The government’s “pandemic” shut-downs are causing a Great Extinction– for businesses.
The government’s “pandemic” shut-downs are causing a Great Extinction– for businesses.
It’s like an asteroid strike, a supervolcano caldera explosion, or a new ice age. But political rather than physical.
Many businesses won’t survi…
The conventional wisdom of the last hundred years or so: The US government can and should decide what we may eat, drink, smoke, inject, or otherwise ingest. It can and should kidnap and cage us if we disobey, and if its restrictions kill us with adulterated or unduly strong black market products, it’s our own fault for not doing as we’re told.
Episode 414 has Skyler giving his commentary on a new website he discovered called “The Price of Panic”. From their introduction: “The negative effects of lockdown are too often dismissed as small sacrifices, necessary to keep a highly deadly disease from spreading. These sacrifices are, in fact, neither necessary nor small, and the disease is only a threat to a minority of the population that can be protected without lockdowns. Sometimes, when major harms become hard to ignore, they are lamented as further damage caused by Covid, even though it is our panic-driven measures that are to blame. This is an effort to bring focus to the magnitude of suffering taking place around us because of lockdowns.”
Imagine you’re a professor somewhere. You here rumors of the creation of a new Office of Student Property Security. “Whatever,” you think. Yet before long, you’re summoned to a brand-new mandatory training session run by certified officers of Student Property Security. At this session (in-person back in the old days; now Zoom of course), they give you a tortoise-paced 90-minute Powerpoint presentation on the student property crisis and the appropriate faculty response. And the whole spiel can be readily summarized in a single commandment: “Don’t pickpocket your students.” To me, such a training session would be insulting, pointless, and unhinged.
Episode 407 has Skyler giving his commentary on the following entries to r/shitstatistssay: @TikTokInvestors shares, “So capitalism is an economic system based on infinite ‘growth’ and infinite consumption…”; buttstuff_magoo writes, “In fact, not paying taxes is as communist as it gets. It’s free riding and profiting off of the contributions of others while contributing nothing yourself.”; Stunning_Capital writes, “I don’t see anything un-libertarian about repealing Section 230. These companies are protected from defamation suits on the grounds that they merely provide a public square. Well if they don’t want to provide a public square, that’s fine, but then they should be held liable for defamation just like the rest of us.”; and @omidG9 tweets, “Well one reason congress doesn’t work is libertarians don’t know how to run a government so they just blame the institution instead of themselves”.
When COVID-19 hit, I quarantined in Eastern Massachusetts. Biking around the woods, I noticed something strange. There are two campgrounds near my house. One is full. Lots of people pitch tents or park trailers at a place called Maurice’s. A short bike ride away is a much bigger campground that’s almost entirely empty.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why or how social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have any obligation to ensure that government elections remain “pure” or unadulterated.
The fact that many people refuse to do what works is a flimsy reason to humor them. And it is a terrible reason to endorse clear-cut errors like, “They just can’t do it.”
California burns due to its unwillingness to thin out forests.
The people who refuse to control themselves and the people who refuse to defend themselves from those individuals who refuse to control themselves are a real problem.