34 thoughts on “Morons”

  1. I doubt he thinks it’s going to be able to be enforced against everyone. However, what I’m sure he loves is the power it gives him to pick and choose who it is enforced against, or alternately, who gets a pass.

  2. I browsed to see what our responses were to the Black Death, and although many cities instituted travel restrictions from outside the city, generally shops remained open, at least in 1348 AD in the Italian town that I checked. But of course the Black Death didn’t present the staggering public health threat that Covid does, or something like that.

    1. I think if we had a disease as potent as the Black Death, with no vaccine or treatment or understanding of its mechanism, as our ancestors did not have of yersinia pestis, we would be imposing far worse restrictions on movement than we have now, and rightly so. I don’t think our societies could sustain 30+% fatalities in a couple of years and remain functional in substantially the same forms, as 14th century societies more or less did. I don’t want to find out.

      We might even take some of the more extreme measures that were taken against plague in some times and places [London 1665 for one] of sealing the sick inside their homes, seizing and condemning potentially contaminated private property, including homes, burning them if we thought that useful.

      If medievals had had an understanding of how plague worked and was transmitted, would they have left the shops open and let people wander around?

      Not trying to be flippant here- I’m a sympathetic reader and extremely intermittent commenter here for years. I’m even sympathetic to the idea that some measures constitute executive or even legislative tyranny [though I’m pretty supportive of state power in war, rebellion, or plague], and part of me applauds the proud localism of sheriffs in New York the other day. Still, I’ve been a little distances from sources I generally support these past 6 months when arguments amount to, “this is tyranny because I can’t visit Aunt Julie & Grandma in the next state for Easter/Thanksgiving”.

      This pandemic might well have been breeding official overreactions- but am I that alien for thinking the above is the wrong balance between the serious and the trivial? Is it just because I couldn’t care less about family holidays? I genuinely am not sure.

      1. Since I largely replied to one comment and alluded to the themes of a previous post, I should stress that I’m not on board with the private homes idea. That’s not even tyranny, it’s tyranny plus hysterical nitwittery.

  3. Same way our provincial government (Quebec) wanted to enforce non-related visitor restrictions in private homes a few months ago, by having policemen do random entries in houses.

    (Of course, it took less than a few hours for them to backpedal so fast, we got whiplash. A surprisingly — for us — large number of people announced that the first cop to try this wouldn’t be going home, and that was that.)

    1. Well, the best way to make sure Covid doesn’t spread is to have government people going door-to-door to get exposed to as many potentially infected people as possible, and then exposing as many uninfected people as possible to the virus the inspector just picked up by visiting as many potentially infected people as possible.

      It’s one of those idiot lab behaviors where someone goes “Oh no! This sample is somehow contaminated! I must check them all!” and then they spread it to all the rest.

      Our elites are so far from being elite, or even competent, that it boggles the mind.

    2. “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

      ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

      1. …had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people…

        Which unfortunately would never have had a chance of working because at least two of them would have promptly trotted off to the NKVD to inform on the others in the desperate hope of being eaten last.

  4. They could just post officers in people’s home. Oh wait, sorry… they defunded police officers. They can just post social workers in people’s home.

    1. They already have “officers” in your home, depending on how many IoT devices you have with cameras on them…

        1. NYC has cops walking around with binoculars trying to peek int the homes of Orthodox Jews. How it’s turned out so far seems to be “it’s still happening.”

      1. One of the problems the Gestapo had was that, although they were thought to be everywhere, there were actually very few of them. A city of 300,000 might have just five. But their phones were ringing off the hook from people angrily ratting on their neighbors, and one of the agents wrote something like “What have we unleashed? This is crazy.”

  5. It is amazing that while 99% of people are currently wearing masks, they think the solution is wearing more masks.

    Rather than telling people to wear masks they are already wearing, they should focus on how to wear them correctly. It doesn’t matter if you have a mask when iy is worn incorrectly and handling them the wrong way can even get you sick.

    They should also look for solutions other than wearing masks. Mask wearing obviously doesn’t stop the spread like they imagine.

    It is like they are applying the enthusiasm hurdle they use for politics to fighting the plague but the plague cares not about how enthusiastic you wear a mask.

    1. Wodun, the problem is that 99% wearing masks is not sufficient. Clearly, like with voter turnout, we must aim higher, like 150% at a minimum.

      There’s also the issue that one mask is not enough. We need to mandate the wearing of multiple masks. The evidence has clearly shown that masks reduce blood oxigenation levels. Wearing multiple masks would reduce it further, and it’s been conclusively proven that a 0% blood oxygenation level renders a person forever unsusceptible to this, or any other, virus.

        1. I was going to make a smartass comment about how the solution is for the Democratics to mandate that everyone wear multiple masks.

          Oh, well. Nevermind…

    2. Wearing masks doesn’t matter anyway.

      A Danish study showed that surgical masks don’t protect the wearer from Chinese Flu, and a study in Nature recently showed that cloth masks spread masses of small particles which can carry the virus with them.

      And then there are the diseases you can get from constantly wearing unsterilized masks, like bacterial pneumonia.

      Unless people are wearing N95s and replacing them every couple hours, they’re useless at best. And irrelevant when only around 0.2% of people who catch Chinese Flu will die from it, most of them already beyond the average lifespan.

      1. Masks don’t prevent you from getting sick, they help prevent you from getting other people sick. I agree that people should use them correctly. Has there been a huge uptick in people getting bacterial pneumonia or other claims people make about the downsides of wearing masks?

        Masks aren’t perfect. They don’t block 100%. But they are better than nothing and are a low cost low effort way to mitigate risk. I don’t get bent if I see a person not wearing them and I dislike the mask Nazi but people who are strident anti-mask are nearly as tiresome.

        I like old people. The argument that they don’t matter is terrible persuasion.

        To me though, it is clear that wearing masks isn’t enough and people should stop thinking we still have the plague because people aren’t wearing masks. There has to be some sort of middle ground between those who want to run around licking doorknobs and those who wont leave the house without a hazmat suit. But no one is putting anything forward because rational thought isn’t part of the decision making process.

        1. “Masks don’t prevent you from getting sick, they help prevent you from getting other people sick.”

          No, they don’t. That was what the Nature study looked at.

          Sure, a cloth mask might stop a few droplets containing a virus, but those droplets dry out and the virus can then be expelled on tiny particles of cloth when you breathe, speak or cough.

          Those particles then hang in the air for others to breathe in, unlike droplets which fall to the ground very quickly.

          It’s all a scam.

    3. Wodun, your argument assumes the purpose is about fighting a pandemic. As the other Rand notes in her books, if you find a contradiction, check your premises. Then again, I fully expect that you know this and don’t need any reminder.

  6. “In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.” — Esposito, ‘Bananas’ (Woody Allen, 1971)

  7. I guess batteries out of your cellphones before meeting for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Make those “contact tracers” work for it.

    1. PS: If they’re still bothering with jury trials, I’m nullifying all of this shit. Thanksgiving dinner: Not guilty. Gunning down looters: Not guilty. Jews in the attic: Not guilty.

  8. A little more locally, the director of the Health Department for Allegheny County (where I am) is done asking:

    “I’m done asking, and today I’m telling you that these are things we must all do to bring down the level of spread and keep our community safe. Today I am issuing a stay-at-home and ‘stop social gatherings’ public health advisory.”

  9. It’s a virus. You will be infected by it sooner or later. Some of us it will kill. Very few. It is not worth destroying any part of our economy, nor further eroding our freedoms in search of this fantasy.

  10. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Morons!

    Someone better tell the wizards their spells don’t work any more and they look stupid. The apprentices have found the spell book and Fantasia-like have whipped up some trouble.

    Masks signal compliance to the crap spell casting.

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