On global corporate capitalism and its helpmates

The ruling class has always been adept at exploiting divisions – be that religious or political sectarianism or nationalism. It has also learned how very effective ideological controls can be, allowing it to keep more overtly coercive measures in reserve, or targeting them at specific groups or countries. 

For example, dipping into the old well of Russophobia was useful in fomenting anti-communism, and is useful now in whipping up a fever for war against Russia even among many of those who would usually call for détente.

Several inter-linking phenomena characterise what we call the neo-liberal era in which we have seen a massive surge in the power and reach of global corporate capitalism. 

All these phenomena were aimed at cementing the power of the global elites and  include:

declaring the “end of history” and of class-based political theories, heralding increasing political fragmentation on the left, and consolidation of the power of elites;

use of powerful global financial institutions coercively to enable the predacious stripping of public assets, and increasing global corporate profits by driving down pay and conditions, eg. the IMF's insistence on denationalisation, and imposition of “austerity measures”; 

the destruction or neutering of working class collectives which were not just important for wresting concessions out of capitalism and its compliant states, but in creating and transmitting alternative narratives to those of the capitalist hegemons;

the crushing by force of some liberation movements, and the co-option and corruption of others, (eg. the rise to dominance of corporate or choice feminism after a blitzkreig of opposition to socialist and radical women’s liberation);

the promotion of hyper-individualism which deemed the Individual Person to be paramount, and not just the Individual as a Body but the Individual as an Identity; 

expanding the ever useful cult of celebrity beyond Royalty, Iconic Heroic Figures and Movie / Sports Stars into the virtual world of Those Who Are Famous For Being Famous (and almost always, Fatuous).

 

All of the above required the expansion of the strata of enablers –  the dense insulating layer of a technocratic-professional-managerial class.

Enablers have always existed but GCC has consolidated and expanded them into a dense insulating mass of a well remunerated, high status technocratic-managerial-professional class whose stake in the status quo is as deep as the controllers/owners of global corporate capitalism themselves.

Lower layers aspire to be part of that stratum and/or are beholden to it by virtue of being dependent on its spending power. More importantly perhaps, they are fearful of falling into the stratum below – the huge and increasing mass of the indigent which increasingly includes the working poor, those whose work doesn't cover or barely covers the costs of their subsistence.

Anything which threatens global corporate capitalism also threatens both its enablers, and all those others who have bought into the superficiality, short-termism and egocentrism of its various ideologies and their fragmenting, diversionary intent.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in relation to the cult of individualism and its partner in crime, identity politics.

The digital era has not just facilitated the explosion of global corporate capitalism, especially finance capitalism, it has granted GCC and its compliant states unprecedented control, including over information.

Faced with the subversive potential of the internet and social media, one countering strategy has been the enabling of a host of large-scale and miniature Influencers, each peddling their monetised aspirational and individualising messages, and gathering unto themselves, a virtual congregation.

Humans are profoundly and instinctively social. We clump – only damaged humans are extreme isolates – but we did not evolve in massive congregations, like wildebeest, for example. We evolved in small clans and possibly the relatively (in evolutionary terms) recent phenomenon of being forced into vast physical (and latterly, virtual) populations is stressful, so smaller scale convocations are comforting. They fulfil the need to belong, and they also allow the person to feel they are more than just a cog in a vast impersonal machine.

In a world in which the notion of the Individual has become not just reified but heavily commodified, and in which people are constantly exhorted to be “the Best Possible Version of Your Self” – in order to stand out from the teeming on-line masses as an Individual, you must have not just have (or pretend to have) the Best Possible physical form, you also need a Special Identity. 

The rush of young people to embrace the ever-expanding notion of a bespoke gender identity may on one level be seen as just another sub-cultural phenomenon. 

However, its core attachment to the notion of a soul-like, immutable gender essence housed in a mutable body – which can or even must be tailored to match the gender essence as far as various forms of surgical, chemical, prosthetic body modification will allow – takes it into the realms of a quasi-religious movement.

Unlike most youth sub-cultures, in which style, language, intra-group mores etc serve to signal a separation from, and rejection of outsiders, gender essence adherents want to impose their beliefs and sub-cultural attachments on others – ALL others. 

It has become like a proselytising cult and at the moment it is being actively embraced and promoted by a host of powerful institutions – giant corporations, governments, NGOs, trade unions, voluntary organisations, lobby groups, media –  hardly a mainstream voice is raised to question any of it. 

The questioning voices initially were socialist and radical feminists who dared to point out that the emperor’s dangly bits were on full display. For their principled stance they have been consigned – most viciously and vociferously by the neo-liberal left – to the realms of not just social conservatism or the moderate right, but to literal Nazism. 

The hyperbole or extremism implicit in the use of that inaccurate and offensive label owes a lot to the proselytising nature of the cult with its "pick a side" rhetoric that is worthy of George Bush in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

Coat-tailing those gender critical feminists are rising numbers of right wing or socially conservative institutions and individual right-wingers who have realised this is a useful weapon to advance their own political and economic game plan – their start point being to label the gender essentialists as being on the far-left. 

That an essentially individualist and individualising ideology which seldom comes close to questioning, let alone posing a threat to the status quo should be deemed to be far-left is a measure of how far right politics has slid in the past half century. It's possibly also a measure of how incredibly dumb some right wing commentators are, and/or how dumb they think their audience is.

Sadly, some gender critical feminists, including some who ought to know better, think they can hunt with a predatory beast and not at some point become its prey du jour but that's a theme for another day.

The resulting inchoate mess has been aided by the failure of the old Red Left to pull its collective head out of its 20^th century schisms, and work to re-establish a broad alliance to take back some ideological and political control – to at least regain a power balance, before we’re all toast.

 

 

 

 

Tick tick tick

I had hoped to steer clear of this most vexing and vexatious of topics.Time will tell how successful my new year's resolution to widen my focus will be but in the meantime, needs must when the pronouns drive.

I wrote something in response to one of the now ubiquitous Tik Tok videos posted by young, mainly white, middle class people who have adopted various permutations of transgender identity to position themselves on the oppression hierarchy. This particular example took youthful self absorption right up to the level of full-blown narcissism.

"I am stitching this video to give further clarification –  again – because cis people keep asking stupid questions –again – I’m fed up with it I go by any and all pronouns – this includes neo pronouns I’m non binary not gender fluid – my preferred pronouns are they/them however I go by any or all pronouns because I know if I go by they/them I will face misgendering and I don’t have the mental energy for that so if I go by any or all pronouns people can’t deliberately misgender me. If I have told someone I am non binary and they refuse to use any pronouns other than she/her I will get a little bit annoyed..." 

In response to those who think this is something the grown ups have to accommodate, I wrote elsewhere: 

Youth subcultures are often alien and inexplicable to older people - that's the whole point of them. This current non-binary phenomenon is a youth sub culture, a form of social contagion fuelled by social media and US-style hyper individualist, aspirational culture. 

The tyranny of neo-liberalism's cult of the individual dictates you must BE and you must MARKET the best possible and most distinctive version of yourself. But humans instinctively ‘clump’ so young people want to be seen as different but not in total isolation – hence the proliferation of sub-sub cultures. And subcultures always develop their own forms of language and subcultural signifiers –  a facility with which signals belonging to the sub group or sub-sub group – or in the case of gender identity, sub to the point of literal absurdity.  

Usually subcultures don't want outsiders to use their language or adopt their style – let alone impose any of it on others – it defeats the purpose. 

To me, there’s a world of difference between the valid demands of people around use of language which serves to enable/strengthen forms of legal discrimination and bigotry, and the demand for others to use individually or small group tailored third person pronouns. What this young person is doing is play acting oppression – appropriating the real struggles of people with verifiable disadvantages arising from legal discrimination and wider/deeper forms of oppression and economic exploitation. 

This is a phenomenon largely of the anglophone world for the simple reason that in some languages, gendered pronouns are the least complicated part of a gendered language. If these young people did not speak a language which has only gendered third person singular pronouns, they would be trying to change the way the entire language signals contrasts of person, sex, number, time, place etc. And of course these demands for a bespoke set of third person pronouns are accompanied by other, wider, changes to the use of language which challenge some very deep rooted beliefs which run across class, race, sex, age etc.  

What this results in is a loss of focus on the fact that at the centre of this burgeoning forest of bespoke gender identities,  always was, is, and probably will remain, a group of people for whom this is not remotely a style choice or a sub-cultural attachment of the moment, but a real, crippling sense of alienation – a disconnection between the objective, material body, and the subjective sense of self.   

It’s like if being disabled became ‘cool’ and something to aspire to being, and a load of people started claiming that being a bit myopic was on a “spectrum of visual disabilities” all of which have equal validity.  

Bottom line for me is – neo-liberal identity politics in general, and gender identity politics in particular, are part of a stage managed process of ideologically breaking down all forms of mass resistance to economic power.  If that makes me an old school economic determinist - then so be it. 

The issue of bespoke pronouns is actually a smokescreen for far more foundational political shifts. Just as we should all be alert to what is actually going on in the economic and political backrooms around the covid pandemic, we should be keeping a very close eye on who really benefits from the divisive power of gender identity ideology.

Take the question of who can be a mother or a father. 

Can those terms really be a matter of a self determined identification into a bespoke gender identity?

Is calling a man who is married to another man, a "husband", the same as calling a biologically female person – the sex which gestates new life –  a child's father because that person identifies as male?

Does a penis become a differently structured vulva/clitoris, and testicles, external ovaries, if the person they are part of identities as having a female gender identity?

Have we collapsed and lost sight of the central distinction between biological sex and the ideological wrapping of gender as a set of socially constructed or conditioned roles, attributes etc?

And by doing so and by elevating gender identity in this way, have we done any favours to those who are legally discriminated against, oppressed, and/or hyper-exploited economically on the basis of their social class, their biological sex, their ethnicity or culture?

The start point for all this surely is what is gender and what is a gender identity? The simplest take on this is also the most profound – there would be no such thing as gender without the foundation of dimorphic sex. 

A deformed and deforming ideology

It's good to see Marxist feminist theory on social media fighting back against neo-liberal leftism and feminism.

What we need also are Marxist-informed examinations of the roles that gender, as a deformed and deforming ideology, has played, and still plays in the socialisation of women and men into rigid sex roles which both embody and perpetuate relations of male domination and female subordination.

The self centred posturing of a tiny minority of privileged people inside the imperial bubble is not going to change that. In truth, it does the opposite by serving to divert possible opposition, and to distract attention away from the undeniable truth – that outside the well-padded buffer zones, the world still moves to older, and often more oppressive and exploitative rhythms.

Unless we expose the role that individualising ideological constructions are playing in the context of the rampant corporate capitalism which dominates the world economically, and which almost completely controls all discourse – we will never get to grips with either the origins, or the extant realities of the oppression of women, and the economic exploitation of female productive and reproductive capacities.

Neo-liberalism drives forms of extreme individualism that serve to increase the range and severity of alienation, (in both senses of the word), and of nihilism and anomie.

It attacks and undermines all forms of collectivism except where they serve its interests and invariably, any collectives it supports are forced to be in competition with each other.

It appears to build bridges over social divides while actually deepening them, and it has mined the approaches so they can be blown if and when it suits the suits to drive even deeper wedges into any alliances that threaten its hegemony.

It promotes extreme short-termism, and the commodification of literally everything – even intangibles.

It drives insanely high levels of consumerism, promoting a toxic culture that deifies acts of taking and squandering, and denigrates cultures and movements that are based on giving and conserving.

Gender – as an aggregation of culturally-specific patterns of behaviour, beliefs, social rites and rituals is rooted in the foundational reality of species reproduction –which is dimorphic. Because we are not a powerfully instinctually driven species – we don't just learn how to be human, we are also socialised into the ways that our culture arranges the business of reproduction – processes that are both natural and immutable, and intensely social and changeable.

Gender became ideology when the essential complementarity and interconnected-ness of the two parts of the reproductive whole were utilised by a minority of men for their individual or clan (later class) advantage.  

Central to this were moves towards a rigid binary of sex roles, reinforced by religious and political ideologies which cemented ideas about an essential maleness and femaleness.

Limited authority over their females and offspring was tossed like a compensatory bone to men who were also being oppressed and exploited.

The easily observable fact that the bones thrown to men at the bottom of the social heap had usually been so thoroughly gnawed and emptied of marrow they were barely enough to sustain life – was covered over with thick layers of ideology which justified the extremes of both advantage and disadvantage.

The densest layers of that ideology were, and remain, male and class superiority – followed, in the capitalist era, by racial superiority. 

Drilling down to expose the essence of all this always was, and remains the most important project for the left. 

However, instead of building and wielding industrial weight drilling equipment, neoliberal leftists either flit round on the margins waving little archaeological trowels and engaging in localised digs, or they have concluded there is nothing worth drilling for, and appearance is the new reality.

The reason I bang on about gender identity being a powerful tool of neoliberalism is, it spreads a dense layer of obfuscation over arguably the most essential of truths.

The extent to which some women have become alienated from their sexed bodies, reaches the extremes in the idea that being pregnant is to be infected with a parasite. 

This should be as worrying as the wave of what has been termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls in the anglophone world which has resulted in large numbers of young women believing they are better off being approximations of men, or creating a place somewhere on the manufactured gender identity spectrum.

These phenomena have a counterpart in the outcomes of trans-humanist re-writes of Cartesian duality – in which severely alienated people come to see the body as a mere vehicle – a flesh suit or meat sack that can, or even must be surgically, chemically or prosthetically altered at the whim of the individual to match whatever sense of self dominates at any given point. Or, just as worryingly, in an ego-fuelled pursuit of some form of digital immortality.

You have to be either a blinkered ideologue, or so mired in misogyny that your world view can't extend beyond the swamp of your own sexism, or just unaware of even very recent history – not to see the pappy hands of some malignantly narcissistic puppet-masters in all this. 

And I used that gendered term advisedly.

Pass the identity parcel

Some musings on a damp Sunday about the identity politics phenomenon and the way it has become a major focus of the left – which these days is defined more by what its various factions are AGAINST than a broad consensus on what they are all FOR. And who does that benefit?

The most recent and polarising wing of identity politics is our pushy friend, gender identity. Its supporters claim it is the quintessence of progressivism while its detractors claim it is the greatest threat to what they hold dear – from women's sex-based rights and science, to conservative religious beliefs about the heteronormative nuclear family.

I get the sense that gender identity is a practical joker's version of "pass the parcel". As the glossy gift-wrappings are removed, the parcel will get smaller and smaller until what is revealed is a tiny box containing the message, "The joke's on you, suckers."

Why has so much of what passes for the left immersed itself in what must surely be seen as a neoliberal sponsored and promoted theory and praxis which is essentially accommodative, individualist and individualising, and based on the existence of a wholly subjective and thus empirically unverifiable, concept?

Who benefits from the reifying of a bespoke, individualist and individualising sense of a gendered identity, and privileging that over the category of biological sex, a material and collective reality which underpins the millennia-old and still extant oppression of women?

How progressive is the idea of an authentic self, conceptualised as an immutable gendered essence, which inhabits a mutable, inauthentic (ie wrongly sexed) body? (Or in the parlance of the weirdly alienated – flesh suit or meat sack.)

How progressive is it to ignore the fact that states which happily accommodate and promote individualist gender identity demands also serve economic and political interests which have proven themselves to be inimical to traditional forms of collectivism?

Who can take the following exchange seriously, except as a reason to get angry about transactivist airheads giving smug right-wingers an open goal?

TA: Trans women are women.

RW: Okay, so what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman.

RW: What is it they are identifying with?

TA: A woman.

RW: But what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman....

And so on, ad absurdum, until most of the progressive forces in our increasingly unstable world have disappeared up their own rear ends, or died of embarrassment.

How is it that otherwise intelligent and aware people are happy to stake their political and academic reputations on such a rickety framework of circular definitions, lazy conflations and stark contradictions? 

It's a puzzle.

Well, no, it's not a puzzle at all. There's no doubt in my mind that the astonishingly rapid move from valid and reasonable demands for equality and dignity from people who suffer forms of psychological distress, to the current epidemic of narcissistic toy-tossing and anomie, has been stage managed, to some degree at least.

It also acts as a salve to the consciences of those liberals who either capitulated to, or colluded with the swingeing attacks on working class collectives and the cruel austerity measures that followed – especially those who picked up their middle-class credentials and sprinted for a place in the political and coordinator classes.

It allows lefties who were outflanked and outmanoeuvred by neoliberalism to feel there is something at least on which they can claim a win. 

And of course it's an opportunity for closet misogynists to indulge in a bit of payback to feminists for actual or imagined slights.

Fact is, it's a mammoth con and the sooner that sodding parcel is finally unwrapped, the better.

More on sports

I spent decades arguing against types of social constructivist essentialism in feminism which ignored/side-lined reproductive biology; I now find myself arguing against forms of biological determinism and essentialism in feminism. Go figure.

Women's sports has become a battlefield – not for equity with male peers but in relation to transgender and intersex athletes' right to compete in women's events.

In the past, women athletes were subjected to inferior status, remuneration, and conditions. Training regimes were based on data drawn from male studies, to the detriment of female athletes. Female sports were almost completely dominated by male coaches, administrators, judges etc all without as much as a peep of protest from most people, including a lot of feminists. 

That so many people have recently developed an interest in women’s sports and issues of fairness and equity is great and long overdue, but perhaps they also need to consider how much of a role the rampant commercialisation and commodification of sports has played and still plays in all this. 

 

“Bread and circuses” is now "fast food and football".

 

Professional and semi-pro sport in the modern era is ALL about money, and in realms where the mighty $ reigns, aided and abetted by toxic nationalism, fairness struggled to survive even before transgender and intersex issues elbowed their way centre stage and complicated things.

 

We know that men on average run and swim much faster; jump and throw much further/higher; lift much heavier weights; punch and kick way more powerfully than women …. because, evolution. 

We also know the more extreme the endurance element in a sport is, the smaller the male APA gets…. also because, evolution. 

 

At the core of that evolutionary, material reality lies the two different roles in reproduction. Fact.

 

There are a few sports in which women have an average performance advantage over men, they’re just not the "blue riband", big money events largely because sports have been and still are designed to showcase male abilities – and in the modern era, to make money, mostly for men.

 

Star athletes – mostly male – are paid obscene amounts of money, and trailing behind them like a school of suckerfish, are a host of agents, PR people, trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, consultants ….  And on a wider front, a vast array of mainly male technocrats, bureaucrats, administrators etc. 

 

As some women’s sports move out of the cinders in terms of financial and status rewards, and with the rise of transgenderism as a political movement, there are now people who were born male, who went through male puberty and competed in male sports, who see a financial and competitive / status advantage in identifying as women and competing against natal females. 

 

These are not elite athletes; they are, to date at least, the also-rans and the has-beens. The financial and status rewards in male sports are simply still too great for an elite male to make the switch.

 

I very much doubt the elite pro bike rider who, as Robert Miller, won stages of the European Grand Tours, would have transitioned to compete as Philippa York in women's races back in the day. 

 

Even with the genuinely gender dysphoric, the switch only happens once an athlete is over the top of the elite male performance hill, or if they were never going to make it up the hill. 

The rewards gap is still too huge and it’s natal male athletes who either no longer make the elite grade, or were never going to make it, who are moving into women’s sports.

 

We know that the post-pubertal physiological and psychological performance advantages accrued by male athletes are not all lost with a lowering of androgen levels – and that an average performance advantage still applies, especially in those areas where the APA is huge, like weightlifting. 

 

Most of the world's elite female super heavyweight weightlifters were out-lifted by a 42-year-old transgender lifter who, even at his male peak was never likely to make it beyond national junior level competition.

 

And with the acceptance of a surgically transitioned trans athlete’s right to add back, on health grounds, synthetic androgens up to the IOC limit of 10 nmols/L, the playing field is completely unlevel – tilted even more against natal females. 

Having presided over the debacle, the IOC has raised its manicured hands, rolled over and waved its be-suited legs in the air and tossed the hot transgender/intersex potato to sporting federations to deal with.

 

And there are no easy answers. The simplistically-minded, ideologically blinkered on the transactivists' side say that it's all down to a subjective gender identity and any male APA a trans athlete has must be viewed as no different from any other naturally occurring physiological advantages. 

The simplistically-minded on the other side look for the solution in DNA, eg the presence of a Y chromosome makes a person male and ineligible to enter women's events. End of story. 

 

Maybe the answer lies in decommercialising and denationalising sport, making it about the individual’s love of sport not national hubris and money.

 

Yeah, I know – like action on climate change, mass pollution, and species extinctions, that ain’t going to happen because ... bread and circuses.

Don't Look Up the Robes of the Elite

The film "Don't Look Up"  irritated the hell out of me on first viewing – so much so, I fast fowarded through it but I watched it again properly and I revised my opinion, somewhat.  

Mark Rylance is an acting genius as is Meryl Streep but I'd rather they hadn't made a US female president a raging narcissist who sends pictures of her fanny to porn stars she elevates to the Supreme Court, etc etc.  

It got way too heavy handed – often slipping from satire into a sort of parodic slapstick. I still can’t decide whether the film makers were being self-consciously heavy-handed – deliberately going beyond satire into cartoonish parody in order to reach those they think they need to reach, i.e. not the already environmentally aware and active, but all those who have been successfully blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by all the plastic shite and disinformation.

 

Did they decide that the target audience needs an apocalyptic beating about the head with the star-spangled obvious because their critical faculties have either not been developed at all or have been corroded by the toxic garbage that is US-style popular entertainment and information media?

 

Were they being doubly ironic? Were they self-consciously and cynically cashing in on the impending environmental catastrophe as much as the Rylance character sought to cash in on a planet-killing asteroid on collision course with Earth?

 

One pretty obvious layer of irony is the title – the injunction “don’t look up” is precisely what all the layers of plastic garbage and fake news are meant to achieve – don’t look up to see what the economic and political elites are actually doing to us and the planet, keep your eyes fixed on the screen and your head filled with ephemera.

 

One thing’s certain, people are watching it, but whether they all get the urgent, allegorical message is another thing entirely – as is whether enough of them will get off their well-padded butts and act. 

 

Another facet that annoyed me was the use of the plot device of a planet-killing comet with all its speed and urgency. The thing with climate change is it's just not that screamingly obvious – yet – and if it were, many people, being what their masters have made them, are as likely to slide into fatalism or nihilism as they are to unite to take the actions needed to save the planet and all who currently survive on her. 

It's a delicate balance – conveying the absolute urgency of acting hard and fast whilst still making people believe that doing so will mean their kids and grand kids will actually have a planet to live well on. 

 

On Public Health

The NZ public hospital system is in crisis. The predicted massive surge of Covid infections, with vulnerable people and the unvaccinated forming the bulk of those needing hospitalisation, could easily tip it into chaos.

If you need any sort of diagnostic procedure or are in need of some sort of elective surgery that is deemed to be non-urgent – and if you don't have insurance or the cash to pay the huge fees of the private sector – you may just have to continue to suffer.

If you are unlucky enough to have a heart attack, a serious accident etc you will be entering a system which has inadequate ICU provision even without a mass of critically ill people with Covid.

THIS is the primary reason for the controls. 

Ardern's government inherited an inadequate public health system and we cannot reasonably blame it for not reversing all the trends of the past forty years – especially not given it has been dealing with a global pandemic for most of its current term – and was hamstrung by a rightwing coalition partner in its first term. 

It's not possible to build, equip, and staff primary health centres and new hospitals in the middle of a global pandemic.

But imagine if all the money that has been poured into wage subsidies, vaccines, tracking systems, PPE etc had been invested in the creation of a proper NHS. One in which there are primary health hubs with a full range of diagnostic equipment and trained staff, a range of auxiliary services, and GPs employed by the NHS, not a privately owned practice with an eye on profit margins. Primary health centres which engage with community health issues, health promotion and disease/injury prevention. 

Well, an old advocate of a socialised, holistic health system can dream.

So, this government gets a bit of a pass – but only a bit and none of those which preceded it do. And let's not forget, National has governed for most of the past forty years of neoliberal asset-stripping and diversion of state funds into private pockets.

That Covid-sceptic, Christian, doctor up north who claims to care so much about his community – owns the practice, i.e., it's a business first, health provider second. He cares so much about his Māori community, his practice doesn't even employ a te reo speaker.

So he, and all like him, can sod off with his posturing in the robes of a defender of democratic freedoms, as can all the other medical people who are choosing, not just to be unvaccinated, but who are trying to persuade others to do the same.

Vaccination is one part of the wider approach to managing this virus. The vaccine gives degrees of protection against the Delta variant but it won't necessarily stop you getting it or passing it on. Nor will it stop other vaccine-resistant variants from emerging.

The biggest danger to the public health strategy is that among the vaccine-resisters, there will be a higher proportion of people who are sceptical about the dangers of the virus, and with that about the need for other infection-prevention and control measures, such as masking, hand washing, social distancing, scanning, etc.

Unvaccinated people are statistically more likely to catch the virus and pass it on, including to people who are highly vulnerable because of known or unknown vulnerabilities. All the evidence points to the fact that an unvaccinated person is more likely to catch and to transmit the virus, to become extremely ill, to need ICU treatment, and to die. It might be their choice, but their choice may well adversely affect other people.

The greatest irony in all this is that the main reason for mass vaccination and control measures like mandates, is the parlous state of the NZ health service. This is not a phenomenon that can be blamed on the Ardern government alone – the erosion of the already compromised principle of free health care (I'm looking at all those self-interested doctors who refused to participate and have leapt on every opportunity since to make money out of the contract culture) – can be laid at the door of successive governments which have enabled the encroachments of the private sector and under-funded the public sector.

Treatment of people with Covid in hospital is massively resource intensive – not just in the ICU – and puts already over stretched and stressed hospital workers at far greater risk of harm. 

Covid-sceptics in Canterbury should be aware that when there is the predicted mass wave of infections as Auckland borders open for the summer exodus – we will see an upsurge down here, not just of mildly sick people, but people ill enough to need to be hospitalised and to be rated in ICU – in a DHB which has now formally closed its waiting lists for any and all non-urgent procedures.

The Canterbury DHB has been upping its triage game over the past year – refusing all diagnostics to anyone not considered by them to be an urgent / acute case. Pretty much the only way into Christchurch public hospital now will be via an ambulance or for life-saving treatment.

And, if you have a heart attack or a serious accident, be prepared to enter a system that will be diverting massive amounts of resources into treating critically ill people with Covid – a high proportion of whom will be vaccine-resisters. A large number of people with Covid will be left to isolate at home and we will see yet more deaths in that scenario. 

So for all those who will now try to blame this government for what is about to happen – if you have never bothered to engage with any of these issues in the past; if you stood by and watched a two-tier health system develop; if you pocketed profits from the sale of publicly owned assets or excused that happening; if you have refused vaccination and/or not taken other infection control measures seriously–-I very politely request that you sod off with your cynical, sceptical, or stupid claims about defending democracy.