COVID and the restriction of human freedom
It goes without saying that the government response to COVID restricted human freedom in the name of protection, and that there wasn’t nearly enough pushback although there certainly was some. And I’m not just talking about the US; I’m talking about the entire Western world and some of the rest of the world.
Here’s a piece about that. For me, it sparks a memory from nearly ten years ago, a series of posts I wrote on Sarah Conly.
Remember Conly, professor and author of a book entitled Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism? Just do a search on this blog for her name and you’ll get a host of links; she made a deep impression on me. Conly aims to justify an interventionist and paternalistic government based on “social science research” findings. Although the lockdowns were supposedly based on epidemiology, they were fueled by a very similar argument about the needs of the group over those of individual liberty.
Here’s a quote from the first post I ever wrote about Conly, almost exactly ten years ago, when her book came out:
They are interested in the collective—the hive, not the individual. And invariably, of course, they end up hurting the hive as well as the individual, in their attempts at “helping” us all.
I’ve not read the book, of course. But it does not sound as though Conly has any sense of the value of an intangible such as autonomy, although she purports to deal with that issue…
Does Conly really think that because (in her words), “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” we should surrender our liberty to a benevolent government that will always act in our best interests? Does she know anything whatsoever about government and power? As is so often the case, I’m not sure whether Conly is a fool or a knave, or both. I vote for both.
So please save the lectures, Professor Conly, and get your oh-so-helping hands out of my life. I’m not your little social science experiment. I have a more polite message for Conly as well: in the end, there are intangibles that liberty and autonomy afford us. Those things cannot be measured or quantified, but they are pearls of great price.
That anyone would defend the arguments in Conly’s book was a real wakeup call. And so here we are, ten years later.
Old Ben Franklin had the right of it, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”
The foolish liberal sheep, the useful idiots who supported all of the state sponsored criminalizing of those who resisted the coercive imposition of an ‘experimental’ medical intervention, deserve whatever karma comes their way.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C. S. Lewis
I well remember the Conly post and am disturbed to find that it was ten years ago.
I assumed at the time that she was young and subject to the moronic enthusiasms of the young. Wondering what she’s been up to since then, I searched and find that she is not young at all, and is now a professor emerita.
https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/sconly/
Look at her credentials. A good picture of the decay and corruption of our elites.
According to the Bowdoin website, Conly did her undergraduate work at Princeton, the same university that gave us General Mark Milley; was helmed at one point by Woodrow Wilson; and currently shelters the bioethicist Peter Singer, a vegan who argues in favor of voluntary euthanasia and unrestricted abortion (and infanticide in some cases). Conly doubtless sees herself as one of the elite who will wield coercive powers over the rest of us rather than as one subject to the coercive hand of another.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a question as true today as when Juvenal asked it in the early second century.
Don’t eat that cookie! We’re too fat. Drop another dollar in the savings bank. We don’t save enough. Boy, doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun. 🙂
Coercive paternalism is hard at work expanding Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAiD) legislation:
According to a government report published in July 2022, MAiD deaths represented about 3 percent of total Canadian deaths in 2021, up from about 0.3 percent in 2016. By now, a majority of my friends know someone who has died by MAiD, and many others who plan to do so when the time comes. For the most part, the availability of state-assisted suicide has become an accepted part of the Canadian social contract.
But thanks to recent legislative changes, MAiD has expanded in a way that many original supporters didn’t expect—or want. . . . It now turns out that some of the original doomsayers weren’t quite wrong when they warned of the slippery slope that MAiD would lead us to, as even many MAiD advocates are now acknowledging. . . . Canadians were once assured that health practitioners would not bring up the subject of MAiD at all unless their patients did. But that has now changed. . . .
How morally normalized has MAiD become in Canada? Normalized enough that the government has funded an assisted suicide “activity book” for children. Normalized enough that a leading clothing retailer, Simons, produced (then deleted) a gauzy video featuring assisted suicide as a form of self- actualization. . . . MAiD is generating plenty of other collateral damage, too. Some relatives are anguished when they learn that their parents, siblings, or even adult children had requested or received MAiD, and no one ever told them. (Authorities say that privacy laws prevent them from disclosing this information.)
The entire article is well worth reading: https://quillette.com/2023/02/01/death-on-demand-cautionary-tales-from-canada/
The Simons “The Most Beautiful Exit” video can be seen here (you may have to tell YouTube that you wish to see it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCafuU5CCfA&ab_channel=ADdictive
(One commenter noted, “This is the first commercial with all white actors that I’ve seen in a long time.”)
The role of Canadian government workers in encouraging people to consider MAiD would doubtless receive Conly’s approval.
Canada must be observed closely to see which policies will soon be implemented in other Western countries (especially its neighbor).
Somehow, not sure how exactly, Trudeau believes that he has the green light to show the world what the WTF has in store for it. Perhaps (probably?) because although his is a minority government, the Liberal Party’s cynical alliance with the (so-called) “New Democrats” (NDP) is believed to be very stable….
WRT Canada, we have already witnessed the digital/financial/healthcare suspensions of the Truckers’ Demonstration (and those donating money to their cause), the Euthanasia “campaign” (including concomitant organ donation…since why not be practical here, right?), massive—and for all intents and purposes, barely controlled—influx of immigrants, endorsement of hyper-inflationary policies, suppression of fossil-energy production, suppression of farm productivity, China policies, etc.—not to mention the “enlightened” Covid-19 policies—all leading to a general malaise, confusion, anxiety WRT to the future…and all ACCOMPANIED by massive propaganda efforts on the part of the government and its media accomplices.
Etc.
Note that many of these efforts either precede or parallel “Biden”‘s efforts to “transform” the US; and we have also seen similar policies in Europe (e.g., the agricultural diktats in the Netherlands).
It may well have been decided by the WTF that Canada is the West’s “laboratory”….
File under: Canada at the cutting edge!
What part of this is getting a kick out of making people do stupid stuff?
The hubris of people who believe that they are more worthy, more special, more deserving than the rest of us is the biggest driver of human evil.
Power corrupts. Always. There is no way to morally rationalize giving the power of life and death to corrupt humans to inflict pain and suffering on innocent people simply by making the claim of superior wisdom of what is best.
I haven’t seen any discussion of the horrors perpetrated by local health boards during Covid. Groups of unelected doctors (mostly) who refused to let go of their emergency powers to play dictators for well over a year. They should serve as a great case study in hubris and the corruption of power.
Related (unfortunately)…
As with the Bidens’ classified documents “issues”, many things appear to be “coming out” now. A cascade. An avalanche. A tsunami of “things”…ALL of which will be attempted to be covered up, concealed, denied, obstructed, kept out of the spotlight by delayed or extended responses and/or otherwise lied about…
“COVID vaccines: FDA adviser says vaccines could cause auto-immune disease;
“Dr. Paul Offit explains how spike proteins could be causing myocarditis.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/366784
One hopes against hope that the above “could” is extremely uncommon and unlikely…
Always here to lend a helping hand. Right up the old dupa.
Canada, continued.
“The Great Reset”…”Parliamentary-Democracy” style….
(Actually, it really should be called, “The Great End-Around”…)
“Canada’s Signing On To WEF Agile Nations Charter Marks ‘Radical Policy Shift,’ Says Tory MP”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2023/02/01/canadas-signing-on-to-wef-agile-nations-charter-marks-radical-policy-shift-says-tory-mp/
Key grafs:
‘ Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis commented on Jan. 28 on the information she helped surface about Canada’s involvement in a World Economic Forum (WEF) project seeking to streamline federal regulations….
‘ “First of all, how did Canada become a member state and who recognize this as necessary?” Lewis asked….
‘ “I don’t even remember this issue being brought up in Parliament, although this is like a radical change in the way that we conceive policy in this country.” ‘
“Streamline federal regulations”, eh? Now THAT’S a creative way of putting it….
I guess Conly never read Kipling.
“The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack “
@ stan > “Groups of unelected doctors (mostly) who refused to let go of their emergency powers to play dictators for well over a year. They should serve as a great case study in hubris and the corruption of power.”
From Newsweek, FWIW, but the author (7th year med student) checks all the right boxes.
https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630
And so forth.