If you wonder why people are so keen on the lock-down, there is an interesting discussion at Samizdata that is exploring it. This comment in particular.
But all those people who dread Monday mornings, who hate their tedious dead-end low-status jobs or who work for bullying bosses or with obnoxious colleagues – these are the millions who are driving the lockdown support, simply because they are rather enjoying being paid 80% of their salary to stay home and potter about all day not doing very much, and are in no hurry to exchange that for going back to work, eight hours a day, five days a week, and all the associated stress and hassle, just for that 20% top-up, much of which gets spent on subsidising the hidden costs of their job anyway (commuting costs, dry-cleaning office suits, buying takeaway coffees and sandwiches, contributing to collections for colleagues leaving / getting married / having babies, etc.).
Criticise them for their short-sightedness all you like. But there are millions of them and I’m convinced they are what is driving the support for the lockdown.
I think there’s a point here. However there are some interesting outliers. At least four of my colleagues rely on motorcycle training as their sole income and it’s stopped. Yet one of them is regularly posting stomach-churning, virtue-signalling claptrap about how the lock-down isn’t hard enough and anyone who disagrees is either an anarchist or a TWAT. That’s when he isn’t advocating for tougher police action and national service for all the modern youth. Kim Jong Un eat your heart out.
We get this along with all the NHS worship. I suppose, being a blood biker, there’s some logic in that, but it gets wearing after a while and I disconnected eventually – it was that or start sticking my fingers down my throat. After all, we all know he is a Blood Biker as we were constantly reminded of it long before this thing kicked off. But, like the other three I mention, how is he surviving?
Most of those who are opposed to the lock-down are either self-employed so the bigger picture comes very close to home or are simply observant enough to see beyond the narrative and think for themselves.
The 80% subsidy isn’t going to go on forever. Then what? I’d guess when that ends, a lot of companies will be looking at how many people they actually still need in our new, crippled economy. The lockdowner’s chickens will come home to roost.
I’m in my 60s and I lost my job last July; I can see I’m never going to work again, now.
I was chatting online to the owner of a rival bike school. He thinks our industry is going to be very badly hit. We are an expensive hobby to most of our customers.
A commenter a week or two ago mentioned that a whole bunch of NHS managers had excused themselves at the earliest opportunity and just left the nurses to get on with it. Lots of people expressed the vain hope that the nurses being able to continue doing the job without them would indicate that they weren’t actually needed.
It would be nice to think that when these useless managers finally do return the nurses tell them to bugger off…
All the 80%ers lazing at home need reminding when they go back to work they’ll get 50% of there income due to tax increases and deflation!
Socialism ruins everything, paying people not to work is disastrous….. They won’t till their government hand out is worthless.
I don’t bother with the 20.00 thing on Thursdays. I respect the HCPs and what they do but this public propaganda frenzy is daft.
Our nurses are angels, don’t you know? That means the NHS must be God.
Burn the heretic. 🙁
Nurses are angels? Mmm – no. Worked with quite a few. They’re just people doing a job. Some of them decent, some complete arseholes. Just like everybody else.
You know this is heresy, right? Heresy that dare not be spoken.
Is this a dry-run for Universal Income?
Will there be two lower classes, the stay-at-home lot and the warehouse/delivery drivers moving ‘esential supplies’ to the stay-at-homes until they drop dead through lack of exercise, over-eating or being killed by their partners?
Either that or it is a version of A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy where the useless hairdressers and telephone sanitisers are persuaded that the Earth is doomed and that they have to flee to another planet. Except this time the hairdressers and telephone sanitisers stay at home and the elite nick all the good stuff and fly off to Richard Branson’s island!
Good point on paid 80% to do nothing vs 100% and commuting etc costs
Blood Biker will be receiving handouts from Gov via their charity
It’s not so much the opinionated one posting all the ‘virtue signalling claptrap’ that bothers me, its the ones going along with it thinking the issues are too difficult for poor little them. You talk to them about some simple but controversial issue and they come back with something like “I don’t really get all that”. Case in point: a little while back a fellow club member was handing out anti-fracking literature, probably having been asked to do so by some acquaintance. The subsequent conversation went something like this.
Me: “I’ll take one – always a good idea to know what the enemy think. I’m all in favour of fracking.”
Her: “But WHY?”
Me: “Jobs. Cheap gas”
Her: [stunned silence]
She’s not stupid but it had clearly never occurred to her to think through the consequences of what was being advocated – whether to change her own mind or to develop some arguments to use on people like me. And she’s old enough you can’t blame modern education. It seems to be a variety of learned helplessness, and there are plenty more people like that.
Like the spoof agitators asking people to sign a petition to ban Hydrodioxide (or somesuch) “they put it in our babies milk!”. Folks duly signed up to banning H2O, water.
I’m told there was no lack of volunteers for furlough among our office staff when told numbers would be reduced from 10 down to 2. The firm engaged an overseas call centre to take the work and I would not be surprised if those furloughed staff never get asked to return.
People can be very short-sighted.
I’m a front-line uniform PC. We’ve been told to just get on with it whilst all he office staff ran off home with a laptop. I’m hoping when this blows over my force will realise who we can manage without and have a huge cull of the shiny-arses in my job and get them back out on the street.
On the flip-side the station car park is empty and my email inbox is nearly empty every day.
Here’s hoping.