So I'm paying attention to the media....

I see a clip of a press conference where the governor of California says he's recruiting an "army" to start going door to door to check on people who are sheltering at home.  He says the next phase in that endeavor will be that, if someone tests positive but is living with people who test negative, the patient will be removed from his home and placed in some kind of care facility to..well I guess to ride out the disease and get what I hope to be actual treatment if necessary.

Got that?

During a pandemic of modest severity but significant (read:  self-inflicted) economic impact, a government official is recruiting civilian collaborators to round up people from their homes and stick them together somewhere.  Does this sound like anything students of history should recognize?

"Sticking people together somewhere," specifically nursing homes, is what got the governor of New York the worst infection rate in the country.  Maybe that was an honest mistake at the time, but in hindsight it was an obvious one and it needn't be repeated.

Meanwhile, next to New York we have Pennsylvania, and someone from that otherwise-fine state called in to Breitbart News to report that in her attempts to ensure treatments for the covid would be available to her mother who is in a nursing home, she was led via from facility management through the governor's office to the state department of health (whatever they call it), where they asked the mother's age and then said flat out that no treatment would be provided even if she tested positive.

To be fair, I don't know that this has been corroborated yet, but I can think of few dumber policies to enact.

Are you a post-Marxist communist who wants to get rid of some useless eaters this way?  It may well work, but if people start getting sick and not getting treatment, they will start infecting more valuable citizens, and there's your next wave of the pandemic.  You're just not going to be able to keep it under control by refusing to take certain obvious treatment steps.

But all that is not directly what my point is about.  I want to tie those things together with the other anecdotes we've heard about needless infractions on civil rights and thoughtless would-be concessions to people who want to reopen.

I'm talking people staying in cars in a parking lot and lone paddle boarders getting ticketed or arrested for violating social distancing.  I'm talking restaurants being told they can reopen but not with a seating capacity high enough to support a clientele that could provide enough custom for the restaurants to stay open.

The former is giving license to totalitarians in blue uniforms, to men who don't really want to protect and serve but just want to be able to drive fast and talk shit.  I'm sorry, I respect the institution and the badge, but there are people like that.

The latter is how how central planners failed to prevent bread lines in the Eastern Bloc (or possibly were able to deliberately effect them; I haven't looked at every case outside of Stalin and Mao).

So what I'm saying is this:

The natural goods are a lot like the moral goods that God gives us.  You can sacrifice a higher one for a more proximate one--lie to get out of jail, give up freedom for security--but statistically it will turn around to bite you in the ass.

"God will not be mocked" is not some warning that He is a bad sport who can't take a joke.  It is the insight that He cannot be without some blowback being put in motion--He's not just that vigilant; it simply can't happen.  It is the abstraction from the principle that if you burn your hand on a hot stove "I was only kidding" will not make it better.

So go ahead, criticize people who won't shut up about civil liberties if you want--again, I'll be fair, this is uncharted territory and we should all be patient with each other while we establish new precedents--but it's looking like they were right after all.

What people don't want to look at

Every so often—too often, yes—there is a mass shooting, and usually it’s a massacre. And there is a cry to ban guns. And it is pointed out that banning guns won’t make violence just stop and it won’t stop would-be criminals from utilizing other weapons or improvised weapons.

And this is admitted, but it’s pointed out that at least it would help.

And conservatives point out it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the other problems that would come from flouting the second amendment and effectively taking guns away from law abiding citizens but not other criminals or the government.

These are worthwhile things to discuss, don’t get me wrong.

But there is an opportunity here, and I think the reason it is not taken advantage of is that it doesn’t actually achieve the real, unstated goal.

You want to make even modest efforts to restrict school violence? Okay. Gun rights advocates have pointed out things they think would work better than a gun ban. So you’re not going to get a ban rammed through Congress tomorrow. So why not try to achieve the things that nobody is opposing?

Maybe it won’t be as good as your pet project, sure, but you already admitted you’d rather achieve a partial victory than none.

So how about it? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Or do you want to keep blaming the other side for every failure that results from your preference for ideological purity?

On crying wolf over "dog whistles"

If you’re the only one who hears them—and we know this is true because you’re the one going around telling people what they’re not hearing—maybe it’s not the accused who is racist and trying to use them to send some kind of secret signals to other metaphorical dogs.

Maybe you are.