Displaying items by tag: covid19

Welcome to East Berlin - I mean Melbourne.

The Covid crisis has thrown up many conundrums, and ideological positions.  The politicisation of death is distressing, so called "Covid death porn".  But there are other dimensions to this, not least the other, less reported Covid porn epidemic.  Returning to real science is critical, as is moral and political perspective.

Australia's battle of ideas - the culture war - seems lost, to the forces of progressive liberalism.  Those who would fight this battle seem preoccupied with getting the Liberal party into office, and keeping it there.  While the bigger battles go by, without a fight.  Understanding where we are going wrong is the first task in understanding the war we are in.

Chesterton once said that the non believer in God doesn't believe in nothing - he is prone to believe in anything.  Observing the current political madness in the world only confirms Chesterton's wisdom.  Whether it is the mad wokeness of the new revolutionaries, or the crazy hysteria over Covid 19, it seems to be everywhere.  There is a madness to crowds.  Not just in Victoria.

The Covid lockdown has infringed the rights and liberties of ordinary Australians in ridiculous ways while leftists have been able to turn up at protest rallies for this, that and the other.  Spot the tilt to the left, facilitated by the State?  The double standards are palpable.

The Government's response to Covid 19, whatever one thinks of the wisdom of lockdowns and so on, has been laced with hypocrisy.  One glaring double standard has been the sudden conversion of governments to apparent concern for the health of the elderly and weak in an age of euthanasia on demand.

China is in the news.  With Covid and with trade wars, the world has begun to question its embrace of China over these past decades.  With good reason.  A repulsive regime has been granted the keys to the world economy.  On our watch.

The Covid Crisis has thrown up its own set of "tribes", interest groups with different stakes in the way the thing is playing out.  Understanding the ideologies and the interests of the various players helps us all to make sense of the crazy times in which we live

Two important things happened on the weekend of 6-7 June.  A court upheld the right to protest in large numbers in public, even in times of real or manufactured health scares.  This has implications for lockdown policies.  The second important thing to happen was that we can go to Church again.  For this, we should, all of us, bend the knee.

The Covid scare has taken even further the tendency for politicians, ideologues and interest groups of all stripes to politicise death.  Already seen during tragedies and natural disasters, political actors rush to embrace crises, and they now even sometimes make them up.  Death counts are now a part of daily political life, and the new currency of political debate.  This is an unseemly development.