Skip to main content

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. 

Labels:

Comments

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

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more