I'm short on time as always, so just imagine I said something clever and wrote beautifully compelling and logical segues between each point [I might edit this later when I have time].
First some tweets and news:
@ScottAdamsSays
— Adam (@AdamDopamine) September 27, 2021
Having successfully avoided a catastrophic Collapse of the healthcare system due to Covid. Logically, we’re pivoting to crash the system with Covid mandates.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory https://t.co/vIDjrtzgbC
Here's the story:
As New York prepares to enforce its COVID-19 vaccination deadline on Monday, Governor Kathy Hochul said a state emergency declaration and other options, including calling in health care workers from the National Guard, are on the table to address any potential hospital staffing shortages.
"I am monitoring the staffing situation closely and we have a plan to increase our health care workforce and help alleviate the burdens on our hospitals and other health care facilities," Hochul said in a statement.
Then read this from Michael Tracey, about a somewhat extreme example which may portend where things are headed, or at least where many want them to go:
The thing of broader societal consequence is that Connecticut College now serves as a miniature test case for what happens when a framework of “permanent crisis” is allowed to persist, long past the point of there being any meaningful “crisis” at hand.
Many commemorations of the 9/11 anniversary this year rightly noted the extreme overreaction the attacks engendered: especially the string of failed military interventions and the erection of a massive surveillance state. All of this was eagerly egged on by a suite of enterprising financial interests which profited handsomely from the frenzied climate of that time. The resulting erosion of civil liberties never hurt their bottom lines; after all, they’re the ones producing technologies to erode them with maximum efficiency.
Do we really suppose that the vested interests which have likewise found such a lucrative market opening with COVID — notably the “endless testing” industry, including the elaborate “surveillance testing” regime that Connecticut College students must submit to — are just going to wind down their operations voluntarily? “Time to call it a day, folks?” Or is the bureaucratic/financial momentum of these initiatives going to assure that they effectively become permanent fixtures of daily life? (I’ve been doing some reporting on the “testing industrial complex,” which is undergoing a post-9/11 style renaissance as we speak, so be on the lookout for that soon. Subscribe, etc.)
Lest anyone find it peculiar that I am devoting so much attention to the goings-on at a fairly obscure liberal arts college in Connecticut, after the Friday article’s publication, I received the following message:I’m an administrator at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts and part of their COVID response team. I fear our college would do the same as Connecticut College if our cases increase. We’re already testing students twice per week despite a 95%+ vaccination rate. I’m one of a handful of voices in our group trying to be a voice of reason but am outnumbered. I’m going to share your Substack column with our COVID team in the hopes it will make at least some members come around to the side of reason. It breaks my heart to see college students, who should be having one of the best experiences of their lives, treated like prisoners.
One thing that has me very concerned about the Connecticut College situation is that college administrators are generally obsessed with following the example that other colleges set. There is a profound fear of being seen as an outlier. Our COVID response team has already received an email from the leader of the team asking if we would be ready to implement the Connecticut College plan if our COVID cases continue to rise.
You may have been witness to or participated in the mind-numbing twitter debates about whether to lockdown or not to lockdown, what is excessive and what is merely prudent, etc. Honestly, I go back and forth, but I find myself more often favoring individual freedom (even though I have the cutest little nephew who is immunocompromised, and several high-risk relatives). Those who are at-risk and/or afraid can and should take extra precautions. It's the same with any other behavior, like driving. We take risks, some of them quite deadly, every single day.
We have stopped thinking about a lot of those risks, and left the crass, but necessary cost-benefit analyses of what a human life is worth to somebody else. Somebody we probably don't know, who we didn't vote for, and who is rarely scrutinized for their valuation of a human life. And we mostly sleep comfortably with that fact we choose not to think about.
This reminded me of a clip of Milton Friedman, arguing with a college student:
We are in the midst of a public mass cost-benefit analyses of covid-19 policies. Weighing the risks versus freedom. This is a very messy and mostly decentralized process, with a lot of misinformation, changing guidelines, a mutating virus, a lot of public fear and exasperation--resulting in this mess we find ourselves in.
Then I started thinking about politics. What group is the most politically powerful? Conspiracy theories aside, that would undoubtedly be the elderly. They are the wealthiest, the most likely to vote, and likely the most at-risk group from this virus. Follow the money, follow the votes, follow the politician's survival instincts... you get the idea.
Whether explicitly or not, I posit that a major (if not the chief) contributing factor to prolonged and excessive policy reactions to covid, be it lockdowns, mask/vaccine mandates, school closures, distancing requirements, indoor activity restrictions, is that the elderly do not want to take any chances.
And there's little we can do about it, short of forming an unrealistically new, larger, politician-donating voting bloc and powerful lobby groups of younger people opposed to excessive covid policies. Or start a revolution.
Since both parties have large swaths of elderly constituents, don't expect either of them to step up. We'll get lip-service and a few politicians serving that niche, but I am highly doubtful things will change until the elderly feel much safer and the vast majority of voters are fed up with these policies. And there's always the risk we normalize and ingrain them: forever-pandemic society. Time will tell.
