Unconditional Surrender

Emily Oster at The Atlantic wonders if we mightn’t just bury the hatchet about all that Covid overreaction; call a social mulligan; just mooooooove on:

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. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

David Strom – now writing for Hot Air – meets Dr. Oster halfway:

[Dr. Oster] has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect…Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers

But…:

Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.

COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.

I might be inclined to agree with David’s premise – in March and April, maybe May of 2020, when we really didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t know that Covid wasn’t going to be a demographic scythe mowing down vast swathes of the population? Sure.

Once we got to about June or July – when it was very clear to anyone who could read a graph that Governor Klink’s prediction of 20,000 dead in Minnesota by mid-July, best case, was off by more than an order of magnitude, and he set about concealing the code for the model that led to the prediction because “someone might use it to get different results than we got” (which is the polar opposite of “science”?

For everything that came after – the schools closed, the tsunami of mental health issues, the endless emergency declarations, the boarded-over basketball hoops and bans on selling garden supplies – you want “Amnesty?”

After this?

I’m going to start the negotiation with “military tribunals”.

For the many millions who couldn’t get their cancer, heart disease and other chronic, sometimes life-threatening conditions seen, diagnosed or treated?

Drumhead court-martials are too good.

For the bans on funerals? For the loved ones that died alone in hospitals and LTCs?

I’d be hard-pressed to deny those demanding a “purge night” their due, but this is a civil society.

For the huge advances in the power of the police and surveillance states? For the “emergency powers” seized, and held for well over a year, by tinpot piglets like Gretchen Whitmer and Tim “Klink” Walz?

Give me some heads on pikes – figuratively – and I I might, might, be persuaded to settle for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, as long as it has the power to imprison people for a long time.

My mother suffered from Alzheimers. She and her husband – also very ill – were in a long-term care in Minot. Her husband died in March 2020. The “emergency” rules in Minnesota – and the carnage caused by Governor Klink and the Department of Health’s policies – meant it took seven months to move her to Minnesota. Seven months during which, alone in a nursing home, my mother declined even more alarmingly than she had before.

Amnesty?

I’m more inclined toward demanding unconditional surrender.

But it’s likely my vote next Tuesday is my only recourse.

Rot in (figurative, electoral) hell, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, and anyone who votes for you.

15 thoughts on “Unconditional Surrender

  1. It Is not over until pitchforks, tar and feathers make an appearance. In the meantime, US has joined the Axis of evil. Only a handful of countries still require full vaccination for non-citizens to enter. Kanadeh? Nope, ALL restrictions where lifted. But China, NoKor and yes, the USA still require it. I did not beleive it myself until I was checking in for my flight back home. Axis of evil indeed.

  2. I’ll be ready to move on when those wretched scumbags are shitting in their pants while hanging.

  3. Ooh, I like it when Mitch goes angry.

    Let’s not forget that during May (and into the summer) of 2020, it was OK to riot because pandemics avoid Demo-Commie crowds. And the funerals of Demo-Commie saints.

  4. if republicans take control of the legislature first bill is to amend the governors emergency powers to expire at the end of 30 days unless a majority of both houses agrees to extend it

    if republicans dont take control or the govenor wont sign the bill, nothing gets passed and government gets shut down until the law is amended to say the governors emergency powers expire at the end of 30 days unless a majority of both houses agrees to extend it

    no compromise
    no half measures
    no reaching across the aisle
    no horse trading for bonding or tax relief

    this is the absolute minimum for the peoples elected representatives to retake control of the state from the man who suspended the united states constitution based on nothing but fear and lies

  5. I’m 100% with Mitch here. The scientific evidence was there all along, but nobody seemed interested. More fun to blame it on Trump and proceed with the witch hunt. Best natural experiment ever: the Diamond Princess, cruise ship hit by Covid and quarantined. Most of the deaths were in the elderly. Those under 40, especially children, barely a ripple. Wish I believed in a hereafter to which Walz and his fellow criminals could be condemned for eternity. The man is a coward, a bully, an ignoramus, and a habitual liar.

  6. Biden justified his vax mandates by saying “we are going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
    At the time Biden said this, Biden’s public health advisers knew that being vaccinated did not prevent you from passing on covid to others.

  7. The covid mandate was a typical unforced error by Slow Joe. He expended tremendous political capital to put himself in a worse political position than he was before he spent the capital.
    I imagine the reasoning was something like “Joe Biden got elected by criticizing Trump’s ‘hand’s off’ attitude towards covid restrictions. Therefore, whether or not a vax mandate will actually reduce deaths and hospitalizations due to covid is of less importance than Joe Biden appearing strong and decisive in combating the pandemic.”
    It didn’t work out that way.
    Joe Biden is very, very bad president.

  8. Fair enough, but why is his entire government incompetent as well? Wouldn’t the odds have put one or two in there that might’ve not f*cked us?

  9. he scientific evidence was there all along, but nobody seemed interested.

    On April 20, 2020, I posted a link to this piece in that noted conservative tool, The Atlantic, about research the CDC had published showing how transmission actually worked, based on studies in Japan and South Korea: droplet not aerosol or fomite; heavily dependent on air flow (almost exclusively indoors), and on and on.

    April. 20. 2020.

    I’m not gonna say “it was all there”, or that it was every answer to every question.

    But basically, the knowledge that all the worst fears about its contagiousness appeared to be baseless was not a far-fetched thing.

    It got swept under the rug.

  10. Popular discourse inadequately reduces their lived experiences to individual poor choices, we leave no room for real solutions.
    When you can only conceptualize matters of life and death in stultifying bureaucratese, you are the problem.
    Take out the words “inadequately,” “individual,” “lived,” and “real,” Does it change whatever meaning it might have had?

  11. Fair enough, but why is his entire government incompetent as well?

    I see we’ve got ourselves another trollbot… or more likely another sock puppet. For that is a trolling question that deserves scorn and to be ignored with extreme prejudice.

  12. The vax did not prevent a person from contracting or spreading covid.
    Nevertheless people who refused the vax were removed from organ transplant waiting lists.
    Elderly patients with dementia were refused human contact with their families by the covidmaniacs.
    Instead of being with the dying parent and holding their hand, you were hooked up with Zoom.
    This was not a result of excess caution and human error. The cruelty was the point.

  13. “But it is Novel Coronavirus!! We didn’t know anything so we had to be careful!!”

    When lacking specific information you should fall back on more general information gleaned from past experience. Yes COVID-19 is a new coronavirus, but we’ve been dealing with coronaviruses on an annual basis for centuries AND this wasn’t the first time a new virus has started a pandemic.
    Past experience tells us that viruses disproportionately affect the elderly and people with underlying health conditions. Also, airborne pathogens are transmitted with increased ease in high density living conditions, especially ones with shared HVAC systems. Ergo, putting Covid positive patients in close proximity to elderly people with underlying health conditions would be a recipe for more dead elderly.
    Past experience tells us that viruses tend to mutate towards increased transmissibility and decreased severity. Instead of saying that with the necessary caveat that “tend to” is not a guarantee, we got endless warnings that the next strain could make the virus from The Stand look like a cold.

    So, anyone interested in demonstrating outside Congress next year while Fauci is being interrogated? I’m thinking that signs and chants of “Fauci Lied, People Died” would be fitting.

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