We Were Wrong: So Sorry that We Ruined Your Life:
The response of governments at all levels to the C19 pandemic,
... has not been modern and scientific. It has been medieval and mystical. The theory behind the policy has been nothing but a panicked cry of run and hide before the noxious gas gets you. Lacking reliable data – which is the fault of the CDC and FDA – we replaced knowledge with power.Read the whole thing.
In the end, this fiasco is an epistemic crisis. As Ed Yong has written in a beautifully detailed article for The Atlantic, “The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure.” Even the wide acceptance of social distancing as a norm, however much it helps curb the spread, presumes this absence of knowledge. Stay away from everyone as much as possible: a slogan that reveals how little we know.
And yet lacking that knowledge, the politicians, cheered on by the media, acted in ways that have fundamentally wrecked life as we knew it, all in the course of a couple of weeks.
The massive knowledge gap was filled by a cascade of predictive models made possible by modern statistical packages readily available by subscription to any member of the clerisy. If this, and this, and this, and if this and this and this, then ENTER. Out pops what appears to be a precise presentation of our future under the following conditions, along with an overlay of embedded cause-and-effect assumptions about certain policies followed or not followed. Day after day we were bombarded with such predictions, and we paid close attention because we had little in the way of actual on-the-ground facts that have been available to us in previous disease panics.
It then became the perfect storm. Risk-averse politicians deciding to do something, anything, to avoid blame. Bureaucrats doing what they do best, which is telling people no, you cannot innovate, you cannot produce, you cannot distribute. Local tyrants stopping price gouging and therefore preventing the price system from working. A howling media famished for eyeballs, ears, and clicks. A public panicked about disease and death. An egregious dividing of people into essential and nonessential. Policy snares, tangles, missed opportunities all around.
The cacophony of information chaos has been palpable, unbearable.
How "unbearable" has it become? Rights-crushing unbearable, that's what. Exhibit A: The Greensboro Gestapo in that North Carolina city:
On Sunday, we reported that four men were arrested outside a Greensboro, N.C., abortion clinic, where they were conducting a prayer walk. Despite the fact that that a pro-life group, Love Life, had canceled its group meeting and everyone was following the rules for social distancing, the Greensboro Police Department arrested them and charged them with violating Guilford County's stay-at-home order.Video here.
Apparently not happy with violating the First Amendment rights of four prayer warriors, the Greensboro Police Department arrested seven more people on Monday after they were caught praying in public in front of a facility that makes its money by slaughtering innocent children.
Steve Noble, an area radio host who recorded the arrests, wrote on his Facebook page that those arrested were following the county's rules by limiting their gathering, which was held on private property with the permission of the owner, to fewer than ten people. "They were exercising their First Amendment rights [to] assemble and to exercise their religious beliefs," said Noble. "They believe they are allowed to be there under the exemption clauses of the local county order" regarding the Chinese coronavirus rules. ...
In multiple videos, the men can be seen abiding by the 6-foot social distancing recommendations. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that walking alone is permissible under the guidelines, police swooped in to arrest the men, ordering ten cars to the area to deal with the peaceful prayer warriors who were there not only to pray but to counsel men and women who were contemplating having their babies killed at "A Woman's Choice" clinic.
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