A Perfect Storm

The Nuremberg Code is being invoked by anti-vaxxers in the UK, and picked up by people here in NZ. It's a weird movement that engages in forms of theatrics such as threatening medical staff with prosecutions and capital punishment for violating a code developed to prevent the recurrence of the obscenity of Nazi medical experiments.

Some of those drawn to the movement are genuinely frightened; some are reflexively oppositional, and some are just vexatious shit-stirrers.

IMO, anyone who has swallowed prescription, or over the counter medications, without knowing or even wanting to know their mechanism of action; who fails to question the ethics of NZ allowing TV advertising and OTC sales of powerful medications; who eats foods full of synthetic chemicals without questioning their effects in isolation, let alone in combination with all the other synthetic chemicals they are exposed to daily; who fails to address the wider economic and political context of all of this –  has no business getting all holier-than-thou, or forming wanna-be lynch mobs over Covid vaccination.

We are reaping what our corporate and political masters have sown for hundreds of years – get angry with them, not with each other.

If you want to hurt Big Pharma and the wider petrochemical industry – stop buying all the shit its various branches produce; challenge the symptomatic-pharmacological paradigm that modern medicine is wedded to; start agitating for a proper national health service in NZ -  one which provides high quality, FREE primary health and dental care, not this weird hybrid which pours state and individuals' money into private pockets.

And, start organising to stop the petrochemical giants poisoning the planet, and look to how we can combine to develop ways of living in and with nature instead of devouring it.

Disaster capitalism will always seek to turn a threat into a market opportunity and Covid is just the latest on a long and ugly list. Those who run the world know there is a perfect storm brewing – one that is of their creation because of their greed and their utter heedlessness of consequence. 

Their sole concern is to weather that storm with their lives and their power intact. They know that forms of authoritarian governance are inevitable in the future and they've been preparing for the point when the ideological controls they prefer become too thin and frayed to be effective any longer - when people realise they've sold their kids' future for a load of actual and virtual junk and ephemera. 

When the lies become exposed and the contradictions become too sharp and jagged to be borne any longer and enough people start to demand structural change – that's when the iron fist of the compliant states' paramilitary and military wings will be utilised to effect control. 

Anyone who thinks the rise of paramilitary police forces globally is to fight crime is living in a cartoon.Their primary function is to protect the corporate criminals and their political stooges.

There is only one way out of the mess the corporate criiminals have created and that is mass organisation. For that to work, there has to be at least a broad consensus of the need for change, what we change to, and of the strategies for achieving and retaining change. 

The start point has to be to stop allowing ourselves to be divided from our natural allies, distracted away from the essentials, and diverted away from what needs to be done.

More churnalism

On page 4 of today's Press newspaper, there's a story, headlined "Child poverty puts NZ on 'roll of shame' " – the Children’s Commissioner deploring, yet again, the fact that this wealthy nation has an estimated 125,000 kids living in poverty.

Taking up two-thirds of the front page, is a story with a huge photo, headlined: "Transgender woman who waited 80 years to be herself".

To me, those two headlines and their relative positions, sum up the superficial, diversionary priorities of the Neo-liberal era. 

 

The transgender story also takes pride of place on the Stuff website and includes a 5 minute video with a suitably reverential voice over.  The child poverty story does not figure on the Stuff website front page at all, and nor was it in the Press Twitter feed at the time of writing this.

 

To a person who lived as a boy and man for 80 years, married, and fathered four children, and who now wants to dress openly in stereotypically female clothing, use a stereotypically female name, and have people use female third person pronouns when referring to them – I would normally say, do whatever makes you happy. I would not make a big deal out of it being written up as a human interest story. 

 

But occupying almost the entire front page of the weekend edition of a major NZ newspaper and headline story on a major news website has made me take a huge decision. For the first time in my long life there will be no printed mainstream newspaper in my house. I will not be renewing my Press subscription and I will write to the editor to explain why. 

 

Furthermore, until such time as New Zealand no longer has:

 

appallingly high rates of child poverty, extreme and growing differentials in income and wellbeing, and a growing number of so-called working poor;

 

obscenely differential Māori incarceration rates, especially of wāhine, and grossly differential post-surgery survival rates and life expectancy for Māori;

very high rates of family violence and rape;

one of the worst records in the world for native land and marine species extinction; 

 

an economy that is reliant on a mainly for export, industrialised form of primary production which is resulting in a catastrophic loss of top soil, and is dependent on imported artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and anthelmintics, the use of which has resulted in high and growing levels of water contamination and wider environmental pollution ....

...I will continue to call out this sort of knee-jerk, diversionary, superficial, miserable excuse for journalism which, as well as being an insult to women, and promoting what will be viewed in the future as a social contagion, may – by fuelling a conservative moral panic – put transgender people and a host of others, at risk in the future.

I remember the Press too often engaging in populist, tub-thumping, moral panic inducing reportage such as the deplorable coverage of the prosecution case in the Lipine Sila trial. I remember all those crass and racist cartoons. 

This sort of flag-waving in its way is worse than that because it poses as progressive.

This is not a game. This is not a means by which middle-class people, who otherwise tacitly or overtly support the socio-economic status quo, get to acquire some political brownie points and make themselves feel better about their social and economic privilege.

This serves as a diversion away from the vast array of current and looming economic, social, and environmental crises which will hit the poor and especially poor women and kids, first and worst.

If I live long enough to see the knee-jerkers wake up from their gender-identity stupor, I'll get no satisfaction from saying 'we told you so.' 

 

On being nice and stuff...

I just saw a meme about how women can't afford to be nice or some such wording. 

That rather depends on your definition of "nice" I guess.

Women need to avoid behaving like men do – ie swallowing the line that compassion, empathy, cooperation, and mutuality are somehow lesser emotions and ways of being and organising than their opposites.

Women need to protect already stressed female collectives, which sometimes means shelving differences, ie remembering that life always involves degrees of compromise.

Whilst I do understand visceral anger – it's an old companion and the multi-faceted chip on my shoulder sometimes still dictates my responses to people and situations – I also know that women cannot afford to waste precious time and energy on misdirected anger and aggression. 

We need to be strategic.

And we need to be consistent. We can't rail against state enabled violence against women on the one hand, and on the other, call for the death penalty for men we disapprove of.

Well, not in my ethical universe.

Sometimes kicking in a door that remains stubbornly closed against us is the only way to gain entry. But sometimes picking the lock might work, or climbing in through a window ... or better still, saying "sod you" to gaining entry to the structure with the closed doors, and create a whole new structure which we control.

Sorry, I'm in an analogy mindset; must be the drugs.

Speaking of which - anyone who is opposed to the Covid vaccine and doesn't also take a stand against the makers of the chemical soup we are forced to live in, is being foolish. 

And that's being kind.

If you take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs regularly or longterm without understanding their mechanism of action; If you go to the doctor with a cold and expect antibiotics; if you swallow paracetamol as if it's completely benign; if you never check the additives in the food you eat ....you have no business pontificating on the safety of vaccines.

We all know, or should, that modern medicine is bound by its symptomatic and pharmaco-surgical paradigms. If we want holistic, less drug-centred, high quality health care, we need to be aiming at changing the entire edifice -– not just tidying up the waiting room.