Tom Woods on the insanity of 2020

I have no idea what is going to happen in the world even in the near future, much less ten years from now. Imagine being at a point where you positively long for Bill Clinton, and that's where we are now. 

We turn on the TV (mistake #1) and a reporter is seriously telling us that protests are "mostly peaceful" while buildings burn directly behind him, on camera. If you and I protested something and one of our signs had a misplaced semicolon, the news would breathlessly report on the rise of fascism in America.

Just the other day the President Tweeted something clearly true: we don't shut the country down for the flu. We learn to live with it, in exactly the same way that we will obviously have to learn to live with COVID. We can't shut down all of society in a monomaniacal battle against one thing. There will be horrific consequences. At the very least, that's an eminently defensible view, and one held by some of the best scientific minds in the world. Twitter attached a statement saying that this is ordinarily the kind of Tweet they'd remove, but that in the public interest they're keeping it up. 

Today a senior writer with the Washington Post tried to debunk the claim that for some groups the flu is more deadly than COVID -- but in order to do so he had to use CFR figures for one and IFR figures for the other. This is a top person at one of our top newspapers. 

NPR just ran an item on how dangerous schools are, even though every bit of data we have, from all over the world, tells us the exact opposite. 

Three months ago, Washington, D.C., reached numbers indicating that it should have been at phase 3 of reopening, but it's still in lockdown limbo, indefinitely. 

They told us 15 days to slow the spread. It's day 205. They said we could have our lives back when we got a vaccine -- as if that were a guarantee. Now they're saying we can't have our lives back even with a vaccine. 

Joe Biden -- the man leading in the polls -- promises more of the same. Lockdown forever. Your countrymen are begging to have their life savings depleted and be confined to their homes -- or at least that's what the poll numbers seem to suggest. 

To call this insanity wouldn't come close to the scope of what's happening here.

Tom Woods, October 7, 2020

Shannon Alder on living in the present

The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Eckhart Tolle on sanity and insanity

To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Erich Fromm on avoiding the crowd

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

~ Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

Tim Burton on insanity

One person's craziness is another person's reality.

~ Tim Burton

Kurt Vonnegut on insanity

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

Marcus Aurelius on the mania of crowds

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

~ Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, Meditations

Albert Einstein on stubbornness

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

~ Albert Einstein

Nietzsche on crowd behavior

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche