How the COVID-19 lockdown is bringing out the crazy gene in some people
Lockdowns and other factors are causing usually slightly unbalanced people to indulge their full range of oddball, aberrant and sometimes even deadly behaviour, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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Stress exaggerates existing personality traits.
A focused, analytical type will, under pressure, exhibit those qualities in more pronounced ways. Likewise, an erratic, scramble-minded fellow will become even less reliable when pressure is applied.
Coronavirus anxieties and shutdown stress have provided fascinating worldwide personality tests
We normal folk — it’s a close call, admittedly, but I include myself in their ranks — have in most cases become more normal. We’re using whatever extra time we have to get a few things done and otherwise keep occupied.
My friend Angry Anderson has taken up baking. I’ve taken up southern-style BBQ. A possum has taken up residence in my roof, which is far more likely to drive me nuts than any coronavirus restrictions.
Others are sorting out investments, undertaking property repairs and doing the usual perfectly normal things.
Then we have those who might fall slightly outside the category of normal. Like many in Victoria who have turned Dan Andrews’s blundering government into an object of worship.
“Victorians enduring a second lockdown have a new hobby,” the Guardian reported last week. “Expressing their devotion to the state’s chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton.
“For some, that means purchasing a blanket bearing Sutton’s face (or a pillow, tote bag, or mask).”
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A Melbourne lawyer quoted in the piece has a new daily ritual. He watches Sutton’s press conferences alongside Andrews, without sound.
“They’re all just sort of misery and gloom but he makes it so much nicer, so I turn the volume right down and let him perform,” the chap said.
This is not conventional behaviour.
Andrews last week blamed people going to work for spreading the virus, and also people staying at home with their families.
He’s basically covered the entire Victorian population, so no wonder people are turning down the sound. There’s no point listening to him.
Still, at least the Cult of Dan is harmless. Not so the antics observed in the US, where the coronavirus has combined with existing Trump-hating pathologies to create widespread madness.
The stupid are becoming stupider. All of the rioters wrecking city after city have apparently decided that, in the absence of immediate police responses, they are immune from arrest.
They’ve forgotten about security cameras. And television footage. And mobile phones. And the internet.
Police are gradually working their way through months of evidence, painstakingly putting names to faces and then swooping on riot criminals.
Investigators in Portland, Oregon, last week closely examined security camera footage depicting a young man throwing an explosive device into the entrance of the city’s besieged courthouse.
Apparently the guy who threw an explosive at the federal courthouse in Portland has been identified in a review of the vest his grandma bought for him to riot in. You couldn't make this up. pic.twitter.com/t0niw3boUN
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 28, 2020
The perpetrator wore a distinctive vest. Officers searched online and found a product review of the garment on Twitter, complete with a picture of the young suspect.
Then came the clincher: the vest review was written by one of the kid’s grandparents.
“I got this for my grandson who’s a protester downtown,” the helpful old-timer volunteered. “He uses it every night and says its does the job.”
That note led police to charge 18-year-old Gabriel Agard-Berryhill.
Thanks to his idiocy, and his similarly gifted grandparent, young Gabriel is set for a minimum five-year sentence. He could face up to two decades behind bars.
Even at the lower end of sentencing, that boy has just thrown away some of the best years of his life. Well done.
He’ll probably survive, however, which is more than can be said about Garrett Foster. The gun-toting 28-year-old last week forgot that his fellow Texans also carry weapons.
“All the people that hate us and want to say s**t to us are too big of pussies to stop and actually do anything about it,” Foster bragged to an interviewer during a protest in the state capital of Austin.
He was carrying a loaded AK-47 rifle at the time. He subsequently used it, too, firing five shots at the driver of a car who is said to have tried to make his way through the crowd.
Foster wasn’t a great shot. His bullets missed. The driver’s solitary shot in response did not and Foster was killed.
Both Foster and jail-bound Agard-Berryhill are white, by the way. Some of the worst violence at Black Lives Matter protests is committed by young white fools.
Some of them were filmed a few weeks back handing out weapons from the car — bricks and so on — to black protesters. They were put to rights by a black woman justly infuriated by whites setting black people up for a police response.
Individuals with a cervix are now recommended to start cervical cancers screening at 25 and continue through age 65, with HPV testing every five years as the preferred method of testing, according to a new guideline released by the American Cancer Society https://t.co/gUhYdIIx69
— CNN (@CNN) July 30, 2020
That footage didn’t make it to CNN, which has lately evolved from a bland and dull leftist network into a woke leftist crazy-hive.
The network, desperate to avoid offending the trans community, last week devised a new term for women.
“Individuals with a cervix are now recommended to start cervical cancers screening at 25 and continue through age 65,” CNN reported.
That line wasn’t generated by some rogue activist put in charge of CNN’s social media accounts.
The network’s worldwide head of strategic communications, Matt Dornic, quickly defended the weird wording after multiple outlets drew attention to it.
“Imagine feeling so threatened by inclusivity,” Dornic wrote, “that you’re compelled to write a story bashing another organization (sic) for practicing (sic) it.”
Imagine what might happen next. The craziness is a long way from over.