As I’ve noted before, one of the main justifications for lockdowns has been the “externality argument”. This is the argument that government is justified in restricting our freedom in order to prevent us from harming others – which we might do by transmitting a deadly virus. As Richard Dawkins put it:
You can argue over whether masks, handwashing, banning groups etc are effective. What you can NOT argue is that you are personally entitled to take the risk as a matter of individual liberty. You risk other lives as well as your own. It’s just elementary epidemiology.
However, it seems the same exact argument could be made about the use of private cars (or seasonal flu, for that matter). In 2016, there were 181,384 casualties on Britain’s roads, including 1,792 deaths. Many of these victims will have been entirely blameless road users – cyclists, pedestrians and others – who just happened to get hit by a careless driver.
What’s more, according to a 2012 paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, emissions from road transport cause 4,900 early deaths in Britain every year, and that’s not even counting the impact on conditions like asthma. How would Richard Dawkins put it?
You can argue over whether buses, trains and bicycles etc are convenient. What you can NOT argue is that you are personally entitled to drive a car as a matter of individual liberty. You risk other lives as well as your own. It’s just elementary transportology.
Of course, someone might say that 7,000 deaths from car accidents and emissions is a lot less than the number who would have died from COVID-19 in the absence of lockdowns – so the analogy doesn’t really work. There are several responses to this.
First, the average age of those who die in car accidents is much younger than the average age of those who die of COVID-19, meaning that each fatal car accident takes away more total life-years. And in any case, there’s not much evidence that lockdown did prevent a large number of deaths.
Second, even if lockdowns could have prevented a lot of deaths in the early months of the pandemic, the situation now is completely different. In fact, the age-standardised mortality rate in the first five months of 2021 was actually lower than in 2018.
Third, by rejecting the analogy on the grounds that 7,000 deaths is “too few” to matter, one is implicitly conceding that the externality argument isn’t an absolute. In other words, there is some level of externalities that society should tolerate, so long as the benefits to other parties are large enough.
The question then becomes: are the externalities of COVID transmission sufficiently large relative to the benefits of personal freedom (including the freedom to attend school or operate a small business) to justify lockdown? And it’s by no means clear the answer to that question is in the affirmative.
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“The question then becomes: are the externalities of COVID transmission sufficiently large, relative to the benefits of personal freedom (including the freedom to attend school or operate a small business) to justify lockdown? And it’s by no means clear the answer to that question is in the affirmative.”
Sweden, Florida, South Dacota, Texas all provide a clear answer to this question. No.
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Ivor Cummins
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Ivor Cummins
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The banning of cars will happen. Just been watching Tucker Carlson on climate lockdowns coming our way. And he mentions a UK report (but no information) in this context.
Help! Get me out of here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD9JulHePh8
Why not, whilst your at it ban food, ban air, ban love, ban water, ban sunlight, ban the internet, ban clothes, ban swimming, ban music, ban walking, ban smiling, ban haircuts, ban pubs, ban talking, ban listening, ban children, ban agriculture, ban work, ban trains, ban smoking, ban protest, ban questioning anything,
I could go on
Not a far-fetched litany. Most of the above were banned for a time within the last year.
Have you seen that sign in a Japanese hotel which read “No Smirking”?
Mind you, I think this may have been a mistranslation.
Just ban the poor and let the elite enjoy the earth!!
But who will clean their houses, tend to the garden, chauffeur them, cook, sow their clothes, grow their food, etc, etc.
Slaves.
Robots. Remember, they’re technocrats. Then the robots will rise up and the human race will be no more.
the era of cars has to end, they have been way too disruptive. bit those out inthe country must be allowed their cars, so ban them from towns by all means.
Are you a genuine arsehole, or just a good guy having a bad day?
if you behave that way you are worse than the lockdown fanatics… no need to be mean
Or maybe just ironic?
Sorry – now I am being ironic
The former. Posts under other usernames including ‘fon’ who others here have recognised the same underlying character. Claims to live in rural area.
Cars enabled so much freedom and so much productivity. They have improved a lot over time and are still extremely useful for many activites in society. But yes they do want us boxed up in a flat, glued to netflix and ordering from Amazon/Deliveroo etc…thats not living, thats exisiting.
I guess you’ve never travelled in a car then? Even as a child? The same people who benefited from cars now want to deny that opportunity to the next generation. It’s hypocritical.
Feel free to never go in a car or any other mechanised form of transport, and boycott other disruptive technologies
Just don’t force me to do the the same
You’re addressing a covey of petrolheads here
Actually cars have benefits and severe disbenefits, and exponential growth has not been an unalloyed joy. Nor are they an human ‘right’ in any meaningful sense – so confusing them with essential liberty is total bollocks.
One aspect of lockdowns has been to show the undeniable degree of atmospheric pollution from the internal combustion engine. What you do about it is another matter. But it ain’t about fundamental ‘rights‘, and linking it just makes the sceptical stance look barmy.
I cycle everywhere, regularly along a main arterial route into a major city in Yorkshire, where I pass long stationary queues of glorified, expensive sofas, with their engines idling.
During the first lockdown when cars disappeared almost completely, I noticed no change in air quality. Just as good as ever. The modern diesel engine is a remarkably clean power train. Not that the BEV or Climate Change folks would tell you that, though.
PS I enjoy travelling in and driving cars, riding motorbikes, speed, and so on!
Living in a major city in Yorkshire, one of the main features I noticed about last April/May was improved air clarity. It was startling (even tho’ I was already complainin about lockdowns.
Absolutely you are correct about how clean cars are, despite the “common sense” about pollution being as accurate as that about masks, people fall into the same trap.
“Particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution did not decline during the lockdown period in Scotland, according to a new study published by researchers at the University of Stirling.
As the country went into lockdown and the number of car journeys was significantly reduced, widespread reports highlighted the dramatic decline in air pollution.
However, a recent paper has highlighted that in fact, in Scotland, PM2.5 – the most harmful pollutant to human health – did not decline.
The researchers analysed data from 70 roadside monitoring stations around Scotland from March 24 (the day after lockdown was introduced in the UK) to April 23. They then compared this to comparative 31-day periods in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
They found that across Scotland, the mean concentration of PM2.5 was 6.6 micrograms per cubic metre of air (µg/m3) in the observed period in 2020 – similar to the levels in 2017 (6.7 µg/m3) and 2018 (7.4 µg/m3).
Based on these findings, the researchers have concluded that traffic is not a key contributor to outdoor particulate matter pollution in Scotland and in fact, people may be at greater risk from air pollution in their own home.
Dr Ruaraidh Dobson, who led the study, said: ‘It has been assumed that fewer cars on the road might have led to a decline in the level of air pollution outdoors and, in turn, reduce the number of cases of ill health linked to this pollution.
‘However, our study found no evidence of fine particulate air pollution declining in Scotland because of lockdown.
‘This suggests that vehicles aren’t an important cause of this very harmful type of air pollution in Scotland – and people may be at greater risk from poor air quality in their own homes, especially where cooking and smoking is taking place in enclosed and poorly ventilated spaces.’
https://airqualitynews.com/2020/09/08/pm2-5-pollution-did-not-decline-during-lockdown-in-scotland/ ”
Yet another case where the scientific evidence doesn’t back up the initial assumption.
coupe of interesting additions
1 – the overwhelming majority of PM pollution for vehicles is from a very small minority of very polluting ones (that will fail their next MOT)
2 – PM pollution is higher in homes on the whole – from cooking/toast etc
Thanks for that, got any links for both the above to assist in debunking the next greenie that’s “anti the working class being able to travel freely”?
sorry I don’t. I did the measurements myself a few years ago. I was involved in traffic pollution monitoring and took the equipment home for a week to do indoor air measurements.
I did a bit of a literature survey at the time – there was some stuff out of america but not much. the government air pollution action plan doesn’t even mention homes (maybe a passing reference). but burn your toast and the PM pollution in a bedroom can be worse than the worst road – for hours.
1 – the overwhelming majority of PM pollution for vehicles is from a very small minority of very polluting ones (that will fail their next MOT)
came from a statistical analysis I did of MoT failures – unpublished and lost in the mists of time – but true enough
Cars=Statins
I remember about 20 years ago some manufacturers claiming that in some American cities their exhaust emissions were cleaner than the air entering the air intake! Hyperbole, perhaps, but not entirely unbelievable.
Marxists are always plant starvers.
Although marxists ALWAYS create the most REAL pollution, because at it’s heart marxism is economic pollution.
What’s that bollocks about? Who mentioned Marx or Marxists? Obsessions do not a crisis solve.
The infernal combustion engine?
Or internal contradiction engine (in terms of ‘freedom’)?
This is a myth!
Look at this UK Governments own measurement of air pollution in the UK over decades.
The graph in the report cannot be clearer, the UK has cleaner air now than ever before.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-summary
And who decides what is country and what us town? What about people who live in town and work in rural settings?
Yeah ive been reading and seeing sources talking about total UK lockdowns, mixture of covid/flu/climatechange as the excuse for total martial law.
The USA relies on cars, except for large cities there is no public transport. Are they really going to get rid of private cars? I do not think so.
we should certainly lower the speed limit to 20mph in built up areas.
Do you have some stats on the benefits and disbenefits of that? I try to drive at a speed appropriate to the conditions, taking everything into account. That’s usually within the speed limit. Many London roads are 20, often it would not be sensible to exceed that on those roads, but not always. I guess you have to draw some lines, but the direction of travel away from treating people like sensible adults is clear, and the consequences can be seen in the current covid madness. The more you treat people like children, the more they seem to want to be treated like children, and then they turn into rabid fascists.
At which point one has to shift down a gear in most cars and so increase the engine revs and consuming more petrol, while traversing a given distance at a 2/3rds of the speed, Consequently one creates more pollution per metre for a 50% longer time period over given distance. Result = up to 100% increase in emissions. Smart!
Oh I do enjoy a wind up. Mmm, there’s an idea, perhaps clockwork cars?
Inconveniently spot on for the highways/local authority/police control freaks – in my neck of the woods they are happy to see these useless devices but content to only prosecute motorists doing over 97mph on a dual carriageway which feeds into our village. More candidates for the mass executions…
I trust you were simply being ironic.
“You can argue over whether masks, handwashing, banning groups etc are effective. What you can NOT argue is that you are personally entitled to take the risk as a matter of individual liberty. You risk other lives as well as your own. It’s just elementary epidemiology.”
I think I can argue that actually. The above argument seems more like elementary medico fascism to me.
Ultimately I think the only argument against lockdowns that really works is the one that they are wrong on principle and should never be used, because it’s simply too easy to manipulate people into believing there is an emergency.
You certainly can argue it. Every single interaction you have with another human has the potential to “harm” them in some way – whether it’s germs, accidents, annoyance, causing psychological injury due to telling then you don’t support their football team, a micro-aggression here, a misplaced look that causes anxiety there.
The only way to be sure of never harming another human, is to never interact with one.
In which case you could be causing harm by isolating family members and upsetting friends that wonder why you never call anymore.
Then they’d think you’re ignoring them!
There are people, I’m sure, who think never interacting is the solution. They probably include with those who’d do away with the human race so the planet can return to “normality”. I can think of a few celebrity eco-freaks who fall into that category (but I’m worried about libel).
Hear hear!
You can argue whether masks, experimental gene therapy shots, social isolation and restrictions on businesses are effective (in somehow, however improbably, improving the nation’s health). What you cannot do is argue that a politician has the right to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives (through lockdowns, trashing the economy and the NHS, missed cancer appointments, etc.,) and risk hundreds of thousands more, by imposing laws that restrict liberty and result in proven physical and psychological harm. It’s just elementary ethics.
Is there a greater plonker in modern intellectual life than Richard Dawkins? No, no there is not. He is a prime example of someone so insufferably clever and pleased with himself that he has morphed into a completely stupid person without anyone really caring enough to point it out to him. You can do THIS but you can’t do THAT, says bossy-boots Dicky Dawks, because evolution you see. Now he wades in on COVID, and predictably, falls flat on his face. Next week, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
“Is there a greater plonker in modern intellectual life than Richard Dawkins?”
To be realistic – yes : starting with the entire government
There is not a scrap of intellect in the entire government, so none of them qualify for the intellectual; plonker award.. Loopy has made a very decent nomination, and Dawkins* would certainly get my vote.
(*) On the other hand his fall from grace has been going on for some time, long before C19…
Yes, Dawkins is very dim, isn’t he? You can argue about masks etc – and unless you can prove they work there is no benefit in them, only tyranny.
But old now and sadly, maybe unwilling from fear to die. Just give in Richard, you know it’s true.
For God’s sake, Noah, don’t give them ideas.
So a double speak article to highlight how they will ban cars in the future. Yes we know all sales of petrol cars will be banned in 2030 and so will the opporunity for many to own a car which allows so much freedom.
Introducing the next measure? Trust not anyone using the word? “externalities.”
Actually, the pretended parallels are mickey-mouse simplicities that don’t work except in a very naive risk framework.
Car usage is controllable for a start, and viruses aren’t (the big con is that they are).
Depends on your definition of “car”.
The average BMW? Yes.
My next door neighbour’s truck? Not so much!
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Ivor Cummins
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Ivor Cummins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se19Dk5Q_Ko&t=0s
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The argument doesn’t work in both instances. The rights of the individual always trump the rights of the collective because you will get into situations like this where people will be forced/coerced into accepting things they don’t necessarily agree with (please don’t confuse with voting). The UN continues and says that freedom is not given by governments, therefore, governments can’t take freedom away from an individual. The US Constitution expressly states the same thing.
None of those is worth the paper they are written on anymore.
Utilitarianism has now replaced the unalienable individual rights principle again.
And as always, this has already led and will lead to disaster, atrocities, discrimination, wars and genocides, before maybe being reversed again thereafter.
But that is what they did do imparts of the US, was it not?
“Third, by rejecting the analogy on the grounds that 7,000 deaths is “too few” to matter, one is implicitly conceding that the externality argument isn’t an absolute. In other words, there is some level of externalities that society should tolerate, so long as the benefits to other parties are large enough. “
Yes, this is pretty much my thinking on this issue.
Imo you cannot apply the externalities argument to the real world without having a de minimis concept to limit it. Anyone who claims to do so is a liar, imo, because you can’t practicably live a life in the real world without inflicting some theoretical disease and other risks on others.
And the risks from seasonal respiratory viruses, even when in pandemic form, and the possibility of passing them on, is certainly one of those that has traditionally almost always been regarded as de minimis in this sense. We now know that covid is not an unusually dangerous disease, societally speaking.
Of course the argument from externalities is limited. Living in a society always involves a balance between personal freedoms and potential harm to others. Even the use of cars is highly restricted because of potential harm to others. By default you are not allowed to drive on public roads unaccompanied – you have to pass a test first.
‘They’ know well that there will be a fraction of the required electricity generation or netwrok capacity to charge up the number of EVs if they replace ICE vehicles. The only way to square this is to restrict the number of EVs to say 20% of present number of cars.
Banning them completely in towns and cities is a near certainty, and restricting one to each household in rural areas is likely. Of course this won’t apply to ‘very important people’.
This is totally consistent with public health dictates. Saving the whole planet ( sic) far outweighs personal constraints.
Ditto air travel of course.
I honestly thought I would be pushing up daisies before this happened , but now it looks like I will see the dawning of our new brave world.
Let’s do the sums. The UK has about 85 GW electricity capacity. Most charging takes place on cheap rate overnight when electricity demand is lowest. UK demand at night is just under 30 GW in the summer and just under 40 GW in the winter This is a bit out of date but electricity consumption has been dropping so demand will actually be lower. So there is about 40 GW of spare capacity at night. An electric car typically uses 7KW when charging. So currently there is capacity to charge about five million cars simultaneously. There are currently just over 30 million cars in the UK. If every car was immediately converted to electric we could still cope. As it is we have a decade to adapt.
Your numbers are completely and utterly wrong and meaningless. Rated capacity is irrelevant.
As it stands without any increases in demand there are many times that supply does not mmet it without constraints.
You say my numbers are wrong. Perhaps you can give the correct numbers.
“You say my numbers are wrong. Perhaps you can give the correct numbers.”
Where do you get your 85GW capacity from? Not including bird slicers or solar panels, are we? If you’re expecting them to charge cars on a windless night…
Nonsense on stilts, you haven’t accounted for what the numpties plan for domestic heating, which leaves no spare capacity at all for battery charging:
” the amount of gas used in domestic heating is 26 million tons of oil equivalent per year, which just happens to also be the total consumption of electrical energy in the UK. So, to phase out gas heating, the electricity generating capacity of the UK will have to double, without using fossil fuels, as replacing gas burned in boilers with gas burned in power stations would be a pointless and extremely expensive exercise. Not only that, but the whole distribution network right down to the feeds to the meters will have to be uprated to carry the additional load. Needless to say, there is no announcement from the government about starting either of these upgrades.
I would like to think that the government’s targets are just pious hopes expressed with an eye to a general election in 2024, but I’m not going to hold my breath. We live in an era of policy-based evidence, after all.
To deliver 1kwh of electricity to a home, 2kwh worth of gas has to be burned in a power station. Transmission losses consume 1kwh, leaving 1 kwh deliverable to the end user. It is infinitely more efficient to convert 1kwh worth of gas to heat AT THE POINT OF USE. Even better, burning gas at the point of use does not require the sun to be shining nor the wind to be blowing.”
I thought we were talking about electric cars? Replacing gas heating with electric may or may not be a good idea but that is a different question.
In rough terms, there is plenty of capacity for generation, but not necessarily for local delivery, via the district network, depending on the total load in a given area. It’s likely that a degree of automatic demand curtailment would be implemented, rather than installing loads more cabling to meet the peak. Where I live they have only just renewed a whole load of it, for different reasons; fairly unlikely to want to do it again soon just to meet a peak demand. A bit more here: https://youtu.be/LS8VFhRMsYY About 5 mins, but the main detail is from around 2 1/2 in. At present, if every house in my street tried to do it simultaneously, it would not work; the local transformer would trip out.
This place is sometimes useful: https://grid.iamkate.com/ All sorts of grid data on display there.
Richard Dawkins struggles with the concept of other people having an opinion, doesn’t he? Anyway. If you don’t feel well, you stay at home. Even with a cold (mild coronavirus). So with a slightly more troublesome virus, definitely stay at home until you are better. Done. I think the rest of it is about mates making money, with the minor side effect of lots of people dying of healthcare denial. Hopefully not important people. Lockdowns should keep the nasty, diseased lower orders away from those who lead proper lives, with jets and holidays and stuff.
Dawkins is not and never has been a philosopher which is why his arugments are like Swiss cheeses.
That said, it wouldn’t be difficult for Dawkins to argue the analogy with cars is wrongly set out in this article. For Dawkins, cars would be the equivalent of our bodies. If we drive cars carelessly we are prosecuted. People can equally, under the law, be prosecuted for knowingly infecting another person (eg with HIV). However Dawkins would argue that as a pragmatic matter we cannot track the respiratory virus in the same way we can the HIV virus, so we have to have preventative laws, just as we have laws about roadworthiness, MOTs and driving licences.
However, it all depends on your philsophical principles. Dawkins seems to be applying some sort of narrow utilitarian calculus. He could be criticised in more than one way. He could for instance be criticised as having too narrow a conception of the calculus that needs to be applied (what about negative effects of masking and lockdowns, effects on education, effects on natural immunity etc).
I would argue that in order to know how to deal with his sort of ethical challenge you first have to understand what it is to be a human being, just as if you want to know how to treat a horse, you have to understand what a horse is.
The government has been working to some v non-holistic, reductionist ideas about humanity: that we need to minimise risk so it as small as possible, that it is legitimate to purposively make us afraid, that freedom is dangerous, that our social interactions can be reduced to a bare minimum, that our views needs to be controlled, that our physical liberty is of no or little consequence.
I would argue that any Covid response needs to be grounded in a view of humanity as beings who are essentially free by their nature, who need free social interaction, who value their cultural practices, who need to be able to breathe freely and exercise freely, who – like all social primates – are vulnerable to a kind of hysteria when fear levels rise, and who have incredibly complex immune systems developed over billions of years which deal with just about all pathogens (as long as humans are well nourished, can interact freely with others, are not overworked and are not obliged to live in unsanitary conditions or ingest toxic materials).
I think if that is your philosophical starting point, you will end up with much better decision-making in central government.
But of course Covid decision making doesn’t stand in isolation. Ever since the populist revolts of 2016, the BBC and MSM generally had been engaged in a pysops campaign to make people doubt their own judgement, to always value expertise over personal experience, to query the value of democracy, to accept PC ideology, to accept that people like Soros and Gates are “philanthropists” rather than determined ideologues and to anathematise populists as evil propagandists. That is a key reason why when it came to the “pandemic” it was so easy to herd people into bovine servitude.
Very well put indeed. Chapeau!
I especially like this paragraph, which put the case in a nutshell:
“The government has been working to some v non-holistic, reductionist ideas about humanity: that we need to minimise risk so it as small as possible, that it is legitimate to purposively make us afraid, that freedom is dangerous, that our social interactions can be reduced to a bare minimum, that our views needs to be controlled, that our physical liberty is of no or little consequence.“
As Julian says, very well put. But if our freedom depends on coming to a consensus on what it means to be human, we are well and truly screwed.
Our world has been taken over by a coalition of the two most dangerous groups in society: psychopaths and idiots.
The first despise humanity and the second are, well, too stupid to understand yoir point and why they are being robbed of their humanity.
Psychopaths are few but over represented in positions of high power. Idiots are just too abundant.
Stewart & Julian. Another well thought out and well put reply. Couldn’t agree more.
One of the best comments I’ve seen on this subject. Indeed, very well put.
Agreed! Excellent summation.
The counter argument to lockdowns prevent us from harming others is that the lockdowns themselves cause harm to people, with increased mental health problems, suicides, untreated diseases other than CV19, poverty leading to poorer health, etc, etc.
Not forgetting that lockdown delivers no tangible benefit by way of diminishing respiratory illness spread as proven by the likes of Sweden or any of the anti-lockdown US states.
Exactly.
Lockdowns are just the wrong answer to the trolley problem.
On principle, because unalienable individual rights should be supreme and are infringed upon or abolished by them, and because the potential collateral damage is unknowable (saving 5 people on the track by killing 1, but not being able to see the 20 behind the 1). In practice, because they are pseudo-science, their efficiency is unknown/zero/actually worsening the Covid result, they set a terrible precedent and are imposdible to exit, and because their potential huge collateral damage was pretty obvious and very clear to see before they were instituted.
Western Lockdowns will have destroyed roughly 200x as many QALYs than they saved in each Western country.
And they will have killed 120million people in the 3rd world as per the World Bank estimate, of which Britons then have the blood of 5 million on their hands, Germans 6 million (as many as the Jews killed by them) and Americans roughly 30 million.
But then, likely, that was one of the main points of them.
Why can I not argue that I am entitled to take a risk as a matter of individual liberty?
Because Dawkins says so?
I’m really fed up of “scientists” telling me what I can and cannot do.
Nice
They love the taxes they levy on car use but detest the freedom that driving gives us. The zealous control freaks will drive us off the road eventually.
In the meantime, they will stop us using internal combustion engines and use road pricing to tax and track us. The “driver re-education” industry will flourish and will expand to cover brainwashing in other areas of our life. Mask awareness courses?
If the numbers of the Portuguese court are teansferred to the UK, even less people really died of Covid than in traffic.
And as the Austrian Whitty just said before being sent off into a slightly earlier retirement by the Austrian Hancock/Javid, if we hadn’t had the PCR test and used it so excessively, we wouldn’t have noticed any anomaly.
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumnen/aus-aller-welt/corona-pcr-tests-ages-allerberger/
Do not let Dawkins confuse you with his externalities argument. Externality is just a clever name for the simple idea of thinking about “unforeseen” and “un-costed” consequences of an action. Maybe well exemplified in the Buddhist prayer about not treading on any ants which most of us would not notice or care about.
Unless the person is utterly perverse (truly evil), all human actions stem from some kind of a cost benefit analysis of a realisation that “this would on balance be a good thing to do”. The problem is of course that that perspective may be limited not taking in the whole story, selfish, ideologically biased and/or in fact misinformed. But what is fundamental behind the cost benefit analysis you make on any proposed action is the set of values by which you assess the cost benefit. What do you actually believe in?
The situation around lockdown is that no government has properly assessed the cost benefit of doing so – although it was clear from the start that the lockdown measures were going to cost more than the NICE 30K per life adjusted year supposedly saved by the GIGO (garbage in garbage out) modelling. Government must therefore have some other perceived good for these measures then, even if it is just arse covering fear of the echo chamber of a politically correct and woke media and electorate, because they have no honest and open values to hold a difficult line with.
But what value do you put on the basic rights and freedoms to live a worthwhile and meaningful life? Stopping living to mainly avoid dying from a single disease, when we all still have to die in the end, is itself also in the end perverse, even if it is unwittingly perverse.
Net Zero and a question of honesty
By
Dr Benny Peiser
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/net-zero-and-a-question-of-honesty/
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday 10am meet fellow lockdown sceptics
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Doris and Carrie (and Stanley) have already banned cars. 2030 bye bye.
Covid was the ruse to protect the earth for pleb/people hating millionaires and billionaires like Stanley, Charles and Gates.
What gives Richard Dawkins the right to tell us what we CAN and CAN NOT argue about? (Perhaps because he is a right kind of scientist).
Furthermore his argument makes no sense anyway. The first part of the quote says we can argue over the effectiveness of measures. Well surely we can say that the Government has no right to restrict our freedom on the basis of ineffective measures?
I actually think restricting freedom to the extent the government has is unjustified, even if it reduces covid cases.
The answer to the first question is that Dawkins and other believe that the only questions worth asking are scientific ones (“it’s just basic epidemiology”). He thinks science can tell us what we ought to think, what morality means and what a good society looks like. Science is the wrong tool to be using for questions about moral good.
But Dawkin’s arguments are not even scientific and, furthermore, science proceeds by debate and NOT by diktat!
The only good thing about Richard Dawkins is that he isn’t George Monbiot
I loathe Richard Dawkins and his zealous atheistic religion – his deluded selfish gene theory is simplistic in the extreme and serves a dangerous utopian transhuman agenda – this covid bullshit is an extension of this agenda – 101 virology – viruses are not spread asymptotically – otherwise we could never ever socialise (ummm there are a shitload of other viruses out there)… Dawkins is more dangerous than any virus – stay away
In the name of God, can we please just stop banning things?
Live your own life and allow others to live theirs
What has happened to LS? It seems to have joined the nanny state revolution. Almost any current human activity causes emissions, so rather than move back into the dark ages we need to use our scientific competence to reduce them. If we weren’t using motorised vehicles to transport ourselves, some alternative means would need to be found or is the writer suggesting we move back to horse based transport with the pollution and probably the same level of danger that would cause.
People need to take responsibility for their actions and the consequences thereof. Anyone who wants to avoid the current low risk of Covid-19 is entitled to shut themselves away and keep themselves miles away from any human contact and wear a full sealed body-suit with an oxygen tank when in the danger of any contact with anything, but don’t impose that stupidity on me. If in the case of me living a normal and fulfilling life, I catch Covid-19 anyone who doesn’t want to take the risk of catching it from me is entitled to take their own precautions which are well known, but bearing in mind the low level of risk of serious illness or death from it now I think we should all be allowed to live normally.
The government has caused many naive people to believe their exaggerated scare propaganda to validate their excessive and often unjustified use of lockdowns, the problem is those who believed in it cannot rid themselves of the habit and listen to the superior scientists who knew and know the crazy models based on nothing but incompetent guesswork were wrong as the actual data has proved. These people are easily duped by the government’s presentations of extremely distorted data to justify their unjustifiable actions and don’t make the effort, because they think they should be able to believe their government, (wrong!) to check the actual data and discover the lies we are being told by them and their SAGE Committee.
Sorry but I had to laugh about the road accidents and fatalities. 1,700 killed in one year!!!! Ha, ha, ha That’s a low death rate on the roads in Thailand for ONE MONTH.
Up until January this year the daily death rate of 65+ was greater than the total death rate for 9 months of covid.
I stopped reading this drivel when the numbers for deaths from pollution were introduced.
The last time this crap was trotted out it was immediately found the analysis was subjective, based on assessments of deaths by Doctors, and that most ‘victims’ were elderly and/or with comorbidities that they would have died from anyway. Furthermore, it was found the life expectancy for those people was estimated to be from hours to a few days longer than the assessment concluded.
I think there is only one death so far recorded as caused by environmental pollution in the UK. It was a young girl with severe asthma whose parents refused to move away from a ‘heavily’ polluted road (somewhere on the North Circular from memory).