Table of Contents
David Theobald
Monday June 8th was the start of another week in the increasingly bizarre parallel universe in which I find myself living. A universe where all the logic and pragmatism that I was happy to have run the bits of the world I move in for nearly three score and ten years has been unceremoniously dumped onto the scrapheap. The world outside my front gate is now run by groupthink and people with the IQ of a radish reacting to groupthink with…more groupthink.
We (definitely including me) deserve better.
At lunch time, the Head Radish will breathlessly tell me I can do what she had no real place stopping me from doing nearly three months ago; was it nearly three months? Theatrically, she will string this out for another 48 hours as that’s how she rolls.
She who would follow the science has, in her eyes, been doing it for months; I’m sure she really believes she is following the science. The Radish Cabinet received reports from the experts in order to inform the catastrophic decisions of mid-March. The ‘science’ they received was no such thing, it was modelling. None of the root vegetables had (has) the intellectual candle power to be critical of this stuff. But that is their job, we need our politicians to be those who give a critical assessment of advice they are given.
Why did nobody say “Hang on, all this 80,000 death stuff is just modelling and modelling has a dreadful track record in this area? They got swine flu horribly wrong for starters. I reckon we don’t know much about this new virus, why don’t we just wait and see if, when we have more proper data, we can make some more pragmatic decisions. Meantime it appears to be coming in on planes and killing the oldies so why don’t we shut the borders and sequester the rest homes. Have another assessment on, say, Friday – things are moving pretty fast”
Nope. Lockdown (a term prior to March we only used to see in prisons when the guests went more feral than usual) and no possible review for a month. Meanwhile in the outside world things change daily in the virus understanding department. But our eyes and ears are closed – for a month. Modelling is king and must be obeyed. The MSM reinforces the groupthink relentlessly every lunchtime (especially) and evening. How many stories did the MSM run suggesting that the path down which we were being led could be incorrect? Yes, I missed them all, as well.
As time went on it became blindingly obvious that the perpetrator of chainsaw massacres of mid March was no such thing but was the annoying, if not all that dangerous, car thief of late May. But has the Cabinet of Radishes been back to the experts with something along the lines of “Oi, look ‘ere, your models are rubbish. How about some new advice based on the growing data from what is really happening? We can then say to the country ‘Sorry, we got it wrong a few weeks back but things have changed. Oldies stay in the rest homes, hospitals are the worst places to go if you have virus type symptoms, social distancing is nonsense so you can all get your businesses up and going again. Meanwhile we realise we can’t eliminate this as we have to live in the real world and we’ll keep the borders closed for a bit longer while we sort out a proper way of dealing with that. That shouldn’t take too long as it is likely this virus will probably just fizzle out as most of its seasonal mates do every year. Sorry about that scary stuff in March.”
The veggies are supposed to make critical appraisals of evidence given to them. They also, when doing this, need to realise that there is not a ‘no risk’ option here. Life is a risk. Some of these are very small (I once saw a woman who died when a garfish leapt out of the water and got lodged in her throat as she paddled past in a canoe – you couldn’t make it up) but they are never zero. The inevitable conclusion of being born is dying. We are dealt an innings with a mean of about 80 years. Mean. Someone dying at 50 will push that mean a lot lower than half a dozen dying at 85. The mean age of virus deaths is the same as the mean age of people who die ‘naturally’ – naturally obviously will not fly on a death certificate, but you get my drift.
The root vegetable view is that all this logic can be suspended so we can eradicate the virus. And I have to live in this daft world.
My biggest worry today is whether my butcher has made any Cumberland sausages over the weekend; life is more pleasant if you stick with the sausages.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.
