#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is…

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA

Let’s consider those, generally. We’re not yet 2 years into this pandemic. The hardship experienced by just about everybody pales into insignificance against what societies endured in the two world wars. And yet everybody seems agreed that it’s all too hard. /2

Much of that is the repeated wearing down of social life by libertarian politics, which began the pandemic by weaponising the most powerful weapon against any novel pathogen - basic quarantine - as ‘lockdown’. /3

Now even sensible people and experts will regurgitate slogans about the Economy and mental health, precisely designed by the political libertarians of the Right to undermine global action. It had form, with climate change. The same strategies. /4

Get people to believe, astonishingly, that action against a pandemic (or climate change) has to be ‘balanced’ against normal life. A normal life that is *producing* climate change, AND pandemics. What I think isn’t being considered is - we may have no choice in any of this. /5

Just as we don’t get to choose to ‘live with’ climate change, like choosing a milkshake flavour, we actually don’t know if Covid will agree to be ‘lived with’, in any form. Smallpox and malaria have killed more than half the people who ever lived. No ‘living with’, for them. /6

Our masters of the universe assumptions, that we get to actually choose major existential outcomes, are those shared by every civilisation that has ever collapsed. Historians will tell you that. But we barely even listen to epidemiologists. I’m not sure anybody is considering…/7

…that our fate may already be out of our hands. That Covid may not be something we can choose to accommodate in our societies. It may destroy them. Not even entertaining that possibility is poor risk management. Idiocy. /8

This is several decades of political libertarian philosophy, becoming real. The idea of collective fates and collective action almost destroyed. The struggle against Covid overwhelmingly framed as individual inconvenience, like bad customer service. That’s our true enemy. /end