Yin Yang Apartheid Distopia

Stray musings as the "red light / green light" social credit passport world takes shape

The reader is forewarned the following is a meandering political musing with no clear “point.” I needed a mental break from my horribly failing attempts to finish any of the illustrations for “Omicron Origins,” and so you are getting this.¹

A further disclaimer: The description of the haka performed in front of Parliament inaccurately portrays it as a “war dance.” As removing the reference to “war dance” would require substantial remodeling of the relevant paragraphs, I have left things as originally written for now. Thank you to commenter “Ezekiel's Call” for pointing out the error.

Fires burn as New Zealand lockdown protesters heckle police during clearance of their encampment. Still from upload by “Conservative Storage” (rumble)

Ambivalent Revolutionaries

Yesterday, you may have heard, police from all over New Zealand gathered to the capital to displace a three-week “protest,” or you could say a “paused riot” to be more accurate.

Most accounts of the encampment describe it as being in protest of a “vaccine mandate.” Ironically it was (a handful of) New Zealand’s police themselves who already had delivered a blow to any future universal mandate, achieving a court win against their own mandate the week before clearance.²

Nonetheless, New Zealand’s government continues to warrant resistance from their citizens in other ways related to the Virus, subjecting said citizens to all the classic Pandemic assaults on liberty (despite extraordinarily high Covid-vaccination rates), with stated intention to continue doing so at least until the current wave peaks. Ironically, that wave (in which BA.1 and BA.2 are neck-and-neck in the sequence results, and Delta still holding on at the margin³) began while the encampment was ongoing; so it’s pretty clear that the dissenters made the Virus mad just like the government said they would.⁴

Like last year’s January 6 invasion, the “protesters” in Wellington were essentially able to overwhelm the state - by definition the supposed holder of the “monopoly on violence,” whether legitimate or not in a given local context - with ease (as well as impressive logistical coordination), and after doing so, had no idea what to do with that victory. In the case of Wellington, no building invasion took place - but the point is that superiority over the state was easily established (otherwise, clearance wouldn’t have required shipping in extra police).

So, the victorious rioters simply camped out, Bonus Army-style, in the lawn in front of Parliament House, waiting for the state to muster the courage to displace them. Early, when numbers were at their height, a contingent of Māori performed a haka in the direction of the House. Presumably this was not intended as mere diversion, a cultural appreciation side-show; presumably it was a gesture, meant to mean something. But no actual “war” followed the war dance. The “protesters” remained behind the guard-rails. What do they say about the riot that haka’ed wolf? Negotiations were held between the state and the entity that did not intend to challenge the state; predictably, nothing was granted.

As Police Commissioner Andrew Coster would have the news put it, the more “genuine” protesters eventually left out of frustration, and the remainder were thus obviously no longer “protesters” at all, but only “people more intent on violent confrontation.”⁵ In other words, the “protesters,” who were really rioters here to overthrow a tyrannical government, but were yet unwilling to riot to overthrow the tyrannical government, were accused by the tyrannical government of having rioted anyway; just as with January 6.

Numbers seem to have dwindled in the weeks since the No War Dance, though it’s not clear whether the encampment was really outnumbered by the (unarmed) police during the clear-out or not. And yet the state was successful. There were fires. Another 65 arrests, added to the 132 which had occurred in the weeks prior. Another revolution unwilling to label itself a “revolution” simply… waited out.

The protesters who were not arrested will go home and tell themselves they could have won. And they will be right. They could have won, they just obviously didn’t want to. Footage from the clearance, when smoke was billowing from the fires and objects were being flung anonymously at the neon-safety-vest-decked police, and yet both parties were for the most part just standing still and looking at each other, evokes Revere’s iconic rendition of the Boston Massacre. But in Wellington, the yellow-vested agents of the state had no rifles, only tear gas. No blood was spilled; only milk. The riot was dispersed, in the end, not because the police were overwhelming or brutal, but because a riot cannot survive in stasis. It must do what it is designed to or dissolve. In the case of a political riot, it must be willing to embrace existential conflict with the state, i.e. revolution.

Ambivalent Observer

I am not actually a “fan” of revolutions. In the modern context, especially, revolutions seem to create a stain of political illegitimacy that leads to decades of sectarian war in the geography that belonged to the deposed status quo. Whether due to the cheapening of the tools of violence - so that an army of peasants can achieve parity with the modern equivalent of the Landsknechte - or other factors, it doesn’t seem like “wars” are any longer a thing that can be “won,” as Russia is once again learning in the Ukraine (hopefully the lesson will be quick, and not drawn out into decades). That would obviously include civil wars.

But I do support self-determinism. Human societies should be shaped by human psychologies and emotions, both specifically - as in, by the will of the actual, specific participants in that society - and generally. To hyperbolize, I do not support handing over human government to a hypothetical enlightened alien race monitoring us from orbit, ushering in an eternity of world peace and universal fairness. This may sound farcical, but it’s essentially how the progressive mindset approaches any given question of policy or ethics in general: After all, since “human nature” is just flawed anyway, it should be subtracted from the design of society, because otherwise the society won’t be good. The result, of course, is just an endless series of policies that are incompatible with reality.

What policy “should be” is simply whatever comes out of the competition of interests within and without of the state; and what the state “should be” is just whatever comes out of the conflict of raw power that precedes it. Anything else is rhetoric.

That’s what societies are; if you don’t like it, welcome to the club (there will not be any meetings; the previous members were all slaughtered to make room for the society).

And when the state governing over a given society becomes noxious, or weak, or both as is the case in this simultaneously ominous and ridiculous era of the “Great Reset,” it will be displaced, for it no longer serves the interests of those who in fact have the advantage in raw power. Or it will at least enter a transitional state, where discrete political violence (abrogation of the state’s monopoly on violence) is normalized, but doesn’t halt the inertia of social order, as characterized much of America for most of first two centuries of her existence (see “decades of sectarian war in the geography that belonged to the deposed status quo,” above).

Or at least, that is what one would expect.

Ambivalent Species

So it is in this sense that I find the world’s reaction to the last two years disturbing, in fact a bit staggering. How can there be so much compliance, so much self-pacification; how can the entire world be covered in it?

In what way are today’s humans literally not the same as before? Why no actual “anti-vaccine riots” in the hold-out pockets of the American states that are fully onboard with the Injection Autocracy model, as was still conceivable up to a century ago?⁶ If the state is weak, and our current “tribal” factions are irreconcilable, why no Spartakusaufstand, nor Freikorps, as naturally followed the vacuum of power of the Weimar state? So this is not simply a matter of revolution being impossible in democratic republics; something has changed about the nature of the citizens ruled under them.

Again, I am not “rooting” for these things to occur; I am just wondering what has desensitized the human race to the conditions that normally induce these responses. I don’t “root” for people to bleed to death when they are stabbed, either - but if suddenly everyone everywhere was being stabbed and none of them were bleeding, I would start to get the heebie-jeebies.

If we propose that this is an evolution, not a devolution - in other words, that modern humans are moving beyond their violent instincts - well, I have some road rage youtubes to show you. In the Anglosphere, at least, almost everyone is still capable of at least being conditioned into a state of constant hair-trigger willingness to commit or court violent attack with random strangers, if they aren’t constantly in that state already; it only takes a few weeks of driving in an area with high traffic to bring this latent barbarianism out of us.

We haven’t become less rowdy or unreasonable; and in fact most of us are already constantly primed, thanks to the conversion of so much of our societies’ physical spaces into a mod-assembled corporate product peopled by anonymous strangers that we must drive and walk through like it is a 1st-person shooter video game arena, beset all the time by imaginary attacks (in what way is someone else changing lanes “cutting” anything; and how is it that you arrived in that lane if not by doing the same?).

So it would seem to be a matter of devolution - it is not that modern humans cannot be violent to others, just that they are unwilling to direct that violence against the state - even if “others” are merely strangers who parked in a handicap space (when the whole point of convenience stores is allegedly to be convenient), while the state will demand that they walk around with useless masks, stop associating freely, and subject themselves to genetic experimentation in order to sit at an In-N-Out.

We seem, as a species, to still react to perceived “affronts” from private actors irrationally, but to have no appetite to respond to affronts from the state rationally. Obviously, there are a number of burned-out American police stations and a certain harassed Portland mayor that would disagree with me on that point. Suffice it to say that I have become so jaded on the entire subject encompassed by that phenomenon that I hesitate to credit it as a counter-example.

What is more conspicuous is that only those actions defined as “intolerable” by the mainstream press seem to be interpreted as intolerable, at least to the critical mass that is required for a riot as opposed to a lone gunman looking for secret doors in the pizza shop. Is this a clue for what has “changed” about humanity since 100 years ago? That there is now only one arbiter of consensus, centralized and easily controlled, who dictates what we can and cannot “protest” and, in its biased choreography of our “protests,” actually creates the pressure that leads to political changes (as in, the changes which the arbiter favored anyway).

Maybe. But even the masses of “deplorables” allegedly seeped in algorithm-fed counter-realities (to the media’s counter-reality) for so long they can’t see straight don’t really seem to want to overthrow the government. If these are the “control group,” they seem to show that merely tuning out the MSM isn’t enough to remove the spell of protection that insulates the modern, weakened state from revolt.

So maybe it’s all the seed oils, and the antidepressants in the water. Or the bike helmets, the turn-by-turn guidance, and the addictively escapist fantasies available daily via social media, video games, and CGI fiction. Like in Yukio Mishima’s Japan, some sort of sleeping-spell has come over the entire human race, inflicted by the post-war materialist revolution in the West, which makes actual revolutions seem like some quaint anachronism.

I really don’t know. But perhaps the centralization of our press into the hands of the coastal elites has nothing directly to do with it, and the modern human’s overriding need to be looked after by someone pervades even to the precipice of overthrowing a tyrannical state which doesn’t have enough police to stop anyone from doing so.

Illogical Distopia

Of course, disrupting physical transit in part or much of a city is not nothing. But once again the state knows it need only wait things out, and that seems to be where we are at the moment. Plans are already being prepared and openly broadcast for the reinstitution of the Emergency, almost certainly before the end of the year:

source: whitehouse.gov

source: whitehouse.gov

And why shouldn’t they advertise the plan? They have a constituency to reassure. For those in America and the West at large who did not shrug the Virus off from the start, or at least within the first year, the return of full mitigation is already eagerly awaited. It will never matter how much the next strain is declared mild or treatable by the authorities who should have declared the original strain mild and treatable to begin with; something has metastasized in the psyche of those who spent too long letting the fear soak through their reality.

Although likely skewed, yesterday’s Post-ABC poll reveals the frankly staggering extent to which, almost two years after the first curve charts appeared on social media, Americans are still obsessed with the Virus’s most elusive and resoundingly capricious character, its spread:

source: The Washington Post

Never-mind the emphatic rejection of liberty from the supposed global beacon of the stuff which these results represent; just how can 58% of Americans still imagine it was ever possible to “control spread”?! How can they see a lie revealed as false over and over, and still buy into the lie?

My previous comments on the psychology at work would suggest that what these Americans actually believe, is that the act of believing it is more important to stop the spread is elemental to their avoidance of the Virus’s God-like “anger,” and thus protective absent any real-world effect.⁷

But at times, including now, I feel that rational explanations are inappropriate; the incomprehensibility of those who cannot move on from fear of the Virus must simply be beheld in its raw, organic majesty. How are their brains actually pulling this off?

So we can expect that either two things will happen, when the states of the West attempt to reinstate the Emergency as they have openly signaled intention to do: Either this fervent, resilient belief in the Virus God’s powers to smite those who do not “take it seriously” will finally wane in the intervening months, depriving the state of the rabid support detected in the poll above, or the state will have an incredible reservoir of rabid support behind it.

And if the latter is the case, then no aspect of the state’s response will be too self-contradictory or incoherent to be passed off by the media-expert propaganda factory. Covid vaccine mandates that turn off and on with case counts? Sure; why should the full expectation that the virus is just going to cause the same amount of cases now and come back later anyway prevent forcing everyone to “do their part”?

I promised in the preamble that this essay would not have a point, but in fact, it does. The point is to offer a clear view of the media/state’s tactical position, post-retreat. What rhetorical and political resources have they managed to conserve from the apparent “routing” effected by the Omicron flop, and what have they potentially gained?

In the latter category, I think we can put the poll above. They have demonstrated, at least in those portions of the country which likely drive the “important to control spread” responses (which leaves the problem of how to handle the portions of the country that moved on a year ago), that the likely consolation prize to a defeat of perpetual lockdowns and mandates is nothing other than… on-off lockdowns and mandates. Just 2021 all over again, but with the futility and incoherence normalized and accepted in advance, continuing forever.

And again, that’s what they get if they lose the real prize.

1. See “Omicron Origins.” Learning phylogenetics proves to be the easy part. Visualizing it is nasty work, which is why we let computer codes do it for us, and why Bedford gets millions of dollars thrown at him for nextstrain. I have never been very good at coding, especially if tables are involved. I can’t even finish my list of mutations. I hit a Stress Wall with only five silent mutations left to sort.

2. See https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/cases/yardley-v-minister-for-workplace-relations-and-safety

Further ironies: New Zealand’s bill of rights offers one of the few explicit, unambiguous guarantees of protection against state-coerced medical treatment in the West. It is further incredibly broad in prohibiting the state from suppressing the practice of “minority” religion or languages, with no adjacent clause about reasonable-ness. However, the entirety of the bill of rights itself is modified by exactly such a clause, as well as a clause that laws are not void merely for violating said rights, and so the whole document might as well be used for kindling.

3. Currently, at nextstrain (teal is Delta; given how few cases are represented by any time-points before the last two weeks, it seems weird that Delta would still be represented now that cases are in the 10,000s per day, so maybe this will look totally different in a few more days):

source: nextstrain.org

4. By the logic that insists that all waves of the Virus must be prompted by something other than nature and random human interactions (i.e., must instead have been prompted by Covid-vaccine first-dose uptake in 2021), this one is an open and shut case.

Ah-ha! It must have been the protest!

I am sure the substack statisticians determined to prove the 1st-Dose-Rollout-Wave Theory over and over will be covering this one for months to come, as it’s clearly not like they would only cherry-pick the random patterns that confirm what they want to believe, Heaven forbid.

5. See AP “New Zealand protesters set fires as police break up camp.” (2022, March 2.) npr.org

6. See https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline#EVT_111

7. See “In Orphania.”