Morality Theatre (as Distinguished from Morality Plays)

[jsburbidge]

 It was shooting fish in a barrel to point out that Doug Ford's closing of strip clubs and shutting bars at 11 would have a minimal effect on the growth of coronavirus cases. There are, however, a couple of interesting things to say about it.

 

First, it's classic morality theatre, blaming the ills of the age on a limited number of bad actors. There are some advantages to this, usually: most people hearing it are not only not called on to do anything difficult but can actually get warm fuzzy feelings that they are not the ones who are at fault. This is much more politically palatable than telling people that the moderate-sized social gatherings they're having, or chained smaller ones, need to be curtailed.

 

Secondly, it paves the way for stricter measures by allowing leaders to say: "See, we did try less objectionable measures, but they didn't work; now everybody has to suffer a little." Pity the time wasted performing this gambit translates into more sick people.

 

Like the comments by several Canadian political figures I heard last week, Trudeau among them, that by hunkering down and avoiding social gatherings over Thanksgiving they may get a reprieve at Christmas, this shows limited thought. There's no reasonable way in which the conditions at Christmas (Dec 25) will be in any way better than those at Canadian Thanksgiving (or Hallowe'en, Oct 31, not that far off and also sure to be shut down, to invoke an old programmers' joke in passing). Likewise, the need to impose even more stringent restrictions because of slow reactions is more costly in every way, including politically, in the long run, than acting early and firmly but with less draconian measures.

Comments

[graydon]

Dougie doesn't care who dies. If he cared about that, the eviction moratorium would have held for residential renters. In-person schools would not be a thing this year.

In general, Canada has a couple-three cultural constraints -- lack of numeracy, mammonite aversion to public direct production, and deeply entrenched political focus on a cultural proxy war that's there to prevent meaningful public action (and thus any meaningful range of public choices) -- and two really nasty material constraints -- the time to effective medical intervention is unknown but at least another year, and that we have no prospect of economic normalisation until the cousins get their act together, the which they may well never -- so the only effective solutions are inherently large changes from the status quo. With political success defined as minimising the distance from the status quo, rather than extirpating the disease, we have no prospect of an effective response to the pandemic.

(I am coming to the belief that the best single indicator of pandemic response effectiveness is that public production question; if it's "of course the government directly produces medical supplies, and is set up to ramp up quickly in a pandemic when the market will probably fail", things have been going pretty well despite broad differences in form of government and GDP per capita. If not, not.)

[jsburbidge]

In about March, about the only really reasonable path through the pandemic was a fairly simple three step process: first, lick down to gain time while building resources (PPE, medical supplies, testing resources) and getting as much basic research done in the disease as possible; secondly, restart based on massive, proactive testing with extensive coverage and rapid turnaround, as from an epidemiological point of view that acts as a partial standing for immunity, allowing exposure to infection to be minimized; third, roll out universal vaccination with exceptions made for only those with genuine medical issues, which would allow for a return to fairly full economic activity sometime in the middle of 2021.

Except they (Ontario, Quebec, Canada) never went beyond a partial stage 1, and now they are reaping what they sowed. The really stupid thing is that even from a purely pragmatic political point if view it's a great way of blowing any credit they got from even moderately good aspects of their initial reaction.

We are not in a second wave; that term derives from influenza, where there really is a seasonal abeyance in the summer and a resurgence in late fall/winter; we are still in a first wave, and anyone of any intelligence could have concluded that cases would be on a significant uptick as restraints were released unless both the conditions were satisfied of a much more cautious population and much greater and more convenient availability of testing.

[graydon]

Entirely agreed!

Most of my response is about why I think that's happening. ("crippling organisational incompetence due to prolonged lack of contact with material reality", if I had to summarise.)

[jsburbidge]

And there's an article in the Star this morning about how the government knew for months that they would need to increase testing capacity but failed actually to move on it on account of the cost; which can probably be summarized about the way you did above.

[graydon]

It's the mammonism.

It's just, apparently literally, unthinkable to spend money on actual public goods because Those People Are Poor and Money is Too Good for Them, while it's "what else would you do?" with apparent seriousness to dump half of Toronto's infrastructure budget into keeping the Gardiner functioning because of who that conveniences.

I find this spectacularly croggling, but can't find any other explanation. "To spend is to tax" and "all taxes are immoral" combine to end with "Hobbesian anarchy, and how" so we've got this mass shift of conservativism as a political label to being the party of anarchy, on the one hand, and this act of faith to refuse to notice where their policies go, on the other.