Does the Chinese Virus rot the brain? Surely nothing else can explain the collective outbreak of mass lunacy that’s struck a great deal of the Western world – including the entirety of its media-political elite.
They’ve all gone completely insane. Utter, stark-raving, barking mad. Collectively lost their ever-lovin’ minds.
If you thought Perth’s bizarre five-day lockdown over a single person, who wasn’t sick and infected no one else, was strange, then Victoria’s statewide third lockdown of 6.6 million people is so freakish it raises a worrying possibility.
The west, and Australia and New Zealand in particular, are suffering mass psychogenic illness, where only sociology, psychology and the perverse incentives of large welfare states, can explain the ongoing obsession with COVID-19 and our medieval responses to it after almost a year of improved treatments and new information.
When hordes of people apparently decided that the only thing that was going to get them through the End of the World as We Know It was a truckload of toilet paper, it seemed bonkers enough. But the lunacy of packing a thousand bog rolls into a minivan for a family of four pales in comparison with the gibbering derangement that’s seized the governing class.
Australia and New Zealand have incurred costs equivalent to a world war — and more than any other nation has — fighting a pandemic that has killed not even 1000 people, with a median age in the mid-80s, between them. And this is widely seen as brilliant.
Don’t applaud, you’ll only encourage the bastards.
Having insisted early last year that lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve”, rolling capital city “snap” lockdowns of millions of people have become the norm, at extraordinary economic, psychological and social cost, without a single person in ICU across either country.
The Australian
If you don’t think that the political class and the fools who blindly follow them have gone completely demented, consider the following: internees of a quarantine in Melbourne evacuated with bin liners wrapped over their heads. British politicians proudly announcing that “adults will be allowed to sit down outdoors for a coffee or on a park bench with one friend, or with members of their own family”. Tennis stars playing an empty stadium to the sound of canned applause. Valentine’s Day diners fleeing Auckland restaurants mid-meal as their phones, lighting up with a Civil Defence warning (supposed to be used to warn of earthquakes), trumpeted the latest lockdown announcement.
Does any of this seem the least bit sane?
Instead of trying to tamp it down, governments and the media are actively abetting this descent into mass psychosis. The reliably-idiotic The Economist magazine recently claimed that 150 million people will die from the Wuhan plague, despite the fact that the global death toll is in fact about 2 million – roughly on par with the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu. The sort of “strong government action” demanded by The Economist has exacerbated, not restrained the hysteria.
Not only have governments and their pet “scientists” regularly hyped up the virus with baseless doomsday hysteria, but their “remedies” have only made things worse. A new research paper, COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, argues that mass media who profit from panic and powerful welfare states have incentivised hysteria and prescribed the worst imaginable actions. “Governments have prohibited activities that reduce fear and anxiety, such as sports and socialising, thereby contributing to anxiety and psychological strain.”
But why would they do that?
I mean, I know that governments are using the pandemic to grant themselves almost unlimited “emergency powers” and that the restrictions on bricks’n’mortar businesses have meant that the world’s richest corporations have made record profits.
Oh.
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