Notes on Covid
Introduction
Musa al-Gharbi 2022 Guardian, a long article with links on flip-flops and mistakes by authorities. Good.
- Dreher nad Kingsnorth very good essay on authoriatrianism and panic. (2021):
Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed the compliance of the legacy media and the power of Silicon Valley to curate and control the public conversation. It has confirmed the sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to corporate power. It has shown up ‘The Science’ for the compromised ideology it is.
Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times. In the last month alone I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about ‘vaccine passports.’ I have watched much of the political left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless ‘liberals’ campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all. I have been reminded of what I always knew: cleverness has no relationship to wisdom.
I have learnt more about human nature in the last two years than in my preceding forty-seven. I have learnt some things about myself too, and I don’t especially like them either. I have noticed my ongoing temptation to become a partisan: to judge and condemn those on the other side of the question - those sheeple, those malicious enemies of Truth. I have noticed my tendency to seek out only sources of information which confirm my beliefs. Revelation is never comfortable.
Most of all, though, what the covid apocalypse has revealed to me is that when people are frightened, they can be easily controlled.
- Unherd article on the Netherlands and its horrible government. (2021).
- The Zvi blog, which is very good on covid.
- John Tierney in City Journal, July 2021, on the suppression of covid science by the media and the panicky resort to lockdowns and masks. See also Peter Hitchens (2021) on how the Danish mask study that got the "wrong" answer was suppressed.
- The missing flu riddle: 'Influenza has been renamed COVID,' maverick epidemiologist says. Why would masks stop colds and flu but not covid? It must be something else, such as reclassifying flu's and colds as covid. But I guess it could just be that covid was aggressively increasing, and so even if cut in half by the precautions, it would increase a lot. It has to be that covid spreads a lot more easily than the flu or colds, tho, rather than just being more dangerous, which seems odd. For the standard view, see a good Nature article here.
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