We must bring this sad state of government-promoted mandates to an end. And we must follow the wisdom the field of public health has acquired over a hundred years about what works, what protects people from both COVID and other health risks, and what protects the social fabric of our larger human experience.
Those who think their fear of a microbe gives them the right to destroy society have it backward; your fear (irrational or otherwise) doesn’t give you the right to take away everyone’s inalienable rights and essential liberties; if you want to live in fear then you are perfectly free to do so.
This is no longer about scientific confusion. This is starting to look like an old-fashioned political purge, whether justified by fake science or theology. It is happening at many levels of society.
Government should not gamble with the lives and livelihoods of their people by taking extreme measures in the hope that they might work.
The Deprecation of Human Rights in the Age of Covid Read More
To today’s Americans, appearances are everything — we are afraid to be different, lest it make our friends uncomfortable (maybe we will lose one, whatever will we do?!) We have ceased caring about truth and authenticity entirely. We have tacitly agreed as a society that true things should be hidden whenever they conflict with what is “popular”; with what everyone “smart” and “cool” is doing. Anyone acting outside of these boundaries — the “eccentrics” of centuries past, considered by Mill to be geniuses — are today’s untouchables.
The epidemiologists asked to advise governments almost invariably admitted that what they were advocating was only based on their projections of Covid cases and Covid deaths, devoid of any analysis of the effects these actions would have on public health, the economy, education and other important aspects of life. They nonetheless had no problem advocating lockdowns and other draconian measures.
The case against lockdowns and state medical mandates is the obverse of the case for freedom itself. It seems unconscionable for any liberal mind to be wrong on this point. That so many have gone silent or even shown sympathy for medical despotism reveals just how tremendously confusing these times have been.
There will always be a new variant, there will always be a new mandate, and there will always be the new carrot dangling on the stick in front of your face (like the booster jab) only to be pulled away again. You can acquiesce to this conditioning and reorganize your entire life around the principle of avoiding this one pathogen while giving up all expectations of freedom. Or you can resist the propaganda, get informed, and join with those who are working to rebuild after the disaster of the last year and a half.
These principles can help risk assessments function as intended – as a tool to help individuals and communities evaluate risk and put in place targeted measures, to contain and ultimately reduce anxiety, and to move away from more performative measures that simply serve to entrench anxiety and cause harm, without any benefit.
Receiving less attention has been the rise of censorship on the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the social network for professionals that has thus far seemed to be a less active participant in the Covid information wars. Its largely passive approach is starting to change.
LinkedIn Censors Harvard Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff Read More
The lesson is that the questions, answers, and solutions are within the capacity of individuals in society to discern and implement. We do not need powerful institutions with legal rights over us to feed them to us, to legislate us, to coerce us.
The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets.
