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Winning and a New Blogger

The convoys have continued and caught on. In the middle of winter in Canada, droves are driving to be in conga lines, carry jerry cans, bounce in bouncy castles, and blockade the border. If many more crossings are blocked, the US-Canada border will be closed. As an American, I feel slightly rejected. 

But the protestors are winning. Alberta and Saskatchewan have dropped, or will drop, their mandates and Quebec dropped its plans for a unvaxxed tax. Crowds carrying jerry cans (fuel cans) showed up in Ottawa after police threatened to arrest anyone bringing fuel. GiveSendGo, the protestors' crowd funding platform, thumbed their nose at a Canadian court order to block payments to the protestors.


More convoys are happening around the world and there is supposed to be one scheduled for Washington, DC. I won't be going. I support the convoys, but it's not my fight: life is normal here at Cafe Americain and it's hopping at work. Dropping everything to go to Detroit to sit in your car and help block the Ambassador Bridge is for desperate people. As it is, it's busy at work (where they've finally given up on enforcing masks) and there are more people out and about than I've seen in two years. We have jobs here and we don't have the time or inclination for protesting. If Canada said that it's time for everybody--vaxxed, unvaxxed, half-vaxxed, boosted, recovered or never ill--to get back to work and school (i.e., ditch the mandates), the protests would be over tomorrow.

Blogger Bad Cattitude thinks they're drunk on emergency powers. He observes that it doesn't matter what the majority in a republic thinks:

if 90% vote 10% into slavery, that is democracy.

in fact, many “democracies” used to do just this.

we now (justly) revile it.

Exactly, we live in a republic with democratic elements. 

they will try to hide behind slippery claims of “democracy” to use appeals to the fact they are in office to justify increasing the power of their office.

but this constitutes invalid reasoning.

democracy is not freedom.

democracy is one of the more pernicious forms of tyranny ever devised: the tyranny of the majority.

even a king must fear the mob for he is one and they are many; but the mob need fear nothing when its proportions sufficiently swell.

such a mob is not moral, nor just, nor fair.

its numbers bestow no special wisdom or ethical high ground.

it is simply force, applied by the many upon the few.

If you want to read more takes like this on COVID and political science from Bad Cattitude, his(?) blog is now in the blogroll. 

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Anonymous said…
I've been wondering who pointed me to bad cattitude. Thanks Lori.
July 24, 2022
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