By An Old Friend
Friday, March 19, 2021
Mark Steyn on the Crushing Stupidity of "Public-Health" Officialdom and on the Related New, Permanent Abnormal
Fri, Mar 19, 2021 9:08 p.m.
N.S.: Steyn has apparently (somewhat) recovered from his ordeal under his North Korean captors, though he still refuses to mention The Big Steal.
Mark Steyn on the Crushing Stupidity of "Public-Health" Officialdom and on the Related New, Permanent Abnormal
AOF: Below are excerpts from the transcripts of two Mark Steyn shows. To access the shows' audios and even the transcripts, you probably have to be a member of his club, but I've included links in case not. The first is an exchange between his colleague Andrew Lawton and Mark from the March 2 show; below that is follow-up from the March 5 show.
March 2 excerpt:
https://www.steynonline.com/11127/the-mark-steyn-show-waving-and-drowning
Andrew: Thanks, Mark. Across the Great White North, various public health commissars have decided that things like church services or shopping malls or sporting events are all just a little bit too risky in the era of COVID, but the real scourge according to the commissars in the region of Peel, named after former British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, comes from children, yes even in their own homes, children are at the risk of unleashing a deadly plague if they're so much as allowed to walk the halls of the place they call home.
A flyer sent out to families in the Peel region, which is just outside of Toronto in Ontario, has said that if a child is dismissed from school or daycare without symptoms, because someone else in the classroom may have had symptoms of the COVID, they should self-isolate and this means, according to the flyer, they should "stay in a separate bedroom, eat in a separate room apart from others, use a separate bathroom if possible, and if the child must leave their room, they should do so wearing a mask and staying two meters apart from others." Any other children who live in the household, well they're allowed to roam the house and go get a snack from the kitchen if they'd like but they're not to leave the house, and certainly not to play with any others.
Now this is not for teenagers, who might revel in the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks holed up in their bedroom, getting room service and having a private ensuite [sic] bathroom, this is for children as young as 3 or 4 years old who have already been deprived through much of their lives the ability to socialize and engage with their friends, but are now being told if someone else in one of their classes or daycare groups so much as has the sniffles and they have to go home because the class has been shut down, they are not even allowed to spend time with their parents and with their siblings under their own roof.
And this is what passes for public health guidance in the region of Peel, and this is I stress even if a child has no symptoms whatsoever. We know from looking at the region of Peel, there are just a handful of cases that have actually permeated through schools, and when those have happened there hasn't really been transmission at the school, so the idea of scapegoating children as young as 3-years-old for a pandemic that is taking place pretty much anywhere but in schools, it's not just absurd but downright evil.
Peel region resident Judy Martin wrote on Twitter that her 10 year old granddaughter was sent home from school because someone else in the class had tested positive for COVID-19 and Public Health had instructed her mother to keep her in a room with no contact with the rest of the family for 14 days, lest they get a $5,000 fine for non compliance. As infectious disease specialist Martha Fulford told the Toronto Sun, "I don't understand how any healthcare professional has moved so far away from the fundamentals of public health and of doing no harm that they would think that basically incarcerating a child in a room for 14 days is in any way justified."
It wasn't that long ago that south of the border, people were up in arms because Donald Trump was supposedly keeping kids in cages locked away from their parents, but when done under the auspices of public health advice in Canada, there is no outrage anywhere to be found, because heaven forbid you question the almighty public health guidance. We've gone from telling people to stay home to save lives because there's no place safer than the home, to now relegating children to their bedroom. Putting kids who have already been deprived the right to live their lives under house arrest, just because.
Back to you, Mark.
Mark: Your comparison, Andrew, with Trump the Evil Orange Separator of Kids is well put. Is it only evil when a distant marmalade hued dictator does it? I didn't seriously think a lot of Peel region mums would go along with this garbage, but here we go courtesy of Twitter: "And so the 14 day isolation begins," says RedIslandDreamer. "Nothing has broken my heart like the sound of my 10-year-old crying while I sit on the other side of the door and tell him 14 days will go quickly."
Well if it's breaking your heart, redislanddreamer, you could always open the door.
And here from a self described mum of three, who says, "Us too, I have my 7-year-old in isolation downstairs. He keeps messaging me on Facebook messenger, 'Mummy I'm lonely.' My 5-year-old wrote in his journal entry today, that he is sad because his brother isn't here. I set up a baby monitor to let my 8-year-old ask for things. The 5-year-old is using it to talk to the 8-year-old."
A decade ago, in After America, I talked about what happens when a once free people loses the habits of liberty. Leslie Gelb, the emeritus honcho at the U.S. Committee on Foreign Relations, and so nobody's idea of a right winger at all, put it another way, and warned about what happens when a society slumps into a mediocrity of spirit.
Over the last year of Wuflu lockdown, millions of people apparently have lost the habits of liberty and slumped into a mediocrity of spirit, to the point where when the government tells you to wall your kid up in the basement for a fortnight and communicate with him via a baby monitor, apparently sane mummies meekly comply. And those same mummies would be utterly bewildered if you accuse them of abusing their children. "Oh but I'm just following the science."
March 5 excerpt:
https://www.steynonline.com/11128/the-mark-steyn-show-chinese-penetration-update
Christopher Gelber writes from beautiful North Yorkshire, beautiful North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, where I hear the hard men of Ulster are so bored by lockdown they're thinking of restarting the terrorism just to have something to do all day long—seriously, seriously. Anyway Christopher writes from beautiful North Yorkshire: "Surely though, the key - and the part which fills us with dread - isn't the 'they,' the hardcore activists. We know they have radical agendas, or are nuts and/or pathological in their narcissism. No, the really bad part is what this last terrible year has taught us beyond any doubt: that most people are psychologically almost infinitely malleable within shockingly narrow timeframes. It isn't just a vague idea of liberty which beats a feeble drum these days; individual autonomy itself is under threat. We recognize the terrible collectivism which underlies all this groupthink, but until 2020 who knew it would be this easily and willingly ingested?"
That is a very good point, Christopher, particularly the part about the shockingly narrow time frame. As you know, we're just about to enter year two of the permanent abnormal, but you already get the sense, if you just go on Twitter or Facebook, or even if you talk to some of your neighbors, that people are beginning to forget what it was like before late February, early March of 2020. We touched on some of this a few days ago. It's not, as Christopher says, the militant trans fanatic or the so called public health bureaucrat, it's the massive widespread compliance by people who really don't believe any of this stuff, but somehow feel obliged to go along with it.
On Tuesday we discussed the Peel regional government in Ontario, which had ordered perfectly healthy grade school kids to be quarantined in isolation for two weeks. In other words you basically lock your kid up in a room for two weeks and slide plates of food under the door. And I quoted tweets from apparently sane mums trying to explain to terrified 7-year-olds via the baby monitor, or if they're a little older by Zoom, why it was necessary to torture them like this, and of course it didn't wasn't necessary, not in the least and the minute Andrew Lawton and I and a few others--not as many as there ought to have been—made a bit of a noise about this, the totalitarian wankers of the Peel region reversed their policy.
But as you say it's not the totalitarian wankers but all these women who undoubtedly think of themselves as good mothers, agreeing to abuse and torture their kids, because the government told them to. If Doc Fauci, or Professor Pants Down at Imperial College, ordered you to saw your kid's leg off at the first sign of COVID, what percentage of moms would comply?
I talked on Tuesday about how quickly people can lose the habits of liberty. We're seeing a lot of that as year two begins. The abject prostration before experts, which would be bad enough, even if as in Peel region, the experts weren't totally inexpert, but Christopher makes a further point when he says it isn't just a vague idea of liberty which beats a feeble drum these days, individual autonomy itself is under threat. I think that's because most people find it least stressful to be like most other people, and so generally the way you become like most people is to go out and stroll around the real world and see what they're doing and saying and thinking and just absorb the general vibe but right now there is no real world, insofar as we have contact with any kind of wider world it's online and the online world is not real but a distortion. It's a world where management consultants like Bain Capital pretend to believe that woman is spelled WOMXN and where public health agencies tell you that nursing your baby is now chest feeding, because breast feeding somehow implies that nursing your baby is something to do with being a woman, and as we all know the world is full of men happily and nursing their babies now.
And as this is the only sense of a real world we now get, it's easier, I think, to be pressured into going along with it. In other words, what happened was that normality got suspended a year ago, and actually what passes for normality is now determined by a very unrepresentative sliver of society. It's only 12 months since the suspension of normality, but what's weird is the sense you get that large numbers of people are already beginning to forget what the old normal was like.
Not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I was in Hungary and I had lunch with Robert Ratonyi, an elderly operetta star who was singing a number on a show we were filming over there and I said to Robert, "But look you and millions of other Hungarians were old enough to remember what it was like before the communists. How could you just collectively agree to forget all that?" And he said to me, "You do remember but it's like a childhood memory, as much as you might want to be, you'll never be that 12-year-old boy again." Now that's a rationalization but right now societies with far longer traditions of liberty than Hungary, are making their own such rationalization at what Christopher correctly identified as breakneck speed.
The last year has been a pilot program, and from the point of view of those who introduced it, a very useful and successful one.
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3 comments:
"There's a new sheriff in town--and his name is Reggie Hammond."
In otherwords,nig*er brained LE are changing the focus of who gets their attention--and it isn't blacks.
Who does that leave?Those nasty White supremacists.
--GRA
I am confused: there is a NS comment that Steyn refuses to mention the Big Steal. But when I click on that link it goes to Tucker Carlson. Is this a mistake or did Steyn refuse to mention the Big Steal????
Anon,
I apologize. Mark Steyn came on immediately after Carlson's NOKO POW speech, and said essentially the same thing. I just searched for the Steyn excerpt at g/yt, but was unable to find it.
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