Lockdowns do work.

A friend sent me this video. It’s an Irish ‘youtuber’. He would be broadly categorised as a Covid Denier, but I think what’s most interesting to me is that he’s a perfect example of how a complex situation (the global spread of an infectious, partially deadly disease) can become simplified into silliness.

His two main conclusions, backed up with data, are:

– Sars Cov 2 has been most deadly in countries who’d had a recent mild flu season, therefore leaving many more people vulnerable to Covid (the dry tinder effect)

-All countries will experience a ‘Gompertz curve’ (a ‘hump of older people dying first) of infections regardless of lockdown measures. Lockdowns, apparently don’t work.

He uses many graphs from countries in Europe to show the spread, including classic curves. The virus goes nuts and then tapers off as the community reaches a level of immunity, over and above any extant T cell immunity. The graphs look familiar:

What he doesn’t do is show the graphs for a country that had two states with graphs that looks like this:

Yes, this is cases, not deaths, but the deaths are in line with cases because NSW and Victoria have a very high rate of testing. As you can see, the trajectories look completely different. NSW had a spike in March/April, Victoria less so. Then VIC experienced an outbreak and all the Australian states closed their borders. Victoria’s outbreak continued unabated, whereas NSW (and the other states) kept their numbers low enough for testing and tracing to be effective.

Australia had a severe 6 week lockdown in March, and this is what drove the cases down. Victoria has just had a second lockdown to contain its spike in cases.

Clearly, lockdowns work. NSW didn’t reach ‘herd immunity’ or anything like it and yet the community transmission cases are down to zero and have been now for a week. There’s still disease circulating but it’s at low numbers.

You can’t argue (as Mr Youtube does) that lockdowns don’t work and that the typical Gompertz curve is inevitable no matter what ‘us humans’ do, and still explain what’s happened in NSW (and all the other states except VIC). It’s impossible.

Yet, you can argue that some populations will have higher background immunity than others, that Vitamin D status might have a role in disease trajectory, that variations in the numbers of vulnerable people in the community prior to an outbreak will lead to a spike. This is where things get murky with these guys. They’re all going for a ‘let it rip’ strategy, because the semi-lockdown is both costly and ineffective (because the virus rips anyway). But they never consider the hard lockdown followed by lesser restrictions model.

Here in NSW we have had an economic decline, for sure, but many things are going back to normal, kids have been in school in March, businesses are open, some with restrictions. There’s an aggressive test and trace program in place. The intention I think, is for Australia to tread water like this until a vaccine comes along, something that is looking increasingly feasible in 2021.

What these youtube denialists should be doing to holding their elected representatives to account for their ‘worst of both worlds’ strategy.

Identity, oppression, fascism and drivel

This blog isn’t a blog, it’s a diary. I use it to think through problems, to ruminate on whatever iteration of neo-fascism-Lite we’re currently nurturing like a multi-tiered sprout-maker in the sun. It should be immediately apparent to anyone who read this blog that I write as I talk – completely unedited drivel. And I truly mean, unedited. I don’t revisit. I can type almost as fast as I can talk, which surely must be the crowning achievement of my ignominious ejection from third form typing with Mrs Wilson during my one unremarkable year at Wellington Girls’.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the US. I’m not given writing about US politics, in the main because I’ve noticed that most New Zealanders seem peculiarly fascinated with it, which is an odd cultural artefact in itself.

No, I’m thinking about it because of Facebook, most notably, the sheer number of friends who’re moving back to either Australia or New Zealand. It seems, generally, that my friends in the US entered some form a lockdown in around February and thought; ‘let’s just sit tight, this will be over soon’. But it wasn’t, and the pandemic, coupled with the prospect of an unwinnable election – that is, it doesn’t matter who wins, the outcome will result in destabilising protest and social unrest – has rather galvanised their thinking. New Zealand, with its cutely grandiose, homely politics and largely functioning justice system provides an irresistibly appealing realpolitik.

Alarmingly, they’re talking of fascism in the US. Good old fashioned fascism.

It’s a great word but I don’t think it will come to pass. Rather, I think the US will end up with a situation resembling Brazil. Or, I should say, even more like Brazil, with uber wealthy captains of industry flying their choppers over the rioting slums, straight into their luxury compounds. The US is already a peppercorn of ‘worlds’ – parts of the American south have been listed as ‘third world’ since the early 1980s. For every matcha tea drinking Californian hipster there’s a grimy 8 year old in Missouri with rickets. The diversity of the US is so self evident it’s not noteworthy and so I won’t either.

Fascism requires broad appeal, consent and consensus, none of which are available in tipping-point quantities in the US. Also, we receive a very jaundiced view of US politics here in the antipodes – a sort of a caricature of a failed state, complete with a cartoon leader and manichean narratives of righteousness. Broadly, the US is drawn as a cautionary morality tale illustrating the pitfalls of unfettered individualism, both economic and cultural. This is why we’re exposed to so much crowing about their lack of a public health system – it’s the embodiment of a failure of the true meaning of citizenship. They only care about themselves! No wonder they’re so fucked!

It’s not true, of course. Americans are politically engaged in ways that Australians and (to a lesser extent) New Zealanders are far too lazy to countenance. Many Americans – ordinary, lower to middle class people – think hard about their personal connection to politics. To be sure, sometimes this leads to perverse outcomes, where large groups of people come to believe that the entire show is being run by lizard people from outer space, which, quite frankly, might be a bit of an improvement.

Americans also give a shit about their ‘fellow man’. They believe in charity – real, genuine charity, often motivated by (largely) Christian impulse. Churches in the US provide an enormous amount of social support. Many if not most Americans also believe in free speech and freedom in a way that would make Australians squeamish. I guess my point is – there’s no point in thinking about America in the simple dogmatic terms we’re presented with in our media.

So what of fascism? Is the US headed for fascism? And what might like look like? I’ve long been fascinated by how and why countries head into fascist dictatorships. What’s interesting is that although the authoritarian dictators, everyone from Hitler to Mugabe, look more or less the same, the methods by which they come to power are historically bound and necessarily different.

Yesterday some clever sausage on Twitter posted a letter in which Roald Dahl’s publisher roundly told the author to fuck right off for being an annealed turd. Most odious was Dahl’s lazy anti-semitism, having casually stated that he thought that the Jews retained something in their character that made them responsible for their persecution. I’ve written about this before, but I think the point to be made is that it’s no good wringing our hands over Dahl’s personal shortcomings unless we’re prepared to look at the social and cultural milieu in which he came by them.

Roald Dahl was expressing a view that was quite common in the middle of the 20th Century, and something we like to quietly sush-up about now. He would have been familiar with what was known as ‘the Protocols’ and ‘the Elders of Zion’, a laughably facile co-ordinated campaign of misinformation with terrifying parallels to today. And I think it highlights something important about where we’re at politically and what that means for galloping ‘fascism’.

To explain Dahl’s anti-semitism as a personal failing is simple. It appeals to us on contemporary terms. He was a shit and should be cancelled forthwith. To make sense of his anti-semitism as a structural failing is a different matter entirely. We see this dualism emerge again and again – a binary between a cultural explanation and a structural one. Take this article, for instance, that contrasts African American theorists talking about oppression in the US.

I’ve used this example because the ‘right’ is often more engaged in cultural explanations of social dysfunction and decay, being more invested in explanations for inequality that blame the victims rather than the structure. Is it the individual’s fault? Or is it the society in which they find themselves? It’s a tawdry question and importantly, the answer is less important than the format of the question.

It’s obvious to anyone that society and the individual are inextricably interwoven but when we focus on ‘the individual’ we come to see the solution to all problems as the responsibility of the individual. This is the danger of identity politics. Identifying oneself as racist or ‘anti-racist’ is pointless unless you’re willing to engage with the structural, institutional arrangements that make racism possible. We’re not though, because we’ve been told we can’t. We have personal power – all the narratives about ourselves are personal ones – but not political power. The collective is dead. It is boring and unfashionable. The only social capital to be made or found is through identifying oneself as unique in some way. An influencer.

We haven’t eradicated questions of social injustice, inequality and oppression, we have shifted our language to preclude them.

Initially I was incensed that so many people would spend so much time engaging in the pointless internecine war of gender politics over say, JK Rowling’s rather pedestrian public article about women’s rights. I thought it was a distraction from the huge, looming catastrophes like climate change and destruction of the environment. And it is, but it’s more than that. It’s a training module, yet another way of encouraging people to think deeply about their identity, to focus their attention inwards.

Foucault saw this coming. The techniques and strategies of the self are myriad but all moving in one direction: inward. We are being trained in ever more subtle ways to accept power. I’ve mumbled incoherently about a personal example of this before, the time when everyone in my office cheerfully donned an ankle bracelet for a week.

I suppose I’ve got a lot more to say and think about this, but I’ve also got work to do and yet another computer program to learn (seriously, why can’t we just agree on one program and stick with it? This is why I still do (some) equations by hand).

I have one other observation this morning. Although me this seems like a completely banal observation it came as a shock to the dog walkers on the beach this morning: I think Trump will win the 2020 US election, just like I thought he would win last time. In fact, I thought he would win more or less from the moment he received the nomination. I think this time he will win with a more convincing majority, largely due to a higher turn out on Republican voters.

Just while I’m crowing about my prescience…I never predicted Brexit, ostensibly a country and system I should be more ‘familiar’ with, living, as I do, in a British colony.

Identity politics, the ultimate ‘own goal’

Yesterday I furiously wrote about an article that described that way that public health posters perpetrated stigma against people with a disability.

It made me think, once again, about the so-called left and perils of identity politics. This is well trammelled ground, but it’s increasingly striking me how dangerous it is.

I consider myself left wing, both economically and socially. This means that I believe in social and economic justice (broadly, the provision of welfare, including public health for citizens, not just because it makes them productive economic units). I am anti racist and I am a feminist. I am a secular humanist. All these things aren’t surprising, given that I grew up under the ‘New Zealand Experiment‘ – a failed attempt at operationalising the neo-liberal economics of the Washington Consensus.

Yesterday’s article on disability demonstrates the worst excesses of identity politics. It completely overlooks the colossal impact of mass vaccination campaigns against terrible diseases such as polio and smallpox in favour of a fine-grained, revisionist textual ‘reading’of posters used during the campaigns, between 60-100 years ago.

The imagery, it argues, depicts disabilities as negative and contributes to the stigmatisation of people with disabilities. Rather, we should depict people with disabilities as representing the ‘full spectrum of human difference’. Which of course, we do.

This is the long shadow of neo-liberalism, a cultural artefact that so individualises our thinking that all issues are refracted through the lens of ‘the person’.

As our politics is increasingly shuffled into the hands of technocrats – economists and ultimately, the authors of sophisticated currency trading algorithms, we search for meaning and engagement in the political sphere. We’re constantly told that decisions are made by technocrats, opaque and delineated along complicated economic (or epidemiological) modelling. It is beyond our ken.

And so, we’ve turned our agency inwards.

Now, I’m watching as the neo liberal machine encourages the flourishing of increasingly stupid ‘identity politics’ which is designed to disempower. Young people, disenfranchised both socially and economically, are encouraged to direct their agency inwards. Can’t change the world? Can’t get a job? Can’t earn any money? Constantly told the world is an unsafe place for you?

Look inwards. Look to yourself. Think very, very hard about your gender and your body. Spent hours on Twitter arguing about JK Rowling, threatening to kill or rape one another in some embarrassingly facile internecine war over the intricacies of your gender and ‘lived experience’. This is all you have left – this is the fetishisation of the individual when there is nothing left available. It’s tragic.

We often hear how the cult of the individual is the result of indulged, narcissistic young people, raised by helicopter parents, unable to function as adults. This misses the point. Late stage neo liberalism creates this narcissism. It fosters it, unintentionally, in the same way that heat opens a seed pod. Neo liberalism exists and thrives on the disempowerment of collectivism. The more individual we are, the more atomised we are, the less we combine together to demand change.

The irony of identity politics is that it promises personal freedom, the realisation and actualisation of one’s ‘true’ self. In reality, it just reproduces old inequalities and injustices.

Take the article about the vaccination posters, above. It might seem, on the surface, to be about empowering people with disabilities. Sure, it’s easy to see how these images could stigmatise disability. The author is no doubt lauded for her work.

But what are the real consequences? What does the article really tell us in terms of age-old injustices?

1. It is wrong to connect vaccination with the absence of a paralysing or debilitating disease.
2. Disability doesn’t exist, it’s simply the ‘full spectrum of human difference’. Everyone is different, therefore, no-one is. Don’t stigmatise disability by offering help or sympathy.
3. Overlook the material reality of mass public health campaigns (posters convey pictorial information to literate and non-literate people) in favour of focusing on unpalatable imagery that is, in some cases, almost 100 years old.
4. We should privilege the individual (stigmatisation, hurt feelings, prejudice) over the collective (ridding entire countries of a painful, disabling and traumatic illness).

The author is basically pointing out that some 60-100 year old imagery of disability presents a pretty nasty picture by today’s standards and reminds us that people get disabling illnesses and we should consider their lives and feelings. I’m one of them, so I agree. Fair enough. That’s nice.

The real consequences, however, are more sinister. If you convince people that disability is ‘just another way of being normal’ you undermine attempts to address it. It’s a direct substitution of ‘feelings’ for ‘doings’.

Second, focusing on the individual (hurt feelings) instead of the collective (e.g mass public health campaign to eradicate polio) privileges one over the other. The first thing I thought when I saw this article was that it was written by the anti vax lobby.

Who loses? As usual, poor people, the least franchised.

Examples of the individualisation of political agency abound, and each and every time they serve to replicate existing disparities and reward the wealthy and powerful.

Yesterday I mentioned NZ’s shift to a midwife-led model of maternity care. Again, this was because of a sustained campaign based around identity politics – women as strong and capable, and birth as a natural process. Healthcare as a consumer item, a fashion of the body rather than essential, lifesaving technology.

The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, was that this cheaper model of care wasn’t as good for babies and mothers.

Here’s a classic example of the pitfalls of individual politics. Good healthcare is obtained through sustained collective pressure. If you can’t make the case on utilitarian grounds (the negative consequences cost more than the intervention itself) then you must make them on social justice grounds (I am a citizen and I deserve to have a healthy birth on those grounds alone). Here, women were undermined by a campaign, run by women, to shift their entire maternity model to a cheaper, more dangerous version.

Perhaps what is most striking is that no-one even thought to check and see how it was working along the way.

Once again, we recognise a structural inequality (being a woman) at the heart of poorer health care.

Identity politics convinces people to work against their own interests in a way that a monolithic government could never do.

Cancelling disability. (I’m very angry about it).

I was chastised this morning on Twitter and told I ‘need to read this article again’ in that imperious tone that academics sometimes use to express their own righteousness over someone they consider to be less able and educated than them.

The article in question is this from the Wellcome Trust.

I’m so angry (not really about the tweet, about the article) that this blog post may not make much sense so feel free to abandon ship.

The article describes how public health campaigns, circa 60-100 years ago, are guilty of perpetrating able-ism against disabled people. Disabled people, it argues, “display the spectrum of human difference”. They’re not errant, or broken or wrong, simply, different. To suggest otherwise is to stigmatise them.

These posters are ‘problematic’ apparently because they portray a sense of guilt and shame that accompanies the acquisition of an illness, thus stigmatising the patient as carrying something of the guilt or shame of their lack of vaccination. To be paralysed by polio, for instance, carries the regret of not vaccinating against polio:

“The use of disability to shape public health behaviours was not restricted to sexually transmitted infections. Smallpox vaccination campaigns often played on the fear of scarring and other disabilities. A Soviet poster from the 1930s shows a young man being vaccinated while the figure of an older man with a severely scarred face, his cane and blank eyes signifying his blindness, looms in the background.

The disabled man is a warning: his blindness and disfigurement are presented as the consequences of failing to vaccinate. Public health posters that use explicitly disabled figures to influence health behaviours only reinforce the existing stigma around disability. Historically, this stigma has contributed to disabled people being shunned, neglected, discriminated against or being socially isolated. 

My point (and tweet) was that public health campaigns like the the eradication of polio often used posters to encourage take-up of vaccination or inoculation because they portrayed the message clearly. Importantly, posters don’t require many words, important in an era of lower general literacy. Indeed, the eradication of smallpox was in part engineered through radio – the ability to spread spoken, rather than written, material was very helpful. It is an astonishing story of success over a terrible disease, involving the co-operation of many countries and a general faith in science.

Nothing to see here, move along people.

Yes, the images in the posters are dated but are they ‘stigmatising’ of disabled bodies?

Some are, for sure. The image of the young girl ‘blighted’ by syphilis is a shocker by anyone’s measure,

It’s also almost 100 years old but thankfully, through articles such as these and the magic of the internet, we get to reconstitute the stigmatisations associated with some diseases. Otherwise this nasty little image might have just faded into obscurity.

I tried to think about why I felt so angry about this essay. I think it started with the sentence;

The disabled man is a warning: his blindness and disfigurement are presented as the consequences of failing to vaccinate

The reason blindness and scarring are ‘presented’ as the consequences of of failing to vaccinate is because they ARE the consequences of failing to vaccinate. I think this is what got me furious.

So often we’re told to keep an eye out for government authorities telling us lies. Yet, the time to really shit ourselves is when we’re told that the truth is unacceptable.

Smallpox was a hideous, extremely contagious disease. It’s easy in 2020 to argue about the niceties of a campaign for eradication but it was the 1930s in Soviet Russia and people were a bit……preoccupied. Revisionism aside, I struggled to work out why I felt so angry about this article.

In my early 20s I had a bit of time to think about how disability is constructed, mostly during the long months when I was completely paralysed on a respirator, unable to blink, and being fed through a tube while I came to terms with being a cripple (my word and I WILL NOT be chastised for claiming it) for the rest of my life. I had been advised that I would not recover the ability to walk, nor pilot a wheelchair on my own. I was in a hospital ward with many other people who were in a similar situation, many of whom had MS, but there were others too – stroke victims and victims of motorcycle accidents, all of us washing around in the too-warm soup of the therapy pool, into which we were lowered like crayfish in a pair of tongs, shucked of beige, prosthetic limbs. There we were, cheerfully living on the ‘spectrum of human difference’.

I had the rare good fortune to not end up totally paralysed but it gave me an insight into the world of disability and the importance of speaking plainly about it. I’d heard this idea before – the idea that my body was on a spectrum of human variability – from the physio, to which the guy from the room next door snorted and said, ‘Yeah, the fucked end’. He would know – he died a couple of months later. THIS IS REALITY.

I think the spectrum idea is offensive because it flattens and conflates the experiences of disabled people with those of non-disabled people, thus eliding the unique and often extremely difficult challenges they face to perform the simplest tasks of living. It’s kind of like the ‘nice’ physio who chirpily told several of us patients that we weren’t ‘sick’ before she hopped on her expensive racing bike she’d parked in the hallway and whizzed off into the outside world. I get where she was going with it, but fuck it felt like being cancelled.

And I guess that’s the point. If you normalise ‘human difference’ it’s a quick step away from saying, ‘you’re fine’. But people’s physical realities ARE part of their personalities. Go and tell someone with end stage bone cancer that the pain they’re feeling is just another way of being human. It’s true, of course, but it’s also most specious and egregiously heartless. It’s also selective. I note that we don’t tell someone who feels they’re ‘in the wrong body’ that actually, it’s not ‘wrong’, they’re just on the spectrum of normal human difference. Our physical beings, our physical bodies, matter. We are embodied beings. And sometimes those bodies are a bit on the shabby side. I know mine is.

When you plot everyone on a ‘natural scale of human difference’ you erase the singular fact that some people’s lives and experiences are incredibly difficult. They present unique and painful challenges, challenges that should be recognised. I know that some people treat people with a disability poorly – they talk dismissively, or, more commonly, they don’t talk to you at all. They design buildings that are fucking impossible to navigate in a wheelchair. It’s humiliating, sitting, waiting for someone to help. We need to fight this stigma. We need to treat people well. Telling people we’re ‘different like everyone else’ (and therefore all the same – thanks Fantastic Mr Fox) doesn’t help.

I find the vaccination argument in the essay particularly offensive because it suggests that not wanting to end up paralysed from polio is a bad thing. If there’s any ‘able-ism’ rocking around, it’s the idea that people who are at risk of polio should embrace the opportunity to live on the ‘spectrum of human difference’. It brings to mind all the other times that vulnerable groups are manipulated into thinking that preventable pain and disability is good. New Zealand shifted its entire maternity system to a midwife-led model and did not study the impact of the change for 20 years. Because who gives a fuck about women and babies, right? How about the cults that convince people that childhood vaccinations aren’t necessary. Because who gives a fuck about children, right?

* I can walk and use buildings in the mainstream way now but constantly make complaints about their lack of accessibility, which happens ALL THE TIME and in places you really wouldn’t think would be so bad, such as museums, public art galleries and train stations. I am informed that this is called ‘being a Karen’ which is a good example of how women get cancelled for trying to improve something important.