Fly Away

I still remember fondly the "still call Australia home" ads from Qantas (which in the car and climate if we watched would probably take on a bizarrely ironic meaning).

So I wasn't coming in biased I started very prepared to embrace this but when I watched it the first thing I thought was man things must be really hard in Australia if people are getting excited about such simple pleasures. And reading your comment yeah I reckon there are echoes of that in in there. Sort of the blade runner dystopian future where you have you know advertisements for off world colonies, or half life.

Vaccines in general are a good idea I just got vaccinated against yellow fever and meningococcal variants for Africa. But I'm cautious about these recently developed and globally deployed vaccines there's just not enough time to know what they really do.

But what I think is really interesting and should give people pause is the heterophobia--not as in fear of a sexual orientation but a fear of heterodoxy. It seems that the discourse has tried to criminalize punish and shame any speech or thought that goes against a sort of obsequious acceptance of the orthodoxy that vaccines are the only way that we can recover normality.

If you just isolate that strand of the current situation and look at it it seems very easy to take the view that the vaccines were the main game all along and the reaction of the lockdown to the problem of the virus was just the pretext deployed in order to coerce people to get vaccinated. I'm not suggesting the entire complexity of the current situation can be reduced to this but I think it's instructive to consider that this may be an aspect that plays A part somehow.

The way this choice has been set up for people as, "well we can imprison you in your homes in your communities or you can all get vaccinated." I mean it's the sort of schoolyard or prison yard or concentration camp discipline where the entire group is punished until everyone can meet whatever criteria the guards decide.

Even if vaccines are the best public health policy and I think in the end they are (which does not make regard to whether the magnitude of the threat of the virus justifies a policy of that magnitude but putting that aside), whether or not they are the best public health policy there's just such a very strong and obvious power dynamic in the way this "choice" has been set up for people, that even if it was done sincerely, I think people who are in control could easily sort of let it go to their head--these great powers that they're holding over everybody right now--the ability to keep their subjects in indefinite lockdowns until people agree to submit to vaccination.

while I'm not really trying to blame how I feel about this on the current situation or its actors I think it's instructive that I do feel that I need to be sort of modal about this and sort of careful in choosing my words. Any that fact is quite illustrative of how heterodox thought and speech about this topic has been criminalized by the discourse I think.

I'm outside of Australia right now and have been for the entirety of this whole situation so I feel quite lucky that I am able to make a statement like this because I think I'm reasonably scared that if I was in Australia making statements like this would then I would be inviting myself to be subject to some sort of ad hoc harassment from the state, as it would seem to perceive its fragile narrative power would be threatened by such heterodoxy. The danger of this of course is that people surrender the ability to question and no longer choose to think critically. And without questions and critical thought then we can't really arrive at the best solution especially in a representative democracy now can we?