Mask of the beast (aka tinfoil hat time Part II)

True, people who demand that others don't wear a mask are just as bad as the people who demand others do wear a mask. If people want to make their own risk assessments and take whatever precautions they deem appropriate they should be free to do so. All I ask is that I get the same freedom.

 

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

 

Where is John Connor when we need him?

 

The overall impact is huge but it's often hard to tell how much of it was caused by the virus and how much of it was caused by governments of varying stripes seeking to impose control. The largely arbitrary nature of many regulations paired with the appallingly short notice often provided and total lack of help offered to businesses to comply with them makes the concept of starting a new business, especially one that requires people to be located in a specific place, to be even more worrying than before. It's one thing to consider whether there's an adequate market for a product, whether it can be brought to market, whether competitors may appear and how to compete etc. It's another thing entirely to consider whether the government might just order you to close with less than a day's notice, leaving you stuck with ongoing costs but no way of covering them.

It has also caused unimaginable damage to what trust remained in politicians. When "two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into a month, then two months, then six months and extended longer and longer with no indication as to when or even whether restrictions would be lifted, when individual state governors insisted they were led by science and data but refused to offer any objective metrics that would determine when restrictions might be lifted, and when we were told "the science is clear" and yet the science seemed to say different things in different places, it became ever-harder to trust what officials were saying. And that was even before incidents like Fuhrer Wolf banning large gatherings and then marching in a BLM protest that violated his own order because apparently it was an important cause. Because, you know, millions of people who want to do crazy things like feeding their families and paying their bills isn't an important cause.

It will be interesting to see what happens to retail. The small local businesses that can provide service way above and beyond the faceless chain stores have been hammered by closure orders while the faceless mega-corporations have thrived. It may be convenient to order something with a click of the mouse and have it delivered to the door within two days but endlessly pumping money into machines like Amazon simply sucks money out of local communities, where local businesses are more likely to employ local people and keep at least some sense of local community.

I suppose one good thing to come out of the pandemic is the realisation that the vast majority of corporate meetings are little more than a waste of time, and a lot of work can be done from home just as easily as from the office. It will be interesting to see if the long term result is more flexibility where work is concerned, at least in businesses where being in the office at a specific time is less important. Retail is trickier because it obviously doesn't work to have sales assistants turning up whenever it suits them whereas someone like a programmer might be able to work 9pm-5am, even if only some of the time, just as easily as 9am-5pm without meaningfully affecting anyone else.

One desperately sad thing about the pandemic, is that it seems to have created more fault-lines in society giving people another reason to hate anyone who isn't "on their side".

 

The de-humanization of society reverts to tribalism in crisis. The church hasn't figured out that community aka koinonia is the remedy. Instead, the church has become just as tribal as the rest of the natives.

 

But you just can't have community with people who don't think the exact same way you do. Because science.

 

Where is John Carter when you need him?

 

Self-immolation coming soon...

 

To borrow from a meme I recently saw, It's remarkable to think of a vaccine so beneficial to us we have to be threatened with societal exclusion to take it, to protect us from a disease so deadly most people don't even know they have it.

 

Just saw a report that from blood donation records, 83% have COVID antibodies.

 

That can't possibly be true. Scientists saying that sort of thing were censored back in the early days. Surely Big Tech wasn't lying to us...... right?

 

Yeah, that post-millenialist utopia doesn't seem to ever work out.

Something about some law or thermo something that says a 13 year old's room will not naturally get cleaner, or something like that.

 

There's the idea floating around out there that God did fill the cosmos with life. Planets that fall are effectively quarantined while the rest aren't. But, why would advanced alien life bother with us either way?

But yeah, we're no better than we were thousands of years ago, we just have nicer newer things to surround ourselves with to deceive ourselves into some notion of moral superiority.

 

I sometimes think that was the entire point of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Apes just stronger with artificially created bones.

 

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” -- Douglas Adams

(Referring to Earth in the past tense only relates to the time after the Vogon spaceship destroyed it, for those not familiar)