The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with…
The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1 #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/IN7K3xyfrF
Those who want to minimise or even deny Covid’s seriousness, often speak of the virus as some sort of independent being. It lives ‘alongside’ us, we ‘live with’ it. Scientifically we know the virus survives about 3 days, on its own. If you deny it bodies to incubate in i.e us. /2
This is the deepest layer of the deceit the minimisers and deniers ply every single day. The decoupling of Covid from bodies. From people. Covid isn’t a virus, it’s an ecosystem. SARS-Cov-2, the virus, is a puny thing, easily killed with soap and water. /3
But if it gets into bodies, it becomes Covid. And Covid doesn’t live inside a single body. It lives inside a community of bodies. Without that community, it would again die, inside a single body. Fresh hosts = Covid. Community = Covid. It’s an ecosystem. /4
It’s people interacting with other people, that creates ‘Covid’. People being SOCIAL. The laughable idiocy of Covid deniers and minimisers is that they’re mostly political libertarians. The individual freedom crowd. But the freedoms they fight for are *social* freedoms. /5
Their entire vision of society, as individuals living freely, is a fantasy. The freedom they crave is socially generated. The public health restrictions they’ve been so vehemently fighting against during the pandemic overwhelmingly target social, not individual freedoms. /6
They’re freeloading hypocrites, they love the individual freedom social cooperation gives us all, but they don’t want to do the social cooperation to get it. Some are just genuinely ignorant, and don’t understand the social underpinnings of the individual freedom they love. /7
The triumph of this fantasy is the ‘Economy’. Another bodiless entity, existing alongside the people who work in it. They began the pandemic saying we need to ‘balance’ the Economy against public health action. They’re still saying it, the resurgence of that view *is* 2022. /8
A statistical construct, extracted from the social activity of the entire community, is substituted for that community. Nearly everybody swallows that sleight of hand, it’s a political triumph of fantasy. We’ve all seen what happens when the bodies, the people…/9
…in our communities get Covid. The ‘Economy’ stops. It was just people, doing social things (work is a social invention), the whole time. This is the real libertarian agenda, not individual freedom, but the freedom of employees, to work. The only individuals they actually… /10
…care about are the people who employ these employees. Political libertarianism is a smoke screen, a philosophy weaponised by vested interests to sell widespread erosion of social rights and responsibilities. /11
We can see all of this even in the most basic of pandemic discussions, about cases and deaths. The statistics. It’s vital we don’t look at pandemic curves as the ‘virus happening to us’. These curves chart social behaviour, and the resultant infections. /12 https://t.co/2FEQR1bLTf
The up-and-down slopes of epidemic curves are the outcome of social behaviour. Caution on the way up, triumphal abandoning of caution on the way down. Countries who instead adopt a social behaviour of ‘fighting the pandemic’ don’t experience these curves, and/or they dampen…/13
…them hugely. Countries who focus on people, people living in communities, doing social things. Who don’t separate that from individual freedom, as most of those freedoms are also social, communal. Try living in a desert or a jungle, as a lone individual.
/end