The Stupid Convoy Fulfilled Its Purpose

 

These miserable Yahoos have been allowed to be so effective because the oligarchy is agreed that sensible government/state action to combat the pandemic (and, especially, the increased taxes on the wealthy necessary for this action) are ideologically unacceptable.  With nothing in the way of scientific legitimacy, the clod Doug Ford has announced an end to vaccine passports and capacity restrictions on gyms and restaurants.  He says that the timing of this stupid announcement has nothing to do with the convoy.  If he mans that (and I'm sure he doesn't) somebody should have told him that that is EXACTLY how it's going to be perceived: As a pandering to the ignorant deluded yahoos blocking the border and harrassing the people of Ottawa for over a week. His announcement will surely please his skank daughter and her bully-boy cop husband who are very much the "intellectual" soul-mates of the dullards in the convoy.  

Ford has joined Jason Kenney and Scott Moe (two individuals who put the lie to the belief that psychopaths need to be intelligent) in denying science as well as the obvious reality that is staring them in their stupid faces.  Expect another surge of COVID in Ontario as the shit-heads are pandered to.  The only silver lining that I can see is that Ontario voters will clearly see how incompetent and stupid Ford is and they will ditch him and his whole party of grifters and morons.

Viruses spread and evolve.  That's how reality works.  The more people refusing to mask, observe social distancing and crowded (especially indoor) public events and vaccinations, out of some blinkered notion of "freedom," the more opportunities the virus has to thrive.

But the Trudeau/Freeland Liberals are also satisfied with the convoy.  They allowed it to act as a sort of theatre so that other Canadians (the 80% majority) can see what it is they're up against.  The argument being that if the Liberals' half-assed response to the virus has produced this much rage, imagine what further restrictive public health measures would have done. 

Of course, as Ian Welsh has convincingly argued, pursuing "Zero Covid" from the start would have meant far less in the way of mass lockdowns and overtaxed hospitals.  And subsidizing the people affected by these lockdowns in a meaningful way, and providing the poverty-wage workers with sufficient protective equipment and expanding public transit to avoid crowding and ventilating schools properly, etc., all would require a state capacity that Canadian neo-liberals have trashed and would also require raising taxes on the plutocracy.  So the interminable misery of lockdowns, brief re-openings followed by more lockdowns is the lot of all of us. 

Of course, all of these idiots, from the convoy participants and their supporters, to the convoy organizers, to the right-wing media supporters, to the Conservative Party opportunists, to the right-wing corporate owners, the centrist corporate owners, the Liberal Party of Canada and its insufferable hack supporters, ... they all have their independent ideals and analysis.  They all luxuriate in their ideological bubbles, blissfully unaware and uninterested in superior points of view. But in the end, it doesn't matter.  They're stupid and we are all suffering for it. 

Oh yeah: It's an entirely natural process. But one that allows Justin Trudeau to point out to some hypocritical Conservative wind-bag who happens to be Jewish, that she's siding with people who are led by white-supremacists and who have people waving swastikas at their rallies.  Which gives that Conservative MP the painful moment of trying to deny what a fetid, moronic hypocrite she is.