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2020-

2020-06-07 c
Progressive Hypocrisy on Display

What Happened to the Public Health Emergency?

People who were insisting that public gatherings, even for funerals, were grave, completely unacceptable threats to public health that must be harshly suppressed are supporting public protests over racism.

Remember when all the politicians and talking heads were telling us we had to listen to the allegedly unanimous opinion of public health experts that nothing, literally NOTHING, was more important that social distancing to prevent the spread of coronavirus? And that anyone who raised objections to the scope or persistence of lockdowns was a misanthropic, anti-science troglodyte. That was yesterday. Today, protesting against racism is more important.

I agree that it's important (regardless of whether the particular incident of excessive use of force by police in question was a product of racism or just race-neutral police brutality). I also think that putting 30% of the public out of work is important, indeed more important, especially given that racism is a persistent issue that will create plenty of protest opportunities, whereas destroying millions of people's livelihoods was immediate with the lockdown.

Some of my social media friends have been insisting for some time that many of the hardcore lockdown/social distancing advocates were less concerned about public health and more about imposing their own value system against what they considered an unenlightened public, and some subset of those people actually welcomed the lockdown because they prefer people to live on the government dole that to allow "capitalist exploitation." I'm not, to say the least, a big fan of the political and public health establishment, but I nevertheless thought this was too cynical, and I did (and still do) think that many aspects of the lockdown were justified by public health needs. (read more)

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