Bullshit. You are another black and white merchant, grasping after absolutes that do not exist except in the mind of ideologically blinkered individuals. I find it risible that your ratiocination levels are so low that you cannot think outside of a framework where someone is either 100% right or 100% wrong.
My concern was – and is – straightforward. I went dealing with a claim – made here repeatedly throughout 2020-21 and again this weekend – around the effect(iveness) of lockdown as a pandemic option. The claim was that lockdown is entirely and completely “a waste of time”. Note the italicization. The corollary claim, here, is that lockdown cannot cause in any circumstances a significant fall in infection rates. Any such claim patently flies in the face of established fact (as per my point about December 2020 to March 2021 in Ireland) – and therefore is irrational in the extreme.
I have never claimed – nor could I rationally claim – lockdown is a perfect solution to a pandemic. I am not interested in supposed ‘perfect’ solutions. I think reality is quite enough as a challenge. I quite often speak to someone who eschewed lockdown and taking a vaccine. I think he had quite good rationales in these regards and I admire the carefulness with which he and his family thought through the difficulties on both sides. The problem is that his solutions, however admirable, could not be scaled up for society at large.
The nub remains this issue: should Covid have been left to make its way through society in early to mid 2020, whatever the various mutterings about ‘shielding the vulnerable’, mutterings mostly made in bad faith by ideologues, personality alibi merchants, the professionally obnoxious, devotees of the GBD, loonsters, former members of the gaming community, and so forth? Clearly not, for all sorts of reasons – not least that the great majority of the Irish public would not have tolerated non lockdown. Chaos, high up and low down, would have been the main effect of non lockdown in 2020. You would not need Adam Smith’s intellect to realize commercial society cannot function in the midst of chaos.
A disproportionate number of TFK posters, if voting patterns in Irish politics stand as the control, profess fervent belief in right wing shite. Okay, some of this stuff is just lads without a personality trying to achieve a smidgin of personality, a gom pretending to be a gom so as not to be, in his own little head, a gom – the equivalent of a dreadful Sunday morning soccer player deciding to wear pink boots.
They say empathy and imagination go together. Perhaps this splice, and its absence in the personality alibi merchants, explains the kango factor. Gross stupidity is not quite enough of an explanation for irrationality and childishness of that reach.
Which or whether, the reality is that the kango cohort mostly saw Covid as another card in the standard right wing deck of issues (‘Low card bad, high card good!’). Conservatives and Conservatism represent a different case. But a majority of right wing people are stupid and childish. Why? Because they believe in the availability of simple answers to complex problems. As such, they are wonderfully manipulatable by any common or garden demagogue. These right wingers’ sense of identity is long invested in seeing themselves as hardheaded and anti liberal – hardheaded because anti liberal. They could not think clearly about Covid because they cannot think clearly about any issue that involves one of more of the following topics: the benefits of state intervention in some cases; the advantages public sector workers enjoy in discrete circumstances; the inability of impatience to solve certain problems; the fact that people do not forget being treated as a second class citizen simply because a crisis passed; the right of citizens not to have other citizens take on risk on their supposed behalf; an inability to think in dialectical terms, in terms of what might have happened rather than merely in terms of what did happen.
There we are. The fact that so many people still wish to worship in the Church of the Holy Kango makes my case far better, in the end, than I ever could.
), 5km walking limits, and 9 Euro meals.
