Swine Flu was never eradicated. It has hung around ever since it first emerged in 2009 but now goes by the name ‘flu’. It’s quite possible that coronavirus ends up seen as part of the viral furniture, lethal, but a manageable risk if the right preparations are there.
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Overall it’s just that Birkenstock stamping on a human face, forever, again isn’t it? April 22nd, 2020 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Taiwan is not a Chinese province, you bat-eating, dog-beating, grave-robbing, ethnic cleansing, police state cockwomble of a stolen Nazi uniform. April 20th, 2020 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
I expect ability to procure was some way down the list of attributes they were expected to demonstrate at the interview, coming behind devotion to the cult of the NHS, commitment to diversity, and being utterly subservient to upper management and bureaucracy. – Tim Newman responding to reports of NHS procurement ineptitude. April 19th, 2020 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“China knows it is in a strategic battle with the West; it is time we realised this basic fact, too. Using their comparative advantage of getting through the virus first, Beijing is pursuing its geostrategic interests via ‘mask diplomacy’, soft power, trying to change the basic narrative by offering hard-hit countries medical supplies, both as a showy humanitarian gesture and as a sign of their system’s supposed superiority. Leaving aside that these supplies must be paid for and some are defective, the whole exercise feels like an arsonist expecting gratitude for providing their victim with a watering can.” April 17th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Governments anxious to be seen to “do something” (the curse of democratic politicians everywhere) made grand dramatic gestures – building hospitals in days that would normally have taken years. To hell with whether they were needed or not (the much bruited London Nightingale reportedly has just 19 patients) Look! We are doing stuff. Stuff you could never do yourselves!! The State and its hordes are heroes. April 16th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata no longer needs me. Soon it will no longer need you. I took the text from the sidebar:
and copied it into Talk To Transformer.
Comments are, as ever, welcome. Even from humans. April 16th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The coronavirus outbreak gives us a neat experiment in what happens when humans suddenly dramatically reduce both production and consumption. And, to put it mildly, most of us are not enjoying it one bit. That suggests that instead of the hair shirtery favoured by the Gretas of this world, our best solution is creating the technologies that allow us to keep consuming while also keeping the planet cool with our doing so.” April 15th, 2020 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
If there is a disaster, would you like people for hundreds of miles around to drop everything and make herculean efforts to get those worst affected exactly the sort of help they need most – even when the helpers have no personal connection with the victims? Would you like factories worldwide to rush to switch production to making whatever they are short of in the disaster zone? You would? Then let people make money by doing it. You can either rely on the small subset of people who will seriously disrupt their lives to help strangers out of pure charity, or you can also get help from the much larger pool of people who who are pushed from vague thoughts of benevolence into action by the prospect of profit. Let them sell goods of which there is a shortage at a higher price and soon there won’t be a shortage any more. – something sorta like this was said by someone, whom I would gladly credit if I could remember who they were. My post was prompted by this story by Edward Thicknesse in City A.M.: Coronavirus: Calls for price controls dismissed as ‘economically illiterate’. April 15th, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve just been reading the twitter feed of a senior journalist and also of a well-known philosopher. They seem to me to be preposterous figures. One of the extraordinary effects of digital is that it reveals the hollowness and mediocrity of those we’d once have lauded. April 13th, 2020 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m amused to see we’ve now reached the “interracial marriage is bad” part of the transition of the illiberal left into 1950s conservatives. – Marcus Walker responding to this. April 9th, 2020 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The signature of authoritarianism is not the use of force, but the pathological dependence on deception, often to the extent of becoming self-delusional.” April 8th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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