Poll: Freedom Convoy and Related Protests

[temporal1]

I think it's also important to point out that 90% of truckers in Canada are vaccinated. So it's a small amount of truckers that are impacted by this -- however, as frequently happens, this protest is also being used as an opportunity to further other agendas and other groups on the right.

You seem to be assuming that all vaccinated truckers are not opposed to vaccine mandates, which isn't the case. There are many people, like myself, who are fine with vaccinations but are opposed to broad vaccine mandates.

Sure. I'll buy that...but those truckers who are vaccinated are not at risk of losing their livelihood as Robert said.

The objection is: they complied to remain employed BY FORCE OF THE SWORD.

crazy how this is repeated+repeated .. Robert, appleman, Josh, etc., the actual convoy leaders in Canada.
response: “i can’t hear you!” (“don’t repeat.) i’m jumping to conclusions about all of this and have no interest in considering other views.” “the convoy leaders are lying when they claim they do not want this to be partisan or violent.” case closed.

the convoy leaders have described in brief, plain language, how restrictions/mandates in Canada far surpass “the most serious” in the U.S. - specifically citing New York.

truckers drive places. they see things. they are heavily regulated.
trucks are expensive. truckers contribute to society. they are invested.

listen to him. he’s not an idiot. BEN DICHTER / B.J. DICHTER

i’m enjoying seeing more general news out of Canada in these couple of weeks, than i’ve seen in my lifetime.
the public is deliberately kept uninformed. no accident.

[Robert]

Sure. I'll buy that...but those truckers who are vaccinated are not at risk of losing their livelihood as Robert said.

Until the next set of mandates or overreach happens.

[Josh]

I think it's also important to point out that 90% of truckers in Canada are vaccinated. So it's a small amount of truckers that are impacted by this -- however, as frequently happens, this protest is also being used as an opportunity to further other agendas and other groups on the right.

You seem to be assuming that all vaccinated truckers are not opposed to vaccine mandates, which isn't the case. There are many people, like myself, who are fine with vaccinations but are opposed to broad vaccine mandates.

Sure. I'll buy that...but those truckers who are vaccinated are not at risk of losing their livelihood as Robert said.

They are if they don’t want to get repeatedly boosted.

[Signtist]

Sure. I'll buy that...but those truckers who are vaccinated are not at risk of losing their livelihood as Robert said.

Right now you wouldn't have far to go to convince me that we are all in danger of losing our livelihoods. "Essential" or "non-essential". Give me a break. I don't like those titles. I thought every human was essential.

[Szdfan]

You seem to be assuming that all vaccinated truckers are not opposed to vaccine mandates, which isn't the case. There are many people, like myself, who are fine with vaccinations but are opposed to broad vaccine mandates.

Sure. I'll buy that...but those truckers who are vaccinated are not at risk of losing their livelihood as Robert said.

The objection is: they complied to remain employed BY FORCE OF THE SWORD.

crazy how this is repeated+repeated .. Robert, appleman, Josh, etc., the actual convoy leaders in Canada.
response: “i can’t hear you!” (“don’t repeat.) i’m jumping to conclusions about all of this and have no interest in considering other views.” “the convoy leaders are lying when they claim they do not want this to be partisan or violent.” case closed.

the convoy leaders have described in brief, plain language, how restrictions/mandates in Canada far surpass “the most serious” in the U.S. - specifically citing New York.

truckers drive places. they see things. they are heavily regulated.
trucks are expensive. truckers contribute to society. they are invested.

listen to him. he’s not an idiot. BEN DICHTER / B.J. DICHTER

i’m enjoying seeing more general news out of Canada in these couple of weeks, than i’ve seen in my lifetime.
the public is deliberately kept uninformed. no accident.

You’re confusing disagreement with “not listening.” I understand the arguments and reasoning, I just don’t agree with it.

[Josh]

You’re confusing disagreement with “not listening.” I understand the arguments and reasoning, I just don’t agree with it.

So you're saying you think people who aren't vaccinated should lose their jobs?

[Jazman]

I like some of the less black or white thoughts found at The Dispatch. Here's one regarding the Freedom Convoy.

[barnhart]

I like some of the less black or white thoughts found at The Dispatch. Here's one regarding the Freedom Convoy.

I have come to appreciate The Dispatch in the last year. Goldberg makes some interesting points, among them, significant advance of Marxist ideology (positioning social groups against one another) is now coming from the group who calls themselves "the right." It will be interesting to see how much the real Marxists recognize this and play to it.

[temporal1]

So you're saying you think people who aren't vaccinated should lose their jobs?

i’m not sure why this isn’t mentioned, but, truckers typically drive ALONE, or with one other, often a wife or family.
Physical distance is pretty much a non-issue.

In the decades of my life, i don’t believe i’ve been within 6’ of any commercial truck driver ..

They stop for fuel and food, etc.
They stop to load+unload. i’m not aware of hugging/snuggling in these processes.

No interaction to begin to compare with any typical cashier.

In B.J. DICHTER’s interview, he described how he was so thoroughly digitally tracked by government at a Canada-U.S. border,
through his vaccine records, he did not have to get out of his truck or speak to anyone, other than on his phone.

In the decades of my life, this convoy represents truckers being more physically close to others than i’ve ever witnessed.
Evenso, i see nothing to compare with any typical stadium filled with sports fans.

i can see where they’ve had it.

Please enlighten me if in error.

[HondurasKeiser]

I like some of the less black or white thoughts found at The Dispatch. Here's one regarding the Freedom Convoy.

I have come to appreciate The Dispatch in the last year. Goldberg makes some interesting points, among them, significant advance of Marxist ideology (positioning social groups against one another) is now coming from the group who calls themselves "the right." It will be interesting to see how much the real Marxists recognize this and play to it.

N.S. Lyons has a kind of Marxian analysis of the truckers vs. Trudeau (though I doubt he'd like the idea that his is a Marxian one) over at his substack. I found it quite interesting. He quotes my favorite social-critic/crank, the late Christopher Lasch; so I guess he had me at "elites".

In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”

In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”

I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:

"The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself."...

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today...

The great Honkening of 2022 has already been revelatory to people around the world. It is the climax of a process in which all the divides in society, including between the “Physicals” and “Virtuals” I’ve described here, have been revealed by the pandemic and governments’ responses. At the same time, the pandemic served to clarify the continued reliance of the Virtual class on “essential workers.” The revelation of the exceptional vulnerability of modern supply chains has demonstrated very clearly to everyone paying attention that the Physicals still possess tremendous power of their own as long as they are able to act in unity and solidarity – or as many signs at the protests have pointed out to the Virtuals: “no truckers, no food.”

In this sense the Freedom Convoy has already become the most successful labor movement in decades, awakening a genuine new “class consciousness” (as a Marxist would put it) in the minds of the reality-based “working class.” And it is notable that this has already become a transnational phenomenon, with the convoy protests spreading like wildfire around the globe precisely because the exact same divide now exists in so many developed countries, where the Virtual ruling class has everywhere overreached with similarly hubris.