The Digger

―So you’d give the Devil benefit of law! ―Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ―I’d cut down every law in England to do that! ―Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on yo u—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them dow n—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. —Robert Bolt,  A Man for All Seasons Allusions to the Maoist cultural revolution launched in 1966 are sometimes used to deride the current wave of Social Justice activism. It’s easy to scoff at such hyperbolic comparisons, but the analogy isn’t mere caricature. It expresses a genuine preoccupation about how a moral movement can go astray. In this view, the Chinese cultural revolution is an extreme example of a soc

Mask Madness — Our Latest Moral Panic BY   BRIGGS   ON   JULY 24, 2020   •   (  35 COMMENTS  ) We might as well have a tinfoil hat mandate to protect from aliens. It would, at this point, be just as useful. Should somebody tell him about the evidence about masks and the end of pandemics? Nah. Evidence and reason are now utterly useless. When are leaders get into a purity spiral, there is nothing to stop them—except the next crisis. According to  one depressing poll , three-quarters of Americans agree with The Godmother. Three out of four Americans, including a majority of Republicans, favor requiring people to wear face coverings while outside their homes, a new poll finds, reflecting fresh alarm over spiking coronavirus cases and a growing embrace of government advice intended to safeguard public health. The only part of this that makes any sense is the “fresh alarm”, which is real. But caused entirely—and I mean  entirely —by ignorance and politics. How many ti

Ratcheteering — The Mob and the Mind Screw By  Zen Gardner It was wickedly clever of these planners to use that “new normal” meme. The ratchet job into more and more dystopia has been going on for a long time, but this overt label-hanging bumps the very baseline, an irreversible platform from which even more manipulable insanity can be attained. Not for all, of course. But enough. That’s all that matters to a deranged strategist. The full meaning of ratchet is quite telling: –a device consisting of a bar or wheel with a set of angled teeth in which a pawl, cog, or tooth engages, allowing motion  in one direction only . –a situation or process that is perceived to be deteriorating or changing steadily in a series of irreversible steps. Pretty much nails what we’re experiencing. It’s not intrinsically natural by any means. It’s once again aberrant behavior on the part the deranged few trying to control the many. Yet it’s part of the Universe of possibilities within

A Pandemic of Surveillance Americans are increasingly monitored, and COVID-19 health concerns aren’t improving the situation. J.D. TUCCILLE Pandemic maps are all the rage, these days, but the latest one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a little different; instead of viral hotspots, it displays a plague of official snoopiness, arranged by location and sortable by technology. While it documents intrusions that predate the current crisis, the  Atlas of Surveillance  is all too relevant to the age of coronavirus. Concerns about curtailing contagion help to normalize detailed scrutiny of people's lives and drive us toward a pervasive surveillance state. "The Atlas of Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs' offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check