COVID19 and the Left: an Ignored Civil Rights Crisis
Michael Lesher
Reading op-eds these days about the grim progress of COVID-19 through the United States, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’ve traveled backward in time and landed in some sort of Cold War-like, hyper-conformist dystopia — but with one disquieting difference.
As in those dark days, we’re bombarded with warnings of a ruthless, insidious enemy that will destroy us if unchecked. As in those days, we are assured that the battle to suppress this mortal enemy requires unquestioning faith in government authorities and the suspension of ordinary liberties.
As in those days, dissenters are vilified; people who challenge the suppression of civil rights are mocked as dupes, fellow travelers or outright accomplices of the Evil One.
Only this time, the roles are strangely reversed. Instead of red-baiting conservatives, it’s so-called liberals who are wearing the executioner’s hood and carrying a shredder for the Bill of Rights.
Instead of jingoists shouting down dissenters, we’ve got erstwhile defenders of free speech telling political critics they ought to either shut up or drop dead.
And in the present-day dystopia, the enemies of society are not just people with the wrong ideas, as they were in the old days; even taking a walk in the park can prompt well-meaning liberals to denounce you to the authorities as a public menace.
That is today’s political reality in a nutshell — and I’m afraid the situation is much worse than merely ironic. I think it represents a colossal error by which civil libertarians and their normal political allies are abandoning their most valued principles at precisely the moment they’re most urgently needed.
Just as state repression of working people offers us the chance to unify much of the political spectrum around liberal ideals, left-of-center pundits are simultaneously turning their backs on struggling workers and on civil rights.
Am I exaggerating? I would like to think so, but I’m not optimistic.
Even People Magazine got into the act recently, quoting a “software writer” who is “urging Facebook to crack down” on people who want to organize opposition to stay-at-home orders.
The article’s author notes the warning of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, that if anyone protests her lockdown commands she will simply extend them. Such comments in a gossip journal are probably meaningless in themselves — but where is the principled reaction of liberal pundits to public threats of censorship and political retaliation?
It’s exactly that kind of silence — from a whole range of liberals and progressives — that makes me worry that the COVID-19 epidemic could end up as a graveyard for the American left, an awful tale of a misread civil rights crisis and a tragically lost political opportunity.
Now, before I offer my bill of indictment, it’s only fair to acknowledge that liberal-to-left commentators are caught in an exceptionally embattled moment.
A pathological narcissist inhabits the White House, subordinating national policy to his self-serving whims. Wall Street, flush with a new handout so big that author and economic analyst Matt Stoller has called it a “coup,” is preparing to pounce on what is left of the U.S. economy.
Corporate behemoths revel in the agony of small businesses that will be ripe for devouring after months of lost revenues. The grinning gangsters who run the Republican Party (the real one, not the Trump sideshow) are doing their best to starve the states hardest hit by the epidemic.
Abroad, State Department warlords are sadistically ramping up the torture of Iran and occupied Palestine while defunding the World Health Organization — just when internationally-coordinated disease response is more vital than ever.
And all the while, a national health care infrastructure that has been systematically looted for decades is reeling under the impact of a disease whose effects threaten to outstrip its all too limited resources.
At times like these, it’s easy to understand why no one to the left of Jair Bolsonaro wants to say anything that might be construed as support, however indirect, for Donald Trump and his White House yes-men.
But it seems to me that this posture badly misreads the nature of the crisis we’re in. The genuine medical concerns raised by the coronavirus outbreak do not obviate basic issues of civil rights and the limits of government authority — and those are questions all of us, especially on the left, ignore at our peril.
Yes, we have to contain the spread of the virus in a way that doesn’t overwhelm our hospitals (though it might have made more sense to put up temporary health care facilities, as other countries have done, instead of making it solely the public’s responsibility not to get sick so fast).
Yes, we should plan a more rational health care system for the future, one freed from the tyranny of the current for-profit model.
But we also have to stand up for the needs of millions of devastated working people — who are, after all, at the heart of the constituency the left likes to claim for itself — and for principles of personal freedom that are now under the most powerful domestic assault I have witnessed in my lifetime.
If we don’t wake up soon, I’m afraid we may find that we have abandoned a vital field of action (one that should have been our natural environment) to the demagogues and right-wing extremists who are certain to rush into the vacuum we leave behind. Do we really want to let that happen?
Let’s rehearse some basic principles of constitutional democracy.
Whenever a government official claims some sort of power over others — and even more so when he or she claims extraordinary powers — three questions are automatically present.
First, does the official actually possess such authority, and if so, how? Second, assuming the authority to be legitimate, are the methods being used consistent with the law (including, in this country, the restrictions of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment)? Third, is the authority being used for a legitimate purpose?
Nearly all of the discussion I have read over the last two months involves the third of these questions; to my amazement, even people traditionally committed to civil rights issues have all but ignored the first two. That’s a serious error: the purest of intentions cannot atone for illegal government acts — and an act is just as illegal whether it concerns a blatant absence of authority or an unconstitutional abuse of power.
We can accept, for instance, that our police forces are vested with extraordinary powers to deprive people of liberty — but for that very reason we do not (and should not) allow them to wield those powers arbitrarily.
I hope I don’t need to emphasize that these limits are not mere technicalities. They represent a crucial safeguard against tyranny. Kick away the legal restraints on official power, and we’ve deposited ourselves on a slippery slope that leads, ultimately, to a police state. I’m not claiming that today’s state governors intend to take us there. But we would be naive indeed to trust powerful officials to care more about our rights than we do.
So I’m frankly amazed at the virtual silence — not just from mainstream “liberal” media but even from the progressive left — about the sweeping powers that have been seized by more than 40 U.S. state and territorial governors in the last two months, and the staggering effects to which these powers have already been put, with nothing but a governor’s signature on a piece of paper to legalize each of them.
Businesses have been closed all across the country; millions of people have lost their jobs and are filing for unemployment benefits (benefits that may prove only notionally available, at least at present); at least tens of millions of citizens are in circumstances approaching house arrest. And all this has been achieved without a single act of an elected legislature, without a single court order, and with scarcely any public debate.
A society that prides itself on its respect for individual liberties is watching the Bill of Rights go up in smoke. And, if press accounts are any guide, the only people who seem to be speaking up about it are mobs of half-baked, gun-toting Trump lovers.
The silence on the left is all the more astonishing when one considers the history of the statutes now being invoked — generally for the first time — to confer such sweeping powers on a handful of state executives.
When the original version of these laws was unveiled at the end of 2001, it drew sharp criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as from conservative groups. (The ACLU specifically mentioned the opposition of the Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council in its own written statement condemning the bill as “replete with civil liberties problems” and “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness.”)
The objections to the proposed law were remarkably consistent, regardless of political vantage point. The bill — called the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) — was ostensibly designed to respond to a catastrophic bioterrorism attack in which tens of millions of lives would be in direct jeopardy; but it was worded much too broadly for that specific purpose.
It allowed governors to seize virtually dictatorial powers without any of the political checks and balances normally used to discourage abuse. Finally, the bill paid scant attention to the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process” restraints upon state action that deprives an individual of liberty or property.
These concerns were not just theoretical. They were serious enough to persuade the legislature of one state — Maryland — to add at least some civil rights protections into its version of the MSEHPA. And by now it should be painfully clear to everyone that the critics were, if anything, too complacent.
All 50 states now have some form of the MSEHPA on the books, but for simplicity’s sake I will focus on my own state of New Jersey, which adopted its version in 2005.
On March 9 of this year, New Jersey’s governor unilaterally declared a public health emergency — which he unilaterally extended for another 30 days a month later — predicting (correctly) that New Jersey stood to suffer significant effects from the coronavirus pandemic.
Significantly, though, he did not claim that the impact of the virus was similar to a terrorist attack; nor did he so much as nod to the state’s elected legislators. A series of unilateral “executive orders” followed in quick succession, closing all “nonessential” businesses, ordering all inhabitants of the state to “shelter in place” (a phrase I have been unable to find in any New Jersey statute, but which in practice means something approaching house arrest) and imposing a slew of restrictions ranging from dress (face masks are now mandatory in all public places) to the number of visitors allowed for apartment dwellers like myself (zero, for the last several weeks).
None of these “emergency” orders cited a specific section of the law that empowered the governor to take the actions he did, and that was likely deliberate; a good argument can be made that the unilateral mass quarantine of New Jersey’s citizens violates the EHPA itself, which requires a court order for each individual or group quarantine sought by the governor, as well as notice to everyone affected of his or her right to seek a later court order to obtain release.
Since the governor has not sought any court orders and has not given the required notice to anyone confined by executive fiat, he may well be in violation of state law even in the exercise of emergency powers — to say nothing of the due process provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, which Supreme Court Justice John Harlan (among others) famously celebrated as “bulwarks…against arbitrary legislation.”
Now, one might have thought such an unprecedented seizure of power (simultaneously replicated in more than 40 states) would be worth a bit of public debate. Yet mainstream media seem not even to have noticed one of the most momentous legal events of modern U.S. history. As for the traditional civil rights advocates (including the ACLU itself) — if they’ve had anything to say on the subject in the last two months, I haven’t heard about it. It’s as if the whole question of civil rights and limits on state power had somehow just evaporated like a puddle of rainwater, now that there’s a new respiratory virus on the block.
If that doesn’t startle you — as it startles me — try a simple thought experiment: imagine that, about six months ago, Venezuela’s President Maduro had unilaterally claimed the power to confine much of his country’s population and to close down most of its businesses — without a court order, in likely violation of Venezuela’s constitution, and without the sanction of the national legislature.
Do you suppose the American press would have ignored that event? Would our pundits have given Maduro a pass for grabbing quasi-dictatorial power? Would cable news hosts have ridiculed Venezuelans who dared to defy his orders as mobs of knuckle-dragging weirdos possessed by a death wish?
Or try another sort of thought experiment: suppose that next fall, as flu season rolls around, the governors of New York, New Jersey, California and an assortment of other states all declare “health emergencies” and issue blanket prohibitions against political protest on the grounds that public gatherings might spread an infectious disease.
Impossible? A few months ago, I would have thought so too. But something very similar is happening right now, and its unconditional endorsement by both major political parties and the liberal press makes it difficult to imagine how these institutions, or any related ones, could speak up in any credible fashion against even a power play as naked as that.
Circumstances in the U.S. are already ominous enough for my taste. But thanks to the broad reading state governors are giving their versions of the EHPA, things could easily get a lot worse. New Jersey’s statute allows the state’s health commissioner (who is an employee of the governor — so, effectively, the governor) to “take all reasonable and necessary measures to prevent the transmission of infectious disease or exposure to toxins or chemicals” for the duration of the “emergency” — a period which, as I’ve noted already, lasts as long as the governor wants it to.
This section of the EHPA lacks any provision for the legislature to overrule the governor and does not indicate any mechanism to challenge his assessment of what is “reasonable and necessary.” Can the governor be taken to court by someone who suffers a loss under one of his unilateral orders? Maybe so, but does the court have the authority to second-guess the governor’s judgment? The law doesn’t say; for all anyone can tell, his discretion under the EHPA is absolute.
In a word, this untested statute — and remember, New Jersey’s version is not exceptional — is a wide-open door to some really sinister possibilities. Suppose the governor decides that criticism of his orders is interfering with efforts to stop the spread of the virus. He could then plausibly claim he has the right, as long as the “emergency” lasts, to criminalize any sort of comment (oral, written or electronic) that he thinks might undermine his medical policy.
And why stop even there? Once he’s banning speech, the governor might as well claim the authority to eavesdrop on the conversations of anyone in the state he thinks might be saying something he’s forbidden.
Or he might simplify his task still further by snooping on everybody whose communications come within reach of the police, and then arresting anyone he catches articulating thoughts he doesn’t like, tweaking the rules of prohibited speech as he goes along.
(As a matter of fact, social media thought-policing of coronavirus-related comments has already begun; it’s not a huge step from that to state-by-state censorship of all such speech — allegedly in the “public interest,” of course.)
True, none of this has actually happened. But that should be cold comfort to anyone even glancingly familiar with the history of despotism. “I never knew it would come to that,” says the (fictitious) German jurist at the end of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg.
How many of us have wished we could have told his real-life counterparts — who closed their eyes while a few civil rights were sacrificed to the putative cause of German national welfare — that by the time they realized the danger they had unleashed, it would be too late to stop the juggernaut?
Maybe my experience in civil rights litigation has jaundiced my perspective. But it seems to me that the moment for giving such a warning to American officialdom has actually arrived, gift-wrapped, on our collective doorstep. And? Astonishingly, some of us seem to be too busy making fun of anti-lockdown protesters to recognize the legal crisis unfolding right under our noses.
“I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this,” New Jersey’s governor told Tucker Carlson, when pressed to explain the legal authority under which police arrested Orthodox Jewish worshipers who had allegedly broken his quarantine orders (orders that may well have violated the U.S. Constitution and his own state’s laws). “That’s above my pay grade, Tucker.”
Here we have the governor of a populous state, most of whose citizens are already largely confined to their homes, airily claiming he’s not paid to “think about” the Bill of Rights while he’s having people locked up for praying. And the only voices raised in protest are coming from — Fox News? Really??
If there’s anything worse than the silence of the liberal class over the most massive threat to constitutional rights since the glory days of the Nixon administration, it’s the naked contempt of the liberal press for the handful of people who are stepping forward to protest. I refer to the rash of punditry to be found just about anywhere these days, savaging small groups of demonstrators as if they were refugees from a particularly bad Planet of the Apes sequel.
“My immediate feelings about what should happen to the right-wing anti-science protesters who paraded around cannot be put in writing,” wrote Bill Fletcher on ZNet, who went on to suggest, ominously, that people who dared to oppose Michigan’s harsh lockdown orders should “pay the dear and steep price for their prideful ignorance and complacency.”
A column in the Washington Post mused that the demonstrators were obviously too twisted to give a damn about human life — while Governor Whitmer’s equally over-the-top insinuation that they sided with America’s enemies (Putin? ISIS?) has passed largely without comment. Progressive media have even compared the protesters to Nazis, on the weird logic that Trump has referred to them as “very good people” and once referred to some neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” McCarthy himself might have been impressed.
Two aspects of all this smirking condescension seem to me particularly wrong-headed.
First, none of it even attempts to consider whether the protesters may have genuine grievances. As I’ve been at pains to argue, their civil rights complaints are not trivial. And if they’ve lost jobs and health insurance as a result of orders issued by a governor’s executive fiat — orders that may be unconstitutional, to boot — it’s hard not to grant them at least a plausible basis for complaint.
And let’s not forget that these protesters are merely the most visible of those affected — the extremists who are always the first to take to the streets. For each one of them, I suspect, there are thousands who are quietly nodding their heads and saying, “I know there’s a bug out there, but how the hell am I supposed to make ends meet if this goes on? At least those people are speaking up for folks like me.” The wonder is not that protests are occurring; the wonder is that more on the left aren’t making parallel political initiatives.
Second, I’m troubled by the constant refrain to the effect that the protesters are self-destructive — and, therefore, pathologically rather than politically motivated. The New Republic (typically) accuses the demonstrators of a “morbid ideology,” sneering that they are “willing to die in the defense of a less just world.”
That line of argument reeks of bad faith: it willingly conflates suicidal fanaticism with a mere assumption of risk — real but relatively small — in the interest of a cause. In fact, such rhetorical tropes invite us to bracket lockdown opponents with the likes of the September 11 hijackers, ready to martyr themselves among the corpses of innocent victims.
That — to put it mildly — isn’t fair. It’s true that congregating for a demonstration during a viral outbreak exposes the participants to a somewhat elevated chance of infection, but given that the virus’ lethality is at most about 3% — and probably very much lower, especially in the protesters’ age bracket — that hardly amounts to deliberate suicide.
Nor is the assumption of risk it represents all that unprecedented. Before the famous 1963 March on Washington, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins was asked point-blank on Meet the Press how he expected to “bring 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting…[T]here are risks you are taking.”
The question clearly implied that if any white people got hurt, those in charge of the demonstration would be at fault. Wilkins and the other organizers — including Martin Luther King — took that risk. And we don’t have to share these protesters’ belief in the value of their own cause to see that, from their point of view, they are making a similar assessment and reaching a similar conclusion that the possible benefits of the demonstration outweigh the rather remote dangers involved.
Arguments designed to obscure that fact aim at making us refuse to take these people, or their problems, seriously — and that would be a huge political mistake. Debating them is one thing. Writing them off as lunatics is quite another.
While I’m on the subject, I can’t resist asking whether other people are as spooked as I am about the speed and casualness with which popular media have taken to barking at us in the accents of prison guards. Even their choice of language is shocking. It’s the vocabulary of police states: lockdown, closure, curfew, state of emergency, executive order.
Like many others, I was repelled by the assault rifles in the hands of the right-wing Michigan protesters; for that matter, guns or no guns, those Calibans made a remarkably unattractive tableau as they swaggered and shouted and raised placards calling their governor a “bitch.”
But to be honest, I don’t feel all that differently about the government they came to criticize, which also has nasty weapons at its disposal, which is using a lot more than unkind words to curb its citizens’ freedom, and which not only demonizes its opponents — much more effectively than the protesters do, because unlike them it has the mainstream media for an echo chamber — but claims the right to jail them into the bargain if they dare to step out of line.
Even if the right-wingers are politically clueless, why should progressives gloatingly advertise their superiority from the security of their living rooms? After all, whose fault is it that extremists are the only people raising public objections? We should know by now that when reasonable people don’t lead the way with principled resistance to state repression — facing extraordinary claims to power with the skepticism such claims always deserve — it’s inevitable that other, less reasonable people, are going to step forward to complain. Should we be proud of letting matters reach such a pass?
When all else fails, some of my left-leaning acquaintances argue that the shutdowns and confinements have a silver lining: they illustrate the depth of Trump’s malfeasance and thus ensure a Republican defeat this November. I confess to being skeptical about this.
When the current madness lifts, and politically estranged voters realize just how much harm has been done to them (much of it, of course, by business elites and their cronies in the Republican Party, but mostly carried out under the stamp of bipartisan endorsement), I really don’t think the biggest thing on their minds will be Trump’s preening lies or contradictory claims. Trump has been telling whoppers for over four years, and they have never significantly altered his popularity.
I tend to think that increasingly desperate voters will remember, most of all, that Trump did talk at times about freedom and about preserving normality — while the people and institutions that are supposed to be the guardians of liberty and civil rights, and the friends of the working class, merrily embraced the language of police states.
They will remember the respectable liberals who mocked them when they complained of losing their jobs and their personal freedoms, calling them stupid, backward, self-destructive and dangerous. And they will remember that on the rare occasions when questions surfaced about the right to public protest or the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, liberal leadership had only one message for them: shut up and listen to Big Brother.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that those on the left who think COVID-19 is going to popularize their positions among a large public without the investment of any effort on their part — and certainly without bothering to listen to what the protesters are trying to tell us — are not only wasting a crucial opportunity. They’re playing with political fire. And I am not optimistic about the likely outcome.
As I began to write this essay a few days ago, I was treated to a low-altitude flyover of a squadron of F-16s, supposedly an official “tribute” to health care workers in and around New York City. Even in the military-mad U.S.A., the idea of honoring doctors and nurses with warplanes — the same aircraft regularly used to pulverize civilians in Gaza — is so patently grotesque that I can’t help wondering if the display was intended (subliminally, perhaps) to send a more threatening message.
Roaring over my head, along with thousands of my more or less captive neighbors, those F-16s reminded me that instilling terror is the oldest trick in the book of wannabe despots. Maybe the affinity of our public intellectuals with prison language is no accident, after all: we’ve been a society of mass incarceration for many years now; maybe it was only a matter of time before what’s done in our prisons to people of color, and to the poor, started to be exported to large populations in our cities and towns.
All I know is that those in power rely on our acquiescence, and the shortest path to such acquiescence is through fear. Whether it’s sending warplanes over our houses or ordering us to wear surgical masks everywhere we go — a visible message that solidarity kills, that every human being is a threat to every other — I can only say that U.S. officials seem to be going out of their way to scare us all to death.
At such moments it’s more imperative than ever to remain skeptical, to ask the right questions of those who are slicing up the Bill of Rights with “emergency” measures that may (for all we know) be with us for years to come.
Are the governors who rule us by fiat acting constitutionally? Are people and small businesses who suffer from these restrictive measures going to be compensated? What about people who are driven by drastically increased economic insecurity into depression or drug abuse? Who will provide health insurance to people who have suddenly lost their coverage with their jobs? For how many weeks or months does an “emergency” justify the shutdown of democracy?
If we can’t get satisfactory answers to these questions, we should be prepared to employ all the familiar means of civil disobedience, as well as turning vigorously to the courts and the state legislatures, where possible, for whatever relief we can obtain there.
Such a multi-pronged campaign will require not only commitment but careful political judgment at each step, as we balance legitimate grievances with the risks posed by a still untamed disease. But it can be done — and in the current crisis it might yield important political gains.
The very last thing we should be doing is sitting back and watching while business elites manipulate working class protesters with appeals to their civil-rights concerns, steadily corralling all forms of pro-democracy resistance into the politics of the Republican right. I’m sure I don’t have to emphasize how disastrous such an alignment would be for all of us.
But as long as we reflexively side with the lockdowns and ridicule their victims, we’re playing straight into our opponents’ hands. And if we don’t make the right move now — at a moment as critical as this one may prove to be — we may not get a second chance.
Originally published by zcomm.org
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This is journalism, who ever wrote this deserves more money, i wish i could help support your site, but im currently broke and jobless. I see so much bad journalism thats either click bait or copy paste from msm news outlets, the same groups that have scared my grandma into isolation, to afraid to go to the store or the doctors office. This article feels like it was written by an intelligent caring human being and not a corporate robot with something to gain off of others despair. Ive havent enjoyed reading an article this much in a while. I dont care about politics i just want peace of mind, for everybody.
Thank you
The authors name is at the top. Do me a favor and look him up. Let me know what your thoughts are once you’ve familiarized yourself with his other “work”
Didn’t look. But appeals to non-authority are as false as appeals to authority. What is written here is true or false. Are you prepared to argue against the actual premise that the left should stand for the working class and civil rights, not cede the issue to the right?
I couldn’t pass up this comment (which I just noticed) without a word of thanks. Incidentally, I’m afraid the leadership of my own religious community (I’m an Orthodox Jew) is also contributing to the mess we’re in. I’ve written about that, too:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-lesher/the-selling-of-the-orthodox-rabbinate-how-us-rabbis-are-using-covid-19-to-advanc/10220419062199784/
Wow you brits certainly are very into politics. Im from S.A, so i don’t really understand what’s happening, although we have a very similar situation panning out. I will say this though: the left are bloody hypocrites and a bunch of half baked dim wits. They protest and scream like animals for every thing they can, but when a tiny a virus, which is as yet to be proven no more deadly than seasonal flu, comes about, they all hide under the shutters and beg to be under house arrest! I know many lefties hate Trump, but you gotta be blind if you can’t see that the world’s media has it out for him, i mean just an example, his recent comments about sunlight and detergents killing the virus, the media lambasted and made totally sensational headlines about it, instead of saying exactly what he said, moreover, even of he didn’t say it in a sarcastic way, you would be an idiot to actually try it! It’s really sad how the media is running bolsonaro and trump down.
I was astounded when I first learned that protests against lockdown, etc., in the US are considered rightwing. My friends on the “left” there are equally astounded that I, as a person who is truly left – or to the left of them, certainly far to the left of the Democratic Party, and at the very least Roosevelt first-term left – would be on the side of the protesters.
Trump Derangement Syndrome produces enormous contradictions – support for authoritarianism and political figures whom they’d spurn if they were not Democrats, reliance on “Science” in general but not in particular, making blatant exceptions to their anti-misogyny position, etc., etc., ad nauseam. All astonishing and beyond worrisome. In reading about the beginnings of fascism in Italy or nazism in Germany, one is struck with the refusal of different societal interests to work together on common previously held positions, reaping the whirlwind.
The left/right switch around is perhaps the most jaw dropping propagandist manoeuvre in this entire COVID rhapsody. And it’s enough to really raise the issue of conspiracy theorizing. How was the trap set. Could it be that e.g. Boris has been giving us a marvellous dramatic diversion? Or was he manipulated into it? After all, these political figures must know they are often called on to be the fall guys, the targets for the tomatoes. And there were plenty of gullible lefties to take the bait. It’s enough to put anyone on the Ickean path. Did Trump have a secrete meeting with the WSWS’s David North? “Now look, Dave – here’s what we’ll do. I’ll be the corporate asshole and you can declare the revolution” What Trotskyite could resist?
David North strikes one, by the look of him, as a guy with a bottle up his ass. A real anal retentive nasty prig. Sort of a David McReynolds preaching the wonders of Trotsky.
Would it not be a shame if he were on a teacher’s pension. So after the states go belly up, zip no more pension. Just imagine what will happen to him and his followers after the oligarch mobsters kill Social Security. They will be in the same boat as all the rest of us are.
Wake up schmuck.
The American left has totally failed. Now they are little more than useful idiot children for the deepstate. 1. The deepstate puppet Obama somehow pulled the party into the deepstate. 2. Progressives worship the 4th estate, journalism. If journalists didnt say it, it didnt happen. 3. Worshipping big government, they have to believe the best and brightest enter government service. 4. Plus not believing in evil, they dont see the WMD liars as evil and corrupt, merely as wrong in that instance. Thus they’ll treat the Brennans and Muellers of the world as honorable individuals. Etc., etc.
Covid-19 is a smorgasboard for its globalist creators (aka Greater Israel). Globalists want no demanding, politically powerful middle class – check. Small businesses are annnoying power centers and thieves of globalist (oligarch big businesses) profits and should be destroyed – check. Following Fauci, Birx, Gates, CDC guidelines on the economic lockdown and when to reopen would do all that and more.
By all means print reasoned articles that call into question government policy on Covid 19, but please, less of this ‘the end of civilisation as we know it’ stuff, for it fails to take into account the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition whether it be Labour or Conservative. In a crisis, even a crisis that is overdone, people expect the government to be supported by the opposition and of all the measures that Johnson proposed, the one that included more involvement for the opposition in planning was probably the most sensible.
The problem with many on the left is that they have little faith in the ability of ordinary people to come to reasoned decisions. Yes, Imperial College used its own media people to whip up fear of contagion, and yes, governments of all political shades tend to listen to Imperial College however loony its proposals. With its ludicrous warnings of half a million deaths, lockdown was inevitable, but the people are getting fed up and the government knows it.
There might well be instincts of certain politicians towards authoritarianism, but at the end of the day, any UK government ignores public opinion at its own risk. Everything that has happened since March can be explained by panic and an attempt to be seen to be doing something in the face of that panic. As controls start to wind down, there will be a postmortem and that is when serious questioning of the decisions made will happen.
Then the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition will come into play and Keir Starmer’s forensic mind should come in very useful.
Isn’t that a contradiction terms?
At least in theory no, since the disloyal opposition would be practising rebellion on behalf of the Pope and the Pretender, at least at the time the phrase was coined.
Why should it be a contradiction in terms for the term exactly describes the situation as pertains? Admittedly Jeremy Corbyn might well have disowned the terminology but it is clear that Keir Starmer won’t, and whether offGrauniad’s readership would have it that way, it is unlikely that anyone of any political significance will listen.
The term may well exactly describe the situation as pertains. But it is still a contradiction. I will not bring in Her Majesty since I think it is way past time when Her Majesty should mind her own business. But a “loyal opposition” is ….what precisely? Loyal to what it opposes? i.e. not opposed to what it opposes?
Nevertheless, I appreciate your candour Kevin. Margaret Thatcher was equally candid in saying that New Labour were her finest achievement i.e. that New Labour marked the point where opposition was effectively abolished. Corbyn was a last unexpected gasp of even a nominal opposition.
And I take it by your condescending remarks on the political insignificance of Off-G opinion, that you yourself are quite happy that even the pretence of debate has been nullified. Although I’m sure Sir Keir will be a most loyal …whatever.
Keir Starmer???????? FFS.
Directly responsible for Julian Assange’s long on-going persecution, imprisonment and torture, and I don’t care if Assange did (or not) once work for an Intelligence Agency. He is still being tortured and your beloved leader of the Labour Party is directly responsible for it. Check his history.
“As DPP, Sir Keir tempered his love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.”
Starmer is even worse than Blair. At least Blair occasionally looked shocked (well after David Kelly was dispensed with)
Tony
Your position exactly exemplifies why the left has become such an irrelevance. The article accuses the left of failing to call the government to account for its actions over Covid and you accuse Starmer for his complicity in the Assange case. I am no fan of Starmer but claim that now is not the time to call the government to account. When the time is right, Starmer will do an excellent job.
As a Labour Party member who rejoined the party in order to support Jeremy it pains me to acknowledge that he seemed incapable of ceasing the initiative during his tenure. I know all too well the machinations that have led the Party to the position it is in now. I deplore them, but there is no point looking to George Galloway or some other figure to launch a new socialist party to replace Labour as the party of socialist purity.
We are where we are and preferring purity to power is no way for any party.
I presume you mean SEIZING the initiative – since CEASING the initiative is what Corbyn certainly did. But it is certainly true that Labour has become an irrelevance. They became an irrelevance 40 years ago. As indeed did your vocabulary. “Socialist purity” is almost as quaint as “Her Majesty’s loyal opposition”.
Thanks you of pointing out the error regarding the near homonyms ceasing and seizing. As for socialist purity I would argue that the comments pages of offGrauniad demonstrate the still currency of the term.
Oh Kevin you do make me laugh!
Always happy to be of service!
I know some in the left are happy this is going on. They like to see the destruction of our society as they believe it is ‘evil’ and they think they know better how to run the country. When I ask them they say’ we now have an opportunity to think of a better way’ When I ask how specifically they say ‘its an opportunity to think of a better way’…
Indeed some- possibly many- on the left wish to see the destruction of our society and perhaps see it replaced by something resembling the People’s Republic of China. Of course, that is why many who might usually be expected to support the left have contempt for it, and why we saw Boris Johnson become prime minister while Jeremy Corbyn was stabbed in the back by his own party.
It is sad that left wing no longer means for and of the people.
I’m not interested in left wing/right wing any more
The game now is truth vs lies.
They can call themselves what they like but are they speaking the truth or searching for it?
Oh Kevin, there is no left and hasn’t been for some time – although it is expedient for the political showbiz sector to keep making menacing noises about “left, socialists …” and I was going to say “communists” but no-one has a clue what that means anymore. The sheepherding is no longer what it used to be because the big bad wolf just isn’t there. Meanwhile the very real destruction of capitalism rages on regardless. And the corralorradingdong virus has been brought in to try and disguise the final curtain. And I’ll bet that even as The Titanic is blubbing beneath the froth, you’ll still be there to drone on about “Bloody Lefties!”
A very cynical view if I may say that is by no means unique amongst those who frequent the pages of offGrauniad. As for droning ‘about bloody lefties’ you rather ignore what mightn’t be obvious to those who simply equate being left with having moral self aggrandisement. There are lefties and then again there are loony lefties, both of which groups tend to enjoy lurking in the pages of offGrauniad. I’ve always been proud to refer to myself as a left wing- perhaps even a bloody lefty, but much of what seems to equate with the left nowadays is anathema to me.
I guess its partially an age thing for whatever age and experience teaches there is usually a large element of knowing that much commentary amounts to little more than teaching ones grandma to suck eggs- never a very edifying experience!
And the quaint antiquarianisms continue: “Lefties, Loony Lefties ….” I presume you have actually heard of the Titanic or is that ship yet to sink in your antedeluvian world?
What do you mean ‘society’. Your beloved Thatcher declared that dead. In any case, it means class rule and privilege, forever, ever greater inequality, mass austerity, ever worsening, killing hundreds of thousands, groveling obeisance to the USA and Israel, aggression against easy victims like Iraq, ever more debased and vulgar mass ‘kultur’. And most of the country devastated while the rich in London live it up. That ‘society’, that ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’, that crude Social Darwinism, that arrogant, racist, Western presumption of total superiority over the despised Yellow Devils?
‘As within, so without.’
The left think they have a moral and intellectual superiority which contradicts that they also for some reason have a lot of deep hatred. They wish death and severe pain on anyone that disagrees with them. For some reason they generally hate humanity and just have a lot of doom and gloom to spew out of their mouths. They think everyone except themselves are infected and are control freaks ala Bill Gates.
Hell hath no fury like a leftist scorned.
It’s impossible not to feel moral and intellectual superiority over the ‘Hanks’ of this world.
An balanced and informative site for the UK where sanity prevails.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-6th-may-2020
Civil liberties? Earlier in Manchester:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1258537649368739840
Blimey, USA policing infects Manchester. I give up. Nearly everyone has gone mad. I got hounded a few days ago, for writing a few simple truths on social media, all of which I could prove to be true, and none of them were particularly strong. They even complained to my wife, saying I was upsetting people. So sod ’em. I have now simply banned myself from social media.
Tony
Manchester police are like that. One of their chiefs, Anderton, attracted controversy back in the 80s or 90s because he believed God told him what to do. Earlier it was Manchester police who went after Alan Turing for homosexuality.
God’s Cop! I’m just listening to the Happy Mondays song of that name that was inspired by him. I can’t believe it’s 30 years since it came out…
I was much more into Pale Saints and Kitchens Of Distinction than Happy Mondays way back then (with notable mention of Boo Radleys) but, yes, where the heck did those 30 years go too?
Incidentally, the album names Comforts Of Madness and Strange Free World are very apt for the surreal nuttiness all round us.
Still have all of Pale Saints and Boo Radleys albums here at home, and albums of other bands from that era (Slowdive, Swervedriver).
Your comment sent me on a nostalgia trip Gwyn. Things were so different back then.
Gezzah, me old china. It’s good to hear from you. I hope you’re keeping well amid the corona-madness. I always think of my brother whenever I see a comment of yours on here (he lives in Broome).
I confess to not being familiar with the bands that you mention. I shall be doing some investigation into them. As well as continuing on my own nostalgia trip…
Take good care of yourself.
Hi Gwyn…. I think I’d rather be in Broome! At least it’d be a lot warmer.
Am in Melbourne. And winters here can be bitterly cold.
Comforts Of Madness – one of the best shoegaze albums ever. In history. Ever.
I’m originally from New Zealand, and used to read the old NME every week – for maybe 20 years. Always preferred it to Melody Maker.
3 of my grandparents came from the UK – Staffordshire, East London, Glasgow plus Ireland, and my entire childhood and teenage years was watching Coro, then later Brookside and Eastenders.
But all that was decades ago now. God, you’ve got me started now!
Where did the time go Gwyn?
I hope your weekend is good, and you’re coping relatively okay, cheers…
https://twitter.com/hashtag/LockdownIreland?src=hashtag_click same inn ireland 🙁
shock doctrine
The majority left (like the majority right) have been a deep embarrassment for a looooong time. Bland, beige people with Wikipedia levels of knowledge.
There is no genuine Left anywhere now.
I’ve just had the misfortune to read an ‘essay’ by Umair Haque on Medium that was delivered to my inbox. Its now been deleted.
‘How Freedom Became Free-Dumb’.
The sneering, snivelling, condescending hit job on ‘the riff raff’ – the non PC (unlike Haque and his ilk) working class from this SJW snowflake was breathtaking.
We have fascism in our faces, many tens of millions under house arrest, such blatant censorship that even Goebbels would be proud, and these self righteous creatures like Haque demonise and smear people calling for an end to the lockdowns.
What absolute bullshit. All in the service of Power and the establishment, whilst pretending to be ‘progressive’.
I see Crimethinc (hello, aren’t you guys meant to be libertarian socialists?) have also gone down the rabbit hole on this as well and jumped on board with the panicdemic narrative.
What an upside down World.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/08/germ-m08.html
Title speaks for itself. The World Socialist website wants to stay in lockdown forever.
“The working class can only counter the existential threat posed by the pandemic and the ruling class policies through its own independent programme. The assets of the super-rich must be confiscated and used to fight the pandemic and overcome the social and economic consequences of the lockdown. The big companies and banks must be placed under the democratic control of the workers. Capitalism, which means social impoverishment and death for the majority of the population, must be replaced by a socialist society.”
Of course to do all that the working class would have to leave lockdown which the WS sees as threatening.
These people are demented.
Wsws like most left wing websites (and any website that actively allows Louis proyect to spout shit) are controlled opposition who think they’re going to live out the more fanciful aspects of a socialist revolution and overthrow all religions and behead every last monarch and shoot every bourgeois politician but think little old Cuba is authoritarian. You couldn’t make it up but they have.
To be fair to the WSWS, they never had time for Proyect. Which only makes it more dismal that they swallowed the “corra comin’ ta get ya!” shit
Some of their instincts in the past at least were quite healthy, which is perhaps why they disappoint me now. It is a long time since the British SWP etc. could disappoint me because I have long known they’re no good and perhaps controlled opposition.
Didn’t the SWP collapse after some sex allegation? I recall trying to find out info on that, but it was all cloaked in censored language – which is handy because you can make anything of that you will. In any case, that was when Richard Seymour, a blogger I then followed, seemed to go through an odd collapse himself. He left the SWP, his blog “Lenin’s Tomb” which had been a very lively place up till then practically shrank to zero and he himself adopted a new cynical tone. Hmmm …. call me paranoid but I kept thinking “Mission accomplished!” (Seymour now writes for the Graund – truly “mission accomplished”!)
The SWP carries on in a somewhat shrivelled form. A similar American organisation did fold, however for unrelated reasons. The British SWP had a crisis after rape allegations against a leading member. Never tested in court, and perhaps that was the point. Some rumours claimed it was BS by the state to take out the SWP, but my God, why? It lived off its intake of temporarily radicalised students each year, and a lot of those took off for the hills after the rape allegations.
Re Seymour, maybe there is more money in being an MSM cynic although I do not rule out him being a state fink. I think he had a breakdown or something.
Yes I think Seymour did indeed have a breakdown. In the gloomy later days of his blog he even seemed to go all religious/mystical. And he started to attract comments from the other side of the spectrum that usually started with “I never thought I’d agree with a Left winger but….” He also went into a blog called Salvage – apparently aimed at the “desolated Left”. Oh dear!
It’s a bad sign when people on the other side of the spectrum agree with you. It is likely you are doing something wrong. Having said that I have been disappointed with people closer to my views normally when it is right-wing people for the most part who are the ones reacting against lockdowns while the likes of the WSWS go baaaaa.
Saw an exchange between the WSWS (SEP) Chairman David North and Proyect, and North called him “a liar and provocateur”. I think someone posted it here ages ago.
At least LP has stopped coming here (just touched wood) and hopefully he’ll keep his word about not returning.
I think I told you already, but I was so horrified by the WSWS over the top fear porn, I broke off all ties with them.
They just couldn’t see what was happening. Another site I haven’t been on for a fair while called Crimethinc (libertarian socialists) and saw a comment about them yesterday, so checked out their site – and it was as bad as the WSWS. And Crimethinc are basically anarchists FFS!
“Liar and provocateur”. Well you know what they say about stopped clocks…
Proyect is another Richard Seymour, with an extra dollop of hatred and bitterness.
I’d never heard of Richard Seymour, but have read the few snippets about him in the above comments.
A trajectory from the SWP to The Guardian. Figures. Sorta like Christopher Hitchens. And I won’t even mention Galloway who has apparently blocked OffGuardian from his Twitter page. They’d made a comment about GG’s antics earlier today.
How can all these alleged Left people be so blind and gullible?? Like you, I actually suspect now that some of these people and sites were controlled opposition all along.
And some of us (like myself with the WSWS) got sucked in.
Whatever I may have said about Craig Murray’s site, there is still a glimmer of intelligence there. His latest article is about the dubious connection methods of Twitter. But as for the WSWS, well it’s so depressing. They really must have a tight restriction on the comments permitted.
And the commenters can post stuff as turgid as
and
and get up votes!
(And these are real examples!)
Jesus wept George…. delusional and demented, and yep, depressing.
I liked your comment about how people would look at the BBC front page, look at the WSWS front page, back and forth, and try and spot the difference. Said it all.
I haven’t even looked at them since my last day of mag selling (6 weeks ago today). Mainly only come here, Global Research, Wrong Kind Of Green, Jimmy Dore, The Corbett Report and a few blogs now. There’s not much left!
Have a good weekend George.
As I probably said before, I have stopped looking at my usual sites and Off-G is about the only one I go to now. Furthermore, I have positively blanked out the MSM completely now. I am currently practicing a kind of Zen imperviousness when the TV news comes on. VE Day, celeb deaths, happy clappy festivals for cheering on the end of the NHS – it’s all passed me by, thankfully!
In the meantime, Thanks Gezzah, have a nice one yourself!
Self isolation from the neck up isn’t good for the intellect, Gezzah. Lowers resistance to the bubblebrainvirus (BUBBA-CoV) which causes Mononania. Catch that and before you know where you are they putting you under a tinfoil hat.
I hear you Rob, tho right now, am much more concerned with my actual situation than the danger of catching Bubblebrainvirus and having a tin foil hat put on my head.
I also take your point below about Twitter and Facebook was anything but a bad case of authoritarianism waiting to happen.
And here I’ve been moaning and whining about the censorship occurring on YouTube for gods sake. I mean – hello, ding dong… Duh.
I suppose you’ve heard about the experiment The Wave? And the psychology behind it, aye?
The dynamics of BTL at OffGuardian has changed quite drastically since the Covid19 coverage began. You would’ve noticed also.
A lot of familiar (safe?) names have vanished, and a lot of new names have shown up – especially in the last 2 months.
Appreciate your reply Rob, hope your week is okay.
A lot of familiar (safe?) names have vanished, and a lot of new names have shown up
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/27/lockdown-therapy-for-capitalism/#comment-157741
Okay, yeah, it’s great for this site that a lot of new people have shown up, and I don’t begrudge that at all. It’s important to get fresh perspectives on sites like OffGuardian.
Tho when you’re conversing with the same people over quite a long time, and a lot of them just seem to vanish, and at the same time there’s an influx of a whole lot of new names, it can be a bit disconcerting. That’s what I meant.
Hope your weekend was good.
Unz Review is good apart from the White Supremacist racists he tolerates.
I agree. Also the Holocaust denialists. But there is a fairly broad spread of opinion, including on the virus, although Unz himself is somewhat prone to hysteria, talking about “millions of dead” in the USA. I think the economic effects of the virus could ultimately kill millions, especially in Africa and South Asia, but only because this has been allowed to happen, and the virus itself is comparatively small potatoes.
Yep, agree, tho Unz Review is a bit hit and miss for me.
You do get some really good writers on there, and some I won’t even look at, and then you look at the comments section and it’s bloody hell, what KKK costume have you been wearing?
Hey Rob… hope you are travelling okay in your corner of our Planet?
Observing what is unfolding and how people are reacting….
I had a brief look at Unz Review yesterday, read one essay, glanced at the comments, but before then hadn’t been there for maybe 4 months.
‘but the many lost, confused, bereft, and – in the absence of relief or reason – resentful and blameful’.
Thank you for this reminder, and that despite our ‘differences’ at the end of the day, we are all human beings.
The ‘System’ and the 0.01% divide us in so many ways. And we (including myself) allow it, or go along with it in some way or the other.
Them. Us. The Other.
I have no idea who Edward Steichen or Carl Sandburg are. Perhaps I should? You’ve given me something to check.
Take care Rob✌️
Repost, formatting fixed
Sounds a bit like The Family of Man* to me: some luminously inclusive, some murderously exclusive, but the many lost, confused, bereft and–in the absence of relief or reason–resentful and blameful.
*Apologies to Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg
Nothing like the smell of condescension at bedtime.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
And: has anyone ever really believed that Twitter, Facebook, et al (i.e. any other centralized database of social interaction that is write-accessible only to those who have centrally registered for the privilege) was anything but a bad case of authoritarianism just waiting to happen?
Despite its depressingly in-your-face exposure of the mindless mobthink of so much of its intellectually limited BTL (a common characteristic of all social groups, not a unique characteristic of the Off-Guardian) engendered largely by the mindset expressed in its ‘About’, the Off-Guardian (a) requires no registration; (b) is superficially* anonymous; and (c) practices no evident exclusion–either by registration or by censorship–of BTL contributions. Taken all together, those comprises a minimum set of conditions for the establishment of an online social medium that professes to offer ‘freedom of speech’. The recent introduction of the identification of BTL-commenting ‘admins’, if only by number, is another useful anti-authoritarian condition.
* the relative anonymity provided by the Off-Guardian is ultimately dependent on the anonymity provided by the technical, commercial and political structures of the Internet. Enough said.
Or maybe people just type in what they think.
Yes. My point.
As for your prior bullshit about motes, when I was very young and in the midst of being socialized I realized that there was nothing I could not do. I don’t mean in the sense of capability or freedom but in the sense of culpability: if some particular shit hit a particular fan in a particular way at a particular time I could murder, lie, cheat, steal, … (c.f. Mike Pompeo and the CIA) just as easily as I could do all the goody goody stuff those trying to socialize me were seeking to prevent (OK) and even often believed themselves to be incapable of–bizarrely, self-deceptively, and often patently untrue and definitely–by their own standards–not OK).
Bottom line: I can not only be condescending, when I am (a) I know it and don’t try to hide it, (b) {so}I’m fucking good at it, and (c) I don’t really give a damn when some condescension comes {back} my way, even if/as I respond to it; and (d) on those bases I claim every right to point it out where it occurs, especially when it presents as smug self-righteousness (which I’m also good at, recurse);
Anonymous, self-admittedly rattle-headed (“whatever I may have said about…”) BTLer proclaims Craig Murray’s up front work to contain a glimmer (!) of intelligence after all? ‘Wit’ and ‘dick’ in any order you like.
Yes but MY condescension at least has the advantage of brevity.
So do ‘tweets’. Donald Trump’s knees jerk to them. Though, admittedly, he does have to join two or three together from time to time when he aspires to actual ‘thoughts’.
See – Isn’t that better?
practices no evident exclusion — either by registration or by censorship — of BTL contributions
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/27/lockdown-therapy-for-capitalism/#comment-157741
I think milosevic and Tim (and you?) might be confusing censorship and ‘freedom’ of speech’ with pre-stated publication policies and curation.
Pre-stated publication policies are not any form of censorship because they are pre-stated. Thus they transparently comprise the platform’s own perceived rights under what its owners/publishers/editors understand as acceptable free speech
(which may be dependent on publication laws in any applicable jurisdiction/s that they may not only disagree with, but openly campaign against).
Anyone who has a problem with that can always set up their own fora or look for sites that have a compatible fora posting policies or just directly ?chan themselves instead, no?
Perhaps the true aim of the “pandemic” bullshit was to bring down the last remnants of the Left? Perhaps next week, the media will turn round, say, “Fooled you all!” and the WSWS will implode as its excruciating criminal gullibility is exposed.
I found the WSWS response to the pandemic coverage to be possibly even more worrying than the pandemic coverage itself. So, a major species of bullshit hits the fan, you turn to the one you’ve always trusted ….and they are spouting the same bullshit? You’d think somebody in that Trotskyist organisation would look at the WSWS front page, look at the BBC’s front page, look at the WSWS front page again, and look at the BBC’s front page again, and then try and spot the difference.
I would never join the WSWS (I was a Trot for a time in my youth) but I used to treat their site as a sort of left daily newspaper online. Not any more although I remain seated firmly in the left of the auditorium even if I often find the left disappointing.
Knowing them and that political current somewhat, I am not entirely surprised that they are not keeping a level head.
Youthful Trotskyism–as distinct from adult, reflective Trotskyism–is often the precursor of adult authoritarian arseholeism.
Trot groups often have a significant turnover of young people, often recruited at universities. The SWP benefitted from the temporary radicalisation (often shallow) of university students, who often went onto Blairism if not worse. The SWP’s crisis with the rape allegations – though never tested in court, where they might have collapsed because it was possible there was little or nothing to them – meant that they no longer got that annual “right-on” reinforcement. Feminists wanted to nail the SWP to the wall but the response was similar to that with Assange who was also targeted and perhaps it was also bogus.
The people running the WSWS probably see themselves as adult and reflective. Their reaction to the virus says otherwise.
Have you checked your marbles recently?
The WSWS fret continuously over the gross capitalistic exploitation of the international working class. ‘International’ because that is one of the primary distinctions between Trotskyism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other.
The WSWS’s apparent deviation from the Off-Guardian view of COVID-19, which latter sees it as an insignificant bump on the epidemiological landscape that has been hooched up by a rapacious elite anxious to find cover for the failure of state Capitalism (v1.0) and the installation of the digital panopticon as an essential tool in the great reversioning to the globalized v2.0, is based on the reported characteristic of the disease–that it endangers with lasting ill-health and/or death ‘only’ the elderly and those with ‘co-morbidities’–set against the WSWS insistence that decades of deprivation and impoverishment has rendered the working class rife with co-morbidities across the entire age spectrum, particularly in the ‘developing’ world, such that even a small bias in the CFR against the working class will result in a far greater infliction of misery and dislocation there than elsewhere on the social tree. By the same token, the certain COVID-19 economic catastrophe–regardless of whether it was engendered by the disease itself or its misuse to perpetuate the supremacy of the already privileged–has already fallen massively disproportionately on the working class.
In other words, both of the religions* that you have chosen to juxtapose into a false opposition see the virus as an essentially irrelevant vector for the introduction of political homogeneity, with the Off-Guardian seeking to preserve and extend the chaos of anarchic libertarianism and the WSWS seeking to impose, with more success than the USSR pilot project had, the inverse heirarchical order of soviet-based socialism.
But you understood that, right? In which case I can only suggest that you look for your missing marbles under your Eggs Benedict.
__________
* One of the hallmarks of an organised religion is a creed, a defining statement of its characterizing tenets. By that token almost all political parties and many political movements are akin to religions. ‘Science’ is often categorized as a religion and it does indeed have strongly entrenched orthodoxies but over time it has increasingly aligned itself with repeatable (and, latterly, falsifiable) propositions. In that sense, it is more akin to a virus. That is why the Off-Guardian keeps on lining up outlier ‘experts’ who deny the orthodoxies of virology, epidemiology, etc., that ‘inform’ the sociopolitical response, while the WSWS saves its energy by jumping directly to the socio-economic consequences of the {“virus or sociopolitical narrative, hooch-up or rational, whatever you choose, who cares?”} sociopolitical response.
I find that with most of those spot-the-difference things, holding each up side-by-side (if they are not printed that way already) then crossing your eyes to superimpose them is by far the easiest way to highlight the differences. One possibly depressing point, though, is that if you ignore the content of the superimposed images of the BTLs in (a) the Off-Guardian and (b) the On-Guardian leaving only the metaforms then you will find no differences at all. They say that fish (a) have no concept of the nature of the water in which they swim and (b) don’t recognise themselves in mirrors.
How about your God given rights?!!
God has been strangely quiet on that one.
Probably can’t be botherered.
BDBinc how dare you!!, GOD!-
Jesus is a terrorist and anti Semitic anti vacca anti climate change denier and anti CV denier.
He is a clear communist socialist. sympathizer.
that type of message would get censored ion twitter face book and google youtube
he is a clear danger with his message and the scientific community and fact checker has siad so as they now are the GODs
…historians will tell you that Christians would not be allowed in a “Church of Jesus” because he was Jewish….and he was a “King” [modern day Northern Syria] who led the Jewish Rebellion against the Roman Empire…his aim being to become Roman Emperor …he was defeated and “crucified”, having been previously suffered the mockery of being vested in the purple robe of the Emperor…he was taken down from the cross and banished to the western most point of the Roman Empire [the islands of Albion ]….by the man who defeated him [St Paul] and created “Christianity” – Judaism Light for The Goy….all of the major players in the Bible are identified in the historical tomes…..or it could all be bull….i don’t know because i wasn’t there….and i believe nothing….!!
We can barely find out the truth about what happened last week, let alone 2000 years ago.
Caligula might not have been nuts, for example, Roman historical sources are thin and tend to be anti-Emperor to a surprising degree, although not usually against the one in power at the time the historian was writing.
Robert Graves wrote a poem called “The Persian Version” –
It started, “Truth-telling Persians do not dwell upon/
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon…”
I spoke with a (well-informed) store manager the other night, and told him how the death counts from covid are being preposterously inflated, and he said, “That’s because they’re getting federal funding for every covid death they submit in their reports.”
Like a bounty?
Is this true? Does anyone know about this?
Well, in the US, it is not for recording the death, but for admitted patients labeled c19 and even more for putting that patient on a vent. Something like 13k and 39 k. Fauci himself bragged about the payments during one of his many Il Dulce appearances.
Has to do with Medicare coverage and what it will pay for what. From my notes—
Hospitals Get Paid More to List Patients as COVID-19 and Three Times as Much if the Patient Goes on Ventilator (VIDEO)
https://thespectator.info/2020/04/09/hospitals-get-paid-more-to-list-patients-as-covid-19-and-three-times-as-much-if-the-patient-goes-on-ventilator-video/
another video of Dr. Scott Jensen: https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/10/watch-dr-scott-jensen-reveals-ridiculous-covid19-guidance/
UK NHS hostipals are ‘trusts’! An invoice passes between departments same as USA’s Medicare… we just don’t see it! I read US$5k for a regular death, 13k for Conjob-19 and $39k if they’re ‘popped on a vent’. I also saw that due to cough or gagging response, to intubate someone with a ventilator requires general anaesthetic, a thing that never comes without risk of death!
UK NHS hospitals are not trusts. Only in England. This was voted through on the votes of MPs from outside England in 2003 under Tony Blair. Google the ‘West Lothian Question’. Asymmetric national devolution stinks
to put someone on a ventilator you have to put them in an induced coma. There’s a 20% survival rate. Ventilators are supposed to be when the patient stops breathing not when they are short of oxygen as in the case with this virus. They are the wrong treatment but patients are being scared into accepting it and don’t have their family there to help them.
…and Pentobarbital, which is used for induced coma is the same Pentobarbital used for Lethal Injection of death row inmates! Hmnnn…
Ignoramus alert:
Depends on the type of ventilator. Ever thought of voluntarily isolating yourself in a half decent reference library for a few years? Oh wait, there’s the Internet! That would probably do. You could take your ‘device’ along to your favourite Disney theme park and cough along with Mickey until you’ve gotten yourself half a clue.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3249859/
These patients in the ICU on mechanical ventilators require sedation and analgesia in order to tolerate the endotracheal tube, to lie down in the same position for a long time, to prevent dysynchrony with the ventilator, to tolerate many of the procedures, for optimization of oxygenation and for patient safety.[
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/coronavirus-patient-who-spent-six-18053080
A man who spent six days in an induced coma after contracting coronavirus has shared his story to show people “they can survive this”.
Thanks much, very helpful.
I am just so awash in Covidiana these days, I forgot I skimmed those stories, in my first newbie days with this global saga, before I grasped the whole significance.
Now, two months in, as a well-seasoned veteran lol, I feel it like a whole new revelation, when you juxtapose it with some of the recent lies (whoppers) that have been unmasked.
Like Ferguson’s fall, and other such bottomlessly cynical behavior.
It’s things like that that force me to see Trump’s and Bojo’s little two-steps at the start of this, as the clumsy capo “covers” for what they were.
First, pretend you’re against having a hard lockdown, as the way of choice for priming the pump of all your “drain the swamp” fanboys and girls who still think you’re for real, then have a stable of pimp scientists twist your arm to force you into a hard Lockdown. I mean so obvious, both of them did an about face in the same way, and the same strategy.
“They MADE me do it.”
It’s the most obvious vote pandering, to have their cake and eat it too.
But that was just a mask, not for any mythical germs, but to conceal that the virus was part of their plans, and they were on board with this heist, from the very start.
It’s all simple sleight of hand. To give these supervillains cover while they rob the world.
And we better raise a din about these tell tale clues. That’s our job, to bring everyone to true vigilance.
Thanks again for adding to my arsenal.
It is likely that there are institutional benefits in having people be treated for and even dying of Covid-19 on your premises, so that is what the illness is. It is as though cancer, tumours and every other illness have been miraculously cured since the advent of the virus – after all, you never hear about any other disease any more.
I’d say it’s time for us all to start examining and documenting the money trail- this is a HUGE money grab.
Maxwell,
And at the same time, how about all of us starting a Covid-19 Truth Movement along the lines of 9-11 Truth Movement, get some serious crowdfunding organised for a documentary, books etc. and to take the psychopats who brought this on us to court? If the “Agenda For Sustainable Development” 2030 is the endgame, we are just experiencing part one of series of massive PSYOPS designed to take control over all resources on earth, including people.
In other news, there was a recent coup attempt in Venezuela. I would love to see the Off-Guardian’s take on this.
Rappoport’s latest. The “liberal left” Grauniad says the rat Ferguson’s affair is a “distraction”.
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/05/07/professor-lockdown-neil-ferguson-resigns-over-sex-scandal/
Getting rid of the glaring lie ( Ferg) that operation COVID19 is based on.
Ferg puppet is associated with what is known as “wrong data” this is known even by sleepers.They got rid of him to try to clean up.
Well, the move to dump Ferguson, as an important pimp in their plans (that seems virtually confessed by him, indirectly and by extension of his astoundingly lame meas culpas), could have layers of reasons.
They’re the ones trying to distract from the fact that their top “science” ideologue was caught red-handed admitting that his own lockdown prescription is a Big Lie.
Yes, it could be a Big Lie, or a Big Effup. I suppose the odds do favour something deliberate, a phase in the introduction of ‘Less Friendly Fascism’.
Professor Lockdown’s crime and consequent confession –and the reasons he gave!!!— go well beyond lies and effups, they look like some deep soap psyopera, a notoriously bad script of a cover-up.
But the hope and the glory is that as way far as this cat is out of their bag, already, they should have a hell of a time getting it all to lie flat.
It’s such a grand farce, but we are only a captive audience -literally- and the price of admission to their Theatre of Cruelty is way too high.
His paramour looks worth the effort, but you can’t tell a book by looking at the cover, as Bo Diddley warbled.
Worth the effort if you have a thing for pudgy social justice warriors with dodgy dress sense. 😂
How to make news. Wag that dog . . .
https://www.anti-empire.com/cbs-news-had-health-workers-fake-a-busy-covid-19-testing-site-by-posing-as-patients/
An interesting report, Reg. Whether or not CBS initiated the fake line-up, hospital management must have been in on it in order to facilitate it. So that raises its own questions.
In war zones media fakery is quite common and some of the same principles are being applied.
Your friendly GCHG doctor, who’s been explaining it all to you, is now talking about eugenics…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHW5jkVyLYM
This person is also saying that you should install the ‘tracing ap’.
Brushing all civil rights and liberties aside for a moment, how is the Contact Tracing App supposed to work? Even if there was an effective test for Covid-19, if it identified the positive, how are they going to know that the uninfected are not infected already?
I suspect they know that herd immunity is spreading, TPTB know that, and the spy app will be given credit for achieving that, just as the lockdown was credited with “stopping the plague”.
Wodarg’s recent interview – posted a couple of days ago here at Off-G – includes information about how corona viruses are notorious for their incredible ability to rapidly mutate and leap from species to species as they travel the world. Herd immunity with corona viruses is thus typically achieved at between 20% – 30% of the relevant population. This level of immunity is sufficient – in terms of a particular species being insufficiently-fertile-soil, as it were – for mutation towards using another animal as a host being the more effective propagation vehicle for the virus.
Apologies for the mixed metaphors!
Anyone who gets angry at none happy clapping on a Thursday, anyone who grassed up a neighbour (as happened to my pal on made up neighbourly lies) anyone who buys Union Jack bunting, anyone who downloads any tracing apps and anyone who walks two meters from your or stops to let you by because they think they’re so special and afraid of a few germs is an enemy and can go fuck themselves
Should be avoided like the plague
There hasn’t been a “Left” for years.
They disappeared down the Identity Politics Rabbit Hole a long time ago.
If it’s not about wimmin, shirt lifters, or toilets for trannies, they just ain’t interested.
Anything but class politics it would appear. They then say but trannies are working class too! So are paedos and burglars! Should we help them too?! Fuck me the fake left are a lot worse than any far right neo nazi because the Nazi won’t bullshit you.
Way to go ! Unify the people against their oppressors. Muppet.
Hes got a great point if you’re a trumpet blower and new to this site why not type his name and see how he’s not in anyone’s side but the elites. Everything else is a smokescreen
I posted this several days ago on a website. I voted for Clinton twice. Never again:
The Dems of today are all about social conditioning and a totalitarian view on life that has absofuckinglutley nothing to do with liberty.
They’ve been mesmerized by their political correctness and condemnation of anything that doesn’t fit into a very narrow vision of the world. Of course, some views thy promote on the surface seem noble and good , but this has been overshadowed by the complete disdain and tolerance for anyone who questions what is the MSM/propaganda-induced and agreed upon norm. Anyone who doesn’t goosestep to their socially engineered views is instantly branded with a Scarlett letter and is pushed to the fringes of what is considered acceptable.
Have you ever tried to say publicly that you don’t think Serena Williams is the best tennis player in history? Have you ever questioned the “science” behind vaccines? Have you ever attempted in pleasant company to express disdain towards Israel? Did you ever say in a crowd that you thought Trump wasn’t actually doing too bad? Ever bring up the fact that Obama had the least transparent presidency in history? Have you ever shown disgust that Obama was sworn in on MLK’s bible? What about mentioning that Cuomo really handled the Corona situation like shit? Ever question why a big “liberal” Dem like Colbert did non-stop monologues on Trump and Russia for months on end(even when extremely unfunny)? Ever mention that big liberal guy Cooper Anderson is an ex-CIA shill at a ‘civilized’ gathering? Ever try mentioning that Old Joe Biden certainly seems a little creepy toward little kids? Don’t dare publicly mention that you think a 15-year old might not quite have the sense to decide that they want a sex change.
Anyone who has ever posted comments on the Guardian knows that bringing up any of these topics and thousands more with a legitimate question or a cogent argument with have their comment ERASED.
The Dems are leading the charge for a totalitarian one world technocratic government right now. The Republicans are no better, but the Dems are actually more dangerous at this moment in time.
The fact you ever voted Clinton shows you should never have been allowed to vote at all
Agreed.what a globalist scum bag.
The popular mass is dull. Now who said that?
A US PERSPECTIVE
On May 4, 2020 Police broke up a protest in support of Assange outside of Westminster Magistrates Court. It appears COVID-19 is grounds for terminating the right to assemble. Forcing social distancing is a useful way to inhibit demonstrations. The inability to assemble met with little resistance from the Left since mainstream media news has successfully terrorized the entire population
In early January no one including the WHO considered COVID-19 a pandemic, however, slowly but surely the hysteria surrounding the virus gained astronomical heights as the liberal mainstream news found a new and sensational way to attack the Orangeman. Three year and half years of Russiagate and Ukraine-gate proved unsuccessful, a ploy that gained little traction with the working-class who only smelled the stench of warmongering against Russia. Putin, has been replaced with COVID-19. MSNBC, CNN, WAPO, and the NYT found a most effective means to eliminate an inelegant buffoon, promote a killer virus.
COVID-19 is proving to be a one size fits all ruling class solution. A pandemic puts an immediate damper on numerous protests occuring on every continent. Demonstrations are halted which terrified the rich and powerful fearful of revolution and a redistribution of wealth.
It’s sort of amazing how political groups shouted for violent overthrows, but are intimidated by the coronavirus. Leftist leaders who spoke out with fearlessness about change are now looking for the security state to protect them from disease. Workers with no savings are told to stay home.
Covid-19 is a parasite for multiple ideological hosts needing a suitable crisis to advance their political agenda. The Democratic Party leadership is exploiting COVID-19 to the max–they desperately want to replace Trump with catatonic Joe. Panic and fear are the two big weapons being used by the mainstream media news. Hysteria keeps COVID going, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. State-run mainstream media news would prefer an indefinite shutdown. Commentators are still working and are being paid millions. Affluent liberals don’t live from paycheck to paycheck, they could give a crap if millions are out of work as long as they rid themselves of Trump.
In the meantime, Pelosi and her gang of millionaires are sitting pretty. Trump, served to be the perfect distraction. Under the cover of Trump the Democrats unanimously passed a ton of reactionary legislation. The Dems also fast tracked a slew of right-wing Judges, and voted for the exorbitant military budget. In fact, the Dems just recently voted to transfer trillions in wealth to the banks and Wall Street, while handing the working-class a bone. The only time the Democrats ever opposed Trump was when he hesitated to bomb Syria, or if he wanted troops to leave Afghanistan. The Democrats answer to Trump is mentally declining Biden whose dubious political career proves him to be a warmongering racist crook who advocated for cutting Medicare and Social Security. Vacuous Joe, has always been mightily rewarded for every piece of anti-working-class legislation he passed. As a matter of fact, COVID-19 is keeping Joe in a Basement, which is a relief for his campaign organizers. Empty headed Joe, has a better chance of winning the election if he stays underground. If brain dead Joe manages to win, the intelligence agencies will keep him under wraps for the next four years never surfacing without a security state ventriloquist pulling the tightly tethered strings.
And this explains why the only folks complaining about the lockdowns as well as the loss of liberty are libertarians, small business owners, and workers who are smart enough to know they’re on their
own……. What remains is a panic ridden public manipulated by the state-run mainstream media propaganda news machine who’ll adhere to the coronavirus crisis until their 2020 political objectives are achieved.
Charlotte, it’s easy to get really depressed by things at the moment. All I can say is that there’s a huge number of us kicking back against it. You are just never told about us (because you don’t live in North Korea. Ha!).
Try to hang in there; grow food if you’re able to. The coming months are not going to be easy.
I’m still confident that this will all eventually have a good outcome.
Anyone who doubts that does not understand the indomitable human spirit.
I hope you’re right……
Charlotte, I love your anger and energy and passion. Keep it up. The world really does need people like you at the moment.
My own opinion is that in the short term this is going be very dire (ie, huge numbers of people are going to starve to death).
In the longer term I believe the wheels will fall off the neoliberal wagon very quickly.
What happens after that is anyone’s guess.
Stay well; and above all, try to stay sane.
Good outcomes first require a lot of death and pain, nothing is for free. The ruling rich have declared war on the plebs, they are in this fight to win and will do whatever it takes: they are now destroying your economy and your jobs. These people are not going to be stopped by argument or morals or setbacks such as a few protesters, even a million protesters. Expect to fight and possibly die, or succumb to a long period of pain.
True. And you might even need to risk illness. The central contradiction in the WSWS line is that.
Perhaps CoViD 19,20, 21etc will prove the coup de grace of the parasites war on the ‘useless eaters’.
Significantly less population of any/all class/es left in circulation = less likelihood of resilience through natural diversity engendering regeneration as the accumulated environmental depredations of previous centuries coalesce into Ecogeddon.
First rate post I share your sentiments. it is indeed frightening that in pragmatic America facts are meaningless when a critical mass of a sort is reched and the masses embrace fiction as truth.
“Trump said don’t stick your tongue in the power socket”…1 million libs are instantly electrocuted.
That’s the sad fact. The Dems/Libs will do ANYTHING to keep Trump out of office. I feel that was the plan for allowing him in office, because no one is allowed to be POTUS without the elites giving the thumb’s up. JFK was the last real POTUS and they blew his head off.
‘Libtards’, surely.
errr so it was the liberal left that signed the 2.2 trillion on 27 march 322 equinox period (hopefully that not to deep for you) saw the video it was Trump who signed it.with 5 behind him. a little understanding of esoteric arts may help you.
this joe thing,they repeat the same MO they did it with hellary remember her,!? saying and showing videos showing she had dementia and collapsing being held up by her security etc etc which she was.
I have seen videos of your boy trump not able to even string a word together and Q and the alt right clueless and AJ siad he may of been drugged! by the deep state .
Your fairytale vision of what a maverick trump is and making america great taking on this deep state is just a vision not reality. its a psycho drama.
blaming the WHO gates an co in USA ow yer and CCP (china) or Ferguson is u.k is deflection and a clean up.
The Clinton’s single-handedly destroyed the US working-class.
NAFTA put an end to millions of jobs and devastated rural America; eliminating Glass/Steagall paved the way for the 2008 financial collapse; defunding programs for single woman with children increased poverty and starvation; building private prisons and then increasing the length of sentencing increased profits for prison owners, but devastated hundreds of thousands of lives; bombing Yugoslavia, sanctioning Iraq murdered more than 500,000 children– both are war crimes, and I haven’t even touched on Africa……
Hillary, as Secretary of State advocated for regime change in Syria, the overthrow of Gaddafi,
and removing the democratically elected President of Ukraine. Her State Department forays probably killed close to a million.
The Clinton Foundation is nothing but a pay for play slush fund used to finance insidious operations.
Dimwitted Biden supported all of these reactionary polices and military interventions. Biden’s brother made millions in Iraq on a construction project. Biden’s son secured a lucrative job with a bank
after crooked Joe pushed through legislation that made it impossible for the working-class to declare bankruptcy. Biden, the Clinton’s, and phony baloney Obama is why the working-class preferred a circus clown. Neoliberalism componded by 30 years of military misadventures decimated the lives of billions……
To Michael Lesher:
I am similarly concerned with the speed and casualness with which the US citizenry is saying “Tell us again…how high is it that you want us to jump?” That being said, the combination of ignorance and arrogance that you exhibit at various points in your essay is the same arrogance and ignorance that you claim to deplore.
Let’s start first with the ignorance which may, more charitably, be characterized as blind spots or perhaps a willful ignoring of facts too disturbing to acknowledge or maybe just the garden variety ignoring that each one of us does everyday because we simply can’t pay attention to everything. What surprises me most is that you are surprised at the “Left”. I am tempted to ask what bubble you have been living in for the past decade? This “Left’s” response, which you so decry, has been in the making for a very long time.
If we want to look at recent examples of “Left” supported censorship we can take a gander at what has obsessed the “Left” for the past decade, ever more feverishly, ever more stridently – namely the issue of trans rights. What has been the response of the “Left” to people (women and men, gay, lesbian, straight, bi and transgender) who believe that sex is biological, that gender is a set of power relations and not a subjective “feeling”. I’ll give you the short version. They have been threatened with rape, been verbally harassed and doxxed online, been de-platformed, received death threats, lost their employment, been physically assaulted, been the object of smear campaigns, had their careers destroyed.
As to “Left” supported government censorship of speech? If you refuse to use the pronouns that a trans person demands you use, you can be fined $250, 000. Where? In that allegedly most liberal of cities, New York. (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-pronouns-fine-nyc/ read the entire article)
The “Left” has not been concerned with Left issues, e.g., the economic conditions of the working class, for a very long time. Where have you been? What have you been ignoring? Did you actually think the “Left” with its ever more censorious stance toward anyone who disagrees in the slightest with its identitarian obsessions would all of a sudden welcome something as radical as a divergence of opinion and the free speech necessary to express such diversity? Diversity is OK as long as the “Left” gets to define the parameters of acceptability. (FYI, I can check most of those identity boxes.)
Other displays of your ‘blind spots. Like the “Left” you criticize, you never doubt the dominant narrative. You take it for granted that Covid-19 is the demon virus that mainstream media says it. You never question it, at least in this article. There is a mindboggling amount of information currently available from all over the world that points to the fact that Covid is anything but the demon virus. Of course you may need an open mind to have it boggled. And as for your unquestioning acceptance of WHO, are you unaware of the incredibly layered financial interrelationships between WHO and Big Pharma? Where have you been?
OK on to arrogance. How much mainstream media do you read/watch? Ever read anything that might challenge your rather ill-considered view (given to you by “press accounts”) that the only people who seem to be speaking up about the it [the lockdown] are mobs of half-baked, gun-toting Trump lovers.” You decry the press but seem quite content to believe it.
Did you actually attend a rally? Please tell me you did. No? Probably easier to let CNN do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to go out and deal with troglodyte Trump supporters, actually talk to protesters because, geez, you might find that some of them are not at all who you believe them to be. But, hey, to maintain your possibly tattered “Lefty” credentials, just stay home and remain under house arrest.
No questions asked as you spout the “Left” line you have been taught to spout – “the right-wingers are politically clueless”, “extremists are the only people raising public objections”. Let me get this straight. People who have lost their jobs because greedy arrogant ignorant government officials tell them that is what they must do…these people are politically clueless, these people are extremists? One more time – did you actually attend a rally? How many of these “clueless” “extremists” have you actually talked to?
Saving the best for last. Here is the most egregious example of “Left” arrogance…. your arrogance, on steroids…”We should know by now that when reasonable people don’t lead the way with principled resistance to state repression — facing extraordinary claims to power with the skepticism such claims always deserve — it’s inevitable that other, less reasonable people, are going to step forward to complain.” YOU are reasonable. THEY are not. It’s the “Left” to the rescue, is it? Well, I feel better already. The “Left” may have a patent on smirking condescension. Do they also have one on cringeworthy righteousness?
And, by the way, prepare to get in line with the rest of the “Left” for your mandatory Gates/DARPA funded genetically engineered Covid vaccine which you can probably get at the same time they implant your microchip. Face it, the Third Reich could only have happened because there were millions of “good Germans” who were “just following orders”. In the US we have lots of “good liberals” just “following orders”.
Excellent summation of the sickness of the self-proclaimed liberal Left, Janie.
There is no “left” and there is no “right.” Those are divide and conquer terms utilized by the corporate fascist oligarch mobsters to keep the general population fighting amongst themselves and to frame its justification for its grand thievery and crimes. There is socialism and there is corporate fascism.
Eugene Debs would not want a world wide prison lock down of the population, destitution, hunger, homelessness, war and inequality. The groups that call themselves socialist that advocate for such horrible things act disingenuously and dishonestly.
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
~ Eugene Victory Debs
Hear, hear!
Bravo Janie!
Thank you Janie for sparing me the trouble of writing something along those lines, albeit, much less eloquently! A text like this could not go unanswered!
Lesher started reasonably well (from my point of view, of course), until he faced a tight bend and went drifting, until he crashed violently.
And yet, this fight is no longer a political battle between left and right, it’s a hostile technocratic corporate takeover of the world’s resources (people being one of them) and, once most politicians are now corporate owned, they will do whatever they are told by their masters, despite their original missions and political colors, the people being the least of their concerns.
Off Guardian, this is totally relevant, because it’s all about risk and death and personal choice…
I could not read this whole thing. This author must be living in a time capsule. The Democratic Party, which is still the only vehicle for the left, hasn’t been a supporter of working people for decades. And, if you are going to support the point of view of right-of-center working people, do you have to inoculate yourself by including the de rigeur denunciation of ‘Orange Man Bad’? Those small business owners and working stiffs put him in office, for good reason. He at least sounded like he was on their side, as opposed to the Queen of Darkness.
Unfortunately, having a narcissistic bumpkin on your side is not what anybody’s idea of a worthy President of the USA should be, even if the Queen of Darkness is substantially worse.
Unfortunately, there was no third option that year.
Is there EVER a genuine third option in Washington? I’m not even sure there are two… Washminster is owned by people who refuse to admit any other options at all.
Clinton’s great problem was that she exuded viciousness. Beelzebub would have trounced her. Add to her nasstiness, her and her anti-female feminazi supporters, and you had a losing formula.
Trillions and Trillions of dollars are sitting ready and waiting to be spent by US Corporations in Europe and the Anglo-sphere to pick up the many distressed & vulnerable companies, created by this CIA operation, so the longer the shut down the better for them. My guess is the pressure via the CIA on European leaders is now massive to keep their countries locked down, despite the obvious idiocy of it.
Destroy your own country for US Corporate interests, that is what Brexit was all about and how Tony Blair became a multi millionaire.
This article decries Trumps withdrawal of funding for the WHO and links to another article which states
Well the WHO has a history of corruption and that article quoted above seems to suggest is it the “pandemic” causing the economic disaster when it is the BS lockdown response that is.
The piece does engage in too much appeasement of the technocrat pseudo-medical-science party line. The WHO has been at the forefront of the lockdownist terror propaganda.
There’s a (not very good imo) documentary called TrustWHO. You can watch it for free if you have Amazon Prime. The most revealing moment comes right at the end, when the documentary’s intrepid journalist finally asks a direct question to the WHO’s DG of the time. From the DG’s answer (if I recall her position at the WHO correctly), we learn that only 30% of WHO funding is reliable, assured. That means, of course, that they are 70% dependent on organisations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which means such organisations determine global health policies to a very large degree.
‘Tucker Carlson Blows Up at Rutger Bregman in Unaired Fox News Interview’
Before you all fall in lover with Tucker Carson, and his truth telling, after his billionaire sponsors have fleeced the American public of 6 trillion, remember what he really is.
Carlson is just another Murdoch mouthpiece shilling for one half of the kosher sandwich.
I don’t think people are going to forget what Carlson is in a hurry. I certainly avoid all things “Fox” like the plague, but I can grant Carlson his recent moment of lucidity. He said some things there which might well get some less well-informed people onto the right track. We’ll see how things develop…
Fox are nassty Rightwing thugs, but compared to CNN and MSNBC, they seem almost decent and sane. Their reaction to the attempted legal lynching of Flynn (a nassty shite, too)falling apart, was vicious and hysterical, even by their standards.
Carlson hasn’t been bad at all the past few years. Not a %100, of course–it’s still Fox–but often better than the pathetic stuff on the other news channels. Sadly though, he seems to be falling for the ‘get China’ propaganda emanating from the neocons surrounding Trump. I hope he comes to his sense again.
I have noticed an improvement too, but he will not “come to his senses” in any way which we would recognize. He would lose his job within seconds.
I can’t remember who said it, but this comes to mind: “It is very difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it…”
The quote might be from Orwell, but I am not sure.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
Vintage Rappoport:
Rappoport refutes the “single cause” idea. That it must be one disease with one cause, from Wuhan to Westchester. Those who question the that coronavirus is the cause fall for the same fallacy – that it must be one cause: 5G or a plot by Bill Gates…
Jon Rappoport goes on to list the many environmental factors and health conditions affecting people who have been diagnosed with Covid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04UVB8DUgUg&feature=youtu.be&t=939
I would add from my own experience: All disasters are a confluence of multiple causes. The Covid happening will be no different. To believe otherwise is an illusion.
The two-party circus in the U.S -U.K etc. is the epitome of ridiculous. It is scripted and operated by the same people with the exact same goals.
Mostly correct but the author misses one huge point. This epidemic is NOT unusual, and NOT stressing health care facilities more than any other epidemic. It’s somewhat worse than the average flu year, but not approaching the worst flu years. We never killed the entire country in response to previous flu years, so the virus is NOT THE REASON for killing the entire country this time. It’s just a pretext.
An essential viewing interview revealing the story about Fauci and big pharma and their role in the politicization and monetization of vaccines, including Fauci’s vested interests in the vaccine: Plandemic Part 1.
They are just sub contractors to empire. Why isn’t the CIA stopping the corruption? because they are orchestrating it.
In a tyranny logic no longer works. The elites are all scrambling to serve the dictatorship and have abandoned their official rolls in our democracies. Look at the fear on Kier Stammers face every time he speaks to see what is happening.
The look people have when they can’t rely on the law to protect themselves any more.
FFS #extendthelockdown is trending on twitter. Emotional posts like this:
A little research shows that she is another media lover with interviews in multiple MSMs and has links to our beloved Imperial College.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23extendlockdown&src=trend_click. I am going to run a bath, light some candles, open a bottle of red and chill out because if I read any more of the comments on there, I will do myself damage.
I access twitter on firefox. You can download an extension that will block parts of webpages.
I blocked the “trending” and “you may like” boxes several weeks ago. Such a blessed relief!
I am actually getting the feeling rational people have had enough, several sources have told me the roads, shops, hospitals (normal service) are all getting busier.
I was talking with my wife this evening ignoring all SD diktats, she was horrified (shes a nurse) there was a bizarre convoy outside here hospital of trucks & buses sounding their horns, doing the happy clap celebration thing, my own show of gratitude is a 2 handed raised middle finger.
We were discussing Mine Fuhrer Sturgeon unwilling to release her grip on power, of course it was obvious the moment Boris ends lockup & stops paying furlough wages shes fooked.
I was saying how it will all end in violence but in reality i suspect it will end with whimper people will just get fed-up & go out & back to work, if there’s any left.
This might help balance things for you, i’m not a Brendan O’Neill fan really but Lionel Shriver gives a good interview.
Roads definitely getting busier here (South West England), bus service is back too after disappearing entirely for a few weeks.
Yep notice that where I am. It’s enough to send the happy clappers into fits of frenzied rage.
About ten days before official lockdown was loosened in Greece, you started to see more and more people out, more cars and motorcycles on the roads, and if shops had been open there would have been even more. The Greek media were as hysterical as anywhere else but people will not switch life off forever even if there are thousands of deaths, and in Greece it was not thousands, not even hundreds, merely dozens.
The mini-Fuhrette doesn’t want the conspiracy of feminazis exposed in the Salmond trial to capture the public’s attention. She’s a wee nassty beastie, no doubt about that. O’Neill is a VERY nassty piece of work.
My mother is knocking 79 years old. I had dinner with my mother this evening. Neither of us observed ‘social distancing’ rules. We never do. The nearest big village to us had it’s large first of the month market today. It was all very busy, although I was a bit distressed to see a lot of people wearing face masks (most people in these parts don’t take a blind bit of notice of it all).
I don’t usually watch the telly, but when I’m with my mother you have to be sociable. We watched Palin’s documentary about North Korea on the BBC, which I believe was originally broadcasted four years ago.
My mother tutted and said how terrible North Korea is (although Palin’s documentary had a hard job showing any of this). I had to remind my mother that now everyone in the West is effectively under house arrest, all civil liberties have been suspended, all elections have been suspended.
It’s enough to make you weep.
Wearing facemasks does make sense for some people, namely those in households with an at-risk person, when shopping. The UK has done a poor job of protecting the at-risk groups, and a good job of protecting the no-risk groups.
Oh, and I should perhaps add that my mother has been a complete angel in all this: there are three lots of OAPs in our nearest big village, all of whom have been terrified to step out of their home. For the last month or so my mother has got their shopping for them at the big supermarket on the outskirts of town (repeat, my mother is knocking 79 years of age).
If you ever meet my mother you might get some understanding of me.
My mother was like that at 79. She’s a bit more frail at nearly 97, but still baking and making jam and marmalade, mostly for other people.She’s in good spirits anyway, but I cheer her up with regular pictures of her latest great-grandson.
If they can do this on an apparant capricous whim, did we have any freedom anyway.
It’s the lack of opposition in Parliament that I can’t get over. I’ve expressed this in stark terms to my local MP twice now, but no response except an automated one.
By the way, since it’s being purged from YouTube, here’s a Bitchute link to the Plandemic movie–probably the best documentary of the year: https://www.bitchute.com/video/IB3ijQuLkkUr/
Very credible and astounding video.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Liberals have gone bye-bye.
Wait a minute? Is the lockdown really being done for our health? Or is it just another form of punishment? Hard to tell anymore.
Personally, I can live without a WHO under the thumb of Bill Gates.
When did standing up for yourself become one and same thing as ‘supporting Trump’?
Don’t forget the California surfers. Hang ten, dude!
Trump overs, Hillary lovers, Bernie lovers: Doesn’t make any difference because the US government is unable to provide socialised services without extreme corruption.
The most disgusting part of this sick joke is the narcissistic line dancing shit performed by out ‘heros’, whilst they pause for a moment from allegedly climbing over dead bodies throughout the wards (or whenever a video camera is in sight).
I don’t know why health care workers want to serve as geeks in a top-down astroturfed propaganda campaign.
I would be having respect for them, but such is my hostile reaction to this terrorist propaganda offensive that I can’t help but feel contempt for them as well.
Of course I’ve long known that, at least here in the states, the doctor is not your doctor but the government’s doctor, Big Pharma’s doctor, the insurance racket’s doctor. Same for the whole system. So I guess on second thought the cadres’ play-acting these days isn’t surprising.
It is all getting a bit “White Helmets”.
I’m sure they’re all doing it because they think, or were told, that it would raise morale. It’s just getting creepy now.
Exactly! Instead of White Helmets, it’s now White Coats.
🙂
True to form for Znet – still bolstering the 911 mythos. As Banksy donates a propaganda drawing to a hospital, and Glenn Greenwald goes full hawk interviewing Stoller to whip up anti-Chinese jingoism, my lefty friends are clapping the rainbow skies and sending me links to Galloway’s lies.
There are some straight forward truths about the Left which nobody is supposed to talk about. That is the problem that is coming home to roost right now with the Left’s lockdown denial.
Greenwald is a phony and shit.
All simply the collapse, in a nassty neo-feudal parody of a society, with the populace, driven into hateful camps by decades of divide and rule policies pursued by a diabolically Evil ruling class, foaming at the mouth to attack each other, of an unsustainable modus operandi, that of the cancer, capitalism. The so-called ‘liberals’ would dearly love the ‘deplorables’ all get CoViD19, and the deplos would just as fondly desire that the ‘Left’ (so very funny in the US context) just give them the opportunity to assert their Second Amendment Rights.
this is prime example of psy op
lasts week they changed the U.k gov websites and the media change it tune slightly
story’s like this on a full moon juice horseshit
all of the sudden THEY CARE ! get the fuck of of here.
Th e USA PATRIOT ACT, a 363-page, 57,000+ word document to replace the
Constitution, was voted on by people who didn’t read it. the
C V act brought in 2020 march 23 In U>K across the pond we have
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act also known as
the CARES Act was signed into law on 3/27/2020
Tv show drama
the lady took down $500K on gofundme said a little birdy
This may explain why liberals are leading the charge to make this so-called pandemic as bad as possible. Sad!
———-
Why Liberal Californians Don’t Want to Go Back to Normal
California has let thousands of people out of prisons and found shelter for many who had been living on the streets, but how far the progressive wing can push the state remains a question.
Updated May 5, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-california-liberals.html
The Big Pharma+WHO+Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s main goal is to impose a global vaccination program. No matter what it takes!
Team Davos
So today I finally received Charles Mackay’s book ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’.
And I was thinking to put it on my desk in my office, for anyone to read who is interested. But since the book is pretty thick (so many delusions), and my workplace is only visited by like-minded people (a relief), it is not really needed to be put there for reference, so I didn’t.
I do speak to people who are having a hard time with the madness of crowds though.
One person I spoke through mail. She is a former PhD student from the department where I work and who is doing a postdoc abroad. And having a hard time, really. She is in her 40s, has no husband or children, is on her own in a country where she doesn’t speak the language, and that has been hard from the beginning. But she is a person who loves doing research, puts all her energy in it and doesn’t mind to be on her own as long as she can do research. But the University is closed, her experiments have gone to waste, she cannot see colleagues, cannot see friends. So she is lonely… And she mailed to me and said that she had not been able to respond to some easy task that she had to do for some time (responding to a journal) due to ‘personal’ reasons. So I asked her what was wrong. And she told me that it was nothing serious and that everything is fine now. So I thought that we should correspond a little bit more. And now we are all into sharing books and ideas and discussing the sillyness of the lockdown, and it feels less lonely and it makes me happy.
But there are also other people who are also having a hard time who speak with me, but a ‘different hard time’. For instance one of my bosses (I have several bosses), let’s call her Y. She is perfectly able to come to work, but hasn’t done so since the lockdown as she is really into self-isolating, which is remarkable since she is a professor in defining ‘risk’. And I have to speak to her by phone every week (I don’t videoconference). And we always get into this long discussion about Covid19. And I thought I should share share such a conversation here with you. But I find it very hard to do so, much harder than sharing the discussion I had with the postdoc. And that is because the thinking of Y makes me claustrophobic. You know, the idea that you have to enter someone else’s brain and see that it is so cramped there.
So very briefly then. I told Y about everything I am doing for Covid research (which research I do with one of my other bosses X) and that all I can see from that research is nothing more extraordinary than seasonal flu. And she told me that she found that hard to believe, since the high Ro, the issue of that this was a ‘new disease’, you know all the regular talking points. To which I responded that in contrast to the points she made, that I am just quoting data. So I challenged Y and said: ‘how many people do you think we admitted in our hospital to the ICU with Covid’. And she was off by a factor of 10-fold. And then Y said: but some might have later got admitted to the ICU. And since I did not know that data by heart, she was convinced that her estimate was not so bad at all. And then I said that in 2018 8000 people died of flu and that 5000 died with Covid19. And she was not impressed since Covid19 is underdiagnosed (how does she know, and why would this not be the case for flu). And then I said: ‘what is the average life expectancy of Dutch people?’ And she didn’t know so I told her: ‘it is 81 years.’ And then I asked what is the average age of those who died with Covid19. And she didn’t know, so I told her: 82. And then she said that you cannot compare the 2 numbers and I asked why, and I didn’t get an answer.
And so on and so forth…
Anyway, end of the matter was that she has received money for doing second wave Covid19 research (it is quite easy now for a researcher to get a grant for Covid19 research as long as you believe it is deadly and dangerous) and if I wanted to help finding out how dangerous this disease actually is. To which I kindly rejected the invitation. And then she said that then I should apply for a grant application myself. Which I also kindly rejected since my studies cannot be funded as there is no research line that goes into showing what Covid19 wasn’t and how doctors created the biggest iatrogenic cause of death and misery, ever. To which she just laughed and suggested me to contact one of my other bosses X. Which I have to do tomorrow.
I don’t know how story will end for me (but am not worried). Yet I do know that some people cannot be convinced that they were ever wrong, even if you tell them straight in their face some actual numbers that should make sense. And that is probably related to money and power. Give a scientist a buck and a little attention, on the condition that he should follow the conventional ‘wisdom’ (for foolishness is a better word) and he will follow the conventional wisdom like a headless chicken.
The only Karma in that is that even though these toeing the line kind of scientists may have some fame and fortune (on a Richter scale of 0.0001 that is only felt by their direct colleagues) they will be doing a nutty job. Maybe that is the only way for them to finally see reality.
Willem
Thanks for posting that. I find the human behaviour side of this highly fascinating.