Weekly Roundup: Sauce For The Goose Edition

Let me start with this: The arch use of COVID-19 survivor Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's Tweet aside, there's no point in the pointing out of protest-related left-wing hypocrisy. First off, I'm not necessarily anti-hypocrisy, and I'm not certain that being hypocritical is the greatest sin one can commit. As a completely theoretical example, who is a worse person: the public figure who encourages children to avoid heroin use while shooting up in private, or the public figure who uses heroin openly and who also thinks it's great for kids to use heroin openly? If your answer is "The first, because hypocrisy is worse than encouraging children to use drugs," then you should go ahead and toss your laptop in the trash before you do any more damage to yourself and others.

Secondly, the vast gap between the go-on-you-scamps! attitude shown by the Cathedral regarding the burnings, killings, and lootings that happened during lefty protests of the past five years and the kill-em-immediately-with-military-force-the-way-Patton-killed-the-Bonus-Army-veterans! vitriol aimed at both the January 6 insurrection-in-which-nothing-was-insurrected and the Canadian "trucker convoy" protests is NOT hypocrisy. It's what the kids call a "flex", which is to say: a show of naked force. When you see the media calling for "sustained urban honking" to be added to the list of death-penalty offenses while simultaneously winking at the frequency with which "bail project" recipients go on to murder more victims, there is no accidental contradiction happening here. You are being shown the use of power.

Furthermore, there is no ideological conflict between supporting murders in the CHAZ and calling for the use of napalm against Canadian truckers. The whole point of "Defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" and many other similar protests is to remove local police agencies and replace them with a national police force that is accountable to Washington DC, not local voters. (Similarly, all the griping about "gerrymandering districts" is an attempt to move the district-drawing power into Federal hands, where it will ensure a perpetual People's Revolution of blue-purple districts across the nation.) But the trucker convoy doesn't represent a movement to place more centralized power in federal hands. Quite the contrary. It's about removing the frankly insane emergency powers the governments of North America have arrogated to themselves over the past two years.

So it's gotta go, and the sooner the better.

Whether you agree with the goals of the "truckers" or not, it is difficult to argue that they do not genuinely represent a large number of Canadian citizens, many of whom are disgusted with the manner in which the government has misused its COVID emergency powers. And why shouldn't they be? We have shut down the world economy and irreparably damaged everything from the ability of Millennials to own homes to the mental health of children who have been forced to hide behind masks and laptop cameras during the most formative years of their lives, all in the name of causing some minor inconvenience to a disease that, at the worst estimates, kills one in four hundred people, with most of its victims being old and sick already.

Oh, and the super-rich almost doubled their wealth in that same two-year period.

Probably a total coincidence.

But these protests are not universally popular. The trucker protests represent the repressed nightmare of every urban bugman: that one day the Deliverance people will come for him. Your average Redditor inherently understands that his way of life isn't sustainable outside a major city and his values aren't welcome any place that people aren't living cheek-by-jowl, but he also believes that the reverse is true and that the ultra-frightening Kryptek camo crowd have no power inside the city walls. Having a flotilla of tractor-trailers blowing their air horns night and day outside the windows of 300-square-foot micro-apartments puts the lie to that belief.

Perhaps the deranged fervor with which the government-industrial complex has sought the implementation of autonomous trucks, regardless of the wishful thinking and psuedo-technology involved, makes a little more sense now. Autonomous trucks would be centrally controlled, and they could be used to practice a sort of large-scale hydraulic diplomacy; if your local township or village displeases the Feds, then the trucks simply stop coming. Oh, and maybe the "weird side effect" that California's AB 5 essentially bans owner-operator trucking, forcing all truck drivers to work under corporate control, seems a little less accidental, eh?

In a nation that has never had fewer small businesspeople, by percentage of population, than it does right now, independent truckers represent one of the last bastions of self-employment. Acting together, they have tremendous power. Workers of the world, unite! No, wait, not like that! We wanted you to unite and demand more power for the government, the way the useful idiots of Antifa and similar political organizations demonstrate and protest tirelessly to demand "federal oversight" for everything from police departments to race-traitor emojis.

As I write this, the Ambassador Bridge between Canada and the United States is being cleared of protestors. Traditionally, bridges have been flashpoints for trouble, whether we're talking the "shot heard 'round the world" on the Concord Bridge in 1775, the Key Bridge confrontation during May Day of 1971, or the Gretna bridge blockade during Hurricane Katrina. Let us hope that this latest confrontation leads to greater freedom for both Americans and Canadians, not to a further strengthing of the COVID uber alles approach to government power. No matter what happens, though, one thing has been made clear: after years of enduring the left's street-level behavior without effective complaint, the right wing has finally decided to play the game.

I think we've seen this movie before. Hope I'm wrong.

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This week I wrote about undersquare under-satisfaction and a Dart that never was.