These are both recent photos — and they pretty well encapsulate everything significant about the Covid-19 disparities and vicissitudes and inanities:
This first one is Malmo, Sweden — one of the few countries which, as you know, did not succumb to mass hysteria, nor conform nor cave to the intense consensus pressure which is still being applied.
These Swedish children are children allowed to be children, even in the face of worldwide insanity:
This, upon the other hand, is panic-driven, postmodernistic, progressive absurdity:
The children playing together in Sweden have not been put at abnormal risk, nor are their parents acting irresponsibly, nor are the children in any sort of danger — and, in fact, the seasonal flu, about which no one is talking or even thinking (though it’s still out there), is far riskier to children.
How people react to those two photos tells you in an instant a great deal about the person’s entire philosophy.
Speaking of consensus — specifically the stupidity of making consensus your epistemic standard:
If you’ve ever wondered how something like NAZI Germany could have happened — when after the Reichstag fire, an executive order was decreed into law (the fire, incidentally, almost certainly started by Herman Goering and his men, because “emergencies,” as Frederich Hayek so well noted, even fabricated emergencies, “have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty [may be] eroded”), President Hindenburg and Chancellor Adolph Hitler declared a temporary state of emergency amid the societal panic created by the fire, suspending civil liberties thereby, and doing so rapidly and on a shocking and widespread scale, and this, in turn, gave rise to President Hindenburg signing, in March of 1933, the Enabling Act, which legally granted arbitrary powers to the state, Chancellor Hitler then, one year later, right after President Hindenburg died, declaring himself Führer und Reichskanzler, or Supreme Leader and Chancellor, which superseded both the Presidency and Chancellorship — this that you and I are witnessing right now across the entire USA and much of the world is precisely how such things like NAZI Germany happen. And please don’t be duped, no matter what you think of these particular lockdown measures today, don’t be duped into thinking that people today and societies today are too enlightened, having learned from the past, or too sophisticated or too hip, too politically correct or savvy:
It can happen again.
I promise you it can.
People are as susceptible now — and almost certainly more so because of social media and the groupthink it fosters — to the cultic and conformist mentality as ever before. And the cost of conformity is colossal.
This is why if you have even a vestige of the independent-thinker within you, you must stand up against this unprecedented power-grab, and the propaganda campaign that largely fueled it. Even if you’re perfectly okay with the state now having this kind of power over this particular thing, I beg you to realize there is no longer any check on it: it was decreed by executive order, and that power is automatically unchecked, and horribly dangerous, therefore.
Do not worship at the shine of governmental power. Do not. Government is force. It is nothing more and it is nothing less.
No matter what your political leanings, I beseech you to recognize the inherent danger of unchecked power — any and all unchecked power.
This is not a partisan issue, at root.
Think of that unchecked power turning, for no reason or just cause, against something (or someone) you hold dear — because I promise you that it is only a matter of time before this unleashed power-source spreads into other areas.
Power and bureaucracy once established are impossible to retrogress away from.
Freedom once gone is gone forever.
Freedom is a birthright: it is not a permission.
This pandemic does not in any way warrant the abrogation of individual rights.
What’s been done is a wild and arrantly unjust seizure of power. It is wrong.
In addition to which, it is totally unnecessary. It has not helped the pandemic but hurt — and in the process it’s also completely exposed, in as stark a terms as you could ever conceive, the bumbling ineptitude inherent in government and its bureaus. Have you noticed how we stopped hearing about ventilators? Do you know why? (There is a very specific reason.) One day they were the panacea, the next day they were completely out of the discussion. The “experts” and their “consensus,” despite their lack of knowledge and the epistemic crisis (which crisis and which lack of knowledge will never stop the “experts” nor their bureaus), put 36 million Americans out of work in a ponderous act of bumbling. Ask yourself: how did this temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into three months (and counting) of near-universal house arrest? How did it end up causing furloughs at 256 hospitals, a near total cessation of international travel, 40 percent job loss among people earning less than $40 thousand per year and staggering every economic sector — to say nothing of the mass confiscation of private property with the state-mandated closures of millions of businesses, all enacted overnight on the basis of incomplete knowledge?
How?
Think for yourself.
I implore you: think for yourself.