A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge writes in the Times that the decisions of the government during a crisis were wise and good and that if, perchance, any slight errors were made, fear not, lessons will be learned.
Bzzt. Click. System error. Commence program reset.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge – Lord Sumption – writes in the Times that “Little by little the truth of lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster”.
In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. It seems obvious. Yet it is at that most basic level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being acknowledged.
Sunak makes three main points. First, the scientific advice was more equivocal and inconsistent than the government let on. Some of it was based on questionable premises that were never properly scrutinised. Some of it fell apart as soon it was challenged from outside the groupthink of the Sage advisory body. Second, to build support, the government stoked fear, embarking on a manipulative advertising campaign and endorsing extravagant graphics pointing to an uncontrolled rise in mortality if we were not locked down. Third, the government not only ignored the catastrophic collateral damage done by the lockdown but actively discouraged discussion of it, both in government and in its public messaging.
Lockdown was a policy conceived in the early days by China and the World Health Organisation as a way of suppressing the virus altogether (so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, except Sweden, eagerly embraced lockdown, ripping up a decade of pandemic planning that had been based on concentrating help on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.
At first Britain stood up against the stampede. Then Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published its notorious “Report 9”. Sunak confirms that this was what panicked ministers into a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the assumptions underlying it, it might have been less impressed. Report 9 assumed that in the absence of a lockdown people would do nothing whatever to protect themselves. This was contrary to all experience of human behaviour as well as to data available at the time, which showed that people were voluntarily reducing contacts well before the lockdown was announced.
I find myself in the odd position of being slightly more in sympathy with the government than is a former supreme court judge. Frightened men make mistakes. I also find myself slightly more in sympathy with Rishi Sunak than I was yesterday. However, I have to ask why he did not voice his doubts at the time.
Yeah that’s kind of a big deal. He was the second most important man in the government of the UK.
I don’t know how things are in the UK, but Trump was put in an unenviable position with regards to Covid. He didn’t just have one voice to listen to for advice, but he has the CDC, Surgeon General, fifty-four governors (fifty states and each territory plus DC), fifty-four independent health departments, economic advisors from the US and state governments and Wall Street, his national security advisors, all of whom had their own take on closing borders, shutting down the economy, the disease itself, admissions to hospitals, capabilities of various medical establishments, ventilators, international trade problems with things like ventilators, and so on. Granted, America thinking he could handle big problems better than Hillary is why he got the job in the first place, but this was the biggest health crisis anyone has faced since the Spanish Flu.
What the biggest problem came down to was politicians playing politics with people’s lives (the governor of NY hording ventilators while badmouthing Trump or the surgeon general of PA pulling his mother out of the nursing home she was in while stuffing the same nursing home full of Covid patients comes to mind) and self-serving physicians like Fauci deciding he was a rock star instead of a doctor.
The biggest takeaways should be that bureaucrats don’t know what to do in a crisis and will destroy the economy, people’s life’s work, and one’s rights at the drop of a panicked hat and that those with agenda’s used their media mouthpieces to turn fear into a virtue.
I grant much leeway on just this basis, understanding that hindsight is easy.
But at some point fairly early in the process, they seem to have passed out of the “taking overzealous protective measures for humanity’s sake” stage and into the realm of “we over-reacted, so now let’s all cover my rear!”
Everything past that point in time deserves no benefit of the doubt. And most of the damage was done past that point in time.
Lord Sumption is a delusional bullshitter.
As I said.
But at some point fairly early in the process, they seem to have passed out of the “taking overzealous protective measures for humanity’s sake” stage and into the realm of “we over-reacted, so now let’s all cover my rear!”
As the old chestnut goes, “victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.”
The public seemd to go at it with great enthusiasm, I don’t recall much in the way of dissent. How many MPs asked hard questions at any stage, a few dozen maybe? I don’t think there was anything by way of a Loyal Opposition. No outcry as “five weeks to flatten the curve” slipped into Forever. In some ways it seems futile to start, with Sunak, to try to weasel one’s way out of it: as expert Dr Heinz Kiosk would say, “we are all gullty.” Well, pretty much all.
By a remarkable coincidence all the English speaking countries did the same. A cynical person would suspect a conspiracy.
I noticed in this pandemics how people could do certain public protests, topple statues, etc. I keep thinking the lockdown was a test.
I have no sympathy whatsoever. It was blindingly obvious to anyone who stopped to think about it, that this was a disaster – at the time – and those of us that voiced this, knew that this day would come. It gives me no satisfaction to say ‘we told you so,’ because the damage has been done. Remember, these people actively suppressed any opposing voices from experts in the field who dared to voice dissent. We had that vacuous moron Matt Hancock rubbishing Carl Heneghan in parliament for example.
You don’t do that when you are sure of your ground. There needs to be criminal charges brought against everyone involved, but it won’t happen. ‘Lessons learned’ etc., is the best we can expect as we pick up the pieces. So, no sympathy with any of the scoundrels.
Sunak is as much of a power-hungry egotist as Johnson. The speed and initial impact of his furlough programme was a considerable shock and for a while he was the golden child and the obvious successor for the top job. Hell, even leftist papers were cooing about him akin to the misplaced deification of Saint Fauci and the ludicrous if short-lived support for next President Cuomo over the pond. It’s interesting that Boris never received the same level of popular support despite being in theory a more sympathetic case having contracted a pretty serious dose. Maybe us Brits are even more easily won over by free money than the Yanks.
As it became increasingly clear that the negatives of repeated lockdowns were a far greater threat both economically and health-wise Sunak doubled down by extending the handouts seemingly still unwilling and unable to express those justifiable concerns he is only now so anxious to talk about.
The man is really really rich and could have presumably walked back into Goldman Sachs etc for even more moolah. The fact he still seeks power is evidence to me at least that on no account should he be given a second chance. He’s not the only culprit but economically he is the most egregious and right now the economy is on life-support as a direct result of his profligacy.
Sorry, but I have no sympathy at all. Even if serial failure Professor Neil Ferguson’s “Report 9” was initially taken at face value, it was almost immediately demonstrated as utter bullshit by the real-world empirical evidence of the Diamond Princess.
So nope, not buying it. Ecksian sackings sans pension and compo all round…even if we’re not going to use that multi-person gallows.
Generations yet unborn will be paying the price of lockdowns, both in reduced future GDP and debt.
On this topic, at the website of Children’s Health Defense.org, there is an illuminating discussion between Jeffrey Sachs and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I am now a lot less bemused as to why many government were so misguided.
I have no sympathy either. By saying only now that he tried to resist the lockdown policy Sunak has revealed that at the time he was a moral coward. If he felt as strongly as he now wishes us to think he did, he should have resigned. Not a person, I suggest, with the strength of character needed to be PM at this difficult time.
On a related topic, the nudge unit, and indeed all behavioural psychologists should be driven from government forthwith.
If they can scare the people into irrational action they can also scare the government, MPs, and civil servants into irrational action.
Indeed, it is my contention that that is what happened.
Bear in mind that these people, expert as they may be on mind control, are possessed of no particular knowledge outside that particular field, hence have no better idea than anyone else what is the right thing to do.
Even though many will say there was no reasonable alternative* a plurality of Conservative MP’s chose Sunak as their favoured candidate,
* There was. Her name is Kemi Badenoch. Less than 1 in 6 of the leeches supported her.
“The public seemd to go at it with great enthusiasm, I don’t recall much in the way of dissent. How many MPs asked hard questions at any stage, a few dozen maybe? I don’t think there was anything by way of a Loyal Opposition. No outcry as “five weeks to flatten the curve” slipped into Forever. In some ways it seems futile to start, with Sunak, to try to weasel one’s way out of it: as expert Dr Heinz Kiosk would say, “we are all gullty.” Well, pretty much all.”
Absolutely. The thing one must take away from the whole covid lockdown episode is that tyranny is not something that is necessarily imposed on a recalcitrant population, it can be demanded by the population to be imposed upon it, in order to protect it from some (probably whipped up by those who stand to gain the power) fear or other.
No politician could have stood against lockdowns at the point when standing might have made a difference. They would have been standing in front of a stampeding herd of public opinion, with the obvious outcome. Everyone was sh*tting themselves, people who had never had to think much about death were looking it in the face (in their minds, obviously the reality was very different) and this turned them into fear driven zombies. There’s a few of them still out there, wandering around with masks on.
Its why I’m sure that there will never be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission over covid – 80-90% of the public are complicit in what happened, and you can’t condemn those in power without the public having to accept their guilt too, which they won’t want to face. So there will never be any great demand for too many questions to be asked. It will be memory holed, because that suits most people, rulers and ruled.
What is going on? Are you seeing indications of Progs and Lefties waking up to the incalculable harm that has been done? I’m stunned. Here I’m seeing some anger and pushback over what has been done to children but, in the UK, you didn’t torture and abuse children, did you? And, I am seeing a trial balloon to foist blame for the lockdowns and the botched vaccine rollout on Trump.
Re: Trump. Lest we forget, he was long gone before the negative data on the vaccines began emerging months later, he didn’t mandate the vaccines, he didn’t insist that pregnant women and children be vaccinated, he didn’t suppress alternatives, he didn’t vilify dissenters, he may have gone along with lock downs in March 2020, but it was left up to the governors, and by mid April, he was advocating a phased withdrawal of the restrictions.
This dressing down of the covidiots appeared on Small Dead Animals, a Canadian website this morning.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2022/08/29/rats-fleeing-the-ss-covid-fear-ship/#comment-1677767
Not quite: some US and Australian states imposed less stringent measures. I suppose that the same is true for some Canadian provinces?
Also, Britain did not close the borders, but almost everybody else did. As has been done for centuries, if not millennia, during an epidemic.
The lockdown did not save lives – we know this not just by comparing the United Kingdom with Sweden, we know this by comparing the United Kingdom with ALL the countries that did not lockdown – all of them had a lower death rate than we did.
Early Treatment could have saved a lot of lives – but it was systematically smeared “Trump wants to inject you with bleach” lied the media, and the British (and “Blue” Americans) lapped up these lies. People who could have been saved by Early Treatment died – in the United States and the United Kingdom, sitting at home (as ordered to do so by the authorities) till their disease was often too advanced for them to be saved.
Then came the injections, the so called vaccines, how much harm (how many injuries and deaths) they haw caused and will cause – we, as yet, just do not know. Did the injections also save lives? Perhaps they did – it is possible. What the balance is between of lives saved and lives destroyed is hard to tell yet.
However, to return to the lockdowns – they were a total disaster which did not save lives (see above), and paying for the lockdowns has destroyed the economy – and that destruction of the economy will cost a lot of lives.
However, to return to the lockdowns – they were a total disaster which did not save lives (see above), and paying for the lockdowns has destroyed the economy – and that destruction of the economy will cost a lot of lives.
I am convinced that those lost lives , destroyed economy, disrupted worldwide supply lines, mass hysteria, etc., were completely seen as completely justified in the US by those who simply wanted rid of Trump. Not because they did anything to alleviate the issues Covid created, but because they allowed the introduction of mass mail-in balloting and all the fraud that entails to allow our betters to get rid of Trump. A knife through the heart of the democratic integrity of America was a small price to pay, and as Rahm Emanuel famously said, “never let a crisis go to waste.” And I say this as someone who sat on the sidelines in 2020 simply because I could not bring myself to pull the lever for Trump a second time.
“Perish the universe provided we get rid of Bad Orange Man.”
-Cyrano de Bergerac (probably)
Lord Sumption is not ennobled, he has the courtesy title of ‘Lord‘ as a result of being appointed to the UK’s ‘Supreme Court’. He has the same ‘Lord‘ title as a Scottish Judge of the Court of Session, a much more junior judicial figure. He has not been granted a Life Peerage (a Barony) so he has no seat in the House of Lords, he is, apart from being a Privy Counsellor (‘The Rt. Hon.’) as having been on the UK’s Supreme Court, a private citizen with no official capacity. The difference in title is that he is ‘The Right Honourable Lord Sumption’ rather than ‘The Right Honourable The Lord Sumption’ which he would be if a Baron (Life Peer).
Snorri
Not so, eventually the UK government did make it an offence to leave the country without a ‘reasonable excuse’ but yes, when people could not leave their homes without a reasonable excuse, anyone could come into the country at least until May 2020, and now, effectively the UK borders are open, provided that you come in illegally.
The whole thing was an obvious scam from the start, when they found time to exempt bicycle shops from closure, yet didn’t close the borders, found time to design street signs for ‘social distancing’ (‘physical distancing’ in Scotland) and came up with absurd scare stories.
The only proper answer is a Bill of Attainder for the implementers and facilitators of all this, I would suggest covering as many collaborators be covered as died in WW1 and WW2 combined minus 1, but under the aegis of law.
Sunak fails to explain why – as someone at the very heart of government – he didn’t do a Hezza, gather up his notes & walk out of Cabinet.
Had he done so, he might have been able to retain a scintilla of credibility
As it is, he’s just another loser at the Big Table.
Soon to depart the UK (vide Miliband) for a very agreeable stipend in the USA.
Free speech is an essential part of science. Fear can indeed explain sudden briefly-maintained action – but fear of the virus cannot explain shutting down debate, and all this coming out two years later instead of two months later. A quite different fear causes that – or a quite different motivation than fear.
– In the US (it seemed to me from over here – US commenters by all means correct or clarify) it was always and obviously phoney. The abrupt Dem pivots from “Don’t be an anti-Asian racist like Trump – visit Chinatown today” (early March 2020) to “Lockdown harder – not staying home is murder” (April 2020) to “Riot for George Floyd – staying home is violence” (end May 2020) shouted loudly that politics was everything and true interest in public health nothing for the left across the pond.
– In the UK, by contrast (though that kind of phoniness was here too) it seemed much less important as regards what Westminster was doing. I had the impression (I may have been wrong, of course) that Johnson, though he liked what he foolishly, at the time, saw as a potential Churchill moment, did not like the lockdowns. Yet he did two and if two were fewer than his advisors and the opposition parties wished, they were still more than was sensible.
So my question is, what was he thinking – or rather, why was he not rethinking (and likewise Sunak et al) if indeed the future after lockdown worried them? Why did none of them take steps to get broader advice (if that advice would have been more palatable to Boris)? Did they manage not to know of such things as the Great Barrington Declaration? Did they know to distrust political experts over Brexit but yet swallow what they were told was ‘science’?
– In the US (it seemed to me from over here – US commenters by all means correct or clarify) it was always and obviously phoney. The abrupt Dem pivots from “Don’t be an anti-Asian racist like Trump – visit Chinatown today” (early March 2020) to “Lockdown harder – not staying home is murder” (April 2020) to “Riot for George Floyd – staying home is violence” (end May 2020) shouted loudly that politics was everything and true interest in public health nothing for the left across the pond.
Pretty much. It was always political theater. Dr. Fauci (God’s gift to epidemiology you know) was saying if we didn’t mask up and stay six feet apart we would be dead by dawn…then was throwing out the first pitch at baseball games and sitting unmasked shoulder to should with his family in the stands. Basically the whole thing was orchestrated so the politicians could score “gotcha!” points on the news shows no one watches, print money to buy votes (which gave us the inflation we’re seeing today because no one in DC has ever taken an Intro to Macroeconomics course), and the mail in balloting fraud.
I don’t live in someplace packed with people like NYC, LA, Chicago, or anywhere else like that (I live in a little town in West-BY-GOD-Virginia not terribly far from Pittsburgh) and it got to the point that people just started ignoring the new edicts from on high. About the only places that still require masks are hospitals and government offices, even though the mandates are still technically in effect (mask or vaccine) and even the plastic sheeting between cashiers and customers are coming down.
In spite of the Karens and their “fear is a virtue” attitude, most Americans are just over the whole thing and ignore it now.
“So my question is, what was he thinking – or rather, why was he not rethinking (and likewise Sunak et al) if indeed the future after lockdown worried them?”
Because the public were demanding ‘action’, the harder the better. A politician can often be faced with a noisy minority, and (if they have the stones) face them down and act on the behalf of the silent majority who want something different. Unfortunately in March 2020 in the UK at least, the silent majority wanted lockdowns just as much as the noisy minority. If Boris or Sunak, or anyone with their hands on the levers of power had come out in March 2020 and said ‘We’re doing a Sweden’ they would have been torn limb from limb, metaphorically speaking. The only people who would have been behind him were the 10-20% awkward squad, and in front would have been the 80-90% of the sh*t scared masses demanding ‘the government should do something’ to make the fear rattling around their skulls go away.
At the end of the day democracy should mean that politicians enact the will of the people, and in March 2020 lockdowns was what they wanted, and what they got. Now they have to deal with the consequences thereof. Its no good blaming Boris or Sunak for it, blame your neighbours. They were the reason it all happened the way it did.
Why did the UK and other countries go along with the suppression of other treatments. Cleary the public health apparatchiks, here, were determined to embrace a brand new technology, at any cost, but that doesn’t explain Europe or the UK.
These fuckers conspired to destroy the world and build a totalitarian hell over its ruins. Never forget what they actually attempted. What they still will try.
It seems to me that the real problem is not being discussed enough. I am not one to deflect blame from politicians, god knows they deserve as much aprobrium as possible. But the real problem here was the utter failure of the press and its evil cousin the big tech companies. Politicians do bad things, it is their nature, but there is supposed to be a check and balance in the press: “speak truth to power”, “democracy dies in darkness” and all that. They, with a couple of notable exceptions, utterly failed. They became the willing arms of propaganda of the government. It is shameful what they did.
And then there are the tech companies. When I think about it I weep. The internet was supposed to be the next revolution in communication. Everyone was a journalist. Everyone an author. Every point of view heard. I was around for the beginnings of the web and the revolution of opening it to the public and it was a great libertarian revolution; as one author put it, a crucible of capitalism. Google, a company that I loved, that promised “don’t be evil” turned out to be among the worst. This beautiful pristine jewel of unadulterated free speech turned into this ugly, communist style era censorship machine. A machine where some spotty faced moron with a degree in Native American Dance Philosophy who got a job as a censor at facebook can decide that a peer reviewed journal article from the British Medical Journal written by half a dozen highly distinguished scientists was “disinformation”.
It is a crime against decency, a betrayal of hope, an offence against humanity. It is what we expect from politicians, they have been venal from prehistory. But the the internet? The new hope? I know it is exceptionally corny, and I also get the irony of using a Google web site for this, but it reminds me of this scene from a movie.
It breaks my heart when I see what has happened, and these last two years are the utter nadir of this betrayal of hope.
It’s not exactly new. The press has ALWAYS carried water for one party or the other, skewed stories and facts and narratives to support an agenda, and outright lied when it felt like it. I don’t know what the laws are in the UK, but in the US the First Amendment says that government can’t make laws to rein in the Press. Libel and slander, sure, but the Press is untouched because it is supposed to be one of those bulwarks of liberty.
What can be done about it? Short of adding editors and piano wire and streetlights together and telling their replacements, “your job is to provide the facts about what is going on so We The People can make an informed decision, so do it!”? Not much.
As far as Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc., I’m of two opinions:
1) anyone who is swayed by a Facebook post or a meme without doing some research shouldn’t be voting in any event. Of course, in our system everyone, no matter who stupid, gets to pull the lever and that system isn’t changing anytime in the near future.
2) There was a legal doctrine where a phone carrier like AT&T couldn’t censor what was said on their phone lines. Apply the same standard to Facebook et al. Unless it is truly illegal (e.g. posting child pornography) it can’t be censored by the site. Of course, I’m also of the opinion that like Ma Bell, those services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., should be broken up once they effectively become monopolies, which they clearly have.
Let’s also not forget the odious Neil O’Brien, Tory MP for Harborough, who actively went after lockdown sceptics, as described here by Brendan O’Neil at Spiked.
There were concerted moves to rubbish the views of those involved in the Great Barrington Declaration, such as the idea that targeted protection, rather than blanket lockdowns, made more sense. Yes, there would be problems, but the damage to the economy and resources of the country to pay for healthcare would not have been damaged as badly. The efforts of the GBD crowd were rewarded by a campaign of vilification.
I also think that even certain supposed liberals/libertarians veered too far off the path of common sense. Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs – someone I know personally and like – scoffed at the idea of focused prevention when I saw a roundtable webinar he was on (sorry, I cannot find the link); he said it was unworkable, like trying to contain urine in a swimming pool lane. I never saw him fully explain just why focused prevention was so unworkable when the alternative was so costly and damaging. (In his favour, he said that lockdowns should be ended as soon as possible, drawing a parallel with post-WW2 food rationing). Sam Bowman, who used to work for the Adam Smith Institute, was fairly prominent (for a short while) in having a pop at lockdown sceptic such as Toby Young.
More broadly, as others on this blog have said, the large majority of the public wanted the lockdowns; the official opposition party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, wanted them; the devolved governments of Wales and Scotland, eager to win a sort of auction of authortarianism, wanted them. The Swedish response was just blanked out of debate as unmentionable.
I don’t have the medical knowledge to know whether Paul Marks’ point about early intervention treatments at the time would have worked, but my view at the time, and it remains the case, is that all treatments and techniques should have been on the table, rather than just rubbished from the start. That contributed to the suspicion in the public’s minds that the authorities actually wanted lockdowns as an end in themselves.
And that leads me to the broader conclusion, which is that the episode has further destroyed public trust in institutions, and I hope that even those who at the time supported long lockdowns have come to a more questioning approach to government, including topics such as Net Zero, and other fashionable views where we are told the science is “settled”.
Sunak should have resigned at the time.
Fauci deserves to be investigated for his financial links to the Wuhan lab.
“…tyranny is not something that is necessarily imposed on a recalcitrant population, it can be demanded by the population to be imposed upon it…”
Absolutely this. I was surrounded by people who seemed to believe every bit of the hype, insisting on following every pointless rule, not just to the letter but beyond. Sanitising, mask wearing, distancing, zapping all the QR codes and reporting where they have been. If it hadn’t been for blogs like this one and Longrider’s I would have felt very alone.
The public were (obviously, in retrospect) ready to be led – so could have been led to focussed protection (“We must look after Granny and the vulnerable” and etc.), and/or to various other approaches. The majority were (over-)trusting, not angrily demanding.
– In early-mid March, when the UK government was saying that herd immunity was the only way and the wisdom of the past, it was not some vast amorphous public demanding that that be junked and lockdown be imposed.
– When “3 weeks to flatten the curve” was announced, it was not some vast amorphous public demanding it be 3 months.
Those changes needed a lot of “nudging”. Anyone in the medical bureaucracy and/or government who pretends they knew better at the time but ‘had to do lockdown because of overwhelming public pressure’ is lying to you. Pressure came from the ‘elite’ chattering classes to the public at large – not vice versa – and became powerful because the government turned on a sixpence and abandoned herd immunity. If they’re later failure to review fundamental policy in the light of increased knowledge was from fear, it was fear of an elite, not the public.
It is in the nature of a lockdown that a portion of the ordinary public who want more state enforcement of it cannot effectively riot against a government that merely encourages staying at home. The medical bureaucrats, the nudge unit and the government sold this solution, and the non-discussion of others, to the public, not the other way round.
“The public were (obviously, in retrospect) ready to be led – so could have been led to focussed protection (“We must look after Granny and the vulnerable” and etc.), and/or to various other approaches. The majority were (over-)trusting, not angrily demanding.”
I disagree. The public were happy with lockdowns, masking etc because they made sense to them. Its what they wanted. Of course wearing a mask stops you getting or spreading a disease! Of course if everyone stays at home you stop the spread of a disease, its just common sense! (and later on: Of course taking a vaccine stops you getting a disease!)
If you’d have offered them anything else, that was more nuanced, more counter-intuitive (but based on real science and data analysis) you’d have had a fight on your hands to convince them, especially if it took the ‘risk management’ approach – namely that some people are low risk so let them take it, even if some of them die as a result. The public were not prepared to accept any collateral damage whatsoever, they wanted it all to go away, and only would accept policies nominally aimed at making that happen (even if they were scientific gibberish). Hence the existence of the Zero Covid cult, for a surprisingly long time (still going in China it seems). And with the usual suspects pushing the ‘common sense’ approach in the media 24/7 no government would have been able to resist the pressure, and didn’t.
Niall Kilmartin
The public were (obviously, in retrospect) ready to be led
But it seems to me the big concern here (in the USA, but I think also somewhat true of the UK, and even more true in AUSNZ) is how quickly they threw it all off and followed into a crazy dystopia. And equally disturbing is how many of the public turned into petty tyrants with their “reporting you to the police” and “screaming do you want me to die” and other complete nonsense.
I think this particular situation was exacerbated by the fact that it was targeted so strongly at older people — people who as a general rule are more conservative (with a small ‘c’) and so their normal moderating influence was short circuited.
Franklin allegedly said, in response to a question of what form of government we would have answered “a republic, if you can keep it.” In the past the hands of the British people and their former colonies, were safe places to trust the ideas of freedom, limited democracy, civil rights (actual rights, not made up ones.) But it seems that they have slowly been worn down to the point that today, this latest nadir indicates they are not safe there at all.
It just seems to me that if we have to live in a tyranny like these western countries have become, then we might be better off in living in another country, which, while also tyrannies, at least have lower taxes and better weather. Singapore, Dubai, Panama all look like better options. I have an old school chum who lives in Thailand and is loving it. Maybe a decent retirement option.
The public bought into it all so quickly and fervently because it immediately devolved into the two already-existing tribes – woke versus cons – and so people simply adopted wholesale the positions of Their People.
It became not a question of interpretation of scientific data, but an assignment of good versus evil.
Absent this divide, I doubt there would have been nearly as much polarization, or zeal once a side was adopted. It simply turned into another signaling exercise. People weren’t supporting “the science” – they were signalling that they were with the good guys.
@bobby b
The public bought into it all so quickly and fervently because it immediately devolved into the two already-existing tribes – woke versus cons – and so people simply adopted wholesale the positions of Their People.
That is only half the truth. As I mentioned above, since the Covid thing impacted older people disproportionately, then they, who would traditionally have been on a much more conservative side, tended toward to the woke side. Why? Because the lying press terrified the crap out of them. That simple fact in many ways tilted the balance, and is almost certainly one of the major reasons Trump lost in 2020.
Fraser Orr: I sort of split my living in thirds, with one third in ultra-liberal Minnesota and one-third in relatively-conservative Arizona.
In liberal Minn, the oldsters are and were uniformly terrified of Covid. Masks, isolation, fearfully watching the Covid news day and night. My parents, my rels, all living scared liberal lives.
In conservative Arizona, the oldsters are much much more casual about it. Few masks, few altering their plans, and people can actually have conversations without touching on Covid.
Agree that the press sought fear and terror. But the conservative areas have pre-discounted anything the press tries to foist on them, while the libs lap it up and cower.
“As I mentioned above, since the Covid thing impacted older people disproportionately, then they, who would traditionally have been on a much more conservative side, tended toward to the woke side. Why? Because the lying press terrified the crap out of them.”
I don’t think it was ‘old old’ people who were terrified by covid. If you are 75+ you have to be thinking about death a fair bit – its all around you, your friends and family members are dying off slowly. So its in your face. Covid could just join the long list of things that could kill you any time soon.
My feeling is the real terror was felt by those in the 55-70 age range. Those approaching retirement and those just into it. They were in good health, had no real reason to consider death yet, and were looking forward to a long retirement. This was being snatched away from them, and they were having to face immediate and sudden death, in a way they had never had to contemplate before. This created a massive existential fear and a desire to avoid covid at all costs. And as the 55-70 age group contains a lot of the people in charge of everything in society, they were the ones making the decisions as to what to do. It is my contention that all decisions over covid were made to benefit that age group entirely, everyone else was thrown under the bus – the actual elderly were herded into care homes and allowed to die there, with absolutely no assistance from the State whatsoever, and the young’s future was trashed with all the lockdowns and restrictions on education. Everything was done purely to protect the upper middle age/lower old age group.