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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.
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Date: 2020-10-03 02:43 pm (UTC)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.