Covid Lockdown, Third-World Edition
Sept 28, 2021 22:49:10 GMT -5
Post by Berean on Sept 28, 2021 22:49:10 GMT -5
Covid Lockdown, Third-World Edition
September 28, 2021
By Twilight Patriot
Affluent westerners are so taken with the way their lockdowns are “saving lives,” that they ignore completely the costs those lockdowns impose on those less wealthy than they are. In America, these policies have been an economic hardship for innumerable. In the Third World, the destruction has been infinitely worse, with Madagascar as a microcosm of that disaster.
For the upper-class Americans who have made a life out of manufacturing public opinion, the question of whether to respond to the Covid pandemic by shutting down most schools, churches, and small businesses for the better part of two years can be answered with an easy, “Yes, of course.”
The same goes for the comfortable classes of Canada, Australia, Europe, and the other wealthier countries of the world. As these people see it, whether you’re for or against these shutdowns has always been a simple reflection of whether you want more people or fewer people to die of Covid. For the most part, they don’t look at the situation through a cost-benefit analysis lens.
They can afford their views because they’re part of a social class that pays few of the costs. But for people who are part of the lower classes, or who own or work at one of those millions of small businesses that has gone under, the situation looks very different.
Pro tip: When there are two sides to an argument, and one side wants to compare costs and benefits, while the other side sees it as a simple moral question—with the only question being “do you want people to suffer, or not?”—the first side is usually in the right. This goes for single-payer health care, “non-violent policing,” Covid lockdowns, and a whole host of other matters as to which the Left has discarded common sense in favor of ideological purity.
The more reasonable half of the American populace knows that, for most people, going a year or two without steady work is a bigger threat to their well-being than a mild respiratory virus whose average victim is older than the national life expectancy. They know that, among other things, poor people don’t live as long as rich people, and they don’t appreciate being pushed further down the ladder for the sake of the virtue-signaling managerial-class flacks who work at secure, well-salaried positions in government, academia, medicine, law, or journalism and who have little skin in the game.
Chances are that, by now, you’ve heard more than enough about how the United States’ bumbling response to the events of the last few years has left the working poor with the raw end of the deal. What you’re less likely to hear about is the view from the real bottom—the way that the global shutdown has impacted people in countries like Madagascar.
Naturally, the fragile economies of the Third World have been hit very hard by the rolling shutdowns of the last two years. And while the global-cosmopolitan chattering class that authored the shutdown doesn’t look on the peasantry of Africa and Southeast Asia with the same white-hot hatred that it has shown toward the “Deplorables” in its own corner of the world, it more than makes up for it with straight-up ignorance and indifference.
Continued at link
September 28, 2021
By Twilight Patriot
Affluent westerners are so taken with the way their lockdowns are “saving lives,” that they ignore completely the costs those lockdowns impose on those less wealthy than they are. In America, these policies have been an economic hardship for innumerable. In the Third World, the destruction has been infinitely worse, with Madagascar as a microcosm of that disaster.
For the upper-class Americans who have made a life out of manufacturing public opinion, the question of whether to respond to the Covid pandemic by shutting down most schools, churches, and small businesses for the better part of two years can be answered with an easy, “Yes, of course.”
The same goes for the comfortable classes of Canada, Australia, Europe, and the other wealthier countries of the world. As these people see it, whether you’re for or against these shutdowns has always been a simple reflection of whether you want more people or fewer people to die of Covid. For the most part, they don’t look at the situation through a cost-benefit analysis lens.
They can afford their views because they’re part of a social class that pays few of the costs. But for people who are part of the lower classes, or who own or work at one of those millions of small businesses that has gone under, the situation looks very different.
Pro tip: When there are two sides to an argument, and one side wants to compare costs and benefits, while the other side sees it as a simple moral question—with the only question being “do you want people to suffer, or not?”—the first side is usually in the right. This goes for single-payer health care, “non-violent policing,” Covid lockdowns, and a whole host of other matters as to which the Left has discarded common sense in favor of ideological purity.
The more reasonable half of the American populace knows that, for most people, going a year or two without steady work is a bigger threat to their well-being than a mild respiratory virus whose average victim is older than the national life expectancy. They know that, among other things, poor people don’t live as long as rich people, and they don’t appreciate being pushed further down the ladder for the sake of the virtue-signaling managerial-class flacks who work at secure, well-salaried positions in government, academia, medicine, law, or journalism and who have little skin in the game.
Chances are that, by now, you’ve heard more than enough about how the United States’ bumbling response to the events of the last few years has left the working poor with the raw end of the deal. What you’re less likely to hear about is the view from the real bottom—the way that the global shutdown has impacted people in countries like Madagascar.
Naturally, the fragile economies of the Third World have been hit very hard by the rolling shutdowns of the last two years. And while the global-cosmopolitan chattering class that authored the shutdown doesn’t look on the peasantry of Africa and Southeast Asia with the same white-hot hatred that it has shown toward the “Deplorables” in its own corner of the world, it more than makes up for it with straight-up ignorance and indifference.
Continued at link