This week the options to write about came down to two: either a review of Bio-Dome, our latest entry in the ongoing Pauly Shore movie season I'm watching with my girlfriend, or a dissection of Boris Johnson's comment that the UK is suffering more of a Covid-19 resurgence than Italy or Germany because British people love freedom more.
At 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, Bio-Dome is possibly the worst-reviewed movie I've ever seen, but it's still better than Mission Impossible 2. It also features a young Kylie Minogue, post-Neighbours but pre-music career, and I'm presuming her casting there led to a wholesale firing of her representation team, so it's an intriguing artifact from that point of view too. But I don't know if there's much more of a blog post to it, so on, with a heavy heart, to BoJo's comments.
I'm always aware of this fact when I'm watching, say, John Oliver, but taking on these sorts of statements is always a fool's errand. Doubly so for me, since at least John Oliver is on TV, whereas I'm just some jerk with a blog that few people read (Hi sweetie! Hi Dan!).
But the whole "freedom" thing is an interesting topic, since I don't think Anglo-Saxon people ever really think about the implications of it - though it's relevant in the context of Brexit, since Brexit is just a project where fat white people bellow "freedom" at each other without considering that not all freedom is created equal.
Or to be really cynical, we can take the talking point that conservatives in this country usually say about minorities (they only talk about their rights and not their responsibilities), and turn it back on them.
The main thing is that the Brits have done a terrible job of masking up, and they're now heading for a second lockdown, or rather a bunch of individual lockdowns, because they can't really do a national one again. The implications are that university lecturers, like my sister, are being forced to teach in person, with no real guidance as to how to do so safely (fuck you, London School of Economics).
So Boris claims that Brits are bad at surviving Covid, and at wearing masks, because they love freedom more than (benighted) countries like Germany and Italy, which had fascism during the War of course. It's a cynical comment, because of course he doesn't actually believe it himself, he just knows that it plays well in rags like the Daily Mail.
Of course, the Mail and other right-wing people seem to forget that society is a series of trade-offs that limit the freedom of individuals and groups, by design. In a society of perfect freedom, for example the Purge movies, you can go around killing and stealing and doing whatever you want, as long as you can hold onto what you have. Societies are an attempt to maximize the level of freedom for everyone by limiting the killing and stealing, but strangely even libertarians aren't complaining about the infringement of their right to murder people in the street (yet).
It follows, therefore, that other curbs on freedom have benefits for society more widely. We don't, or shouldn't, have the freedom to pollute, slander people or misrepresent ourselves to employers or others with whom we enter in contracts. Some of us still do, of course. We also don't have perfect freedom of speech, in which certain utterances are deemed not protected by free speech laws in various countries. The US remains more permissive than others, but even here, the celebrated "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" is expressly forbidden in the opinions of several Supreme Court cases on the limits of speech.
Masks are another curb on personal freedom that's beneficial to the society at large. I have the freedom to walk around outside without a mask, but I don't have the freedom to enter a shop without it (at least here in California). People agreeing with Johnson's verbal excrescences would argue that their own freedom is more important than that of some shop assistant or burger-slinger, such people being poor and/or immigrants, but a sane society judges that the freedom of the majority of people is more important than the temporary inconvenience of one person who claims they can't breathe in a mask made of <checks notes> old t-shirts.
Put another way, if you don't respect anybody but yourself, you have a lot of freedom. You can lie, cheat, steal and generally be Donald Trump or Boris Johnson as much as you want. But if you respect people, you willingly give up some freedoms - the freedom to cough on lower-paid people of color, for instance, or the freedom to help the shop assistant infect their elderly relatives with a disease that feasts on co-morbidities.
On the other hand, if you have respect for people, they'll have respect for you, and for your rights. So we come together as a society and willingly curtail our own rights, so that we can all get on with whatever we're doing that doesn't hurt others. So maybe it's not that Germans or Italians love freedom less than Brits - it might just be that we love our neighbors more.
Those who don't like that, are welcome to follow the lead of Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome and lock themselves in a hermetically sealed biosphere for a given period of time. We'll be interested to see how you get on infecting each other.
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