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Apr 30, 2022Liked by epimetheus

Here in the UK, flat-pack ICUs were constructed to cope with the demand that garbage-in-garbage-out mathematical modeller Neil Ferguson (presented by the BBC as an epidemiologist) told us would be overwhelming. They remained empty and were packed away again. Winter came, the behavioural psychologists took over from the mathematicians as chief panic-merchants. A woman was arrested for filming empty hospital wards. Spring came and the spring-denying BBC told us lockdown had vanquished the deadly plague. I ceased listening to the BBC, but millions didn't. Scandinavia looked relatively sane.

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Same shit, different smell.

Mr. Ferguson is a quite unsavoury character, and the notion of closing down unoccupied wards is, well, 'normal'. Abnormal was (is) the agit-prop fearmongering.

Re the comparative sanity: well, yes, but only by comparison, I'd argue.

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May 1, 2022Liked by epimetheus

Neo-Liberal in the Austrian economic sense is free markets. No government heavy handedness. No laws that protect the medical establishment business model. No government subsidy.

Just people who have wants and needs choosing where to spend their money. New ideas and services quickly replacing those out of touch with reality.

I don't know if the free market has existed since the dawn of hierarchy beyond the Dunbar Number though.

There are the Neo-Conservatives you could blame which would be more accurate, but then you would draw the ire of those types, better to blame the Neo-Liberals Because none exist in places where actual policy is made.

But you know a bit of what I think, its a fascist economy from top to bottom including from where you draw a paycheck.

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May 2, 2022Liked by epimetheus

Pet peeve: what an economic/financial model (or ideological/religious) say about itself and the world in its theory is irrelevant regarding implementation: if one school of thought gets to say "It wasn't real ______!", they all do.

It's kind of like when an architect or an engineer complains about people using their constructoins the way they want, instead of as intended. If you've ever seen a park where people have made their own paths, you have seen the perfect example of the disparaty between professional/expert and their ideas, and actual reality.

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May 2, 2022Liked by epimetheus

The experts will construct a fence to prove they are right!

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And levy fines on those who 'trespass' (on public property, no less).

Also, the blame will be shifted primarily onto those who exercised their own will, for they (we) are the problem.

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Exactly. If only we'd agree to set aside ideological blinders when talking about the 20th century. The major change, as I see it, is the massive and unprecedented, if not entirely unforeseen (here's looking you, Mikhail Bakhunin and Max Weber), expansion of the reach, depth, and breadth of state power.

Big Business is the flip side of this change, which took over the world as a consequence of both world wars, as exemplified by New Deal America, Nazi Germany, and the USSR: all cut from the same cloth, and while I acknowledge differences, the role of government increased during the 1930s, and it never receded.

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Apr 30, 2022Liked by epimetheus

I saw NPM, I had to step outside and chop firewood.

NPM is to organisations what necrotising fasciitis is to the body.

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Yep, NPM is to 'bureaucracy' perhaps the same as 'military music' is to, say, Mozart or Beethoven.

Curiously enough, the report says that it took a fake pandemic to break a fake system (NPM).

I suppose the powers-that-be will move to 'defund' the public health insurance system, or whatever is left of it after 20 years of NPM, next. Taxes won't go down, though, which means what comes now will be an even worse deal than NPM.

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Apr 30, 2022Liked by epimetheus

Efficiency and peak capacity are polar opposites in engineering. This is true for manufacturing and hospitals, both.

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Also, they sit on quite opposite sites of the 'availability' spectrum.

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Apr 30, 2022Liked by epimetheus

"And legacy media, again, screws up the reporting, with a 'bonus' analogy about post-modern technocracy, which is really anarcho-syndicalism for the few"

Don't the "few" own the legacy media?

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I suppose they do, but then again, it's not exactly rocket science, eh?

Media is highly concentrate in Norway; if you care to follow up on this, just search for 'schibsted group'.

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deletedApr 30, 2022·edited Apr 30, 2022
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Re the historical experiences: well, my personal take is, sure, it's very exciting, and please let me give you the concrete example of WW2 'scholarship' (which is, honestly, mainly scholasticism redux, i.e., a farce):

Basically, the question as to 'why Auschwitz?' is answered in two ways: you either belong to the 'originalist' camp, by which is meant that National Socialism was always about gassing Jews from the earliest days in the late 1910s, early 1920s. Alternatively, you may fall into the 'escalation' category, which holds that the Nazis may not have been that extraordinary to begin with, but that they, driven by events, increasingly 'radicalised', hence ending up gassing Jews.

I'd argue, in all brevity (and if so desired, I shall go on about this at length in the near future), that the former option is, well, BS, which means that the 'incrementalist' interpretation makes sense.

So, in a nutshell, re-think the past two years to have a real-world--and real-time--almost natural experiment of creeping phascism, and: voilà.

Too bad that there isn't a historian anywhere who says that out loud…

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deletedMay 1, 2022·edited May 1, 2022
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I'd add the following corollary: the politicians may fall in the 'gradualist', or 'incrementalist', camp, but there's apparently premeditation 'behind' all of this, which would support the 'pre-planned' camp.

So, I suppose that I subscribe to a 'ecumenical' view, which applies to both 'Nazism' and 'Covidism'. We must talk about the implications in either set of circumstances.

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