- Re: Jonathan Cook's response to Chomsky's mand.vax comments
Posted by Mark Doran
on October 29, 2021, 1:45 pm, in reply to "Jonathan Cook's response to Chomsky's mand.vax comments"
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> In democratic societies... -- I almost stopped reading right there. > Imagine that Ebola is as transmissible as Covid > and has become as endemic in our communities. [...] > The problem wouldn’t be vaccination hesitancy; > it would be the stampede by members of the > public to be the first vaccinated. Faced with > an Ebola pandemic, nobody sane would have > doubts about whether the virus was dangerous, > let alone whether it existed. The dangers would > be so great and so obvious, there would be no > room for doubt. Ebola is a rubbish 'extreme example' to choose. Covid is very unlike Ebola in that the latter is vastly harder to weaponise in the service of a psychopathic Malthusian agenda, frank depopulation aside. Covid is actually much more like HIV -- which, people may remember, was from the first viewed in certain demographics (remember when Uncle Ted got drunk that Xmas...?) as an actual ally in their hate campaigns against various marginalised societal outgroups ('druggies' and 'queers': I use the terms that the haters themselves used in their own vile minds). I even (?) remember an obtrusively Christian police chief, long since descended into Hell, for whom AIDS victims (including the HIV+ newborns, presumably) were 'swirling around in a cesspit of their own making'; and the way certain newspaper commentators -- at least one medic among them: yes, Vernon Coleman, I'm spitting at you -- claimed that HIV was no danger at all to women and straight men. Well, here comes Covid -- and off go the dead bodies of neoliberalised fascism's First Division outgroups: the expensive old; the expensive incurable; the expensive retarded; the expensive crippled (and more besides: I could practically hear the cheering when nurses and doctors with DARK SKIN started to die in disproportionate numbers). In short, attitudes to Covid and Covid-prevention are not straightforwardly comparable to 'Ebola, diluted' or measurable on some index of 'doubt about whether the virus is dangerous'. They are exactly what Social Identity Theory says they'll be in a species where an ingroup sees the outgroup being harmed: the ingroup happily takes a hit as long as the outgroup goes on getting whacked. #Brexit example: "Yes, we're losing the NHS; BUT AT LEAST ROMANIAN HEALTH TOURISTS AREN'T COMING OVER HERE AND USING IT FOR FREE!" Likewise #Covid: "Yes, it's sad that granny had to drown in the ICU as her lungs boiled over with fluid and debris, BUT AT LEAST WE WON'T BE PAYING FOR SO MANY PEOPLE GETTING 'BENEFITS' WHEN MOST OF THEM AREN'T REALLY SICK OR DISABLED ANYWAY! OH, AND DARKIES!". It isn't *simply* that 'the average healthy white fascist moron under 60' expects to be okay: a major part of the point is the extent to which that ingroup is prepared to pay to see the outgroup getting shafted by a destructive force deployed at untraceable arm's length. Vaccination? For millions, it's condoms and dental dams all over again, 'safer sex' 2.0: "I'm not bothering with all that. It's not my problem. And don't you try and force me..." M. |