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Lockdown Sceptics becomes Daily Sceptic The name of this website is about to change from Lockdown Sceptics to the Daily Sceptic. I intended this change to coincide with the bonfire of the coronavirus restrictions – the long-awaited terminus – but ‘Freedom Day’ has turned out to be a damp squib. Not only have many of the restrictions remained in place, but it’s been made clear by Chris Whitty and others that any freedoms we’ve been granted today will be snatched away as soon as the NHS comes under pressure again.
– Toby Young
I have been supporting the excellent & tireless Lockdown Sceptics & will continued to support Daily Sceptic. Samizdata.net’s sidebar link has been duly updated.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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In many places you no longer have to wear a mask but the majority are still doing so anyway. This is even in places where there is food and drink on sale so you have to take your mask off to eat. Even if the masks did make a difference, putting them on to walk from the door to the table is pretty pointless.
I spent about 5 hours walking around this afternoon and visited a couple of shops during this time; where I am in Sussex most people were not wearing masks except for a few waiters at a bar/restaurant I walked past and I would guess that was the policy of their employers rather than an individual choice.
1. The NHS was never, ever in the last eighteen months*, under pressure.
2. Good to see who the real Prime Minister is.
*Waiting lists for elective procedures are at all time highs. And the Javid the new ‘not-health’ secretary is proposing that waiting lists will rise to 13 million.
I’ve only been out a little in the last couple of days, but I noticed what Brendan O’Neil noticed in Spiked. It’s the help that is wearing masks, because it’s not necessary to see the help’s faces. I hope this stops before it starts to become normal for the help to wear masks and provide services to the barefaced.
N E
What a wonderful turn of phrase, let us all show some barefaced cheek.
Is the “help” a new generation of a servile servant class? Or a new-normal caste system? That dare not speak, just obeying orders from employers, while barefaced folk are more privileged?
The precedents that have been set have been terrible.
In most of the Western World we now know that the justification of “health” means that all basic liberties can be destroyed.
It is one thing to know that Blackstone declared (after some waffle) that Parliament could do anything it felt like doing – but it is quite another thing to see this in practice.
In some American States it was worse – Governors (without even getting the State Legislatures to change the laws) disregarded the laws, including ELECTION laws, on whims – using the magic word “Covid”.
And Federal bureaucrats just declared “moratoriums” on such things eviting people who did not pay rent – meaning that the Constitutional promises of obeying the Common Law on such things as private contracts were disregarded (although the gold clauses in both public and private contracts were ripped up by the Supreme Court as long ago as 1935 – in a 5 to 4 decision).
Centuries ago George Mason (of all people) suggested that “in an emergency” government should have the power to do things it did not normally have the power to do – he was thinking of the issuing of paper money.
The stern New England Puritan (and lawyer) Roger Sherman replied that it was precisely in an “emergency” that government most needs to be kept under control.
By the way Credit Money finance is directly relevant to Covid 19.
If the government had to finance all its spending by TAXATION (rather than by creating money from nothing) then the vast government spending behind such policies as keeping most people at home, not working, would be a lot harder to follow.
Roger Sherman had a point – taxes, government spending and what the money is (is it a commodity chosen by buyers and sellers – or is it just made up by the government and the banks) are what matters in the end.
When governments, and their friends, have a stranglehold on the MONEY – everything else is just “pretty words”.
So, today I went to IKEA and Costco. A lot more masks than at the gym/pool yesterday and the day before. But, I wasn’t challenged for choosing to do without and I certainly wasn’t alone. Masks were more prevalent amongst the staff, but many people on both sides of the employment divide let their freedom show by failing to comply with the mask signs at the door.
Lockdown Sceptics along with Talk Radio have helped me to preserve some sanity during this irrational, hysterical and disastrous overreaction to the virus. A fair sprinkling of unmasked people in my local supermarket yesterday including some of the staff and me but the large majority still masked. I’m hoping that people will gradually lose the fear that the Government’s unethical distortions and lies have brought about.
Well, I am stuck in Wales – but I have ignored the mask nonsense from the outset (with very few comments).
So, the gym/club is an optional place to go. I think that this might be why I see mainly the barefaced there. The places like supermarkets which are less optional appear to be full of highwaymen. I think that people are more likely to comply with the request in places which are seen to be less “optional” as they feel like some of the people in there somehow need to be in there. IKEA, doesn’t fit that explanation, but maybe the kind of people that go to IKEA are more likely to be highwaymen? Is there a political bent to the IKEA shopper? Am I shopping at the wrong place? Is my tribe furnishing their houses from elsewhere?
In any case, I am not hiding my face any longer. Highwayman I am not.
I reached sceptical critical mass in June 2020 & stopped wearing a mask. I have been challenged exactly twice in all that time & in both instances the minimum wage meat robot shrugged and did not press the matter when it was clear I was not going to comply. On vastly more occasions, I have asked people speaking to me to remove their mask so I can actually understand them and in the great majority of cases they did so, often with a grin & relieved aside, and on several occasions a sotto voce stream of expletives about “fucking masks.”
I feel no need whatsoever to keep my views to myself, and I urge people to do likewise. At the very least take the fucking mask off. Do not normalise something monstrous.
“Minimum wage meat robots” likely have a bit more to lose than you do if they fail to comply with their employer’s orders. I think I’d pack that particular phrase away.
Sure, yet two of them in the last year & a half felt moved to challenge me over not wearing a mask. They did their job by saying what they did, and are not paid enough to really care about the outcome.
No, seems appropriate for the job of saying “wear a mask” and then shrugging with indifference when ignored.
This.
It really is monstrous. Babies and young children NEED to see human faces – not just their parents’ faces – to learn non-verbal communication, facial expressions, etc. Plus, we all need human connection for psychological reasons. The man with a mask is faceless and the faceless man prevents real human connection. The faceless man is an automoton, not a person.
” I’m hoping that people will gradually lose the fear that the Government’s unethical distortions and lies have brought about.”
Whats the saying, people go mad in crowds and come to their senses one by one. Its going to take a while for virtually an entire population to come to its senses. Especially when there’s a massive political movement (the Left) constantly pushing people towards more fear and panic for their own twisted ends.
“Come to their senses”? The theme from now forward is going to be “we’re still alive, thank goodness we have smart strong people in government who saved us all from certain death! We woulda died!”
Nothing progressive is ever falsifiable.
bobby b – I fear you are right.
After all in this country even the insane totalitarianism pushed by the SNP in Scotland led to election VICTORY.
SQOTD. Perfection.
“Nothing progressive is ever falsifiable”.
Yes, this is at the heart of the leftist position – just as they reject reason (which we are now told is “racist” or “white supremacy”) so they also reject evidence.
Progressives can turn a peaceful and prosperous place into a Hellhole – but their policies are never to blame. On the contrary, failure just means even more regulations should have been passed, and government spending should have been even higher.
And if you question government regulations and government spending – then you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe (plus lots of other ists and phobes).
Far from rejecting all this madness, the education system (the schools and the universities) is at the heart of it. The education system rejects both logical reasoning and empirical evidence.
[…] – Bobby B […]