Don’t be alarmed: it’s Thursday. I’ve “thrown back” to this classic edition of Phone it in Friday twice before, and even though The Age of The Virus is now over, it’s worth remembering the massive social and economic costs that came from the years of lockdowns.
The line from the Left now is, “oops, sorry, we overreacted, but we can let bygones be bygones, yeah?” Forgiveness is important, but it’s also important to realize how self-righteous busybodies with an untrusting faith in “science” berated all of us into wearing diapers over our faces and putting kids in online classes for two years.
Masks don’t work. If you can smell a tangy fart through an N95 mask, viruses can get through. About the only sensible advice anyone received during The Age of The Virus was to wash our hands regularly.
Yet we turned our civil and medical liberties over to a handful of unelected “public health” bureaucrats based on the flimsiest of information. Granted, those first “two weeks to flatten the curve” were scary, because we knew so little, but in hindsight, it looks like an attempt to see how much the American people would put up with before we revolted. The answer, sadly, was quite a lot.
One other note: I appreciate doctors for their training, though my faith in them has always been equivocal at best. But the real problem seems to be nurses and public health officials. The former is a profession that seems to attract its fair share of self-important nut jobs, and who hasn’t known a nurse who insists she knows better than the doctor?
The latter are people who couldn’t hack it as either a doctor or a nurse, so they got a relatively new degree (I first heard of people majoring in public health only about fifteen years ago) that somehow grants them enormous power to curtail individual liberties in the name of “public” health.
That’s a scary Pandora’s Box: where do we draw the line? I imagine there are all sorts of personally harmful but socially benign health choices that deviously creative public health officials could spin into activity that must be stopped in the name of “public health.” Even when we knew that masks did nothing—I remember folks saying, “Well, the mask doesn’t protect you, but it protects other people,” which makes no sense at all—it was always couched in terms of helping other people. It was the same way with The Vaccine—“if you don’t get this shot, you’re endangering others!” Malarkey.
With that, here is “TBT^2: Phone it in Friday XI: Coronavirus Conundrum, Part IV: Liberty in the Age of The Virus“:
The Portly Politico 