Jaume Ferrer

Autodidacta. Lliure. Demòcrata. El sentit de la vida.

[Jaume Ferrer @JaumeFerr]

PRAGER: The Lockdown Has Gone From A Mistake To A Crime https://t.co/yyOxHoGMIF

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Not a single EU citizen got to have a say in this. One dictatorship sending it's people’s money to another.

[Jaume Ferrer @JaumeFerr]

Los dos tenéis razón.

[Jordi Évole @jordievole]

Qué razón tienes Juan. En cambio Feijoo y Abascal tienen pinta de haberse leído la enciclopedia Larousse de la A a la Y (la Z se la saltaron por no llegar a Zapatero) y los Episodios Nacionales de Galdós se los saben de memoria. Dentro de poco estaremos en buenas manos. 🫶🏻

[Dr. Gator @DrJoelGator]

The biggest mistake institutions can make right now is thinking people have lost trust because they were “misinformed.”

RFK Jr.’s speech showed the opposite.

People lost trust because they watched institutions dismiss questions, attack dissenters and act like skepticism itself was dangerous.

You don’t rebuild trust by demanding it.

You rebuild it by earning it.

[Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi]

Early March 2020 — media was also pushing calm.

The populace wanted none of it. The populace wanted panic and doom, and so — of course — media obliged.

[MadeofStone @samasega]

@Paracelsvs2 No se queje, no han sacado el cambio climático

[Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi]

COVID memory gets cleaner every year.

Here are 27 things people forgot — the rituals, coercion, censorship, lost liberties, and sheer weirdness of what actually happened. https://t.co/BEGg7YNvvk

[Dr Aseem Malhotra @DrAseemMalhotra]

Correct

[Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi]

(27) THEY WANTED MORE
Much of this wasn’t imposed on a reluctant population. PEOPLE DEMANDED IT. They enforced it on one another. Invented extra rituals. Went beyond the mandates. Shamed dissenters. Asked employers to fire people. Asked platforms to silence people. Supported tracking, confinement and even separating children from unvaccinated parents. The sanitized history turns COVID into government versus freedom, but a huge part of it was frightened people demanding authority and then helping enforce it on one another.

[Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi]

THE PANDEMIC YOU REMEMBER DIDN’T HAPPEN

The memory of COVID has settled into a nice little morality play: a terrifying pandemic arrived, science rose to fight it, governments reluctantly did what science required, and millions of responsible people banded together — while a bunch of selfish assholes refused to bend the knee and made everything worse.

That isn’t what happened.

What happened was a worldwide mass hysteria. The PERCEPTION of the pandemic changed with astonishing speed, and frightened populations began demanding that governments DO SOMETHING.

People forget that governments themselves initially pushed for calm. In the U.S., as late as February 29, Trump was asking the media not to incite panic; Health Secretary Alex Azar emphasized that the vast majority of infected people would have mild-to-moderate illness; and Fauci stressed that serious illness was concentrated heavily among older people and those with underlying conditions.

Britain was still saying much the same IN MARCH. On March 3, Boris Johnson said the overwhelming majority would have mild disease and told people to go about their business as usual. On March 5, SAGE said there was no evidence that banning very large gatherings would reduce transmission. As late as March 12, the government was still saying that banning major events would have little effect and that closing schools at that point could do more harm than good.

Then the switch flipped.

What followed wasn’t simply authoritarianism imposed from above. Much of it was demanded and enforced FROM BELOW. People begged governments, employers, schools, restaurants, airlines, doctors, social-media companies — and one another — to impose restrictions. They reported neighbors. Shamed strangers. Demanded people be fired. Wanted the unvaccinated confined. Invented rituals that weren’t even required. Institutions competed to show that they were taking COVID more seriously than the institution next door.

And perhaps strangest of all, CIVIL LIBERTIES SUDDENLY BECAME OPTIONAL. Freedom of movement, association, assembly, speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent — protections supposedly designed precisely for moments when governments and majorities are frightened — were suddenly treated as ordinary policy variables to be balanced away. Fauci captured the mood when challenged about restrictions: “I don’t look at this as a liberty thing.” COVID true believers routinely mocked anti-lockdowners for wanting “FREEDUMB.” Freedom itself became the punchline. Almost overnight, asking whether government had the RIGHT to do these things sounded quaint. The question became simply: might it help?

It was totalitarianism in a peculiar form: AUTHORITARIANISM IMPLEMENTED BOTTOM-UP.

So if your memory is still “science fought a deadly virus while the bad people refused to bend the knee to the new religion that sprang up in mid-March 2020,” here’s a reminder of just how fucking irrational we became:

🧵

[Rana Yashwant @RanaYashwant1]

पुतिन कुछ अलग ही साँचे और माटी के बने हुए हैं. उनको सुनना उनके खुलने जैसा है. आज पुतिन ने दिल्ली से यूरोप के लोगों को अपना मैसेज भेजा. नीचे उनके कहे का अनुवाद है.

रूस कभी आपका दुश्मन नहीं रहा और न कभी होगा!

हमें यूरोप के कच्चे माल या उसकी संपदा की कोई आवश्यकता नहीं है; हमारे पास अपना पर्याप्त संसाधन है. हमें आपके कच्चे माल की बिल्कुल जरूरत नहीं है. रूस प्राकृतिक संसाधनों के मामले में दुनिया का सबसे समृद्ध देश है.

हमें न आपकी जमीन चाहिए और न आपका क्षेत्र.
नक्शे पर रूस की विशालता देखिए. रूस पूरे यूरोप से लगभग दोगुना बड़ा है. आपकी जमीन हमारे किस काम आएगी? हम उसका क्या करेंगे?

आप क्यों सोचते हैं कि रूस यूरोप का दुश्मन है?

रूस ने आपके साथ ऐसा क्या किया है जिससे आपको नुकसान पहुँचा हो?

क्या हमने आपको आपके ‘दोस्तों’ द्वारा वसूली गई कीमतों से कम कीमत पर गैस और कच्चा माल बेचा? हाँ।

क्या द्वितीय विश्व युद्ध के दौरान नाज़ियों से छुटकारा दिलाने के लिए रूस ने 2 करोड़ लोगों की जान गंवाई? हाँ.

क्या कोविड-19 महामारी के दौरान रूस यूरोप की मदद करने वाले शुरुआती देशों में था? हाँ.

क्या हमने यूरोप में आग और प्राकृतिक आपदाओं के दौरान मदद की? हाँ.

आखिर रूस ने ऐसा क्या किया है कि वे उससे इतनी नफरत करते हैं?

रूस आपका दुश्मन नहीं है; आपके असली दुश्मन आपके नेता हैं, जो आप पर शासन करते हैं.

— राष्ट्रपति व्लादिमीर व्लादिमीरोविच पुतिन

[Gerald markel @MarkelGerald]

"Wir haben Ihnen (den Europäern) Gas um 150 Dollar pro 1000 Kubikmeter verkauft
"Das ist zu teuer" haben Sie gesagt

Nun - jetzt zahlen Sie 1000 Dollar
Und weil die Lager leer sind wird es im Winter 1500 sein ..
Ihr habt bekommen worum Ihr gebeten habt !"

Ceterum censeo
Wir werden von Idioten regiert
Von russophoben,verbrecherischen, kriegsgeilen Vollidioten

[Brian McDonald @BrianMcDonaldIE]

EU officials once worried that cheap Russian gas made them dependent. Well, paying twelve times the American price has at least relieved them of that particular anxiety.

[Defiant Ghost @TheDefiantGhost]

Tucker just said it out loud: Trump didn’t fail. He betrayed you on purpose.

He didn’t get overwhelmed.
He didn’t get boxed in.
There was no economic reason.
There was no strategic reason.

He ran on one thing…
then did the exact opposite.

In marriage that’s called cheating.
In business that’s called embezzlement.
When the person you thought was your ally turns out to be working against you…that’s called treachery.

That’s why no one has named their child Judas in 2,000 years.

And that’s exactly what you’re watching at the halfway mark of his second term.

[Pablo Álvarez @pablalva]

No quiero ser dogmatico, pero me parece que el principal motivo de la debacle educativa no son las pantallas, sino la demolición de la CULTURA DEL ESFUERZO.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

The Houthis’ rapid advance is just the beginning of the blowback effects we are now going to face as a result of our counterproductive policies in the Middle East & because of this senseless war in Iran.

The Houthi’s ability to capture key terrain and strategic ports along the Red Sea coast speaks to not just their military capabilities but also to their ability to gain support from tribes far from the traditional Houthi strongholds in northern Yemen.

This is very significant—these tribes are predominantly Sunni, while the Houthis are Zaydi Shias.

Yemen is a tribal region—deals among rivals are frequently cut before or during battles, and even then those alliances can be murky.

Now, however, the Houthis are fighting alongside the IRGC as a member of the axis of resistance against the Saudis, the U.S., and Israel. This has given them far more popular support than a standard tribal deal or a military victory ever could—not because Yemenis support or particularly care about the Iranians, but because especially during times of conflict, we go tribal. It’s human nature.

The Yemenis have witnessed what the U.S.-backed Saudis have done to their people and what the U.S. backed Israelis have done to the people of Gaza, & see how the Iranians are fighting back after the U.S. & Israel attacked them. Now, they’re uniting against their common enemy to fight back.

The U.S.’s war in Iran & simultaneous backing of the Saudis’ war in Yemen, along with our government’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, have given the Iranian Islamic revolution a massive boost that has reached far beyond Iran.

As our war against Iran drags on we will see more of this, especially in Iraq, Lebanon & potentially Bahrain.

Our own policies and interventions abroad are encouraging radicalization, which will in turn inspire blowback terrorism here in the U.S. This is a destructive self-licking ice cream cone and it’s going to get more people killed.

President Trump and his advisors know better, and know that ending our foreign entanglements now is in the best interest of the American people. The question is whether they have the moral courage to do it.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

Republicans are going to lose in November because Trump chose a foreign country over his own voters. Here’s how deep the betrayal is.

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

🚨🚨🚨Weidel accuses Merz in the Bundestag of stoking the war in Ukraine.

"While the US is making yet another attempt to put an end to this bloody war in Ukraine, you are ramping up war propaganda, escalating the confrontation with Russia, and—on top of that—burning the last remaining bridges, all merely to distract attention from your own disastrous political record. Finally, focus on promoting peace negotiations, just as the US is doing."

[Carlos @Pudimos_]

Preguntas complicadas las que se hace @crpandemonium hoy.
Yo me quedo con esto.
A ver si lo ven…

[Jaume Ferrer @JaumeFerr]

Tota aquesta merderada de intentar ofegar la mobilitat de la gent és això, un merder incalificable, inutil i fora de raonament. Papanatisme infantil totalitari.

[Radio Ibiza SER @RADIOIBIZASER]

Particulares alquilando ilegalmente sus vehículos en Ibiza: 34 denuncias esta temporada https://t.co/I95apllyvI a través de @RadioIbizaSER

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

When civilisations rise, they form institutions to serve society by improving governance, economics, religion, and other social structures. Eventually, these institutions become institutionalised, meaning that they acquire interests of their own, and society must be reorganised to preserve and serve the institutions. If the institutions cannot be reformed and serve society, civilisation decays and enters an age of conflict. As is evident with the EU and NATO, institutional rigidity fuels political fragmentation, erodes public legitimacy, and ultimately contributes to conflict within and beyond Europe.