- Re: The dilemma of balancing rights
Posted by Ian M
on October 27, 2021, 6:40 pm, in reply to "The dilemma of balancing rights"
|
I saw the angry bloke get into a shoving match with someone else (didn't see who instigated it) and then a different person launch themselves at him at speed from somewhere off camera, punching him to the floor. Wouldn't say the original guy was blameless but the punch was a huge escalation, I would think emboldened by the culture war framing of the issue. Dunno, hard to interpret accurately from a short clip without context. But surely the point of sharing this video and the reason it has gone viral is to give people the schadenfreude of watching someone they disagree with politically 'getting their comeuppance' - which you seemed rather pleased with too. 'Chomsky is simply trying to lookout for everybody' - er, no, he's looking out for those on his 'side', ie: those willing to adhere to mandates and enforce them across society. He wants 'measures' taken to remove the unvaccinated from society to the point where they will struggle to feed themselves. Only when 'destitute' (his word) does he consider there might be cause for the state to step in and help them. On solutions to the dilemma, yes we've talked about it before and I won't pretend there's a simple, or even non-authoritarian answer (even mass testing is problematic on many levels IMO, depending of course on how it's done) - but I'll reiterate my point of that being the state's problem, not ours. Chomsky is putting himself in the role of crisis manager for the US government, and there are no good solutions to find when taking all of that accumulated state apparatus as a given (which his stoplight analogy & discussion of vehicle surveillance accidentally proves). We don't live in 'communities' or 'collectives' - we're isolated, alienated consumers trapped within the capitalist economy trading neverending wage labour and debt in exchange for the bare essentials of survival (and sometimes not even that). Chomsky is apparently happy for even those minimal responsibilities to be ditched and for the designated Unpeople of the day to be forced to scrounge around the edges to the point of destitution. All this stuff about 'endangering peoples' health' - if you believe in the vaccine's efficacy then what's the problem? The argument about strained health services has a point, but then you have to question the preparedness of those services for pandemics, something revealed as wholly lacking in the US & UK - a result of systematic defunding, downsizing & privatisation. Their failure can't be entirely pinned on the 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' (which is no longer as clear cut, as the effectiveness of initial doses is appearing to wear off and breakthrough cases emerge). Besides, when did 'endangering people's health' become something that only happened because of covid? Clearly govts across the world care not a jot about public health, unless this negatively effects corporate profits. Who's continuing to drive us off the climate/extinction cliff? re: hints of death on the horizon - sorry, yes badly phrased, for many it has come in and touched their lives. My point was that people, esp leftists in my experience, are so terrified of death as the Worst Thing Possible that they are easily corraled by any scheme that promises to save even one (human) life, and really bad at looking at the consequences on the other side of the equation. Further than that the whole obsession with 'minimising risk' is a weird psychosis in itself. Not that you shouldn't be careful and avoid unnecessary dangers, but the singular focus on removing any possible cause of injury or death is a recipe for paralysis, learned helplessness, and paradoxically probably leads to increased risk in the long term. I would say that the risks from excluding 30% of society (the US unvaxxed rate if I recall) from essential goods and services far outweighs any dangers they might pose to the vaccinated. cheers, I |