My latest in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/w6GIOEMhZv
— Emily Oster (@ProfEmilyOster) October 31, 2022
The article linked in the Tweet:
LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too.
No.
I remember how those of us who were not Covidians, who did not blindly obey every Fauci pronouncement, were dehumanized.
I remember how pundits and opinionated assholes celebrated the deaths of the unvaccinated.
How they called those of us who resisted masking murderers and should be denied any form of health care and left to die in the streets.
I remember how they cursed us for wanted to put our kids back in school.
We on this blog have systematically cataloged all the destruction they caused.
Setting kids back years.
The cancers and other diseases that went untreated in hospitals that shut down for the COVID wave that never came.
The deaths from overdose and despair from people locked away.
The businesses that shut down and the business owners that went bankrupt.
In the end we were vindicated.
They narrative has collapsed.
What they did caused more harm to children than it did good.
They vaccines were useless to stop the spread and vaccine policies did more harm than good.
They destroyed the economy and caused the worst inflation in generations.
Had we done nothing in reaction to COVID we’d be better off.
Those who were going to get it and die did, regardless of lock downs and mask mandates.
Perhaps more lives would have been saved had drugs like Ivermectin not become political footballs.
And now that we know they everything they did caused pain and suffering beyond our ability to quantity it and didn’t save one life, they want amnesty and forgiveness.
No.
I want retribution.
I want them to suffer for how they made us suffer.
I want ditches filled with the bodies of Covidisns.
And if you read the replies to that Tweet, I am not alone.
Amnesty is the worst think they could ask for.
It will only make us madder.
When justice fails, people will take it into their own hands.
We can either have truth and reconciliation or we can have frontier justice.
But what we can’t have is the people who caused this mess to be forgiven and to maintain the status quo.
And not only is this too early by a generation or ten, it’s coming while the crimes against humanity are still underway.
After all, the Flying Walensky Circus has just recently recommended that children, as a matter of course, get dosed with a pseudo-vaxx that’s still not even approved, but remains under emergency use authorization despite the lack of emergency. Walk into the grocery store, and you hear background propaganda from Pfizer and BioNTech, aggressively promoting the same non-approved medical product. Events back in California still proudly proclaim “current vaxx card required for all attendees”, in the face of all evidence.
So… hey, I have an idea! Let’s take a page from the Left’s playbook, and simply redefine “amnesty” to be synonymous with “Nuremberg Tribunal”! Where’d I put my Rope of Redemption…?
Correction: Forgiveness. Rope of Forgiveness.
People denying there were lockdowns. Denying people lost their jobs because of mandates. Denying there were regular calls for punishment of the unvaxxed. https://twitter.com/Lana_Macondo/status/1587297451261808641
Mr. 6079 Smith W is having a very busy time keeping history updated.
“These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.”
Actually we did know that the cloth/paper masks were useless, we knew that outdoor transmittal was almost nonexistent, we knew that UV from sunlight killed the virus in seconds, we knew that children were at almost no risk of suffering more than cold symptoms from the ‘rona, and we knew that there was no justification for closing schools for two years. We were not allowed to have honest discussions about the recommendations, no matter how many times they flip-flopped, of people more interested in profit and power than doing their jobs protecting the population.
Dokter SCIENCE1 ™ (his mamma called him Tony) told us, on national TeeWee, in Feb 2020, that , and I quote, “Masks are useless!”
So, Homie (speaking to Wretched Hitler, Michigan’s Goobernor), (as well as all the other mask nazis), don’t be telling me that nobody knew masks underperformed. We had Da Gozpel! from Dokter Science!, his own self, that masks were useless.
I so enjoy turning their own words back onto them!
Children. It is EXACTLY what I would expect from a child.
“Sorry I kicked you in the ass and stole your snack. But, that was yesterday… Friends?”
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Nope. If they just let it slide, I could ignore it. But, instead they are asking us to forgive and forget? Look, I understand you were driven to a panic by the media. But, did you have to act all super-A-hole about it? Yeah… they did.
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Reminds me of the CS Lewis quote about tyrants who are so self assured in their own benevolence.
For some reason they always expect us to forgive and forget. To error is human, to forgive divine. Yet at the same time no error on the part of a conservative is ever assumed to be a mistake, it is always from evil intention, in their minds, and will never be forgiven.
Just look at all the people that have been canceled because they made a mean tweet/post 10-15 years ago.
We STILL have a bunch of brain dead morons here walking around with a mask on and driving ALONE with windows up wearing a mask. Fukkin lunatics. Yea, I can forgive, but I never forget. Its the lunatics religion like “climate change”(formerly known as “global warming “) or a security blanket… I will never unify with lunatics
That Great Sage, and Moral Philosopher, Norman Schwarzkopf, is reputed to have been asked by some numbnut about “forgiveness” for the jerkoff du jour (I think it was the 9-11 weasels). He is reputed to have observed, “Forgiveness comes from The Almighty. Our task is to arrange the meeting.”
Couldn’t agree more.