Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

At the start of the pandemic, Australia determined to squeeze out COVID with lockdowns and travel restrictions and, as an island nation, had considerable success. It was the last of the G-20 countries to hit 1,000 total COVID deaths.

But this created an unrealistic expectation that Australia could have “COVID zero” as a goal for the duration, and use targeted restrictions and surveillance (“circuit-breakers”) to maintain it.

As the pandemic has dragged on, this has become completely untenable and done violence to liberty and common sense in a great English-speaking nation.

Lockdowns have cut a swath through the norms and conventions of an advanced Western democracy, from the suspension of a state-level parliament to the banning of protests to military enforcement of the COVID rules.

With the Delta surge, more than half of Australians are locked down, often in response to a tiny number of cases.

ustralian authorities don’t fool around. State premiers have vast powers, and use them. In Melbourne, located in the state of Victoria, a curfew is in place, and limits apply to people leaving their homes. There are hefty fines for noncompliance.

The spirit of the lockdowns was perfectly captured a few months ago by the chief health officer of the state of New South Wales who warned, “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that.”

Ah yes, the public-health threat of over-chattiness.

The Australian news media might as well be an arm of the public-health bureaucracy, producing stilted and hysterical reports about lockdown violators worthy of some dystopian future.

The state of South Australia has developed an app to enforce home quarantines. As a news report explains, “the app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.” If they fail to do so, the health department will notify the police, who will send officers to check on the possible malefactor.

Unrestricted travel is a hallmark of a free society, but Australians can barely leave the country. Travel has been cut off between states, creating an arbitrary patchwork of states trying to isolate themselves from COVID cases elsewhere.

Tens of thousands of Australians have been trapped overseas, unable to come back home because of monthly limits on returning Australians.

All of this economic and social disruption and coercion hasn’t been enough to stamp out the Delta variant, which is outrunning the government controls.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison finally admitted the obvious the other day: “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country.”

Cases in Australia are up 15,800% since the Washington Post said they had almost eliminated COVID by putting faith in science.

They’re up 5,863% just since late June when Sydney locked down and brought back masks.

Can we stop pretending “faith in science” works yet? pic.twitter.com/RJWzyj7dpf

— IM (@ianmSC) September 4, 2021

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.

I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.

She's got a message for Biden: "You ain't my pimp." pic.twitter.com/8WQ53c3DIq

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) September 10, 2021

Concerns Raised Over Design Of Military's New Vaccine Enforcement Drones https://t.co/V6IxZJqHus

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 10, 2021

I cant breathe 😂😂😂 pmsl#Toto#Africa 🎧 pic.twitter.com/rVzoudYD67

— Mucky Bandit© (@Yorkshirebandit) September 2, 2021