Freedom Convoy
Again with the idiot idea that not getting vaccinated=FREEDOM and vaccine mandates=unfreedom. Being on a ventilator plays hell with anyone’s freedom.
Thousands held a loud but peaceful protest in Canada’s capital Ottawa against prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates, on the streets and snow-covered lawn in front of parliament.
The so-called “Freedom Convoy” started out as a rally of truckers against a vaccine requirement for cross-border drivers, but turned into a demonstration against government overreach during the pandemic with a strong anti-vaccination streak.
A rally of truckers against a vaccine requirement for cross-border drivers – ok let’s discuss this. Where do the truck drivers think trucks come from? Or the roads they drive on? Or the stuff they haul? Or the money to pay for the stuff and the trucks and the drivers? Or the fuel to make the trucks move? Or the laws and enforcement that protect the drivers from people who would steal their trucks and what’s in them? Or the mapping that tells them how to get where they’re going?
It’s all social. It’s a network of arrangements and institutions and people, without which we don’t have much of anything. It’s probably still possible to find places that don’t have any of that, where I suppose a trucker could put up a tent (product of all these arrangements) and attempt to live off the land, but I think the life expectancy would be short (and the life meanwhile would be boring and unpleasant).
“It’s not just about the vaccines. It’s about stopping the public health mandates altogether,” said Daniel Bazinet, owner of Valley Flatbed & Transportation in Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast. Bazinet is unvaccinated, but operates domestically and so is not affected by the cross-border mandate.
So that we can have more disease and early death. Brilliant choice.
The more I think about it, the more it appears to me that being anti-vaxxer fits very well with being a covid and anthropogenic global warming denialist. Business-as-usual is the name of the game and has to trump everything else. (Please excuse the pun.) They are pro-coal, pro-nuclear power and anti-renewable energy as well. The latter indicates that their support base is the fossil-carbon lobby. There is no point to making the fossil carbon last as long as possible for uses other than furnace fuel. The name of the game is to convert it all to $$$$ in the proprietors’ bank accounts as fast as possible.
At current rates of consumption, the oil will maybe last another 100 years, the coal perhaps another 1,000 years. Then after that, our descendants will be driving steel-tyred (no rubber available) vehicles over cobbled roads (no road tar left) with no headlights (no plastics available for electrical insulation.)
But they will have an excellent feel for what life must have been like in the Paleolithic.
Omar, I envisioned the Flintstones. Walking their cars…
These faux truckers were so dumb they couldn’t organise way stops for food and drink, so they ended up stealing food from the homeless. Tells me more about them than I wanted to know.
https://twitter.com/winter_canada/status/1487884598440869892?s=20&t=BMP6pxd8JQuWqcHKDOMVcA
https://twitter.com/braedencaley/status/1487644249554362374?s=20&t=BMP6pxd8JQuWqcHKDOMVcA
Plus the nazi flags, the desecration of monuments, and the general Trump vibe.
To be fair to Canadian truckers… the vast majority of professional truckers in Canada are vaccinated (their vaccination rates reportedly mimic those of the overall adult population), and do understand that the US has similar mandates (so they can’t cross the border anyway, whatever the Canadian government says). They mostly aren’t making up the mob currently disrupting Ottawa and its citizens. Most of the mob are just regular, everyday narcissists with too much time and angst on their hands (not that those groups are mutually exclusive, of course).
Omar @ 1 – So you had to put in a pointless dig against nuclear power.
Do you have any data suggesting a correlation between anti-vax & pro-nuclear power views?
As for pro-fossil being anti-renewable, there is good reason for the gas companies to use wind and solar as green-washing.
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For some data on what works to cut CO2 emissions see:
https://app.electricitymap.org/map
It shows how much CO2 is emitted per kWh of electricity generated for regions where they get data.
Color coded from green for very low through shades of brown to black for very high.
You can click on a region to get how much electricity came from what source over the last hour or day.
Spoiler alert:
The regions that are consistently green use a mix of hydro, geothermal & nuclear for most of their electricity.
The regions that try to use a lot of solar or wind vary from fairly green to quite brown, because when the wind isn’t blowing & the sun isn’t shining they burn natural gas to provide the electricity they need.
Jim B: greenwashing is a religious belief among the comfortable role. There is still a delusions that we will have some kind of vehicles and roads. Contradicted by use of the term neolithic. Nope. Mad Max. Sent me problems are not solvable, no matter what we delude ourselves about higher CAFE standards or delux 3000 square foot green mansions with a few solar panels. There are seven billion people. We are not going to stop AGW until complete population social and economic collapse.
By then, of course, it will be too late. It might be too late already. (I hope not; I fear so.)