Hello from Paris!
Where everything is great all the time.
One piece of good news, anyway, is that a couple weeks ago when Covid rates started shooting up again, the French government finally decided to turn the screws on people to get their jabs.
On July 12, President Macron announced that it was gonna be mandatory for health care workers to be vaccinated (duh!). Even more importantly, most activities involving close contact with other humans were gonna require a vaccination cert or a negative test. Also news, endlessly repeated tests would no longer be free if you were unvaccinated and didn’t have a doctor’s prescription. In short, if you want to sit indoors at a restaurant or go see a concert unvaccinated, much less climb on a plane, be prepared to shell out 54 extra euros for the test —every single time!
Before the night was over, a gazillion people had gone online to make vaccination appointments, and since then we’ve gone from the overall vaccination rate of 39% that I was whinging so much about to a completely marinated 50.5%. Which is nothing short of miraculous.
Of course we’ve also had large demos calling Macron a fascist, because nothing says dictator like forcing people not to kill their neighbors.
As a result of this change in policy, which officially became law today after days of shouty parliamentary debates, a lot of people will still be alive this time next year that would have died without a vaccine. The number of infections is nearly doubling every week. Because this Delta shit is hella contagious. Even vaccinated people that before wouldn’t have gotten infected at all, or been asymptomatic, are getting mildly or terribly sick. I feel dizzy just thinking that there’s probably worse stuff coming down the pike.
So coercing people into getting vaccinated doesn’t bother me at all, even though I’m usually pretty Libertarian. I grew up seeing flags and stickers with a coiled rattlesnake and the Don’t Tread on Me motto dating from the U.S. war of independence.
I can’t tell you how much I regret that it’s now associated with the extreme right, and white supremacists because those stickers probably saved my life. I was trained to be a doormat. And to submit, submit, submit. To men, to marriage, to the nearest authority figure. At least there was one message, in one place, telling me it was okay to resist.
I’m not the only one with fond memories of it. According to Wikipedia, “Following the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, posters containing a rainbow Gadsden flag inscribed with "#ShootBack" were placed around West Hollywood, upsetting members of the community and city government who opposed its violent message.”
My eventual point, though, is that part of the Libertarian tradition is the incredibly basic, and widely-accepted idea that my rights end where someone else’s begin. It’s why good fences make good neighbors. You can get shit-faced drunk, but not climb behind the wheel of a car. You have every right to be a Covid petri dish, but then your neighbors who have their own rights to be uninfected, are entitled to isolate you and your other germy pals.
To me, that’s the purpose of the law in general—to balance rights. It’s why there’s a fucking scale in our personifications of blind-folded Justice. You have rights, but I do, too. Neither of us more than the other.
It should make things easy. If you’re faced with a puzzle, for instance, asking what to do when Persons R harm persons E. And Persons E harm persons Z. The answer is a no-brainer. You protect everybody. You protect E from R, and Z from E.
It’s fascinating to me how often most people would agree with this in principle, but then once you take the blindfold off, Justice finds exceptions. Puts her thumb on the scale. Makes allowances. Pinochet was evil for killing and jailing opponents, but not Castro. George W. Bush was a monster for his post-9/11 policies curbing domestic liberties, but Obama got a pass when he kept them. Trans women deserve protection from predatory males in prison. But females don’t deserve protection from that subset of predatory trans women, so said the British courts after a former female prisoner filed suit after reportedly being sexually assaulted by a trans woman who was already in jail for a serious sexual assault on a child.
The claimant, FDJ, said she was "disappointed" with the judgement.
"By bringing this challenge, I did not seek to prevent trans women in prison from living in dignity, or to exclude all trans women from women's prisons. However, I feel that trans women who have a history of violence and sexual offending against women should not be in a situation where they can put our safety at risk.”
So far, the LGBTQ+ community has decided to paper over the problem, and silence people like FDJ and her supporters by saying they’re transphobes and bigots and TERFs. Some are probably doing it because they’re afraid of a backlash against all trans women. Some of them because they just hate women. But by ignoring the problem, they are forcing people like FDJ to shout even louder to get justice. Making a backlash against all trans people nearly inevitable. (ie. Prepare to get bit in the ass.)
Things That Sparked Joy This Week
I heard high heels out my fifth floor window. That’s right. My fifth floor window. It only took me ten minutes to realize it was this pigeon’s talons clacking against the metal scaffolding that was just recently installed.
This video of insanely cute baby goats on FB.
Then there’s tap dancers on a glorious NYC roof. A version of “T’ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” from Bullets Over Broadway in memory of the late Nick Cordero.
Be warned, if you’re a former substitute super for a NYC building you might find yourself triggered like me, and obsessively wondering if the roof was built for that kind of traffic, did anybody bother to ask, and were they gonna fall through in the middle of the dance…?
Welp, that’s it for this week.
Ungruntledly yours,