Quote of the Day: Modern Politics Edition

Ace of Spades blog nails it.

And then there are the Church Ladies of our new state religion - the whole Karen meme is about these suddenly empowered secular Church Ladies who live for moments like this. Normally their only joy in life is scolding people for simple sins such as not using canvas grocery bags or perhaps driving a large SUV. Now these humorless vigilantes feel they are deputized to enforce the observance of the shutter-at-home sabbath. A sabbath that goes on day after day, week after week, without any end in sight. Karen could not be happier. It is a near certainty that lockdown-induced chastity being imposed on millions of people is a thought that warms the icy heart of these charmless people. (And yes, there are male Church Ladies. We most commonly refer to them as “journalists")

On which subject, Norfolk Police clearly know who the real enemy are: people in unapproved fancy dress.

Isn't that just special? Inspector Karen wants to 'provide words of advice about the implications of his actions'. 

I guess the whole Tori Kutz thing is over now, huh?

And that's not the worst of it. There's a case for this authoritarian lunacy, just like there are good arguments against it, but the whole thing with Karenism, the most defining feature of it, is that it's the political equivalent of looking the wrong way down the telescope. Inspector Karen and the rest of the Operation Versace team are ready to Go! Go! Go! just as soon as they get a fix on this Unlicensed Thespian, but how about the stuff the Government is meant to control? The absolutely basic, pretty much the definition of being a country, stuff, like controlling our borders?

Nope, forget that. They're perfectly happy for .gov.uk to do absolutely nothing then take cover behind crappy euphemisms like 'so connected to the rest of the world'. 

Yep, that's it. It's just like how George Best died because he was so connected to the brewing industry.

Annnnnnnnd that's how we ended up in a country where the Wuhan Clan can jet right in 24-7, but if you want to sit on the grass in the park you, sir, are worse than Typhoid Mary.

The Sliding Sombrero

It's now Day 472 of the lockdown - well, it feels like that - and we still have to put up with people virtue signalling about their readiness to deprive cancer patients of treatment. Hey, morons: this.

If you want to keep people from potentially life-saving treatment to protect yourself against a purely theoretical 0.001% increased chance of death, yes, you are the bad guy.

Meanwhile, normal people are starting to disregard the lockdown. 

Yep, that's a mystery, alright - unless you're one of those weirdoes with an actual, y'know, memory.

For those of us who can remember stuff before last week, the lockdown was meant to slow down the spread of the virus to prevent the hospitals being swamped. Like pretty much any outbreak in history, the idea was that those affected would fall into one of three groups. Some people would get better on their own, some would die no matter what treatment they were given - which is terrible for the people concerned but also, by definition, inevitable - and some would survive with the right treatment. The lockdown, by slowing down the rate of infection, was meant to ensure no one in the third group died through lack of treatment.

Hence, all the talk of flattening the curve.

That's exactly what happened. The lockdown was a rare case of a successful government program but it's somehow become a not rare at all case of a government program that's taken on a life of its own. Nurses are making tik tok videos but we're still locked down. We can't go back to work until.....

Nope, no idea. We're just meant to accept perma-lockdown as one more thing that all upstanding citizens are meant to support simply by definition. Anyone who questions it wants to kill grandma.

There's No There There

Over in the sidebar at Ace of Spades blog, there's a really good question:

Interesting: The same people who say we have to shut down the country based on nothing but guesses and "models" are the exact same people saying we must not prescribe hydroxychloroquine until we have full 10,000 participant double-blind trials and conclusive scientific proof.

It seems the alleged "Science-Lovers" and Twitter scolds are willing to roll the dice on some speculations, but are extremely aggressive that we don't gamble on other ones.

So strange that sometimes we take suggestive evidence as conclusive proof that we must do something dramatic and destructive -- shutting the country's economy down -- but in other case, suggestive evidence is not enough to encourage doctors to prescribe a well-tested drug with minimal side-effects.

Why?

Well, quite.

Hydroxychloroquine has been used prophylactically for decades to prevent malaria. If it caused people's heads to explode, someone would have noticed by now. In fact, it may well be the least-new new drug in history, but we're all supposed to believe that prescribing it in this specific case, and only this case, is somehow incredibly dangerous. Hey, maybe we ought to tell the pills they're been taken to fight malaria, and hope they won't know the difference.

As the great Ann Coulter points out, things were a little different with an earlier plague:

When it came to AIDS, the gay community’s successful campaign to compel the FDA to allow “compassionate” use of unapproved drugs was a civil rights milestone on the order of Selma.

In a 1990 editorial, for example, The New York Times praised the “educated and articulate” gay spokesmen for bringing about “changes in the traditional methods of testing drugs,” adding that the new procedures were “a compassionate response to AIDS sufferers.”

Meanwhile, the MSM is occupying its time with stupid have you stopped beating your wife questions and bogus atrocity stories about the lack of ventilators... no, wait. That was last week, it's PPE that's the scandal this week.

It's all outrage, all the time, but no one will ask why doctors across the world have suddenly succumbed to the exact same delusion about patients getting better when they're prescribed a specific type of drug therapy.

What do the MSM think is going on? Mass hysteria?

Nope, they don't think at all. Bias doesn't even cover it. For all their ostentatious globalism, the MSM are the most insular people on the planet, particularly in the UK. Even a pandemic is viewed in terms of how it affects things in a half dozen north London postcodes.

You can hardly get them to acknowledge that closing down the economy may have negative side effects. 

All of which is by way of saying I can well understand this. How much respect are we meant to have for a bunch of clowns who offer no actual insight whatsoever, just a continuous bunch of lame-o gotchas?

They're supposed to be the Smartest People In The Room but all they can offer is parochial talking points. If it's actual analysis you're after, you're better off with just a bloggers like Hector Drummond.

It goes a little deeper as well. As US Youtuber Stephen Crowder points out, with the shut down in place America's late night talk show hosts are now just particularly high-profile Youtubers...

High profile *bad* Youtubers.

It turns out that once you take away the football team size writers room and the slick production values you're left with the entertainment equivalent of a bunch of beached whales.

Yep, the smart set aren't smart, and the funny guys aren't funny, but at least their arrogance is intact!

We're Not All In This Together

I was worried about getting the Wuhan Virus but a friend is sorting me out with something that will guarantee I can stay free of it, namely: press credentials.

At least I assume that's how it works, given the number of times I see some MSM drone on screen standing in a sunny park reporting on how important it is that everyone else stays indoors.

Again: it's 'freedom of the *printing press*', not extra special freedoms specifically for some group of people called the press but no one else.

Leaving that aside though, I'd wonder if the MSM would be so up for putting the whole country under house arrest if it applied to them - like it should - but I think there may be a chicken and egg thing going on here. The MSM have given up even pretending to speak truth to power, now they're all about speaking truth from power, explaining why the power is totally awesome and how we should give it even more power - and yet somehow they've evaded the regulations that are strangling the rest of the economy.

It's a Scooby Doo mystery alright!

The thing is that the MSM has been so craven in it's coverage of the lockdown, that it's arguably been completely counterproductive even if you think it's a good idea. The average person can work out that strong cases don't need wall to wall propaganda.

Then again, the real epidemic appears to be a nasty outbreak of people advocating for measures that won't affect them anyway. Look at all the academics demanding the lockdown be extended until the heat death of the universe.

Hey, why not? They're still getting paid without having to do any work. It's the Mother Lode for these guys. Meanwhile: this, this and much else besides.

Yep, innovation from a whole host of organisations but almost none from the supposed Smartest People In The Room. We have 100+ plus universities where people are paid to push back the frontiers of knowledge, meanwhile a brewery is producing hand sanitiser

You can tell which side of the great divide Academia is on by the way no one in the MSM will mention this. In fact, they won't even mention the stuff they really should mention.

Yep, this is 'Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive, World War Fought By Mistake' territory. We're trashing the economy based on projections produced by a bunch of Mean Girls - the chief one of whom has yet to release the actual model he used to create his projections in the first place. You'd think that would be a bigger story but the MSM doesn't want to risk it's Park Privileges.

Still, at least academics aren't openly fantasising about mass murder, unlike some people. 

True, that's not official policy yet but they're working up to it.

I guess the good news is they're over whatever problems the 'Tori Cutz' caused, right? Apparently, there were always plenty of police officers available, but they'd just fallen down the back of the sofa.

It's not only the numbers though. When did you ever see this kind of aggressive policing applied to, say, burglars?

They're telling us who they are in the choices they make.

Grooming gangs? Whateves!

Some guy walking his dog in the middle of nowhere? Launch the drones!

No one voted for this. The party that comes closest to this worldview just got hammered in a general election. But no: the police are run by SJW lunatics who hate the average British citizen and seek to humiliate him or - to use their own phrase - to 'rub his nose in it' at every opportunity. Meanwhile, the lower ranks are dominated by twerps, sneaks and virtue-signalling drama queens. 

Basically, it's as if the country has been put under martial law by Tumblr.

All of which takes us back to where we started. We have draconian enforcement of the law when it comes to Rebel Dog Walkers, but how about police officers who harass innocent members of the public citing bogus laws? Anything going to happen to them? Anything at all? 

Nope. No consequences at all: PC Pantsonfire is in the club and you're not.

So there.

What all this has done is clarify where we are in Britain today. We're effectively two countries. One country is stuck at home watching its business implode, the other is in City Square telling you to stay home forever while they count their cash.

Like I keep saying, the whole reason BoJo was able to get a proper majority where Fat Dave and the Maybot failed was that people thought he might actually do something to fix this. Everything that's happened since the WuFlu arrived has just rammed home the need for change.