Today I found out about a Canadian who prioritizes scientific literacy! Dr. Matt Strauss is a hero, an embattled hero in a country of pious Counterenlightenment.
In attempting two (2) thoughtful, measured public-health interventions, in 2022, upon the hoary scientistic depredations of the state-pharma industry-medical professionals’ population control coalition, Matt Strauss, MD, has apparently been subjected to the full brunt of Canadian political assault.
Here are the 100% responsible, scientific, considered public interventions Dr. Strauss waited until 2022 to make:
The limits of masking: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-strauss-im-a-doctor-heres-why-im-done-with-masking
The limits of vaccine mandates: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/time-end-vaccine-mandates-dr-matthew-strauss-inside-policy/
The cross-Ontario medical professional, joint Liberal-Conservative political, and media assault on Dr. Strauss’ employment, humanism, and sense of democratic Enlightenment responsibility is horrifying, galling.
Corey Robin on coalitional liberal-conservative “American-style” Fear:
“It is an affair of collusion involving the grunt work of collaborators, the cooperation of victims, and aid from those bystanders who do nothing to protest fear’s repressive hold…these coalitions of fear work through the very contrivances that are supposed to check fear: the fragmented state and a pluralistic civil society, which provides the wielders of fear coercive instruments often not available to government officials.” The mechanisms of McCarthyism are still in place, particularly in the contemporary Anglo-American workplace, “for it is there, in the coercive relationship between employer and employee, that we see today the most visible and pervasive evidence of fear” (Robin 2004: 163).
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness…You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” –Joseph N. Welch, 1954, to Joseph McCarthy, unprepossessing Red Hunt frontman
For three years, physicians, in coalition with long-embattled caretaking nurses and long-term care aides, were permitted full expression–and unquestioning implementation–of their political interests in exchange for exposing themselves to COVID-19 contagion in the course of their medical work. The politics of physicians have always been in the main autocratic, self-serving, inhumane, and contra the public good. Not scientific. They were dragged kicking and screaming to Medicare. That autocratic, inhumane tendency has exploded under pandemic policy formulated by military strategists and promoted by conservatized liberal party comms professionals. It is well past time for exceptional, scientific democratic-Enlightenment exponents like Dr. Strauss to begin to assert limits on the unhealthy antihumanism of pandemic lockdown governance.
The Chinese government maintained a zero-tolerance policy toward COVID for an inhumane length of time because they have too many people at their disposal and do not value human development; that government has broader coalitional influence than we often recognize, but fetishizing one health variable, COVID-19 infection, at the cost of many others–including healthy development–is a symptom of destructive inegalitarianism. It may be altruistic, but the main beneficiaries of the altruism are autocrats. It’s not a democratic population governance model.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 