Jack the Insider has a great rant today about some very silly people. Refusing to wear masks in public, provoking the police, buying crystals to ward off 5G radiation …
Jack asks the question:
The question that has been gnawing at me is, why are many people in our communities behaving so badly during a pandemic which directly or indirectly puts these people at risk?
Well Jack, the immediate reason is that people are bored and the devil makes work for idle hands. People are also jacked off, if you’ll forgive the pun.
But there is a deeper problem.
I actually laughed out loud when I read:
There is no sense of community, no looking after others.
Like, no shit Sherlock.
No sense of community? What? Not in the most left-wing state of Australia under the most left-wing government in Australia? After decades of lefties telling us that we’re all racists, and bigots, and there are haves and have-nots, and insiders and outsiders, and rich and poor, there is no such thing as a uniquely Australian culture, and definitely no such thing as western civilisation, and whatever other bullshit story they are capable of pulling out of their backsides, what do you really expect?
Jack – I left my sense of community at the Tax Office.
Then there is this:
Take a look at these people and there is nothing there. No grounding in history, no sense of intellectual curiosity, a fluid set of beliefs and credos based on a quick search for easy answers that begin and end with scanning Facebook and YouTube entries from other fools or jumping in the deep end of 8Chan for the crazy brave.
If an individual has no idea of how we got to where we are today, and how the world actually works then almost anything becomes possible.
Yep – that is a problem. After a generation of lefties destroying the schooling system, all of a sudden people don’t know history? People have no intellectual curiosity? How did that happen?
So Daniel Andrews: the world that you wanted, the world that you helped create, is here. How is it working for you? These people protesting against your government, how are they any different from the protests you participated in against government you don’t like?
To be fair – Jack the Insider is a smart guy. He knows the answers to the questions he raises. The decline in civic capital in our society is a problem. I don’t know how to fix it, perhaps it can’t be fixed. But it turns out that all those bourgeois values that the left so despise actually had value.
In the meantime, keep safe, mask up if you live in Victoria, don’t go to work if you are feeling sick, crystals you buy on the internet will not keep you safe from anything (especially scammers), and taxation is theft.
Update I: ChrisM asks in comments, “Why are they silly? They are following the governments and health officials guidelines from just a couple of months ago.”
COVID-19 is associated with high levels of radical uncertainty. The problem is that we don’t know much about the virus and how it works. This will change over time, and as such we can expect official guidelines to change over time too.
Update II: Lee in comments points out that Dan Andrews has done himself a lot of reputational damage.
Yes. I agree. No matter what else you think of him, Dan Andrews had been able to project the image of being a competent technocrat. At the state government level that is a good thing. He speaks well and brings gravitas to the role. But this second outbreak has trashed that image. Now people can quibble – maybe he wasn’t a competent technocrat, etc. etc. etc. Just as location is everything in property, image is everything in politics – until it isn’t.