Doom_Paul [he/him]

It's disappointing to see the pandemic cause some western leftists (who may be solid on practically every other issue) to devolve into hyper-individualist left-libertarians on this subject, who oppose virtually all proactive policies that would help combat the pandemic while offering zero effective alternative solutions. They see anything that would actually help as too "draconian", "authoritarian", or a "violation of civil liberties".

Meanwhile socialist governments like China and Vietnam found success in implementing proactive zero-tolerance pandemic control policies. In China:

China’s zero-tolerance Covid-19 strategy will not change until the authorities are confident that its vaccination campaign has been effective enough to ease restrictions, a senior health official said on Friday. Zheng Zhongwei, head of medical science development at the National Health Commission, said those strict measures – including quarantine, rigorous testing and large-scale contact tracing – would not be changed easily.

“We will not relax controls until we have reached a certain level of vaccine coverage. We will not relax controls unless we make a judgment about the virus and how vaccination can guarantee the effectiveness of adjusting epidemic control measures,” Zheng told a health forum on the sidelines of the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing.

Zheng said China’s “firm resolution” had contained more than 30 outbreaks since the disease first emerged at the end of 2019, adding that three factors – strict public health controls, a high vaccination rate and therapeutic treatment – would be needed to “end the epidemic”.

In China as of September 16th:

More than 1.01 billion people have been fully inoculated with Covid-19 vaccines in China, but the highly transmissible Delta variant is still challenging the country’s target to build herd immunity.

More than 2.16 billion doses had been administered and 1 billion people fully inoculated by Wednesday, Lei Zhenglong, National Health Commission disease prevention chief, said on Thursday.

That total included 170 million doses given to 95 million teenagers and 390 million doses taken by 200 million people aged over 60.

“We rank the top in the world in terms of total number of doses and number of people covered, and have one of the highest vaccination rates,” Lei said.

According to Our World in Data, 54 per cent of the US population, 30.7 per cent of people in the European Union, 13.5 per cent of India’s population have been fully vaccinated. Malta tops the world with 82.9 per cent of its 500,000 or so people fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, in Beijing 20.3 million people have had at least one dose, with 19.5 million fully inoculated. More than 97.4 per cent of the adult population, or 89 per cent of the total population, of the Chinese capital has completed a full regimen, according to Beijing’s health commission.

The figures mean that 72 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion people are fully vaccinated, reaching a target originally set when China started the national vaccination campaign in December.

The Chinese health authorities aimed to have 1.1 billion people vaccinated by the end of October. By then key groups – the over-60s, those at high risk of infection and people who need to travel to countries with high infection rates – will also have received a booster shot.

The high vaccination rate is not expected to lead to immediate change in China’s zero-tolerance strategy, characterised by strict quarantine, rigorous contact tracing and large-scale testing. Zheng Zhongwei, a NHC official in charge of vaccine development, said earlier this month that those control measures would remain in place until the authorities were confident that its vaccination campaign had been effective enough to ease restrictions.

Wang from the China CDC urged eligible teenagers and the elderly to get vaccinated soon so that the vaccines could be “truly effective”. Those under 12 years old should also be inoculated, he said.

China has approved the shots for children as young as three but vaccination started only last month for 12-17-year-olds.

A western article detailing their survey of Chinese citizen satisfaction regarding pandemic control policies (Xinjiang scored the highest satisfaction rate among the Chinese provinces. There are only 3 deaths in that region and 4,636 deaths in mainland China overall):

The satisfaction index ranges from 10 (unsatisfied with all levels of government on both questions) to 50 (satisfied with all levels of government on both questions). On this 10-50 scale, Chinese citizens indicated an overall satisfaction score of 39.2 (38.8 in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located). This suggests that Chinese citizens’ satisfaction with government performance during the pandemic is very high.

To better present the findings, I recoded each item from the 1-5 scale into a binary measure, designating 4 and 5 as satisfied (1) and other categories as unsatisfied (0). On this binary scale, about 75 per cent of China’s citizens indicated they were satisfied with government’s information dissemination, while 67 per cent were satisfied with the government’s delivery of daily necessities and protection materials during the pandemic.

Next, I considered how citizen satisfaction varies across provinces. I have found that in provinces with a small number of confirmed cases such as Xinjiang, Hunan, Qinghai, Tibet and Liaoning, citizens are more satisfied. However, in Jiangxi, Guangdong, Jilin, Heilongjiang and Hebei, where more people were infected, citizens are less satisfied. This suggests that citizen satisfaction might reflect actual government performance. Still, citizens in Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak, were ranked in the middle in terms of their satisfaction.

The governments of China and Venezuela are some of the first countries to announce their plans to extend their vaccination campaigns to vaccinate younger children, but Cuba is the first to do so:

The communist island of 11.2 million people aims to inoculate all its children before reopening schools that have been closed for the most part since March 2020.

The government has announced schools will reopen gradually, in October and November, but only after all children have been vaccinated.

According to a Reuters article from September 1st regarding Cuba:

Cuba will begin vaccinating adolescents against COVID-19 this week and younger children from mid-September as part of a drive to immunize more than 90% of the population by December, state-run media said on Wednesday.

All children ages 2 through 18 will receive at least two doses of the Cuban-developed Soberana-2 vaccine beginning Sept. 3, the official Cubadebate digital news outlet reported.

In the capital, Havana, where more than 60% of the 2.2 million residents are fully vaccinated, cases and deaths per 100,000 residents are far below the national average, according to government statistics.

Articles and studies detailing Vietnam’s success with proactive pandemic policies:

• https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam-2020
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666535221000574
• https://www.businessinsider.com/vietnam-coronavirus-measures-among-best-in-world-contact-tracing-masks-2021-2

Despite Vietnam’s great success of having only 35 deaths up until May 2021, they unfortunately have recently experienced a rise in cases centered mainly in Ho Chi Minh City over the summer due to the more contagious delta variant and their low vaccination rate (with about 30% of the population receiving at least one dose) caused by being unable to secure vaccine imports thanks to the oversupply to wealthy western countries that are hoarding them. Vietnam is thankfully beginning to make good progress with their vaccination campaign though with China donating 3 million doses and Cuba agreeing to supply Vietnam with 10 million doses of their vaccine.

The sub is now mostly a confused mixture of social democracy and libertarianism. A lot of Glenn Greenwald, Kim Iverson, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracy, Thomas Frank, Jimmy Dore, and Whitney Webb. Many of them can be generally anti-imperialist and will correctly call out the Russiagate shit, but then fall for neo-Cold War anti-China propaganda like the right-wing lab leak conspiracy theory. They seem to all take the naïve libertarian position on pandemic control policy that advocates essentially having the government doing nothing and hoping individuals will all be responsible enough. A lot of free speech absolutism.

Its moderation is very weak and it gets brigaded frequently. Head moderator is a weird Ivermectin fanatic. You’ll see socialist content regularly getting upvotes, but then there’s also an influx of right-wing/right-libertarian articles on the pandemic getting upvotes as well.

Max Blumenthal does associate with some libertarians (Scott Horton being one of them) for his anti-war journalism, so I guess it’s not too surprising to see that start to rub off on him. It’s a shame though that he ended up adopting one of libertarianism’s worst positions in being basically opposed to a lot of proactive pandemic policy out of liberal fears of “authoritarianism”, “violations of informed consent ”, and it being “draconian”.

While he acknowledges that American covid vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations, severe illness, and deaths and that high risk populations need to get vaccinated, he still opposes mandates, “vaccine passports”, and lockdowns because he apparently thinks that these policies are “draconian”, racist, and anti-working class. His naive stance here is in opposition to the proactive pandemic control policies of socialist governments like Vietnam and China that have had more success in combating the pandemic. I know other writers at the Grayzone disagree with Max on this issue like Aaron Mate and I believe Ben as well. It would be nice if they could do more to knock some sense into Max on this issue so he doesn’t keep embarrassing himself with these tangents that detract from his great foreign policy work. I had assumed that he leaned more ML, but I suppose it’s possible that he may have always had more libertarian sympathies than I had thought. Regardless, it’s disappointing to see. We really don't need more weird Glenn Greenwaldesque left-libertarians.

Paleolibertarianism is a fringe right-libertarian ideology that was strategically promoted by Lew Rockwell (credited with hiring the racist ghostwriters of the Ron Paul newsletters) and Murray Rothbard (a founder of anarcho-capitalism) in the 90s to try to appeal to socially conservative reactionaries. It basically synthesizes paleoconservatism with right-libertarianism. Rockwell later disavowed paleolibertarianism as the movement predictably became extremely toxic and was pretty much exclusively associated with far-right white supremacists and neo-Confederates. Paleolibertarianism is fringe even among right-libertarians nowadays and is typically associated with the more crypto-fascist anarcho-capitalists. The white supremacist Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an example of one of the few notable paleolibertarians remaining today. He advocates for the establishment of “covenant communities” that would ultimately function as private ethnostates.

Paleolibertarianism is a right-libertarian ideology that was strategically promoted by Lew Rockwell (credited with hiring the racist ghostwriters of the Ron Paul newsletters) and Murray Rothbard (a founder of anarcho-capitalism) in the 90s to try to appeal to socially conservative reactionaries. It basically synthesizes paleoconservatism with right-libertarianism. Rockwell later disavowed paleolibertarianism as the movement predictably became extremely toxic and was pretty much exclusively associated with far-right white supremacists and neo-Confederates. Paleolibertarianism is fringe even among right-libertarians nowadays and is typically associated with the more fascist anarcho-capitalists. The white supremacist Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an example of one of the few notable paleolibertarians remaining today. He supports the establishment of “covenant communities” that would ultimately function as private ethnostates.

Max Blumenthal does associate with some libertarians (Scott Horton being one of them) for his anti-war journalism, so I guess it’s not too surprising to see that start to rub off on him. It’s a shame though that he ended up adopting one of libertarianism’s worst positions in being basically opposed to a lot of proactive pandemic policy out of liberal fears of “authoritarianism”, “violations of informed consent ”, and it being “draconian”.

While he acknowledges that American covid vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations, severe illness, and deaths and that high risk populations need to get vaccinated, he still opposes mandates, “vaccine passports”, and lockdowns because he apparently thinks that these policies are “draconian”, racist, and anti-working class. His naive stance here is in opposition to the proactive pandemic control policies of socialist governments like Vietnam and China that have had more success in combating the pandemic. I know other writers at the Grayzone disagree with Max on this issue like Aaron Mate and I believe Ben as well. It would be nice if they could do more to knock some sense into Max on this issue so he doesn’t keep embarrassing himself with these tangents that greatly detract from his foreign policy work. I had assumed that he leaned more ML, but I suppose it’s possible that he may have always had more libertarian sympathies than I had thought. Regardless, it’s disappointing to see.

The ideological justification of this was, in the US, basically made by libertarian, Koch-brother-funded think tanks and incursion into almost every economics department in the country until even high schoolers are getting taught who Freidrich Hayek is and are forced to read Ayn Rand.

Yep. Literally every econ professor I had in undergrad was a right-wing libertarian. It wasn't until after I graduated that I discovered that our econ department was funded by the Koch brothers and they actually had a contract with our school that gave them influence in hiring. I had lectures in environmental economics where we were told that we should simply ignore the negative externalities from climate change because addressing the issue would result in excessive opportunity costs. We even had professor-led Ayn Rand book clubs.

The Koch brothers through their foundations and think tanks heavily promote the Chicago school variant of neoliberal economics through their funding of academic institutions across the country. A comprehensive list of these Koch-funded schools: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Universities#Koch_University_Spending_and_Academic_Freedom

Pretty much. I was taught in high school that the tank literally ran him over, thousands of peaceful protestors were murdered in the square for simply wanting democracy, and that Communist China was evil and totalitarian because "they murder their own kids".

Some of Walter Block's greatest hits:

contract, predicated on private property [can] reach to the furthest realms of human interaction, even to voluntary slave contracts.

Otherwise, slavery wasn't so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc.

Further, there can be no such thing as “involuntary intercourse” for the female slave whose owner is a pimp. In her slave contract, she has already agreed to alienate her body for such sexual services. Yes, it is indeed, and only, rape if her owner does not consent to this sexual intercourse. And, if the woman in question objects, which she has no right to do, ask her if she really wishes she had not made the contract in the first place, and instead allowed her child to die.

Suppose that there is a starvation situation, and the parent of the four year old child (who is not an adult) does not have enough money to keep him alive. A wealthy NAMBLA man offers this parent enough money to keep him and his family alive – if he will consent to his having sex with the child. We assume, further, that this is the only way to preserve the life of this four year old boy. Would it be criminal child abuse for the parent to accept this offer? Not on libertarian grounds. For surely it is better for the child to be a live victim of sexual abuse rather than unsullied and dead. Rather, it is the parent who consents to the death of his child, when he could have kept him alive by such extreme measures, who is the real abuser.

In a question-and-answer session, Block was asked to elaborate on his assertion that the wage disparity between blacks and whites was due to blacks being less productive than whites. In his response, Block said the "politically correct answer is that lower black productivity is due to slavery, Jim Crow legislation, poor treatment of African Americans in terms of schooling, etc. The politically incorrect explanation was supplied by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their book The Bell Curve: lower black IQs.”

Walter Block is embarrassingly popular among libertarians. He's one of the most prominent Austrian economists and anarcho-capitalists.

As a former libertarian, these are unfortunately very standard libertarian positions that you'll see many right-libertarians perform mental gymnastics to defend. Title II and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 obstructing the ability of private property owners to discriminate against customers and employees are enough for many libertarians to call for repealing the Civil Rights Act outright. Defense of private property rights are always taken to the limit, regardless of the consequences. This is illustrated by libertarianism's most prominent thinkers.

Libertarian icon and economist Murray Rothbard called for the elimination of "the entire 'civil rights' structure" stating that it "tramples on the property rights of every American". Rothbard also advocated overturning the Brown v. Board of Education decision on the grounds that state-mandated integration of schools violated libertarian principles.

Ayn Rand on the Civil Rights Act:

The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights.... It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.... Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject. It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently — the Negroes — are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

According to Jeffrey Miron, libertarian economist at Harvard and Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Economics Department:

[L]ibertarians should not only oppose Title II [of the Civil Rights Act]; they should shout that opposition from the highest roof tops…Title II is a bald-faced assault on a principle that libertarians hold dear: that private property is private.

Milton Friedman shares the typical libertarian stance and libertarian rhetoric on anti-discrimination laws:

But in a society based on free discussion, the appropriate recourse is for me to seek to persuade them that their tastes are bad and that they should change their views and their behavior, not to use coercive power to enforce my tastes and my attitudes on others.

Libertarian economist Walter Block on the Civil Rights Act and anti-discrimination laws:

But all Senator Paul was saying is that while it would be illicit for government to discriminate on the basis of race or sex or any other such criterion, it is a basic element of private-property rights that individuals be free to engage in exactly such preferences. If they were not, an important element of liberty would be lost. It is clear that discrimination on the part of individuals, but of course not the state, is part of our birthright of liberty. If not, coercive bisexuality would be the logical implication of the antidiscrimination movement.