#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end of the gated community market. /1 https://t.co/ATJpz0VWJ2

The gated community can be used to keep the unwashed out, or to lock them in. The NSW pandemic strategy is the latter, locking down much of the West of the city to keep the virus there, though it arrived there from the East. We need to think a bit harder about these trends. /2

The big libertarian push of the past 50 years has been to deny the collective element of social life, and pretend society isn’t real. Just a bunch of separate individuals. I’ve Tweeted before about how I think this actually created and now prolongs the pandemic. /3

The pandemic is a tug-of-war between what’s left of our old collective structures, trying to do basic public health work, and the new libertarian push, which describes that public health work as oppression. Every gain is quickly erased by a new libertarian ‘opening up’. /4

Perversely, the ‘freedom’ the libertarians want us to open up to is social life. A collective thing. They’re already individually free to do whatever they like at home. The social life they want back is created by a collective effort they reject in their core beliefs. /5

The ‘live with the virus’ fantasy to escape the pandemic is pure libertarianism. Vaccines have been repurposed as personal Covid-shields. If you get Covid now, it’s your own fault. A ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, where a vaccine magically transports you out of a pandemic…/6

…that continues to swarm around you. A vaccine is just a tweak to a collective, complex ecosystem of people and microbes. It succeeds collectively, not individually. Via an integrated public health strategy. You can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic. /end