In the frame of three countries of common heritage.
It is time for me to blog something here. It is of some interest to people concerned about the situation regarding covid19 in New Zealand and Australia. It also refers to the Panquake initiative and the people putting a lot of hope in it as a solution to the increasing inadequacies of Twitter.
First, to “down under” people, from Ontario, Canada. I have begun watching your covid situation as a result of following a couple of bloggers living there or from there. They are both interesting to me in different ways. However, I do not have much use for the left libertarian ideas they both put out.
Those ideas do not seem to be getting much traction in those countries. People down there, as in Canada, generally want government to govern. They want a competent response to the pandemic. The three countries have followed very different paths during the pandemic.
The basic problem with getting a proper response to covid is the libertarian mentality. It comes in a left version and a right version. Both these variants simply cannot process the pandemic. They cannot fit it into their ideology so they try to foment resistance to government measures to control it, seeing it as repression.
This is the problem with any kind of ideologically based belief system. In this case it causes left and right wing versions of libertarianism to make common cause. They keep on trying to enforce their ideas on the general population. That is what ideological people do.
Fortunately most people are mainly non ideological in their belief system. They take a pragmatic view of the situation and their own interests. Still they are bombarded relentlessly with a lot of ideological propaganda passing as information.
Right wing ideology predominates in business culture and so it has a lot of power. Most of the covid story in the past year and a half has been about the libertarian right trying to break up attempts to control covid. This movement has been built around the Great Barrington Declaration.
The main points of the GBD trope are that the supposed interference with economic activity and with a warped idea of civil rights is more serious than covid. The disease should just be left to rip through the population, people will develop “herd immunity” according to their wrong understanding of that concept, and the unfit who are presently a drain on the economy will be “culled”.
Over and over, the result whenever they get their way has been an impending collapse of the health care system followed by the rest of the economy, forcing a remission of GBD approaches. Countries which are able to apply normal pandemic measures, understood for centuries, ride it out pretty well. Yet the libertarians are utterly unable to learn.
Left libertarians add their voices to this as well, often repeating exactly the phoney arguments of the right libertarians. Everything government does, good or bad, is interfering with people’s personal liberties. The idea that the most important ‘liberty’ is the personal safety and provision of basic services and social supports by a well organized government, is outside their comprehension. But most normal people get it.
The paradox here is that the people screaming that government is oppressive are doing everything to make sure it is that way. Government serves an oligarchy. Fortunately those oligarchic factions usually prevail who understand that a basic level of social provision and a minimally competent government is necessary to their own survival.
Police serve to protect and maintain oligarchy. Everywhere, they largely do what they want, regardless of words on any piece of paper called a bill of rights, charter of rights, or whatever. Lacking an authentic democracy, no one, or no class, has any rights except what they can enforce.
These left libertarians I am discussing always seem amazed to discover this. This is paradoxical given their professed hostility to government. No one should be surprised when a few thousand fanatics who take to the streets to smash things up and cause trouble get treated brutally by the police.
No, that is not “the way things will be from now on in Australia if ‘we’ don’t do something about it”. That is the way police always have been and will continue to be, in Australia and everywhere else, as long as you live under an oligarchy; especially, a capitalist oligarchy. There is nothing you can do about it until you are able to overthrow capitalism altogether.
Do not misconstrue that I am excusing police. Some are in the police to do the job society needs. Some are there because they like attacking people. But police who cannot control disturbances without gas and rubber bullets, who cannot control women half their size without choke holds, are incompetent cowards.
Recent history
It is instructive to compare the histories of our three British heritage countries in the years of The Great Pandemic. Canada’s progress has been in many ways the reverse of its subequatorial sister countries.
In Canada, to start with, many of the provincial governments refused to recognize the implications of covid. They had a GBD mentality even before GBD. The federal government partly got it but was unwilling to stand up to the provinces.
The four Atlantic provinces plus the territorial governments got it and applied proper measures from the start. They also restricted travel from the other provinces. The governments of the six more populous provinces resisted until reality forced them to back down and lock down. Thus we have had the Atlantic bubble, the northern bubble, and in the middle, the “covidiot six”.
The best things the federal government did were to shut down border traffic to the southern cousins, and to make sure we got a supply of vaccines as quickly as they were available, and into people’s arms as fast as possible. We got tolerably good pandemic relief benefits for small business and low income people.
The behaviour of the covidiot six provinces, including my home, Ontario, has been ridiculous. They have been utterly unable to lead, no matter which party is in office. They give into the business lobby and the right libertarian mentality, until it becomes obvious they are heading for the abyss. Then they bow to reality and public pressure, and institute a “mockdown”; poorly thought out and communicated.
Then they open up too soon. Then they have to impose a new lockdown. We have been through three lockdowns now. They absolutely refuse to commit any money to building up the run down health care system, including a proper ‘test and trace’ system. No money to school boards, to improve ventilation in run down classrooms or to reduce class sizes.
The aim of the GBD faction within the provincial governments seems to be to get as many people as possible infected with covid. They are largely failing. We have most people vaccinated. Their last chance is to get children infected, and they are failing at that due to local resistance.
The libertarians of left and right are getting desperate. From taking over city parks and driving out any masked people, to harassing patrons of restaurants patrons who enforce vaccine card rules, they now resort to besetting hospital covid wards and community vaccination clinics. Lately a nurse was smashed in the face and sent to a hospital for the offence of giving vaccinations in a vaccination clinic.
The police here have had the sense not to come down like nazis on the covidiots, but to let them discredit themselves. Local authorities have insisted that compliance with rules be voluntary. This has been a very successful strategy.
The pattern in Canada has been for higher governments generally to not want to do Pandemic. The public fought very hard to make them do it. Local governments often created their own measures. Now we are in a fourth and probably final wave, a pandemic of the idiots who still refuse to get vaccinated. We are positioned to come out of covid in pretty good shape.
New Zealand has been, along with the Atlantic bubble provinces, a model for other English heritage countries for how to deal with a pandemic. Only recently have they begun to crack a little under pressure from business lobbies, opening things up before vaccination is sufficiently progressed.
Some of the Australian state governments started out stupid and then took their lead from New Zealand. Lately some sort of GBD coup has happened there. Their federal government is trying to force the country open too soon. The public and most state governments are fighting back.
If they are not successful, they will soon experience some things we in covidiot six Canada have been dealing with. The worst is the stressed health care system, with exhausted doctors and nurses. People are dying of diseases which could have been prevented, because they could not see doctors or get necessary surgery.
Then we have the tragedy of care homes, especially the private ones. Often no preventive measures are taken at all. Covid spreads through the residents. Staff quit out of fear. The owners throw up their hands and walk away.
No one wants to deal with the urgent reports of relatives of residents, of doctors, of staff. Finally the army is sent in to find people days dead in their beds, people starving to death, people laying in their own excrement. No one is held responsible and the federal government ends up paying the owners for their reduced profits.
Then we have the unequal and unfair distribution of pain. In Toronto, covid has been concentrated in the northwest of the city and in the south part of Peel. This is where the true working class and recent immigrants live. They are the ones who often do not know to, or are unable to, protect themselves from covid.
Middle class employment can mostly be done remotely. If not, people can take precautionary measures, or regular testing protocols can be set up. They can take time off to get vaccinated.
People working in industrial jobs cannot shield themselves. Their employers often have a CBD mentality, treating their staff as disposable. Thus, no protective measures are in place and people cannot even get paid time off to get vaccinated.
What has not been a problem in Canada has been “sunlight, fresh air and fresh food.” Even during the worst part of the pandemic in Toronto, lockdown number three during mid winter, I had no trouble finding low cost fresh food at the market. The food system has hummed along well. I could go out every day when weather permitted and sit in the park.
What I could not pick up I could order in; bypassing Amazon for local businesses who protected their workers, usually charged less, and usually could deliver just as quickly. Outside hard lockdowns I only had to wear a mask in indoor public places. This was no burden; I think Canada now has the best, highest quality, most creative mask industry in the world.
The biggest gripers about pandemic measures are people who have been accustomed to a lavish lifestyle; restaurants, clubs, gyms, sports events. Many have discovered the advantages of a simpler lifestyle. I understand similar developments are starting in Australia and New Zealand.
My final advice to Australia and New Zealand people is to continue to fight fiercely for proper pandemic measures. No opening up until vaccinations are over ninety percent. Toward that, insist on a system of vaccine passes.
The vaxx pass is the latest battle with the Bucket Head Doug government in Ontario. They are being forced to do it, but they are bungling it as usual. Some local governments are setting up their own systems. As usual.
Do not listen to the “covid will become endemic” nonsense. The history of similar viruses indicates it will disappear world wide in a few years. It will be gone in developed countries once near total vaccination is achieved. Keep it up, the battle is almost over.
Addendum on Panquake
It is disturbing that the guiding force behind the new Panquake social media platform also turns out to have this left libertarian mentality.
PQ is something badly needed. We need to restore the original concept of the internet, that it should be controlled by the users themselves. We need to develop a new range of decentralized platforms to replace all this surveillance based, curated nonsense which has been imposed.
I do not know if PQ can suppress trolls, noise makers, and ideological drivers. Yet it is less important to shut them up than to have a space in which to discuss a serious reordering of society; what is really needed. We need a Gab for the left, a Mastadon which is not closed off and compartmentalized.
The concern is this; not many people will ever buy into the libertarian mentality from left or right. People know what the consequences will be of “getting government out of their lives”. They will soon have civilization out of their lives. Like the wise old man long ago put it;
“In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth;… no commodious Building;… no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
PQ depends on public donations to get going. My concern is that if the founder, Suzi3D, from New Zealand, concurrently espouses left libertarianism and supports individuals who should not be supported, she might retain a small following but put most people off. Obviously, this could compromise the rollout of PQ.
I think Suzi3D should consider something. She is currently living in Russia because she claims to have been harassed out of her home country. It is critical to developing a powerful movement for a transformation to socialism, that leaders in the movement be protected from attack by the “forces of darkness”.
However, most people will never support libertarianism because it is unsupportable. This may be why she was unable to get any protection or support when she was under attack in New Zealand. Perhaps in the interests of bringing the important Panquake project to a successful completion, she might consider putting extreme political philosophies on hold.
Once Panquake is working, she and her little left libertarian friends can theoretize on it to their heart’s content. I would like to use it to be able to reach people with my own stuff; about creating a society and economy which can deliver a secure and abundant life to everyone.
I will keep developing my own ideas on it and writing about it, on every platform I can find. Watch for it.
Competents in charge 