A sense of proportion

One of the things that has been very evident to me over the last few years is the lack of any real sense of proportion. Issues, like pronouns, have become an important thing for many. Pronouns? Seriously?

There are many other things that seem somewhat blown out of all proportion. I still can’t quite fathom the anger over hairstyles. Mind you, this egregious appropriation is not a modern thing. The Vikings styled their hair into dreadlocks - the racist appropriationalist bastards.

In statistical terms covid mortality was never, even with the most virulent variants, all that much more deadly than a severe flu. Indeed, if you do proper age adjustments then excess mortality without the Goo was not disastrous in many places. If you look at age-standardised deaths, per 100,000, in the UK for the years 2001 - 2020 then the deadly pandemic year can’t even be picked out when you jumble up the years as in the picture below - it ranks 9th on the list.

The answer here is E, and the data is taken directly, without any modification, from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (sorry, I didn’t keep the link to the ONS spreadsheet which listed these age-standardised deaths per 100,000).

None of this is saying that we should have ignored covid. It could be very severe, even fatal, for a small percentage of people (overall). Even in one of the most vulnerable categories, the over 80’s, according to the ONS data we were looking at an IFR of around 5% which is not good, but also not completely horrific either.

If you were fortunate enough to be in the under 30 age bracket the data was indicating that about 1 person died for every 25,000 covid infections (about 0.004%) and this is an overestimate.

These things could be inferred very early on in the ‘pandemic’ - from the data emerging from Italy and the data from the Diamond Princess. My own estimate at the time was that the IFR was going to pan out to be around 0.3% overall (that’s about 3 deaths for every 1,000 infections) and, as we now know, this is an overestimate also.

The thing that really started me to question everything was the obvious over-reaction. It was grotesquely out of proportion to the actual threat posed. I’d already seen that the first UK lockdown came too late to alter the dynamics of the virus, because those dynamics had already started to significantly change before lockdown could have had any effect. But as things wore on, and the interventions became more and more restrictive and baked-in, and the propaganda became more and more oppressive, I began to wonder what the hell was going on.

Very quickly, and heavily promoted by the government propaganda machinery, covid became the only issue of concern. Everything, our whole way of life, was upended to combat this one disease - a disease which as of October 29th 2021 had claimed the lives of about 11,500 out of about 45 million people under the age of 60 in England & Wales. That’s about 0.026% of this age group. And it’s actually fewer than that because this figure comes from those deaths with covid mentioned somewhere on the death certificate.

It didn’t matter that we were trashing our economy racking up debt of over £400 billion - a debt that would take generations to pay off. It didn’t matter that we drove small businesses to the wall, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people. It didn’t matter that we destroyed the education of our kids, or laid waste to their mental health. It didn’t matter that diagnoses and treatments were delayed, consigning thousands to unnecessary suffering and death. It didn’t matter that rights we all thought were sacrosanct turned out merely to be privileges that could be removed at will by our government.

All of this was ‘acceptable’ in order to save us from covid.

None of it was at all proportional.

It got worse. The Goo arrived and things rapidly took a joyride over Cretin Canyon. Science, sitting quietly at the bottom of the canyon, kept getting squashed by all the cars. It was like some horrible mania had taken over that can coarsely be represented as “fuck the economy, fuck businesses, fuck your jobs, fuck the kids, fuck the cancer sufferers, fuck everything - you gotta get stabbed to save us all from covid”

These people saw themselves as saving society, when in fact they were doing quite the opposite.

I think there’s more going on than just a completely batshit bonkers response to a virus. I’m not sure what that is, but I’ve been warning people for quite a while that one of the things under threat is our free speech, our ability to express our views and to listen to the views of others. This is not a minor thing. There’s a reason why the founding fathers in the US put this at the top of their list. It really is central to everything. Free speech protects not only your right to air your views, it also protects your right to listen to the views of others.

The Canadian Truckers have exposed the real cancer at the heart of our so-called democracies. Look at the massively disproportionate response of Trudeau. They are threatening to freeze the bank accounts of those who supported the protestors. Some have already been frozen. Of course they’re not going to do this to everyone - that would be counter-productive - all they need is the awareness of few high-profile and well-publicized cases. The threat is sufficient to scare enough people. Government censorship doesn’t need to be complete - you just need enough people to do it to themselves out of fear; fear for their livelihoods and families.

The media is hugely complicit in all of this. You only need compare media responses to the BLM protests, described as ‘mostly peaceful’, and the Trucker’s protest which has been categorized as white supremacist, racist, violent, illegal, and equated with terrorism. This is no accident. It is deliberate manipulation and it’s clearly nothing to do with any notion of an independent media.

This has gone so far beyond the attempt to ‘contain’ a virus, or public health - at least in Canazida. Freezing bank accounts for supporting an overwhelmingly peaceful protest - where the only casualties have been as a result of police action. Think about that. Think about what that means and what power it represents. The Trucker’s have forced Trudeau’s hand, but it’s coming everywhere - you only need to manipulate things so that certain views are seen as “unacceptable” and you have the pretext for clamping down on the people who express those views.

You might think that’s OK when it comes to actual white supremacist nutjobs, and if they espouse violence I, too, would probably want that to be prohibited. But there are moves to categorize dissent from official covid messaging as akin to domestic terrorism (the DHS in the US has explicitly done this, and the UK government is introducing a bill that would implicitly do this).

Once you can get that linkage established then it’s a short step to freezing bank accounts - and that’s something that should worry us all. We often hear things like “oh, these measures are necessary for the really nasty people, they wouldn’t do this to ordinary people”, but those who supported the Truckers are ordinary people. And anyway should we really be OK with governments having this much power? It’s not about whether any particular government will be gracious enough not to use those powers - it’s about whether a government should have those powers at all.

Remember that “two, or three, weeks to flatten the curve” might have seemed proportionate and reasonable at the time. It didn’t end there though, did it? Can we be sure that all these bright and shiny new powers governments are taking upon themselves in response to covid are going to end when covid is over?

I doubt it - the last two years has shown me that my government is anything but proportionate and reasonable in the application of power.

---