Setting neighbor against neighbor in eager cruelty is an evil worse than a virus

One of the reasons I am in favor of political and charitable donations (particularly from individuals) being as anonymous as the donator wishes them to be is because a fair number of people in our day see “list of people who donated to cause or candidate I do not like” as “list of people whose life I should make every possible effort to destroy”. And electronic and social media has made efforts to destroy the life of another as low-risk and immediately pleasurable as perhaps it has ever been, which encourages people to make the effort.

I mentioned in the last post here that GiveSendGo, which had “taken over” donations for the Canadian truckers from GoFundMe, had been hacked. At the time I did not realize that the hack included obtaining, and then releasing, a list of all the people who had donated to the truckers - oh good, a list of people whose lives we should destroy. And of course that was the whole point of releasing the list.

Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 @ezralevant

BREAKING: Trudeau's CBC state broadcaster is combing through the illegally hacked database of GiveSendGo donors, and emailing donors asking them to explain themselves.

And now we get to enjoy articles like, from the Ottawa Citizen, “Threats close Stella Luna Gelato Café after owner's name appears in GiveSendGo data leak”.

Helen Andrews @herandrews

After her $250 GiveSendGo donation was leaked, "We got a call from the team saying, 'We're getting phone calls here . . . They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.'" The gelato shop is now closed.

Alison Mah @alisonmah

The owner of Stella Luna says she regrets making her $250 donation to the truck convoy, saying she thought it was a “peaceful, grassroots movement.” She made the donation Feb. 5, when police were calling the protest“volatile and dangerous." By @GetBAC https://t.co/cVLwBDJWMI

Alison Mah is an editor at the newspaper, and note that her preferred phrasing here is something like, “she made the donation after police were already saying they were bad, she should’ve known better”. Because journalists egg this behavior on more than anyone else.

David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense @davereaboi

The animals in the media are what they’ve always been. But the replies from leftist Canadians—they truly want their fellow citizens to suffer and die—is something new. Covid rhetoric has brought death into the policy debate like never before; half the country wants you to die.

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A few thoughts, if I may

One, there is an alternate reality out there where public health recognizes that setting neighbor against neighbor in eager cruelty should itself be counted as a failure of public health… and one much worse than a virus, in fact. Public health officials, the media, and others didn’t create this impulse within man, but they did encourage people to let it out.

Two, even when it is trying to function rationally, the whole idea of a “public health response” carries within in it the requirement to weigh how important one aspect of human life is as compared to another aspect. It is therefore an inherently worldview-dependent, or we could even say religious, activity. Perhaps most obviously, is telling people they cannot attend church worth whatever reduction in viral spread will result? Do the benefits of masking the faces of children exceed the harms? Is making the unvaccinated a designated target of rage for the public a good idea if it’ll slightly raise vaccination rates? One way to understand why our public health response has been so dysfunctional is to say that, when officials were implicitly forced to decide “is A more important than B, or is B more important than A?”, they have constantly made the wrong choice, and it turned society upside-down.

Three, we live in evil times. Many have remarked that we had all these pandemic plans written for exactly this moment, and then the moment arrived, and we ignored them. Actually we often acted exactly oppositely of what those plans indicated we should do in this situation.

PoliMath @politicalmath

We were told, in 2006, how to respond to a worldwide "flu-like" pandemic from the man with more real-world experience in disease eradication than anyone in history Our leaders decided to simply ignore everything he said

(I’m not sure you can see PoliMath’s link above, so here it is.) Why did we respond so poorly? Because, when we wrote those plans, we were decently sober-minded and had a proper concern for such things as “maintaining social cohesion and a well functioning society”. And many people now either don’t much care about those things, or actually want to destroy them. I would not be the first person in history to note that authoritarians find a divided and angry populace much easier to manipulate and control. And generally, sin enjoys destroying what is good, for the very reason that it is good. No further “benefit” is needed besides that sinful pleasure of destruction.

So, as just about every critical post I write seems to end - people have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened.

THE END