Tagged: lockdown

Two Random Acts of Civilizational Implosion

George Clooney, a thoroughly inconsequential member of an ultimately inconsequential profession who because he is famous for being famous believes, like so many of his ilk, that the world ought to care what he thinks about important political issues, has praised Australia’s Covid-19 response, and declared, on the basis of his no doubt expert-analyzed calculations, that 900,000 lives would have been saved had...

A Fluid Situation

Not every person who has been granted power over others necessarily wished to assume that power. But no person, once granted power, ever wishes to relinquish it. New excuses are always found to rationalize prolonging the new status quo of empowerment, or to expand it. To let go of one’s will to control may be of the essence of wisdom, but practical efficacy...

Van the Man Redux: It Hurts Him Too

A couple of months ago, I wrote here about two of the most unlikely topics for this website: A contemporary pop musician and a contemporary display of genuine courage. The first topic is unlikely because I have little interest in, and even less respect for, most popular artists of the day; the second is unlikely because genuine courage, of the sort that involves...

Two Thoughts on the Police (and One Glimmer of Life)

In the current American climate, any white police officer knows perfectly well that if he harms a black person in any context other than a genuine life-or-death shootout, or is even perceived to have done so, his normal life, his family’s safety, probably his career, and certainly his future privacy and sense of self-determination, are over. In such a climate, and with such...

When Freedom is “Above My Pay Grade”

In my recent “Reflections On Independence,” I noted that modern man, as a mechanism of soft despotism, has gradually been convinced, or rather conveniently allowed himself to be convinced, to judge important decisions, particularly those regarding the wellbeing of society as a whole — the sort of decisions that once formed the very core of the republican idea of self-government — as being...

Social Distancing

Regular readers may have noticed that I am writing very little these days concerning The Pandemic That Ate a Planet. Living in Korea, which was the first epicenter of the outbreak outside of Wuhan, China, back in February 2020, I hit the ground running on this coronavirus debacle and its political exploitations right at the outset, and then maintained a consistent stream of...

A Climate Change to Die For

A pandemic — even a second-level one by historical standards — is a totalitarian’s dream come true. Suddenly, progressives have complete, hysteria-induced access to all the moral weaponry they have tried to invoke for years in the name of “global climate change” with only partial success. The whole thrust of the climate change movement, since its beginnings fifty years ago, has been to...

Conservative Communist Canada

Doug Ford, the “conservative” premier of Canada’s most populous province, my native Ontario, has once again instituted a province-wide “stay-at-home order,” promising that those found in violation of his government’s strict but nebulous new rules on private behavior (i.e., living) and business activity (i.e., supporting oneself) — those whom Ford labels “bad actors” — will be punished. Will this ever end? I know...

Discussion Questions for Your New Year’s Zoom Party

Do you believe that the state has the authority — legal or moral — to shut down any or every sector of society as it sees fit, when it sees fit, for any reason that the state has decided warrants suspending all property rights, all private economic activity, and all freedom of movement and association indefinitely? If so, explain? (Note: “This pandemic is...

Pandemic Lexicon

COVID-related: Euphemism for “government-imposed,” designed to obscure the real effects of excessive state power by reframing these effects as symptoms of a virus that has in fact caused almost no such effects, e.g., “COVID-related unemployment,” “COVID-related poverty,” “COVID-related closures,” “COVID-related suicides,” etc.

Expert: (1) A person whose beliefs about a given subject have been elevated to the status of absolute truth by…