A recommended listen:
Strange, crazy and dumb: two insane years.
I think: one thing that we all need to think about is having a really sensible understanding of why basically every country, every government, different cultures, different political systems, y’know communist China, democratic UK, whatever… they all just lost their mind. For, like, two years everybody went insane.
And what I found was like: when we even suggested, because we put out four policy papers saying – well, maybe we just need to roll this back a bit – but we saw polling where I think at one point Jacinda Ardern had 87 per cent support for her actions on Covid, so when we would suggest something like ‘Maybe instead of MIQ you should be able to isolate at an Air B’n’B people were like [whispering] ‘Oh my God, you want people to die?’ And I remember getting interviewed by Jack Tame saying [aggressively] ‘How many deaths David! How many people do you want to die?’ and I’m like ‘[profanity] I don’t want anyone to die! I’m just saying there’s trade-offs here and I’m not sure that we can afford to be sealed off from the world forever, and there’s other things: like, kids need to go back to school. You can say that now and it seems rational but it’s easy to forget how crazy the environment was, and I think we all need to ask ourselves how that happened. […]
But y’know there’s also a lot of people who are looking at really crazy theories like: ‘It all happened because the secret people who secretly run the world made it happen,’ and that’s just insane because, believe me, I know Jacinda – she couldn’t; she couldn’t keep up with a global conspiracy, even if she was in one she’d screw it up [laughs]. Uhm, so don’t worry about that one folks: she’s not going to do a conspiracy: she’s too dumb. Sadly, she can’t organise anything… uhm, but I think that sensible people need to ask why the world collectively lost its mind for two years, and made decisions, and violations of rights and sacrifices that we’d never [emphasised] make to save as many lives as we save normally.
Well said, and food for thought. Is she really that hopeless, do you think?