Lockdown is Lockdown 3: In Which I Find Conspiracy Wanting

I think it's fair to say
My contribution yesterday
Was a little bit lackluster
But in truth it's hard to muster
Daily wit to produce something great
Which is why I might be late
In citing something that's truly new
To provide value to the likes of you :D

Ok that's one paragraph. What next? Got to be honest, I'm struggling a bit keeping up with this. Fear not, I shall endeavour. I mean people are dying ffs, talking bollocks on a blog is hardly comparable!

I have spent far too much time over the last couple of days reading tweets from people who want lockdown to end. Their reasoning seems pure speculation, which is ironic considering their criticism is based on the same accusation only levelled at the proponents of lockdown. Yes, all of this is speculative. We won't know for sure until (if) it ends. But surely to god it stands to reason that curtailing social movement will curtail, to one degree or another, transmission. Thus the drive to flatten the curve. Surely that's a reasonable inference?

The other basis for the scepticism is the notion that Covid is being 'over prescribed' that doctors are, for reasons unknown, assigning covid as causal even in cases where it isn't. But they cannot cite numbers. It doesn't make sense. I have no idea whether this actually true and I've not had much luck finding out. The ONS doesn't appear to think it's a problem. They say that government numbers do not include deaths outside of hospitals of which there are certainly more than none.

But why would doctors do this? Have these highly trained capable individuals all taken leave of rational thought? Is it all a giant gag? If anything the reverse would be true: that the government would want the virus to be under reported. It makes no sense for a capitalist govenrment that wants to appear, to coin a phrase, strong and stable, to increase the death rate even falsely. That's absurd! But it's part of a long standing 'New World Order' conspiracy narrative: that they want to kill off, qutie literally, a portion of the population. I presume they think that would make it easier to manage the rest of us when we're consigned to the gulags and made to sing the Internationale.

Honestly though it doesn't bear out and in the absence of evidence it's unhelpful reactionary (these people are never left wing, let's be honest) conspiranoia.

No one has argued that lockdown is easy or economically beneficial. No one advocating it or supporting it thinks it's fun fun fun till daddy takes my T-bird away! But you will note none of these irrational thinkers advocates different economics. That, to me, is the giveaway. They are doing capital's work for them: everyone back to work, regardless of the risk. This is the working class lacking the awareness of its own exploitation. The government doesn't care about you, it certainly doesn't want to pay you. So why believe it supports lockdown? It's allies in the gutter press all want it to end.

Yet, it cannot. Even if we want it to, how can it? We have no idea how to combat this virus and simply appealing to 'social distancing' (as if these reactionaries are going to be its strictest adherents) seems vain at best. In many places it will be impossible and so the economy will still be affected.

We must not let them dictate the course of things. The working class must be allowed to decide for itself when and if we open and return to normality. Not people with a limited grasp of the reality of the situation.

I don't like picking on such low hanging fruit but we need critical thinking. Not mere speculation. There's always a kernel of truth in conspiracy thinking we are at the mercy of corporate capitalists and their ruling class stooges in Parliament. But the answer is to understand how taht works, not believe the unbelievable or the incoherent.

It is erroneous, in my opinion, to argue that because lockdown is economically damaging we should abandon it. This implies the alternative isn't, never mind the likelihood of increasing the infection rate, which will certainly impact the economy. What happens if essential shops, like supermarkets, have to be shutdown as a result? Doesn't bear thinking about.

The bottom line: we need testing. We should have had testing. We are STILL not testing anywhere near enough. The claims to victory made from the government are arrogant boasts. We are not testing 100,000 people a day. This government didn't even lockdown airports and now wants schools to open.

We are our only hope. (I'm going to record that and programme it into my droid and send him off into space...help us Obi Wan, it's all gone to shit!)

Today's forecast is...Class War!