You’re Losing Your Freedoms, Sucker!

This weekend I went to a number of very neat downtown bars. The bar owners and employees were desperate to make sure that us patrons followed the city’s draconian face mask policies. The employees constantly (and aggressively) reminded us that if we did not abide by the face mask rules THEY would get shut down.

These rules ran something like this: if you are standing or moving around the bar you MUST wear a mask. If you are seated, the mask can be off.

Now, I’m not a virologist, but I don’t think the C-word gives a single shit about whether you are standing or sitting in order for it to spread. You’re in a tight, enclosed space with fifty other people: you’ve accepted the risks.

We have deluded ourselves into a dystopian reality completely bereft of common sense. The experience was both sad and terrifying.

Sad because these businesses oozed with desperation for us us to adhere to the government policies. Many of the bar managers said that if they had to shut down again they would definitely go out of business.

Terrifying because the government has essentially outsourced the policing of its mask mandates. If you’re at a bar and an employee threatens to kick you out because of your mask, you’re going to take your anger out on the bar and its employees, not the people who are the root cause of the problem.

To make matters worse, local news media was frequenting many of these bars and taking photos of the “bad social distancing” in an effort to have these bars fined or shut back down.

The incentives are screwed, and as a result we have lost track of the role of governments and business in our society. If we continue down this road we are moving head long into a Soviet/Chinese style tyrannical overreach that leads to internment camps and genocide.

Hyperbolic much? The internment camps are already here.

Today we imprison college students if they happen to live on campus and catch the virus. Read this article about Boise State University:

The part that stood out the most to me was the observation that students locked up in this fashion very quickly begin to show signs of depression and mental health issues. There’s a reason that prisons use solitary confinement as a threat to get their inmates to behave: it’s one of the harshest forms of psychological torture known to man.

We should be infuriated by this gross overreach of government tyranny and terrified of the future consequences.

This is not okay.

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