From John Ray's shorter notes




December 05, 2021

Leftism as a mental infirmity

Below is an excerpt from a long essay by Claire Wolfe.  She is an extreme libertarian but she sounds a bit unhinged to me.  She forgets Hanlon’s razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".  

She writes a huge amount, which must take up a lot of time.  It is perhaps for that reason that she seems to have dog in her life rather than a man.  But the excerpt  below  has some interesting points


The woke demand that we believe in the historically unlikely and the biologically impossible or face demonization and unpersoning. Those awaiting the climate-change apocalypse are utterly undeterred by its repeated failure to arrive and insist more loudly than ever that the rest of us — those not in their crowd — will eat soy, give up our cars, own nothing, and like it.

And — as omicron madness rises from the ashes of the dying COVID panic to sweep the global “public health” establishment — we can expect the True Believers (who in this case have the added incentives of billions of dollars, increased political power, and media fame) to hit us, harder than ever, with the same-old same-old of their broken “expertise,” their failed prophesies, and their useless (and cruel) “solutions.”

Never mind that we know very little about omicron at this point. Never mind that what we do know hints that the new variant follows the standard pattern for mutating viruses: more contagious but milder.

The True Believers of Public Health faced their own Great Disappointment. Millions were beginning either to ignore or strike back at the best panic they’d ginned up in their bureaucratic little lifetimes (a real and nasty disease, but eminently survivable even for 98+ percent of its most vulnerable victims).

So — GLOBAL CATASTROPHE, Part umpty-ump! Whoohoo!

And if previous tools didn’t “slow the spread” or sufficiently cow the peasants, then let’s use the same tools, only more and harder! Lockdowns! Shutdowns! Masks and more masks! Firings! Travel bans! Closed borders! Closed schools! Vaxx passports! Above all, more and more NEW JABS! And for the unbelievers, increasingly stringent punishments to save their souls force compliance.

Heck, even before the excuse of omicron, one country in Europe had already banned the dirty unvaxxed from buying gasoline. (I also thought this was fake news until I checked beyond the original link I received.)

In Greece, where the average monthly pension is 730 Euros, every filthy unvaccinated resident over 60 will be forced to pay a 100 Euro monthly fine. (But never fear, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis assured us he was “tormented,” the poor dear, by his decision to smack the most vulnerable. Also he wants us all to understand “It is not a punishment.” That should make everybody, especially all the newly poor, feel better.)

And as Noah Rothman noted in the second half of one of the links above, despite omicron giving, as yet, no sign that panic is called for, panic swiftly ensued around the globe and on the shores of our very own burgeoning banana republic. Or at least it did in the minds of officials and “experts” for whom panic (in Rothman’s words) is a lifestyle brand.

Boston University School of Public Health Associate Professor Dr. Ellie Murray must have been chortling with glee when she recommended “solutions” for this new variant we know almost nothing about: more jabs, more tests, more mask mandates, more business closures, PLUS paid pandemic furloughs, new eviction moratoriums, forcing airlines to absorb the costs of socially distanced flights, requiring (this is my favorite) ALL winter gatherings to take place outdoors (have fun, you Minnesotans and Canadians!), and being ready to close (again) whatever schools may have managed to open.

That sort of thing worked SO well before, you know.

Of course, whoever’s actually running the Biden administration responded instantly with bans on travel from various African nations. (NOTE to readers: Bans on travel from various nations are racist only when issued by Republican presidents.)

Japan slammed its borders shut entirely (as it is historically wont to do).

And all around the world True Believing governments behaved like True Believing governments. They panicked and hoped we’d all panic right along with them. And they did the same-old same-old, then more of the same.

https://www.clairewolfe.com/blog/2021/11/30/from-alpha-to-omicron-theres-nothing-new-under-shining-delusions-of-authoritarians/





This note originated as a blog post. For more blog postings from me, see
DISSECTING LEFTISM,
TONGUE-TIED,
EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL,
GREENIE WATCH,
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, and
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. I update those frequently.



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