We must begin to stick to our guns when both the powerful old, and the insouciant young, spring the “Agree-with-my-sound-bite-version-of-the-truth-or-be-banished” gambit on us. We need to be conflictive with them in ways that we never believed we could be.
During Covid, responsible nurses were unable to perform their advocate role in many hospitals. Under the cover of a medical emergency, many hospitals devolved into inflexible institutions paying more attention to orders from above than to the well-being of patients.
How many Americans have learned the bitter political lessons of the pandemic? As long as most people can be frightened, almost everyone can be subjugated. In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.
Brazil is the only country in the world mandating Covid-19 vaccines for children aged 6 months to 5 years. In the end, the arguments of those who support this are similar to those of Islamic State members.
The Pope cannot afford to be a mass-man, but he is one: unable to understand that his job is not to please his flock but rather to encourage them to become conscious of the historical reality of their own existence.
There is no such thing as fully objective history, and that’s for a simple reason. History is generated in narrative form, and the creation of every narrative—as Hayden White made clear four decades ago—necessarily involves the selection and discarding, as well the foregrounding and relative camouflaging, of items within the panoply of “facts” at the disposal of the historian.
Welcome to the age of abstraction, when lived experience is irrelevant and theoretical constructions carry the day – when what is deemed right and true is unmoored from what is actually happening here and now.
Outbreaks do occur and we should monitor and prepare for them. However, we have allowed the development of a system where outbreaks are almost all that matter. Perceptions of risk, and resultant funding, have become grossly disproportionate to reality. The perverse incentives driving this are obvious, as are the harms. The world will be increasingly unequal and impoverished, and sick, building on the outcomes of the Covid response. Fear promotes profit better than calmness and context. It is on us to remain calm and continually educate ourselves regarding context. No one will sell these to us.
If we are to survive as a civilization, that is precisely the kind of community and support structure that we need to form, especially on the local level. For that reason alone, I warmly invite you to the 2024 Brownstone Institute Conference and Gala in my hometown of Pittsburgh, where we will seek to experience a community of collegiality and friendship in service of “The New Resistance.”
Although random hatchets were thrown at Fauci during the hearing, he managed to garner a fair bit of support from the subcommittee and seemed to come out relatively unscathed, earning him the title of ‘Teflon Tony.’ The subcommittee will release a final report by the end of 2024, with its findings and recommendations from its two-year investigation.
Thus ended the official “grilling” of Dr. Anthony Fauci, an American “hero” who continues to be persecuted by a few disinformation-spreading members of Congress and tens of millions of Internet kooks like myself.
When government takes on core tenets of civilized life, such as the right to associate, and presumes the right to manage the whole of private and public life including all civic institutions, under whatever excuse, what you end up with is something other than civilized life. Minnesota is just one case in point but the same afflicts many other places in the country and world, as the fallout from the disaster cascades through our lives.
