Dare Not To Care - Or Let's All Pitch In To Help The Rich

You may notice in all this nonsense about the lockdown and, increasingly, even masks that the "constitutional rights" being violated are...nothing of the sort. No one has the "right" to get service inside a private business, or to do so without wearing a mask if the private business requires it.

Clearly this isn't about the rule of law, so much as it is about the rule of white Christo-capitalists and the entitlement they think they're owed.

Dennis Prager said on his podcast a couple of weeks ago that "science" was getting the virus wrong: the death rate was being far overestimated, he said, because no attempt had been made to distinguish between c19 deaths and deaths unrelated to it. Therefore the straightforward solution was to isolate the sick and vulnerable from everyone else, and to let everyone else go about their business. This is actually a fairly widespread "case" being made on the right, and the fact that the last part is true makes it particularly believable and intuitive.

It is not true for us, however, because der Drumpf has refused to honor his oath of office and provide for the well fare of the American people by ensuring we have the testing capability we need to know who's sick and who isn't. He get's "lava mad" at his staff for his personal exposure, of course, but the rest of us can die in our thousands without so much as a crocodile tear from this psychopathic toddler in an aged and corpulent corpse.

This is, of course, the exact example his brownshirts are taking when they refuse to wear masks: it is our safety, not theirs, they put at risk. It's okay if the rest of us want to take their health seriously, but the "constitutional" principle in play here seems to be a desire for the "rugged individualism" they imagine our forebears embraced. Daring? If they dare to do anything, it is simply not to care. I've quoted Upton Sinclair so many times in the past, about it being difficult to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it. The lesson the pandemic is reinforcing is, however, that it's hard to get someone to unlearn a lie when their dinner depends on believing it.

It is especially hard when the other side has completely abandoned the working class, preferring moralizations about race, sex, and various "cause-isms" to offering the substantial defenses against the predator billionaire class that the working class needs.

Nobody's a better example at the moment of predator billionaires than Elon Musk, who has threatened to move his lucrative business Tesla out of California unless the state allows his employees to get back to work. And what do you think they produce? Cars? Not at all. They produce riches for the rich, for Elon himself. He has called the quarantine "fascist" which seems to me of a kind with calling a diver putting himself at personal risk to save a caveful of Thai children a pedophile. Disgusted doesn't even begin to express my feelings about it.

Nevertheless, his propaganda - and that of his class - is winning the day. These poor working class stiffs need to go back to work because they're just so poor. They'll be homeless and hungry without Musk's jobs. Which is true, though it needn't be. In fact what's happening here is that the American people have bought the proverbial bridge in Arizona, in which they positively refuse to demand of the Croesian class that they should make some of their unimaginable wealth available to keep the real producers in this country housed and fed.

The need for a minimum basic income has never been clearer, and yet those who should be threatening the Musks of the world are instead shooting each other at McDonald's because they can't sit inside the restaurant. And where in all this is the single most powerful voice of the opposition? At home, in his basement, quietly denying allegations of sexual misconduct.