I have been getting fairly wrapped up in the information battle about covid, generally called the infodemic. It is definitely getting more intense, with the Great Barrington Bastards bearing down harder as public mobilization against herd immunity grows.
I am not sure of the best approach to take individually in dealing with the virus fans. What needs to be done about the pro virus, anti people weirdos is to silence them and jail them if they persist. Also, to shut down services which insist of giving them a platform in the name of ‘balance’.
However, that is impossible; at least for now. In such circumstances, it is hard to know just what to do. There is an old rule; propaganda always works if it allowed. In terms of debating the pro virus blowholes, you simply cannot win, you give them a foil, so why do it?
I think the best approach is to not engage directly, but to show what is behind the pro virus campaign and insist it be shut down. That is tricky if you are in a forum which invited the propaganda blowhole. That is why I approached carefully my response to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s strange decision to run this ‘opinion’ from a fairly generic Great Barrington type.
I decided to very carefully craft a rebuttal to it, fitting usual newspaper guidelines. In the probability that CBC did not take it up, I could use it as a template for responding to other eruptions of the ‘covid is violating our civil rights’ nonsense, and invite others to use it. They did not; they said they do not publish rebuttals.
The question then is, why did they publish something like that in the first place. They even surrounded it in blue. Many journalism people seem to think this makes it okay to publish something this spurious.
It is disturbing that CBC did this. Its coverage of the pandemic has been very passive; getting basic facts right but avoiding looking into the inadequacies of the government’s pandemic response. I hope publication of the Richarz nonsense is not the harbinger of a new trend in official Canadian Government policy in a negative direction.
Whatever, below is my finished response to it. I encourage people to make full use of it in dealing with the provirus propaganda. Especially that which runs the bogus ‘civil liberties’ line.
Again, do not answer directly. If possible, ask whoever is giving it a platform what the hell they thing they are doing. Remember that ultimately this has to be shut down, not engaged.
If government in Canada were really abusing its powers regarding the Covid pandemic, Allan Richarz would not have been able to publish his work in the CBC opinion page this Friday. He might even have been in jail. If government were using its powers as it has the right and responsibility to do, something like that would not be publishable while the pandemic continues.
The article is Judas Goat work. It harnesses what the public is becoming increasingly and rightly irritated about regarding government handling of the pandemic. Then it points people away from the real cause of this failure.
The article is an exercise in packing in as much as possible of the dishonest tropes developed by the Great Barrington conspiracy. Nothing could be more stupid than trying to refute them point by point. But if you have followed closely the way the ‘anti’ campaign has developed in the English speaking world for the past year, you know where it all comes from.
We have been all through the antilockdown, antimask, antitesting, antivaccine, and antivaxpass campaigns. We have also seen the antagonism to any kind of social relief related to the pandemic; paid sick days, emergency benefits, rent moratoriums. We have been through the waves of the pandemic which are really the waves of the right wing business network’s “forcing open” profit maximization, and the reality of covid forcing it back shut again.
We have been through a year of being told we are in a ‘state of emergency’ in which “bureaucrats”, better known as government employees, and politicians, have been “grabbing a mile”. All this while the federal government never used the emergency measures act and other powers at its disposal, when it really should have.
So, those who have been paying attention during this covid time know just where Richarz is coming from; the paper thin ideology and fake narratives of libertarianism. That is, government is always bad and always interfering with ‘freedom’, and private business is always good and should be free from all interference.
Fewer people are buying into this doctrine in these times when the damage caused by it is starting to hit hard. Nonetheless, the well funded and organized networks which drive it are able to use it as a bully club against the mobilization of society and government to properly deal with this crisis. Such mobilization is a huge threat to profit maximizing business interests and their continued domination of society.
The measures needed to properly deal with the pandemic will point society strongly toward a reconstruction of the economy to meet human needs. Thus the pandemic has become the main battleground in the culture war waged against such a reconstruction.
So the cure is worse than the disease but only for a narrow economic elite. Thus the seriousness of covid must be denied. The answer to it must be to let it rip through their human herd, creating “herd immunity”. Also, culling some of the pensioners and the disabled who cost too much money to maintain.
The Great Barrington conspirators cannot publicly argue this but they do talk like this in their own channels. The best propaganda line for them to use with the public is that all measures to contain the pandemic are futile and an interference with civil rights.
These efforts to obstruct pandemic measures with spurious civil rights concerns prevent the approaches which would interfere least with people’s lives. This soon makes necessary measures which interfere much more. As well, they are the main cause of the failure to contain the pandemic, which they have then used as an argument against even trying to do so.
The pandemic could have been largely over by now. The people Richarz works for have prolonged it, mainly by intimidating politicians and government workers. It is justly said that they have become the pandemic.
While claiming to protect our civil rights, they are a big threat to them.