on their platforms. Only with this information can we work toward preventing harmful misinfo.
gatito bueno is rightly critical of a new variant of Covid hypocrite [8].
My, how the ACLU has fallen [9].
Phil Magness on Facebook [10]:
I did a comparison of social media presence between the Great Barrington Declaration and the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum. The differences are pronounced.
The GBD’s main signers are mostly not on twitter, and those that are just have a personal account. Only 3% are bluechecks.
By contrasts, the majority of the JSM’s signers are active on twitter and 43% of them are bluechecks.
This aligns with John Ioannidis’s recent paper, showing that JSM signers tend to have higher Kardashian Indexes than GBD signers – which is to say, they have a high ratio of twitter activism to scholarship.
Jay Bhattacharya tweets [12]:
Lockdowners now assert that we’ve never had a real lockdown and that there’s no real prospect for another lockdown. I think they badly underestimate the enormous sacrifices people have made chasing the utopian fantasies the lockdowners foisted on us.
Kulvinder Kaur tweets [13]: (HT Jay Bhattacharya [14])
“We inverted precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm by doing the one thing that we knew would cause harm: lockdowns.. What we do see very sadly.. harms unfolded.. We sit watching devastation that we knew these measures would cause 2yrs ago”
—Oxford Prof @SunetraGupta [15]