Canadians are protesting against a public health effort that endlessly centers power as a response to risk, making health by barking orders. They’re opposing coercion, in good part, because (two years later!) it still doesn’t work, and also in part because it’s a condescending reframing of the relationship between government and governed. To a significant degree, effective government argues and convinces; it proceeds on the basis on rational agreement around a set of shared goals.
So this is the response Prime Minister Zoolander offers to mass protest:
Pardon the redundancy, but I’m also going to embed that as a photo, in case the tweet vanishes. If the tweet is still up there, just use the opportunity to soak in a second bath of pure empty man-child shit-gibbering:
Assertion: We reject coercion in the service of public health, and demand that government respect informed consent and medical autonomy.
Response: Racist flags!
We have a political class, in the U.S. and across much of the world, that credentials itself through adherence to slogan-chanting, and has so deeply accepted the centrality of lawn sign behavior as a gateway to status that the members of that class don’t notice when their non-sequiturs are non-sequiturs. They say something, then you say something, but they don’t listen or hear, and then, no matter what the topic is and no matter what you say about it, they respond, “Well I won’t tolerate white nationalism, misogynist!”, and then nod proudly at the wisdom of their response.
Didi: I am serving pancakes!
Gogo: But I prefer waffles.
Didi: Putin racism Trump, white nationalist!
[Curtain]
It’s the joke about playing chess with a pigeon, repeated endlessly as elite status performance. No one in the history of the universe has ever been more lost than these people. They have no noticeable relationship with the world that appears in front of their own faces.