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I would not really classify myself as an anarchist, but I think that it is important here to clarify that we are not talking about the infringement of freedom so much as a clash of freedoms. On the one side, you have the freedom of individuals to choose whether or not to get vaccinated and, having decided not to get vaccinated, to participate in society. On the other side, you have the freedom of other members of society (whether vaccinated or not) to participate in society safely. Given the nature of the pandemic, both freedoms cannot coexist.
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Pretty sure Noam Chomsky counts as a Left Anarchist. Coincidentally, he was asked exactly this recently.
His response was that it is the right of everyone not to be vaccinated if they don’t want to. And it is the right of everyone else to tell them to stay the hell away until they’re safe to enter society.
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Oh, you mean like the shots that are required before a child can enter school? All the shots that every last one of those anti-vaxxers have had during their lives without screaming about their personal liberties to all and sundry? All those anti-vaxxers of a certain age have smallpox shot scars, and they and their parents and grandparents lined up to get the compulsory polio shot as soon as it was available, because there was a deadly pandemic.
Strident anti-vaxxers are quietly getting vaxxed so they can keep their jobs! That sounds nothing like anarchism.
I don’t normally engage in whataboutery, but why haven’t these people been pitching fits and screaming about big pharma every time they are prescribed a drug?
“My dentist is such an asshole. S/he prescribed antibiotics and painkillers for my infected tooth! What a jerk, huh? Then, when s/he pulled the tooth, s/he tried giving me novocaine, but I said, ‘Fuck off! I don’t want that in my body!’”
“My doctor wanted to give me high blood pressure meds, so I said, ‘High pressure this, pal!’”
An anarchist friend in England set up squats, created networks for travelling punks and bands on tour, set up and managed gigs and festivals, etc etc etc. He’s as horrified, angered and disgusted by the vaxxholes and maskholes as I, got vaccinated as soon as he could, and still wears a mask whenever he goes out. He thinks the antis are clueless, stupid gits, not fellow anarchists.
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They lined up to get polio vaccines because they were told to. Now, they reject vaccines because somebody told them not to. Far from anarchists, they are authoritarians who are simply trusting in the “authority” of Tucker Carlson and random people on YouTube, rather than actual doctors and scientists, whose authority they now reject.
ETA: They call themselves “free thinkers,” but they rush to guzzle down hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin when an “authority” whom they respect tells them to.
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I’ll smoke to that. I don’t want any of those new variant factories anywhere near me, or anyone else!
Someone I once loved has got heavily into vaxx- and maskhole crap on faceschnook, both consuming and posting. It apparently (I’m not a user) got so bad, some of her posts were flagged, and she’s now got at least two factcheckers wasting time on her dumb ass. This makes her proud.
She’s been bitterly whingeing about bars and restaurants that require vaccination proof, demanding others help her compile a boycott list. This cracked up my BF, who wondered aloud, "How TF do you boycott a place that won’t let you in?!" I think he should tell her to include all the places he and I go, so we’ll never have to deal with her again. sigh
My BF sent me a couple screengrabs of her ravings, one of which featured my best friend’s BF’s equally rant-y reply. It was anti-Fauci, anti-FBI and -DOJ (?!?!), and so fulla merkin von bankrupt BS and fascist propaganda, I couldn’t finish reading it. I felt sick, angry, and afraid. I am wondering how many actual friends I now have. I can’t be around people who think like that, and are so narrow-minded they can’t be moved. Dumping all my fake friends when I was 17 and becoming a hermit was liberating AF; I felt alive for the first time since high school began.
Doing the same at 55 is frankly scary, esp doing it for such frightening reasons.
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I know the feeling. The pandemic has made people throw down their masks and show us who they really are. You can spend time wondering if they were always that way or if these bizarre circumstances have transformed them, but they are what they are now, and it’s hard to go back from that. I am so thankful that I have not had to cut out anyone with whom I was ever particularly close, but it still stings.
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…and I am also grateful that you haven’t. All needed healing, and wonderful new friends to everyone who has!
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This is society in a nutshell. All rights are in conflict with other rights. The role of government is, at an abstract level, to decide which rights are more important than others, in order to maximize freedom for the most possible people. I think conservatives (especially American ones) often forget this (perhaps willfully).
You have a right to bodily autonomy vis-a-vis swinging your arms around, right up until one of them contacts my nose, to paraphrase the old saying.
Courts the world over long ago decided that public health measures supersede rights of individuals to opt out yet still participate in society. So, to send your kids to public school or work a government job, you must be vaccinated. This has always been recognized as a necessary trampling of individual rights dictated by the scientific reality of fighting communicable diseases.
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Interestingly enough, that was part of the point of taking the name libertarian, to defang active non-market, non hierarchical movements. Rothbard explicitly said as much.
Page 83 as marked on the page or page 108 by pdf numbering.
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