“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.”
-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Well, it’s been over a year since Trump Virus (TM) made it big in the States, and as the cartoon goes, it would like to dedicate this next song to all the people who never believed in it when it was coming up.
Cause if it wasn’t for all those people, it wouldn’t be as big as it is today.
Even after we developed a workable vaccine distribution program, there’s still at least 25 percent of the population nationwide that refuses to take it, and that’s an average. In some Republican states the numbers are a lot higher, as are coronavirus cases.
Again, Trump himself tried to get his cult to get vaccinated, and that’s one direction from their Leader that they just won’t take.
I saw something recently at the store that explained everything. It was on a box of Pop Tarts. If you are a connoisseur, you would know that while Pop Tarts can be eaten raw, they are supposed to be heated in a toaster, or in extremis, in a microwave. So consider that. I looked at the back of the box, and in large capital letters, it said: “REMOVE FROM FOIL BEFORE HEATING”.
When you have fully pondered the implications of this directive, namely the fact that the food company deemed it necessary in the first place, you will understand why we haven’t beat COVID.
Meanwhile, I don’t know if this is a case of being on brand or just trying to jump on the culture war, but the national Libertarian Party is putting up social media posts and ads saying “Already Against the Next Mandate.”
I have come to the distressing realization that the word libertarian is one of those words that should only be used in air quotes, much like “conservative” or “progressive.”
I mean, last weekend we had to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attack – and you know, it’s distressingly commercial how 9-11 Season seems to keep coming up earlier every year – and it really amazes me how the people who scream and howl and threaten civil war over wearing a mask or getting a vaccine for a temporary situation don’t care so much about the fact 20 years after 9-11, we STILL have a TSA and it’s STILL making us take off our shoes at the airport over airplane hijackings that we learned how to counter maybe a week after the event, when largely thanks to these “patriots”, we are losing a third of the people we lost in the 9-11 hijackings to COVID EVERY DAMN DAY.
You know, the same people losing their minds over Joe Biden mandating employer vaccines through OSHA, saying “he doesn’t have that power!” and all the Liberal Media going, “well, yes he does, cause this is part of OSHA’s charter and it’s been that way for years.” Now, all the actual Libertarians, who don’t assume government’s powers as existing a priori, would be telling you, “uh YEAH, that’s what we’ve been warning about” but apparently this is a huge shock to everybody whose first definition of “libertarian” is “not being a Demonrat.”
I mean, good for you if you’ve finally realized that government doesn’t always (if ever) have your best interest at heart, but strange that you only feel this way about the one mass initiative that is doing something right, and just happens to be the one that the grievance media wants to use to gin up the next round of the culture war.
In the last few decades the libertarian movement was greatly associated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, but Rand herself despised the original libertarians, calling them “hippies of the right”. This is why. As I say, Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, but those personal issues were largely due to her disregarding her own statement: That reality exists objectively (thus the name), independent of emotion and perception and it can only be properly apprehended through reason and examination, not “whim-worship” and emotion. And nobody seems to get that these days, because the only opponents of the normie Democrat system are a Libertarian political party that is not very organized at all and an organized political party that must rely on emotion and whim-worship because its “conservatism” is that much less coherent than it was in previous years. And when, as a natural result of that trend, the movement experiences identity fusion with the most emotional and whim worshiping politician in our history, you can’t just turn on a dime and ask them to suddenly start thinking. When said figure (in his own long term self interest) asks people to get vaccinated, the cognitive dissonance is too great. It’s like Uncle Festus saying you CAN’T get drunk and fuck your cousin.
I don’t think we should need a mandate or government action to take the vaccine. I also don’t think we need a law banning people from sticking forks into wall sockets, but if enough “freedom lovers” decide that’s the best way to own the libs, that might happen.
But then, I told people that joke on a Libertarian Party Facebook page and got pushback on that. I was told, “do you want government to have the power to tell you what you can put in your body?” I said, “there’s this thing called The Law of the Excluded Middle you might want to look up. Also the word ‘sarcasm’.”
Let me see if I can break it down for you, people.
To begin with, viruses are real. Like God, they cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Unlike God, they can be perceived with advanced microscopes, so if you can believe in God, you can believe that viruses are real. Moving on. On a related subject, science is real. And as Neil DeGrasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “the beautiful thing about science is that it exists whether you believe in it or not.”
One aspect of viruses is that they mutate. This is only a matter of time. It is the reason new viruses pop up despite our immunization procedures. It is that much more likely that a virus will mutate if there is no immunization procedure, which we did not have until Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, and even then the benefits did not really manifest until after Biden’s inauguration. (Oh, that reminds me of another fact you might not have been aware of: Biden is President.)
This would be happening whether government was restricting public action at all. It is in fact, happening for largely the reason that it hasn’t restricted public action much during the last year of the Trump Organization or the first few months of the Biden Administration. Part of that is because the US actually is a federal system where states have power, as opposed to a ‘unitary’ government like Britain or France, and virus containment policy was not a matter of scientific consensus but a governor’s decision on what would benefit them with their pet voter demographic. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said in regard to the coronavirus that because virii do not acknowledge state boundaries, this means that not having a national mask mandate or expecting mandates to only be enforced by some governors and not others is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”
A virus spread can only be contained and reduced if the virus is not given the opportunity to go to new hosts, because since a virus is not actually a life form, it needs the cells of a biological host to infect so that it can replicate itself. Social distancing before the vaccination program was a very imperfect method of preventing the spread, and so is masking, but they are better than nothing, which was what we had last year. Because we had vaccination proceeding nationally we were having state and local governments remove mask and distancing restrictions and were on track to making things controllable, but then people decided to make disease treatment into a political football again at the same time the coronavirus achieved its Delta mutation. (This is from the Greek alphabet where ‘Delta’ is the fourth letter in sequence. We now have scientists warning of Lambda and Mu variants, which are the eleventh and twelfth letters. THAT’s the timetable of mutation and spread we’re dealing with here.) Delta is more effective than base COVID-19 at infecting people even when they are vaccinated, so yes, kids, vaccines are not a cure-all. They are however still better than nothing. In fact, according to the CDC (if you’re one of those gullible sheep who believes experts) ‘breakthrough’ cases among people who have been vaccinated are still a lot less likely to lead to hospitalization. But because the virus continues to spread and mutate, restrictions are coming back, and if you are not vaccinated you do not even have the imperfect defense that the vaccines give you.
In other words:
THE ONLY ENTITY WHOSE FREEDOM YOU ARE EXPANDING IS THE FREEDOM OF THE VIRUS TO SPREAD AND MUTATE, AND BECAUSE OF THAT EVERYONE ELSE STILL HAS TO WEAR A MASK AND WAIT FOR BOOSTER SHOTS, BECAUSE YOU DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. EVERYONE ELSE IS LESS FREE BECAUSE OF YOUR “FREEDOM”, INCLUDING YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY TO GET STUCK ON A VENTILATOR IF YOU NEVER GOT THE SHOT. AND I AM PRINTING ALL THIS IN ALL CAPS ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU WILL FIND BIG LETTERS EASIER TO READ.
The 2016 election, in which the two most unpopular and incompetent candidates the duopoly ever presented faced each other, should have demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system and given the Libertarian Party the perfect opportunity to capitalize.
And yet you have somehow managed to combine the feckless incompetence of the Democrats with the childish ideology of the Republicans. Now, if you could combine the popular civil libertarianism of Democrats with the Republicans’ skill at winning the game no matter what, you’d actually be dangerous.
The Libertarian Party still has the best chance to challenge the Republicans if only because the Democrats are the only other popular alternative, but you can’t challenge them by being that much more emotional and stupid than they are. You can’t challenge them by being more “punk rock” than they are. Once you might have been able to present yourself as being anti-establishment, but after Trump, the Republicans pretty much stole that act. The problem there is that too many people define “the establishment” not as the Democratic Party but as the whole concept of a constitutional republic. And given the backlash against Republican childishness, it does not help a smaller fringe party to be even MORE childish and unpopular just to prove how Xtreeem and Edgee we are. At this point you are no longer challenging the Republicans, you are following them. And that’s not going to work.
“There has been a lot of talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ being thrown around, not only by right-wingers but by leftists who look at them and see ‘liberty’ as a joke. In fact the coronavirus crisis (the crisis being not the virus itself but our response to it) does a lot to demonstrate why we don’t have a more libertarian world or in particular a more libertarian America. In a perfect libertarian world (itself a subjective hypothetical) we would need less laws because people would be educated enough to make decisions for themselves and exercise common sense. We have all the laws we do because people do not have education and common sense. And every time there’s a crisis, government uses that as a pretext to take more and more liberties, and they can do so because people do not exercise common sense.
“Liberty doesn’t just mean rights, it means responsibility. And contra libertarians, it used to be conservatives making that assertion. Liberty means not only taking responsibility for one’s free will but accepting that we need to protect others’ rights. But some people define ‘rights’ as belonging only to them, not even to ‘white people’ but only to white people of a certain tribe and political alignment. And these rights do not imply taking responsibility for one’s own decisions or extending the same right to others.
“Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences.”
Libertarianism at base is nothing less than what liberals have been calling “the American experiment” – the idea that We, the People of the former colonies are fit to manage our own affairs without the Parliament in London or the King in his court overriding our priorities. But that assumes we are in fact fit to manage our own affairs. If you want a more libertarian world, you need to demonstrate that you DON’T need a whole bunch of new intrusive laws because you acknowledge common sense ways of living. Coronavirus has made it that much more clear that the reason we have all the laws we do is because common sense ain’t all that common, at least in this country.
That is, if you want to be treated as a rational adult, you first need to start acting like a rational adult. If you want to act like a child who wants everything except responsibility, you should expect to treated like a child: That is, to be pushed around by grownups and told what to do because you are clearly incontinent to make your own decisions. There is a reason that adults don’t let children run around naked and throw their own shit, and it’s that much more obvious when the “shit” in question is a deadly contagious disease.
And I can hear the response even now: “Why CAN’T I run around naked? What do you mean THERE ARE ALREADY LAWS against public nudity? Who says?? That’s just another step towards The Holocaust! Do you want the Democrats to turn this country into SOCIALIST NORTH KOREA?!?!?”
No, I don’t, “freedom lovers”, but if anything is going to make that more likely, it’s you. You are exactly the sort of libertarian that the Left points at to say how useless the movement is and now you’ve made it that much easier for them to brand any dissenters as a public health danger. It would be a lot harder for them if you were not in fact a public health danger. Again, this is exactly how government grows and spreads, because not only are there opportunists in authority taking advantage of a real crisis, other people react to that crisis by making things worse for themselves and others, and that makes the heavy hand of authority that much more popular.
In fact there are a couple of recent articles (both in New York Magazine) indicating that this anti-Democrat virtue signaling might actually be helping the Democrats. One September 10 article quoted a previous article in The Atlantic on the California recall effort, and then says more generally, “Democrats also are aware that the ranks of the fearful and possibly angry vaccinated include a disproportionate percentage of seniors and college-educated people, who are the most likely to vote in non-presidential elections like the California recall or next year’s national midterms. It’s not safe to assume that all vaccinated people will embrace mandates (which is where these predictions of this being a 75-25 winning proposition for Biden come from), but it’s not unreasonable to think that on balance it represents smart politics for a president who’d rather be talking about fighting COVID-19 than about not fighting the Taliban or about Democrats fighting with each other over his domestic agenda.”
This leads to a Sunday article reviewing the current status of California’s ballot initiative to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who was never all that popular to begin with, but the recall effort didn’t really get serious until what the article describes as “a series of slapstick-quality self-owns” like Newsom appearing maskless at a fancy restaurant when mask restrictions were still on. Once the petition for recall got enough votes, the referendum started to gain more attention as right-wing talk show host Larry Elder entered the race as a Republican. Elder is fairly famous in talk radio, but if you didn’t already know who he was, don’t worry, liberal outlets like New York Magazine will be happy to tell you. “Shortly after Elder got in the race this summer, Newsom’s political consultants sat the governor down with a highlight reel of the radio host’s most offensive claims. A sampling: Systemic racism is “a lie”; employers should be able to fire women who get pregnant; the women who marched against Trump in 2017 were too unattractive to be sexually assaulted. “What the fuck?” Newsom said, according to someone who was there. “Is this serious?” Soon Politico reported that Elder’s ex-fiancée had accused him of waving a gun at her while high. “I say he’s even more extreme than Trump,” Newsom now routinely tells supporters. It’s worked. By the end of August, Newsom had reeled in huge donations from unions, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Netflix’s Reed Hastings has donated more to Newsom than most of his opponents have raised in total, while producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Priscilla Chan, and Connie Ballmer aren’t far behind.”
The result: “Polls that showed “keep” and “remove” voters almost evenly split in August, thanks to liberal apathy and right-wing fury, have now widened to a comfortable 13-point margin in Newsom’s favor, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.” The article implies that a lot of the turnaround is because of the two different factions’ approach to the virus, not to mention other things: “And yet Newsom, in the final stretch, has now allowed that there’s something to the idea with the politics of COVID blending into Republican power grabs blending into a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment around the country. “You see what’s happening in Florida! You see what’s happening in Texas! We have to give those ballots back in!” he said on an early-September Zoom call with LGBTQ+ activists. “Forgive me for being intense about this, but, man, this is real! This recall is real!”
If there is anyone who epitomizes limousine liberalism and its clueless, statist approach to the virus more than Nancy Pelosi, it would be Newsom. And he might win this recall because the presented alternative, one of the most prominent “small l libertarian” right-wingers out there, is perceived as being even worse.
In this Cold Civil War between left-wing faith in government and right-wing “liberty”, each side is handicapped by its own disadvantages, namely deserved unpopularity that will only increase as everyone becomes more polarized. Thus the fight will end up being won not on a positive level, with one side proving the worth of its arguments, but on a totally negative level with one side losing because its malice, incompetence and compulsion to alienate the general public ends up pissing off more voters than the other team. Well, I guess we know who’s winning that fight.