assessing the covidian descent into the dark ages

how mendacious medievalism caused so much harm and how to stop it from doing so again

sometimes a headline is so unintentionally apt that it becomes literally perfect.

this is one of those.

because, indeed, covid policy did become entirely medieval. it was rooted in superstition, not science and it tossed 100 years of evidence based medicine out of the window in order to chase a bunch of absurdist “doing something” tactics to look proactive.

this course of action was all psyop and pseudoscience. there was no data to back it. and the results were abject disaster with lockdowns and other bad panic-driven responses causing FAR more death than covid ever did or could.

and this is the sort of panic normalizing twaddle that cheer-led for that disaster.

it’s painfully obvious in all the data that the pre-existing guidelines were 100% correct right down to predicting the manner in which politicians would panic and try to do the wrong thing. THIS is from 2006 and was published in “biosecurity and bioterrorism: biodefense strategy, practice, and science.” not exactly a pop journal but one that is influential in the policy circles that should have know better on covid.

it was more than a little prescient including and especially its prediction that “some authorities and government officials” would seek to do the wrong thing.

this NYT diatribe is not only dead and deadly wrong, but its couched in the manipulative language of the propogandist, not the measured diction of science.

following modern science is “surrender” and the “brutal” medieval way is shown as strong and proactive. this is a shill carrying water for a repressive regime based on fake data from fake scientists.

the fact that this became mainstream ideas speaks very poorly of public health.

it was known and knowable twaddle used to manipulate.

and as is every the case from hitler to mussolini and from stalin to mao, the NYT gushes over dictators and covets the application of such power here at home in fawning authoritarian envy and apologia.

they still favor “rounding people up and putting them in camps” because they always do.

and of course they’d like to see this approach spread.

the parallels to “the spanish flu” were everywhere and also oddly apt as that was the last time medical science got misused and turned pandemic into something far more deadly through severe mishandling and pharmaceutics misapplication that drove massive iatrogenic (cased by medical treatment) deaths in healthy people who should not have died.

and they just fell for it again.

because authoritarians invariably choose the path that lets them assume authority and they put forward whatever claims they must to justify it and call themselves the hero.

“Harsh measures horrify civil libertarians, but they often save lives, especially when they are imposed in the early days.”

this was facile and false. there was always zero chance of stopping a respiratory virus and it was already all over the US in november and december 2019 and perhaps earlier. but they sure do like framing personal choice as anti-social instead of notions of the point of society being to provide just that choice. you serve it; it does not serve you.

all these folks ever seem to have had was a hammer and the “nail” is always “your freedom to choose” and “the threat that individual rights and democracy pose to doing the things we want to do to you. uh, for you. uh, for your own good. swearsies.”

and they sure managed to infect everyone. dictatorship is more contagious than measles because one thing is always true:

if you grant vast new powers to the state in emergencies, it will produce and sustain states of emergency to grasp and keep such power.

the WHO, whose own guidelines warned against this suddenly changed its tune and abandoned the data “because modeling.” (and a quick perusal of their funding sources might make the reason pretty clear)

and so we got an entire world organized around “doing the wrong thing” by abandoning modernity and adopting the dark thinking of the dark ages. and even now, the more strident of “team lockdown” are trying to twist history and invert outcomes.

they cannot bear taking ownership of that which they built and a mind will engage in all manner of projection and distortion to protect itself from recognizing its own culpability in disaster.

it's breaking their brains in a sort of cognitive dissonance spiral. imagine you had been the strident proponent and progenitor of the worst public health calamity in human history.

to what lengths would you go to avoid admitting it to yourself?

it’s all so obvious now. that NYT piece reads like parody. but it wasn’t and at the time it was taken deadly seriously because frightened people do not make good decisions.

this is WHY fear is the tool of the demagogue.

and this is why i’m going to link two pieces here because they fit together well in prescribing the remedy.

the first is this: nothing is obvious to scared people and however smart you may be, once the lizard brain takes over, you’re dumber than ditchwater and twice as easy to manipulate.

the second is this: there has never been a dangerous society-scale pandemic in the modern world that was not made so by bad reactions rather than pathogens. iatrogenic deaths are the far greater hazard than disease.

these are the truths and intuitions that will keep us in modernity and out of the dark ages.

if you learn nothing else from covid, learn that.

internalize it and weave it into the warp and weft of your worldview as this is the integument of a free society. “land of the free and the home of the brave” is actually quite an apt pairing. it was written by people with a more acute understanding of these issues than seems prevalent today.

staying free means staying brave and thinking for yourself. it means keeping your head when all those around you are losing theirs. but it also means stopping the contagion. it means helping those around you to resist as well, becoming not just a dead end for the fear virus but a deflector of it and a cure for it able to heal those already afflicted and restore them to sound mental states.

we all saw what happened. however right some of us were wound up not mattering a whit because too many were stampeding. once that starts, we’re helpless. you cannot resist such a surge. you can only prevent it.

this is why we must talk about these issues, get ahead of them, learn the ins and outs, and learn to stop this tyranny of terror from finding purchase upon us. they will keep bringing it on in health and climate and social policy and technology and economics using the mendacious mantra of “thinking for yourself is ignorance.”

this is our societal immune system, the base knowledge and attitude held beforehand that lets you resist the fear and stop the witch burnings. you can only stop it before it starts. once it’s rolling, you’re helpless.

and “the experts” do not want this. they seem determined to keep us from it.

call me mr cynical, but i struggle to see how their motives are pure…

narrative is truth. there is no questioning of “the science.”

truly, orwell was an optimist. (more NYT)

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” the scholar Tom Nichols writes in his timely new book, “The Death of Expertise.” “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

this is absurdity and inversion. (and quite a good description of “woke”)

it’s the desperate rear guard action of the group whose reputational star is long past zenith and about to fade beneath the horizon.

the true crisis is manipulative fearmongering.

but once you see how the trick is done, you can stand against it and help others to stand with you. courage and comprehension may spread just as virally as fear and ignorance. we must become a civilization proof against such infestations, so it it falls to us to block these malicious magicians from further infecting the demos.

bravery is freedom.

anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. (generally your subjugation)