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COVID Tropes: We Were Never in it Together
Related: SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus, The Brownstone Institute
re: COVID
re: ethics in medicine
re: follow the money
re: How to Know You Triggered Your Critic Into Cognitive Dissonance, Save Yourself Time in Emails, etc
The theme I keep noting each and every time someone expresses indignation at what I’ve writen in this blog is always the same.
That is, rationalizations justifying coercive force, with the distinguishing characteristic being this: the viewpoint of whose livelihoods remained intact during COVID tyranny is strikingly different than those who were kneecapped by overwhelming government edicts.
See also: Did the FDA rush to license Pfizer's covid vaccine to enable vaccine mandates?
Brownstone Institute: Bonfire of the Covid Vanities
2023-03-14. Emphasis added.
Remember the mega-hit book The Bonfire of the Vanities? While a work of fiction, the book shone a harsh light on the all-too-real world of lies, corruption, and hypocrisy in high places.. the Covid regime was replete with rot, from taped-up basketball nets and masked toddlers to vaccine passports and…
ome of the slogans were carefully crafted by governments, while others sprang from the weeds of social media. They all drew from the same playbook, capitalizing on fear and using emotional manipulation to activate people’s guilt circuits. They served as thought-stopping mantras that precluded honest communication about the pandemic.
Two weeks to flatten the curve. ... Anyone remember what happened when the two weeks were up? ...
Stay home, save lives. This sanctimonious and bossy slogan sent the message that mental health didn’t count, livelihoods didn’t count, arts and culture didn’t count, religious communion didn’t count, and the dreams people had spent years pursuing didn’t count. The only thing that counted was preserving metabolic life—or at least, pretending we were doing that.
Follow the science. “Follow the science” makes no sense. Science is information. It tells you what is, not what to do about it. That depends on our values: ....Whose rights are paramount?...
We’re all in this together. ...Was the worker delivering DoorDash orders in the same boat as the Netflix-and-chill couples perfecting new sourdough recipes during lockdown? Was the event planner who lost a 10-year business in the same boat as the Amazon shareholders? Was the foreign student stuck in a low-ceilinged apartment in the same boat as the well-connected mom who hired a power tutor for her kids?
Muh freedumb. ....Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.
Mask it or casket. Hyperbole much? The glib phrase was designed to frighten, rather than inform...
The virus doesn’t discriminate. ... risk of serious harm from the virus was orders of magnitude higher in certain groups, especially the old and frail. Experts downplayed this sharp risk gradient, plunging everyone into an abyss of fear.
Can’t do X if you’re dead. ...the slogan doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. It sets an actual scenario (restriction on an activity) against an improbable counterfactual (dying if the restriction is lifted)...
Listen to the experts. OK, but which experts? The scientists that governments allowed to speak? What about the scientists with hundreds of citations in prestigious journals but divergent views... Some of the sharpest insights about Covid have come from people outside of science. We ignore them at our own peril.
My mask protects you, your mask protects me. More naked emotional manipulation... if you don’t mask, you’re a bad person...
Pandemic of the unvaccinated. ...by now we all know that vaccinated people both catch and transmit Covid. What’s more, a Danish meta-analysis was unable to find credible evidence that mRNA vaccines reduced mortality, leaving statisticians with the unenviable job of torturing the data in subgroup analyses...
You may be done with Covid, but Covid isn’t done with you. ...Of course Covid isn’t done with us. Neither is the common cold or the flu. Neither are thunderstorms and volcanoes and earthquakes and a thousand other forces of nature...
Stay safe. ...verbal equivalent of touching wood—a knee-jerk utterance to ward off the evil eye. It always reminded me of the “praise be” muttered by the handmaids...
WIND: of all these, “we’re all in this together” grates most harshly to me. A slogan to suppress those whose lives/dreams/hopes were wantonly crushed by government force from rising up in droves, in sharp juxtaposition vs the lives of those ended up sailing through, if not profiting handsomely as the stock market soared.
