The pandemic highlighted how decades of pushing for socialism have utterly destroyed our ability to measure costs against benefits and evaluate risk. We're down to people refusing to take vaccines until they're 100% effective and demands for lockdown until we have 0% coronavirus.

Political violence is always wrong and should never be tolerated from anyone. Once "protesters" threaten lives and property, their grievances and ideology should become absolutely irrelevant to the situation.

That is, obviously, not the country we live in.

Long ago, we had an attitude of zero tolerance for terrorism, "we do not negotiate with terrorists," etc. One reason for this was the implicit understanding that negotiating with terrorism legitimizes it. Violence becomes an instrument of politics.

Some of us warned all last year that treating violence as acceptable, even laudable, from SOME people would mainstream it and touch off an arms race. Everyone would start getting the idea that only groups with a demonstrated capacity for violence are taken seriously.

When violence becomes acceptable from one party and its clients, one ideology, it becomes an instrument of authoritarianism. That's why authoritarian regimes frequently have violent vigilante groups roaming the streets in addition to their vast security and military forces.

Iran, for example, has all sorts of heavily armed police and security forces, working for both its secular and theocratic governments, but it ALSO has ultra-violent "vigilante" groups indulged by the State whose "grievances" supposedly justify vandalism and murder.

Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.

Minimum wage hikes are an easy pander - thank politicians for "giving you a raise," and don't think about all the jobs they destroyed! - but they're also an important weapon in the Left's war on the middle class.

An important lesson of the post-Cold War era, learned far too late: allowing totalitarian regimes to interface with the political, economic, and media systems of free nations is like installing a dangerous virus on a computer.

The suicidal folly of globalism was believing the reverse: that freedom and democracy would leak into totalitarian systems and produce quiet revolutions. As we know after 30 years of disastrous experimentation, tyranny is FAR more viral than liberty in the modern world.

Tyranny, like a computer virus, breaks all the rules that allow free markets and democracies to function. Tyranny ruthlessly exploits "weaknesses" in the code of free systems, working from beyond the reach of the legal or social enforcement systems in targeted nations.

Tyrannical nations use brutal methods to extract value from their people, then invest that value to target and destroy industries in free countries, taking control of important supply chains with production unencumbered by the costs free societies impose on their companies.

Tyrannical nations easily overwhelm the media of free societies with propaganda, ideological content and official lies. A tyranny can run op-eds in free-world newspapers while silencing all dissent, both foreign and domestic, in its own state media.

Panic has always been a valuable political resource, but 2020 was the year our ruling class perfected the art of harvesting it, renewing it, and refining it to weapons-grade purity.

The bitter irony is that one reason panic became so easy for politicians and grifters to sow and reap is the great collapse in confidence caused by their own incompetence and greed over the past few decades. The political class found a way to profit from its own ineptitude.

If public confidence in government and major institutions had not been so thoroughly shaken by years of rampant corruption and incredibly expensive failures, perhaps the public would not have been panicked so easily - and profitably! - when the coronavirus struck.

Even as public confidence collapsed and paranoia grew, social media came along to make our society more twitchy and neurotic. We argue constantly about the spread of "disinformation," but not enough about how social media rewards irrationality and performative emotionalism.

Panic and social media both nourish the human herd instinct, and herds respond to loud noises, not reasonable arguments. Our society was panicking over far less important and dangerous things before Covid-19 arrived. We were panicking over some bizarre social issue every week.

*Heads-up that this thread will feature some extreme examples of homophobia and transphobia.*

Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.

Groups such as this would lure unsuspecting gay men via dating sites, and brutalise and humiliate them on camera. They did so under the guise of combating child abusers, one group calling themselves "Occupy

THREAD: We filed RTIs on behalf of @no2uid asking the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare questions about how your personal data will be protected while you're using CO-WIN, the COVID-19 vaccination registration platform.

We got answers... kind of. Here's the new info.

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Just like with Aarogya Setu, many Indians are worried that about the potential CO-WIN has to leak your data or threaten your privacy in the name of dealing with a pandemic. So, we asked the MOHFW some questions about data protection under the Right to Information Act.
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In the responses we received, MOHFW said that it cannot provide us with a privacy policy on CO-WIN (?!).

Thankfully it was clarified that Aadhaar is not mandatory for registration on Aarogya Setu or CO-WIN, and that physical vaccine certificates will be provided to everyone.
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The data it says it will collect will be your name, gender, date of birth, photo ID, and number.

National, State, and District level admins will have access to use the app, but there is not much further clarity on this point.

But most importantly...
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The responses (or rather lack of them) related to your data privacy and protection are completely vague. We received no clear answers on which Ministries/Depts will have access to your personal data, the permissions provided, etc. This is a failure in terms of transparency.
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