Megan McArdle fears that public health officials’ endorsement of mass demonstrations to support Black Lives Matter has destroyed their credibility to order lockdowns in the future.
Academia/media will have lost it, because let’s be honest: we treated these protests very differently from church services or anti-lockdown protests, something a bunch of public health experts made explicit. We already, clearly, had a problem communicating our concerns to more conservative people, especially in redder states. That problem just became insuperable. They will trust nothing we say because apparently, we only think the danger is great enough to override their priorities.
McCardle was referring to a letter signed by 1,200 of the country’s most renowned public health “experts” calling outdoor mass gatherings “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people.”
The damage may affect more than officialdom’s power to call for a lockdown in the event of a second coronavirus wave. Not only has the academia/media lost much of its credibility on social distancing/lockdown questions, it has collaterally diminished its authority to sound the tocsin on Climate Emergency, the Rohingya genocide, and all the many other “alerts'” it has been issuing. The true will be doubted alongside the false.
The idea that the media inflated or exaggerated the pandemic fears to justify a lockdown for social engineering purposes may seem monstrous to those whose modest jobs and small businesses were lost, but like a spouse walking in on flagrante delicto what else are they to think? “Honey, I can explain why we locked down the jobs and churches and visits to nursing homes but not antifa. It’s not what it looks like!”
That’s a hard sell.
Of course, science still exists even if the science explainers are baloney. The truth lives despite liars. And as Kurt Godel famously said, “religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.” Yet if you’re looking for the real McCoy, maybe you won’t find it on TV.
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God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?, by John C. Lennox. Oxford mathematician and author of God’s Undertaker, Lennox takes a closer look at Stephen Hawking’s logic in his book The Grand Design. In lively layman’s terms, he guides the reader through the key points in Hawking’s arguments – with clear explanations of the latest scientific and philosophical methods and theories – and demonstrates that far from disproving a Creator God, they make his existence seem all the more probable.
The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O’Connell. For millennia, Carthage’s triumph over Rome at Cannae in 216 B.C. has inspired reverence and awe. No general since has matched Hannibal’s most unexpected, innovative, and brutal military victory. Piecing together decayed shreds of ancient reportage, O’Connell tells the whole story of this apocalyptic battle for the first time, its causes and consequences, its leading players Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, and reveals the lessons it teaches for our own wars.
The Disappearing People: The Tragic Fate of Christians in the Middle East, by Stephen M. Rasche. Today, Christianity stands on the brink of extinction in much of the Middle East, the land of its birth. How did this happen? What role did Western foreign policy and international aid policy play? What of the role of Islam and the Christians themselves? How should history judge what happened to Christians of the Mideast and what lessons can be learned? This book, published in March this year, examines these questions based on the first-hand accounts of those who are living it.
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Open Curtains by George Spix and Richard Fernandez. Technology represents both unlimited promise and menace. Which transpires depends on whether people can claim ownership over their knowledge or whether human informational capital continues to suffer the Tragedy of the Commons.
The War of the Words, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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The Three Conjectures, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle, why government should get small
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Storm Over the South China Sea, how China is restarting history in the Pacific.
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