When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.This passage from Mark Steyn's address at Hillsdale College in 2009 has been ringing in my head a lot this past week. Look at the comments from rank and file people on a variety of Wuhan Flu related articles and you'll see the same sentimentality rising surprisingly fast to the surface: the government needs to force more people to do the thing I want them to be doing to "self-isolate"/"social distance" or "#PlankTheCurve or whatever the trendy formulation is this week.
It reached (what I thought was) peak idiocy with the recent story that people were upset that EB Games in Toronto was the site of a long line of people outside. The reason? The store itself was closed, but they were letting people who pre-ordered big video game titles to pick them up on the much-hyped release date. Let's all remember that people can watch the news -- with things like the ongoing French lockdown or the various "Shelter-In-Place" US States -- where they see they may be essentially locked inside their homes for days/weeks/months/whoknows, and figure that a popular new videogame (one of which I'm told is expected to be an immersive Skyrim-level masterpiece that could occupy hundreds if not thousands of hours) might just come in handy. Stores were merely asked not to open, and EB Games decides to only open to honour the pre-orders and enforce a ten person social distancing rule inside the store. Not everybody finds digital downloads as fun and easy as the urban elites with their high speed internet (my own ISP estimated I would need 11 hours to download Doom, presuming after all that time it didn't freeze and force me to try again), and of course crossing half of Toronto to get to the store meant they weren't anxious to turn back around. So they waited in the street, probably too close together but outdoors and not in a situation where they were touching anything but the door to the store and the game they walked out with. But people freaked the fuck out and the primary thing which caught my attention was how utterly fascist they were about it. The same people who think Mike Pence is a creepy invasive weirdo for thinking maybe we shouldn't teach kids the homo agenda are suddenly a-okay with the government shutting down a specific business and fining/jailing its executives/employees/customers for the crime of -- not even selling! -- distributing their legal product at a time it is legal for them to do so with sensible precautions for a disease which nobody had any more than an infinitesimal chance of contracting. Just look at a selection of some of the comments on this (predictably fake news) Vice story on the topic:
NBEllick
EB Games is an essential service, really, how trumpian of you. EB Games is an American company that is out for the almighty buck and dick all else. What a sad state watching a bunch of young people in withdrawal, lined up to feed their video addiction. On camera a young girl said she lived with her grandparents but she was taking precautions having hand sanitizer in her backpack! Just pathetic. She may as well just buy a gun and just shoot her grandparents.
Zach G
Not essential at all we can buy games thru online stores on our systems and they need to update the cancellation policy properly this is a company that parent company holding the public hostage to keep share holders happy and profits coming in during a bloody global crisis risking everyone. Time to SHUT IT DOWN
Joseph Zaffern
The Government has to shut this business down. Fine it so much it never re-opens and prosecute and imprison its corporate officers for the Public Health of Ontario and Canada!
Patricia ShaunessyLeader
"An Essential Service"? That's absolute hogwash. Nothing but greed. Close down EB Games/GameStop
Anthony BurgessThis "close them down" mentality doesn't just apply to stores that people decide aren't "essential" (as a commenter notes, liquor stores aren't essential either nor are financial services companies, but both of them get to remain open). It applies to people too. Yes, people like you and me. These people have a sick urge to exert control over us based on an overhyped viral contagion.
Video games stores don't fill prescriptions and they don't sell food. They are not essential. Close them down!
It's also very prevalent in comments on Youtube to the far-left CityTV Toronto coverage as well:
Nathan
And this is why we have to depend on the government to shut things down/make laws and enforce them because people when left to their own decisions will not do the right thing, they will just do whatever benefits them the most.
Mark Leviathan
City should hit them with a heavy fine
But if it's bad in Canada it's getting ludicrous in Her Majesty's realm of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
A spokesman for Northamptonshire Police said his force have had ‘dozens and dozens’ of calls from people saying: ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them.’ He says they’re also getting calls from people whose ‘neighbours are gathering in their back gardens’. Nosey, small-minded bores used to gossip over the garden fence about their neighbours – now they call the cops if they see their neighbours gossiping over the garden fence. It’s hard to fathom the mindset of a person who sees some people in a back garden and says: ‘Jim, dial 999 – there are people outside.’That Brendan O'Neill article mentions a term "covidiots" created by Daily Mail headline writers. Let me take this opportunity to coin a new one.
Other police forces are actively facilitating corona-snitching. Some have set up online portals where you can get your Stasi on by narking on your neighbours. The Humberside Police portal allows you to input info about neighbours who are ‘not following social-distancing rules’. West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Avon and Somerset police forces have also created ‘a mixture of hotlines or online portals’ to ‘encourage the public to let them know if they spot a gathering of two or more people’. Some in the public are excitedly getting stuck in to their new role as Covid informants. People are reportedly ‘inundating the police 101 and 999 lines reporting people for flouting the new lockdown rules’.
Viro-Fascist noun 1. An individual who uses the Wuhan Flu Crisis as an excuse to engage in his dark reactionary urge to impose strict rules and strict penalties on others for perceived offenses, regardless of the legality of the offense or the relevance of the rule.
Which brings me to the Mark Steyn evaluation of the President George W. Bush (pbuh) quote at the top of the page: the entire spirit of liberty is rapidly being lost, particularly on the younger and/or Eastern Canadian populace.† Their inherent nature, the primary driving force of their soul, is their dream of being part of the group that exerts control over everybody else. What else could possibly justify this bloodlust of the government stepping in to stop people from doing things that in reality have little practical impact on the Wuhan Flu but a huge impact on the ability of a (formerly) free citizenry to go about their daily lives. Look at, for example, how much of what is being stopped is the sort of thing that far-left civil servants like Theresa Tam enjoy taking away from people rather than seriously impacting disease transmission. Alberta recently closed the provincial parks and told us to stay away even though that has no real impact on disease transmission. This isn't a Trump style government shutdown where the parks remain open but no events are permitted, this is straight out of President Monkey's playbook. Even the public statements are contradictory and nonsensical. "Enforcement officers" will be going around supposedly to "support education and awareness" but also "issue fines for non-compliance". So you can be fined for being insufficiently aware? They say both that "walking, hiking, biking, horseback riding and off-highway vehicle use are still permitted on legal trails" but also "Now is not the time to visit our provincial parks or public land recreation areas. If you have plans to visit one of these areas in the coming days, please cancel your plans". But...why? Trails aren't going to be how the Wuhan Flu is spread. Nor is sitting by yourself under a tree: but they pivot from "social distancing" to "hide indoors" awfully fast. It's worth telling "jobsworth cops" and SJW idiots like the Shiny Pony that: COVID-19 is a virus, not a tornado. This is "mission creep" in almost its textbook definition.
People who were sleeping naked next to each other aren't suddenly at risk because they are holding hands in a park, no matter what some Niggerfag gets angry about on CNN.
† Don't leave with any false pretense that the COVID-apathetic gamers were doing this as some sort of libertarian exercising of their inherent property rights, by the way: these same people would be taking a gaming break to denounce the "Purell For the Soul" guy online when they saw that the pious were ignoring the social distancing stuff.
Finally, the second paragraph of the quote from the top of this post:
It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.Well it turns out if you wanted to go to the store to pick up a record to listen to when you were stuck at home without socializing, the Viro-Fascists are opposed to that too.
And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end.
