Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2020

Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:

I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)

Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.

This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.

Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.

There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.

June 20, 2020

“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:

Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

[…]

If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.

The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.

Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.

More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.

June 15, 2020

Canada’s ongoing experiment with Justin Trudeau’s “basic dictatorship”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell outlines the development of the concept of “rights” from Saxon England through Magna Carta and how a bad king finally triggered a rebellion that forced him to grant the Great Charter which still acts as a foundation for British (and Canadian) law. Justin Trudeau may be the modern day version of the bad king:

A few hundred years later, one of liberalism‘s and democracy’s greatest voices told us that we have three absolutely fundamental, natural rights: to life, to liberty and to property. These rights were not and still are not unlimited. There were and are ways to lawfully and properly deprive a person of his property and his liberty and, in some countries, even his life. A few centuries after John Locke another philosopher wanted to do away with the right to property: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Karl Marx wrote, and many, far too many, believed. The only real problem with Marx’s notion is that it requires that humans are perfect … and most of us know how rare that is. Here in Canada, especially since the early years of the 20th century, we have had far too much Marx and far too little Locke.

Now, in 2020, we even have a new version of King John: a vain and foolish prime minister who seems to believe that he has been sent to rule over us. Justin Trudeau is profoundly ignorant about both liberalism and democracy. He is, actually, more of a puppet than a ruler but it is less easy than it should be to determine just who is pulling on which strings. He does not appear to have the mental capacity to pull more than a couple of ideas together at any one time.

Because we have been panicked by the coronavirus pandemic we have decided accepted that more government is the best least bad answer. To give us more and more government, Justin Trudeau’s handlers suspended parliament until September … they wanted to have that “basic dictatorship” thing.

Democracy is in peril in Canada … it’s not because Justin Trudeau is an evil dictator, it’s because we, as a people, are too complacent. We have come to believe that democracy is, somehow, automatic, that it is natural. It’s not. It needed to be carefully built, brick-by-brick, over many centuries. We needed to fight for democracy: we needed to win it and then defend it, too. It doesn’t renew itself, it is not the natural order of things, and, In Canada, in 2020, it is in peril. Parliament needs to be recalled, soon, before September. Parliament needs to tend to its ancient rights, duties and powers. The Trudeau regime needs to be called to account and then replaced by a new, better, government.

June 14, 2020

The cat’s in the bag … once. Twice is a different matter altogether

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren discusses some specific cats and bags:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

You can get a cat into a bag twice, as someone said (I think it was me); but the second time it has to be dead. This would be the reasoning behind my prediction that a second general lockdown will not even be attempted; but it must be qualified. For many of the people who imposed the first one were demonstrably insane, and they haven’t yet been removed from public office.

The same could be said about our impending “summer of love,” or hot season of race riots, already endured a half-century ago. That cat has been put into that bag before. This time is bound to be a different story.

It is fairly strictly a party question, now. The “theory” behind the lockdowns — to avoid overloading the hospitals in Manhattan — proved a crock, but there is a more cogent alternative theory. The Democrats in Natted States Merica guessed that destroying the “Trump economy,” and encouraging “peaceful” riots in the cities, was the only way they could defeat Trump, having tried other methods to remove him. And for a party of convinced abortionists, defeating Trump takes priority over mere human lives. We’ll see in November whether their Caracas strategy is the final winner.

To be fair, as they say at Instapundit, the Repubs have historically played along with this, and agreed to take responsibility and blame for almost purely Democrat measures. A good example is race, where the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenic birth control to reduce the black population, and Jim Crow laws, presents itself to captive media as the champion of the black man against “systemic racism”; while the party of Lincoln apologizes for itself. That the devil is at large in American politics is, to my mind, an irresistible hypothesis.

The refusal of this Trump fellow to play this game, as his predecessors did, drives Democrats berserk. He actually fights back, to their consternation. It didn’t help that they were so proximate to berserk already.

Healthcare is a provincial responsibility … thank goodness

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley reminds us that despite all the attention the media pays to every twitch of the federal government, it’s the provinces that are actually responsible for the healthcare systems in their territory:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Here in Canada, however, astonishing scenes continue. On Thursday the Toronto Transit Commission announced it intends to make masks mandatory for riders — no word of a lie — in three weeks, on July 2. That’s assuming the commission approves the measure … next Wednesday. TTC CEO Rick Leary was at pains to stress the rule would never be enforced.

Meanwhile Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, could not appear more reluctant to endorse mask wearing unless she advised against wearing them altogether — which was, famously, her original position. On Wednesday, she unveiled a four-bullet-point plan for getting safely back to semi-normal under the moniker “out smart.” The word “masks” does not appear. Supplementary text only concedes they “can be used … when you can’t maintain physical distance of two metres.”

This is a strange qualification: The official federal advice stresses you shouldn’t touch your mask except to take it off at home and immediately wash your hands. You shouldn’t be taking it on and off while you’re out and about, when social distancing suddenly becomes impossible. But it’s not as strange as the qualification Tam offered on her Twitter account, where she offered a link to an instructional video but only “if it is safe for you to wear a non-medical mask or face covering (not everyone can).”

It is true that some people with asthma or severe allergies have trouble wearing masks. Presumably they know who they are, and would not risk suffocating themselves when mask-wearing isn’t even strongly recommended, let alone mandatory. Blind people will struggle to keep two metres’ distance from others. People with aquagenic urticaria can’t wash their hands with water. People without arms can’t cough into their sleeves. Those “out smart” recommendations aren’t qualified, because that would be silly — as is the qualification on masks.

I would be lying if I said I had any idea what the hell is going on. But this never-ending weirdness is doing us a favour, in a way. The fact is, we have been paying far too much attention to the feds throughout this ordeal. Canada’s COVID-19 experience was always much too different from region to region to justify everyone taking their cues from a single public health agency — let alone one that comprehensively botched something as simple as issuing self-isolation advice to returning foreign travellers.

Canada is a federation by design, not by accident, and thank goodness for that: Far better that most provinces’ authorities did a good job knocking down COVID-19 than that a single one screwed it up for the whole country. It’s something Liberals and New Democrats should bear in mind next time they find themselves demanding yet another “national strategy” in a provincial jurisdiction.

June 3, 2020

Fanatics gonna fanatic … they can’t help it

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s funny that no matter what the claimed crisis, the answers always go in the same direction, as Kristian Niemietz points out with the demands to turn our still unending lockdown toward “protecting the environment”:

The change, superficially, is to encourage “a safe return to work” allowing more social distancing between pedestrians, but more substantially in order to preserve the cleaner air that has resulted from the lockdown.

The health and safety excuse for the policy change can be largely dismissed. The simple truth of the pandemic and national policy is that if social distancing matters, the centre of London is not safe to return to work. It is too densely populated and almost entirely reliant on mass transit which cannot operate above 10-15% capacity with 2m exclusion rules. With average commutes over 9 miles each way, substitution effects to walking and cycling will be extremely limited and temporary.

It is then hard to see then how the policy’s architects imagine the streets will fill up to the extent urgent measures are needed. Conversely, if social distancing does not matter (and it will cease to matter eventually), then a policy to enable more social distancing outside by widening the pedestrian streetscape is redundant. If it is safe to sit on a crowded train, it is safe to walk on a crowded pavement. It is not hard then to cut through the pandemic packaging to note that the motive for this policy is opportunistic, to accelerate a pedestrianisation plan that is the dream of many an urban planner.

Many will see this as self-evidently a good thing. Removing vehicle traffic from densely populated narrow streets will reduce air pollution, congestion and road traffic accidents. As a policy it will have more supporters than opponents; very few people drive into the centre of London to commute and there is very little capacity for parking. London’s leaders are not wrong to think that this is the future, the question is really one of timing and how they go about it, which is far more difficult and does not have anything to do with managing a coronavirus.

What the pandemic allows is the ability to use emergency powers for something that is not an emergency. This matters, in normal times it took several years to close one dangerous junction at Bank to most traffic, and this under a hail of protests from local businesses and taxi drivers. The same result can now be achieved in a few weeks across many streets. The democratic checks and balances that differentiate the UK from authoritarian states can be ditched and London officialdom granted extraordinary powers to do as they please. If the protestors don’t like it this time, they should note the right to protest has also been suspended, at least for now.

May 30, 2020

David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:

The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.

We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.

These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.

Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”

But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)

The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.

May 29, 2020

The contagion of fear and the progressive loss of perspective in the modern world

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Hector Drummond Magazine, Dan C. discusses what he calls the “comfort of fear”:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

This is the sort of glib response (akin to “so you WANT people to die then?”) that has essentially hijacked all conversation and debate since the start of the Coronavirus outbreak. I didn’t respond, partly because I didn’t have the energy for an argument with a friend (at least Twitter rows tend to be anonymous) and quite frankly, what does one say to this? That we shouldn’t send out children back to school ever again in case one child happens to pass away from any illness or disease? That we should continue in lockdown until we cure death itself?

My concern is that this bizarre way of thinking is commonplace right now for many parents. Locked inside their houses for weeks on end, soaking up an endless stream of Netflix programs, mawkish Instagram feeds and daily Government briefings, convinced that Black Death Mk II has landed outside their front door, paid by the state to stop working and lapping up every rainbow-based hashtag that emerges from “our NHS”, all sense of balance and perspective has vanished. With such an unprecedented paradigm shift, this new state of heightened safety has led many to consider their view on illness and risk for the very first time in their lives and unfortunately the concept of critical thinking has been found lacking. Real life, which has been slowly eroded for many decades, has suddenly been switched off completely overnight and the worst of it is that most people don’t seem to care.

The scary part of all of this is that if the adults in the room have suddenly lost their desire to engage in the outside world, to have meaningful human interaction, to take risks (don’t get me started on the definition of “risk”) and to live their lives in the fullest possible way then what chance do children stand? After all, you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Historians will look back in bewilderment at this period, noting that it took no more than a month during the spring of 2020 for fearlessness to completely evaporate in society. In its place is a comfortable sense of fear.

May 28, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus versus Canadian government planning and implementation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:

When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.

Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.

In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.

There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.

May 27, 2020

Comprehensive planning and communication failures are the hallmark of Canada’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley understands why the internet shaming community is dunking on the apparently large number of people who crowded into Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park over the weekend but doesn’t feel the need to join them:

Screencap from a CBC report on unorganized social distancing civil disobedience at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Saturday.

Human beings need to get outside and socialize. They have breaking points, and many are very understandably at them. (An aside: I can’t help noticing how many people venting fury on social media have also treated their followers to images of their back-patio office setups, or updates on their new vegetable gardens.) There is also no surplus of parkland in downtown Toronto. Photographic evidence suggests other neighbourhood greenspaces were very busy as well, though not to the same extent.

In other words, this was always going to happen. So the time is long past when politicians like Ontario Premier Doug Ford or Toronto Mayor John Tory should be able to cluck their tongues or stamp their feet at such people and expect their constituents to nod along in solidarity.

Jurisdictions facing significant COVID-19 outbreaks had one finite period of time in which to try to knock this bastard virus down. After that period of time, the socioeconomic costs of the shutdown would become unsustainable and the economy would have to reopen. We’re seeing that happen all over the world right now: in essence, countries are rolling the dice. If they did well in the allotted time, fewer people will have to die in the name of getting back to normal.

The federal, Ontario and Toronto governments have not done well — certainly not to any extent that justifies their leaders’ soaring approval ratings.

The feds have been abysmal since even before Day One, with Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam actively downplaying the threat. We shipped 16 tonnes of personal protective equipment to China with no viable plan to replace it. Whatever you think of travel bans as an anti-pandemic measure, the government undermined its own credibility by insisting they don’t work, then changing course 180 degrees over the course of a weekend. Most astonishingly, the feds at first utterly failed to communicate the most basic advice to returning travellers — advice such as “don’t stop for groceries or at the pharmacy on your way home.”

And Tam’s initial ludicrous “masks don’t work” narrative has grudgingly evolved to support the use of non-medical masks “where social distancing is not possible.” But the federal government’s official advice on “safe shopping” — indeed the entire web page titled “COVID-19 and food safety” — still doesn’t mention masks, even as the berth shoppers give each other seems to narrow by the day. This anti-mask stance seems to be ideological, bred in the bone.

May 26, 2020

“No more pencils, no more books…”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb considers the demands from the British government to quickly re-open the schools over the concerns of the educational unions and administrations:

The latest turn in an increasingly dull coverage of the Coronavirus panic is a proposed reopening of the schools. The Government wants them open as soon as possible for at least some of their students. The teaching unions are bleating that no one should go back until their members can be sure of not catching anything. The headmasters are worried about compliance with the social distancing rules. As a conservative of sorts, I think I am supposed to side with the Government and the pro-Conservative journalists — denouncing the teachers as a pack of idlers where not cowards, and insisting that those factories of essential skills must be set back in full production before the summer holidays. Of course, my settled view as a libertarian is that the teaching unions deserve all the support I have never so far given them. The schools must remain closed until no one is in any danger of so much as an attack of hay fever. The schools have been largely closed since the end of March. The longer they stay largely closed, the better. Best of all if they never reopen — or never reopen as they have been since attendance was made compulsory at the end of the nineteenth century.

I quote John Stuart Mill on compulsory schooling:

    A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
    (On Liberty, 1859, Chapter 5, “Applications.”)

This has always been the case in some degree. The spread of state schooling in England after 1870, and particularly after it was made compulsory in 1880, and then extended in 1902, is probably inseparable from the nationalist hysteria that drove our participation in the Great War. It also may explain the perverse belief, general until the 1970s, in the unique goodness and honesty of our ruling class. This being said, reasonable patriotism is to be encouraged; and, compared with others, our ruling class was not until recently so bad. A further point is that compulsory state schooling used to be reasonably effective at giving the mass of people a basic education. By 1960, most people were literate and numerate. They could spell and write grammatical prose. They had some exposure to the English classics, and the means of exploring these to greater depth if they wished. They had some understanding of history and the sciences. You can tell much about the quality of a people by examining what is read and watched. Looking at the popular arts in England during much of the twentieth century explains why this passage in On Liberty was less often discussed than his arguments for freedom of speech. Mill was right in the abstract. He could be shown to be right in certain particulars. But the evils of compulsory state schooling were mostly potential.

All this, however, is in the past. Since about 1980, schooling of all kinds has been made into a concerted means of indoctrination. The cultural leftists have captured both the classrooms and the curriculum. I will not elaborate on this claim. Some will argue over terminology, some over the merits of the capture, but hardly anyone denies the broad fact. One of the main functions of modern schooling is to bring about and to protect a radical departure from the old intellectual culture of this country.

Much of this departure has been achieved by preaching in the classroom. But it is supplemented by a growing bureaucracy of surveillance. The teachers themselves are watched, and they can be punished for dissenting from the established discourse. There is, for example, the Government’s Prevent strategy, which applies to the whole state machinery. Its purpose is to identify and root out anyone defined as a “political extremist.” Anyone identified as such is effectively banned from working with children and young people, and probably in the state sector as a whole.

May 25, 2020

Thoreau would clearly support ending mandatory lockdowns

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In an article discussing civil disobedience in the face of unreasonable government action, Lawrence W. Reed recalls the opinions of noted civil disobedience supporter Henry David Thoreau:

Daguerreotype of Thoreau in 1856 by B. D. Maxham.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

History is full of stories of people who practiced peaceful resistance in defense of sound principles in the face of official stupidity and oppression. Sometimes it has been the best way, if not the only one, to get bad policies changed.

One hundred and seventy years ago, a famous American figure wrote,

    Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

That figure was Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he was an eminent philosopher, poet and essayist. His best-known works are his book Walden: Life in the Woods and his essay, “Civil Disobedience”. The latter proved influential far beyond his time and place, shaping the thoughts and actions of eminent dissidents the world over. As we ponder the civil disobedience rising in reaction to coronavirus policies, now is a perfect time to give Thoreau’s essay another look. Toward that end, I offer some excerpts below.

One last thing before I do that: I want readers to know that, speaking strictly for myself, I endorse the re-opening of houses of worship (and many other things, for that matter), whether the government officially allows it or not. If that perspective makes life a little uncomfortable for the power-hungry at this time, so be it. The additional articles listed below reflect my reasoning.

Now, to Henry David Thoreau:

  • “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison…, the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.”
  • “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
  • “I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject.”
  • “If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”
  • “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
  • “I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”

Thanks for listening. See you in church

May 22, 2020

The NFL’s (tentative) plan for the 2020 season

Filed under: Business, Football, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At FEE, Jon Miltimore explains what the league’s officials are thinking based on the announcement earlier this week:

Football fans around the world have been anxiously waiting for signs as to whether the NFL season will kick off in September despite concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.

This week, they got the “burning bush” of signs.

The NFL on Tuesday had a soft opening of sorts, opening a number of facilities around the country to personnel, owners, and players rehabilitating from injuries. But it was in a post-meeting conference call with media that NFL officials delivered a bombshell of sorts.

According to multiple reports, NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller and Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, told reporters the NFL fully expects to have COVID-19 cases during the NFL season, and are planning accordingly.

“We have a task force working very diligently on that,” Sills told reporters. “We fully well expect that we will have positive cases that arise because we think that this disease will remain endemic in society. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise if new positive cases arise. Our challenge is to identify them as quickly as possible and to prevent spread to any other participants. So we’re working very diligently on that, and we’ll have some detailed plans to share about that at a later time.”

It did not take long for reporters to process and interpret what the NFL was saying.

“You didn’t even have to read deeply between the lines,” said Charles Robinson, Yahoo’s senior NFL reporter. “What I just heard from the NFL was, ‘Hey, guess what? We are going to open. There is going to be a season. And we are going to have some people test positive for coronavirus once that season begins. And we’re working on a plan to not stop anything. We’re going to work through it.'”

Terez Paylor, a senior writer who also covers the NFL for Yahoo, concurred.

“He’s saying they’re going to play,” Paylor said in a podcast with Robinson. “Basically [they’re saying], ‘People are gonna get it. We’ll try to deal with it the best we can.'”

To be clear, the NFL has made no official decision yet. That being said, it looks like they are heading in that direction.

While some will say it would be reckless to hold the NFL season during a pandemic, it appears the NFL is making its decision based on some of the same assumptions Sweden used in its unique approach to COVID-19.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top infectious disease expert and the architect of its “soft-approach” strategy, said one of the reasons he rejected sweeping lockdowns is because the measures simply are not sustainable, considering COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.

May 19, 2020

Some changes to the working world … when the world gets back to working

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sean Gabb has some thoughts on the post-lockdown return so … well, not normal, but as the economy reaches toward a new working equilibrium:

Kensington High Street at the intersection with Kensington Church Street. Kensington, London, England.
Photo by Ghouston via Wikimedia Commons.

The Coronavirus and its aftermath of lingering paranoia are the perfect excuse. Decentralisation and homeworking must be done. They must be done for the duration. They must be continued after that to maintain social distancing. No one will think ill of Barclays and WPP for taking the leap. No one will blame them for taking the leap in a way that involves a few deviations from course and a less than elegant landing. A year from now, these organisations will be making measurably larger profits than they would be otherwise. The mistakes will have been ignored.

And other organisations will follow. Whether the present crash will bring on a depression shaped like a V or an L, there is no doubt that, even if slowly at first, the wheels of commerce will continue turning. But they will be turning on different rails. As with any change of course, there will be winners and losers. I have already discussed how I can expect to be among the winners. I will leave that as said for the other winners — these being anyone who can find a market for doing from home what was previously required by custom and lack of imagination to be done somewhere else. I will instead mention the losers.

Most obvious among these will be anyone involved in commercial property. Landlords will find themselves with many more square feet to fill than prospective tenants want to fill. Rental and freehold values will crumble. Bearing in mind how much debt is carried by commercial landlords, there will be some interesting business failures in the next few years. Then there are the ancillary sectors — property management companies, commercial estate agents, maintenance companies. These employ swarms of architects and surveyors and lawyers and negotiators, of builders, plumbers, electricians, of drivers and cleaners. If the humbler workers will eventually find other markets, many with degrees and professional qualifications can look to a future of straitened circumstances.

The lush residential estates in and about Central London will follow. I think particularly of the aristocratic residential holdings in Kensington. Houses here go for tens of thousands a week to senior bank workers from abroad. If the City and Canary Wharf are emptied out, who needs to live in a place like Kensington? It has poor Underground connections. It is close by places like Grenfell Tower. Its residents keep predators at bay only by heavy investment of their own in security and by suspecting every knock on the door and every sound in the night. Many of the shops and eateries that make its High Street an enjoyable place to be will not reopen. Those that do reopen will be hobbled by continuing formal and informal rules on social distancing.

As a result, restaurants and pubs and coffee bars will begin to disappear. All but a few of these were barely making normal profit before they were closed last month. So few are in liquidation as yet only because so few petitions have been lodged in the courts. Most of them will now be surplus to requirement. The same can be said of hotels. Speaking for myself, I used to visit Cambridge twice a year on examinations business. I was always put up there for a couple of nights. I shall now do from home all that I did in Cambridge. I doubt I am alone. Zoom will destroy business travel. In the same way, bigger televisions plus continued social distancing will finish off the theatres and cinemas — also in decline before last month.

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

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