Disease Denialists, by which I mean thoughtless husks like Peter Hitchens, repeatedly make the claim that lockdown is worse than infection. Honestly, I'm tired of their default pro-capitalist rhetoric. Let's be clear: Hitchens - and you can follow a rightward outbound trajectory if you take him as your starting point - has no answers. None of them do. What frustrates is how they are making a virtue of "just asking questions". Well ain't that dandy!
Anyone can "just ask questions", answers are what we need. Why aren't these uncertainty purveyors fighting for better economics. Clearly we don't have that, and we won't until people fight for it. These people could help that cause.
It is not incorrect to point out lockdown is negative. Of course it is! The alternative, rather obviously, is increased spread of the virus. Also negative! Not solely in public health, but also to impact economic movement. There is no either/or. The virus is present; the Tories made damn sure of that. So we are at the new normal; one that could be permanent.
But no, let's provke the usual outrage with no answers. It's easy to bash the ruling class - and god knows they deserve it. But do so by empowering the working class; help them understand why they should be outraged. How they are being exploited.
They've been mugging off the working class since there has been a working class. Now things are different; this is the shape of things to come. But the denialists are only interested in peddling pseudo political faux libertarian bullshit? Intellectually bereft. Real change is hard and uncomfortable. They don't want that. Just look at the protesters in the US (some of whom have now died...of Covid19). They freak out because they have been raised to believe not just that capitalism is the great emancipator and enabler, but that any alternative - even talk - is a social cancer.
So they die to save themselves.
People on social media make conspiratorial noises about how lockdown is a plan from (insert your chosen flavour of New World Order) to control or even cull (because that makes sense in a capitalist system - kill your workforce) the people. As if the alternative, open the doors, has no negative consequences. These are people that believe Covid isn't serious, but cannot cite sources. If you want to make these claims, guys, you need to back them up.
This continued lack of evidence is what is most frustrating. Now we have homebrew militia, asserting their right to be exploited blocking hospital entrances in the US (where else?). Over here telecom engineers are getting spat (ffs) at because some cretins have gotten it into their vacant skulls that a virus can be created or transmitted by 5G technology. Do these clowns not think? At all?
I don't want to crush these idiots too heavily. They are a product of our capitalist society dying on its arse, threatening to drown us all in its digital death screams. The sound of a thousand empty cash registers snapping shut simultaneously. They are fed on a diet of endless biased rolling news, social media ideological disarray, and aggressive churnalism. Manufactured consent for the end of the world. The tragedy is the lack of independent though.
Critical thinking is a skill people should but don't cultivate. It isn't taught in schools and requires practice. It's not easy to step beyond the bubble of peer pressure and ideological conformity but, for their sake and ours, it must happen.
Class War Daily for today.
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