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    Re: Covid-19 denial is feeding irrationalism and masking elite culpability Archived Message

    Posted by Willem on September 2, 2020, 6:01 pm, in reply to "Covid-19 denial is feeding irrationalism and masking elite culpability"

    Disappointing unfortunately, given your usual finely argued articles. Too full of exaggerations in your points, and seeing everything through a `left' and `right' lens doesn't help. It is also rather confusing. First, it is the elite, with Trump and Johnson singled out repeatedly as denying the crisis, making pro-business decisions, then -- to make a point about there not being a `grand plan' -- you mention that they've crashed their economies. That's hardly a "pro-business" action. Unless it is for those particular businesses which are profiting. In which case, it is correct that people become suspicious that the motives are nothing to do with people's health (especially as few believe the elite care about the masses).


    A few interspersed comments.

    As Covid-19 continues to ravage the globe, the tragi-comic denial of the crisis shows no sign of abating.

    Paints a picture of a black-death like epidemic. Really? Even in Sweden or Belarus where it was allowed to spread, it is hardly "ravaging".

    The scale, severity and very existence of this mass public health calamity is being wilfully denied by the most powerful and irrational forces on the planet.

    Really? What about all the lockdowns? Or does Trump and a small clique around him only represent these `most powerful forces'?

    As with climate change, Trump's waving of infantile 'America is doing better than the world' graphs is yet another alarming illustration of the cornered clown simply ignoring vast bodies of scientific evidence.
    Boris Johnson, likewise, stumbles around like a clumsy circus act, evading responsibility for the carnage and playing the 'persevering populist'.
    With so much at stake, it's humanity's terrible misfortune to have so many dangerously vacant and narcissistic people running the show at this most critical juncture.


    "Cornered clown", "clumsy circus act". Are these two individuals so important?

    As with Trump's and Johnson's coming to power, the problem is deeply systemic rather than aberrational.
    We've long been governed by corporate-serving, war-seeking, people-sacrificing, planet-destroying 'leaders'.


    OK. So it's the system, not just the figureheads.

    How fitting that the same life-denying, globe-killing neoliberal system which produced this continuity of villains should now give full stage to such a troubling troupe of virus-denying/minimising crazies.


    If they really are virus-denying, why do we have three-month lockdowns, quarantines and masks? Presumably there must be other reasons for this then.

    From Trump to Johnson, an entire political elite are directly responsible for the tragic failure to protect lives and prevent the staggering extent of avoidable Covid-19 deaths.

    Again, this odd insistence that these two leaders are single-handedly in control.

    From the outset, their business-first priorities have been nothing less than a class assault on the poorest and most vulnerable.

    Tell that to the thousands of people whose business have folded during the lockdowns and the resulting millions of unemployed.

    Yet, rather than holding them, and the system that created them, directly to account, the same tragi-comic irrationalism seems to have infected a range of figures and platforms purporting to be of the 'indie left'.
    In this freakish hall of mirrors, much 'left' Covid-19 denial looks little different to the unhinged nonsense peddled by the libertarian right, from Breitbert to David Icke.


    What is `left' Covid-19 denial, and what is `right' denial? Why this insistence that a critic is one or the other?

    Depressingly, it not only rejects well-respected scientific and public health advice on Covid-19, but, like the libertarian right, sees it as part of a dastardly 'grand plan' to impose some New World Order.

    What's "well-respected"? Neill Ferguson, whose swine flu predictions were way out? His 1/4 of a million Covid deaths prediction? And look what you did there: connect criticism of measures to conspiracy, a `grand plan'. And "dastardly" for extra ridicule.

    If one were really conspiratorially-minded, it might be tempting to see all this as some malevolent right-wing plot and narrative to discredit the left. But that would be to wander back into the fantasy maze itself.

    Here we go again; the `right' trying to destroy the `left'. Whatever it actually means.


    Why would Trump, Johnson, and the capitalist class they represent wish, or 'conspire', to crash their own capitalist economy, all in some devious plot to realise a 'new authoritarianism'?

    So, you agree they have crashed their economies. Because earlier you indicated that their policies were all in the interests of business.

    As should be blindingly obvious, Johnson, Trump et al have done everything in their power to avoid lockdowns, masks and all other such disruption to business.

    You make it sound like lockdowns is some standard response to pandemics. It is not. Also it was Trump who suddenly decided to shut down all air traffic to the US and was castigated by much of the media and the Democrats.


    The UK's belated airport, border and quarantine orders are but the latest weak and bumbling efforts to 'catch up' on 'containment' as it struggles to end lockdown and fully open up for business.


    Completely agree they are pointless. But it sounds you want more draconian measures. What would they be?


    To think how so many are suffering in war zones, the imprisoned souls of Gaza being relentlessly bombed, the lives and homes being washed away by climate calamitous floods. And here some people are mounting insurrections over being asked to keep a temporary safe distance.


    Should we say to people striking for their pay that they should get back to work as there are worse things they should be concerned about (eg war in Yemen)? Should we ignore Assange because there are worse things happening? Secondly, how temporary is temporary really? Look how what we call a crisis has shifted; if in April/May -- at the height of the crisis -- the death rate fell to about 10 a day, that would have been considered the end of the crisis. Now it's enough apparently to warrant quarantines and masks. Is it any wonder people start wondering what's going on? Trying to connect some dots?

    That's not to minimise the many difficulties of life under Covid, the physical impacts, the mental distress, the deep social and economic consequences. These are bleak and dispiriting times.

    Yes, please, could you (or anyone else advocating lockdowns etc.) actually assess the impact of such measures? Are there limits how far one should go? Why no lockdowns in 2018 when 50,000 died of flu in the UK? Were those people's lives not worth locking down/masking up for?

    Nor, of course, is all of the science completely uniform in its understanding of the virus. Just as science is a process of learning, so too can we be critically receptive to emerging studies.

    Right. Just what many critics are pointing out.


    Yet, none of this merits the kind of fanatical reactions of Covid-19 deniers, the blanket dismissal of WHO-accepted science, the value of proven epidemiological practices and public health programmes.

    Just to remind you, nationwide lockdowns have never been used in epidemics.

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