It’s an odd thing, freedom. Tied in to democracy, speech, liberty.

We’re living in times where our liberty is increasingly limited by covid measures, and we have odd sections of people that will take exceptions to various bits of it.

I’ll join them in one bit: Derbyshire police “reviewed” (cancelled) fixed penalties issued to two women committing the obvious transgression of going for a walk, while of course, last year the PM’s special advisor got totally let off for driving hundreds of miles while symptomatic. I’m generally on the side of the cops, but it seems hard to support this: it doesn’t seem unreasonable to drive 5 miles to meet up with a friend, maintaining distancing while doing so.

Meanwhile, in the face of popular opinion and governmental diversion tactics, compliance with lockdown rules is actually quite good. Could it perhaps be the rules that aren’t good enough?

Alongside this, we have covid deniers, and anti-maskers, and the anti-lockdown people: all generally on a personal liberty platform, their ideas range from global conspiracies down to not wanting to wear a mask, because it impinges on their freedom as individuals.

Now here’s the thing: civil liberties are important. In theory, we live in a democracy and have certain rights as citizens. We need to defend the liberties we have by fighting against unreasonable limits on our freedom and ensuring that law enforcement is exactly that: enforcement of law, not police extending their authority beyond that.

But… as this image indicates, it’s all well and good being free to do as you wish, so long as that doesn’t present an unacceptable risk to others.

We regulate some of the excesses of capitalism to prevent corporations taking the piss with things: unrestrained, profit-driven businesses are not good for society, just ask anyone near that nice Union Carbide plant in India, or people near Rio Tinto’s abandoned mining in Papua New Guinea.

We regulate individual behaviour too: it is a legal requirement to insure your car on a public road, despite what a Freeman on the Land fucknugget thinks.

The lockdown sceptics kind of have a point: This is Lockdown 3, the previous 2 didn’t work, clearly, so another is just damaging the economy and screwing up our lives for no good reason, surely?

I think not. Our government executed previous lockdowns in a half-hearted, unplanned, very British way: with unclear, bumbling instructions, too late, too light. Then they sent all the kids back to school and university, encouraged people to mix in public for a subsidised meal, and routinely disregarded the rules themselves; all the time while allowing anyone in to the country un-monitored: for a country so keen on excluding anyone a bit foreign, it seems odd we couldn’t control our borders during a pandemic.

Now we all pay the price, while in NZ, admittedly with a lower population density, but also an island, they’re covid-free.

Moving on to the anti-maskers: we have a genuine problem here in that some people are medically exempt, and that they shouldn’t have to disclose medical conditions to all and sundry to justify that- discrimination law means that they don’t have to. Of course, this handily plays into the hands of the selfish bastards who only choose not to wear one, who can buy an exemption lanyard from Amazon and continue potentially spreading to the rest of us with their free will: the supermarket chains are now saying that they will refuse entry without masks anyway, which to me sounds like a good idea: I know several people who are technically medically exempt, but who wear a mask, because, well, they’re not selfish: You might question a mask’s effectiveness, you might feel like it’s a dreadful impngement on your rights (for some fucking reason), it might steam up your glasses (or, if you have very light ones like I do, threaten to fling them off), but really, it’s just a minor inconvenience that might save a life.

There’s the thing with freedom: freedom to do as you wish shouldn’t be the freedom to limit someone else’s rights, within what society as a whole has taken as acceptable limits. Our freedom to drive internal-combustion vehicles (within a framework of regulations), for example, does limit other people’s health and welfare, but slowly, regulation is controlling that. Birmingham is due to introduce a clean air zone to address this in one way. It is, of course being derided in many and various ways, from it being a tax on the poorer driver, to being economic disaster, but it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

One already addressed was smoking: some people like to smoke, some hate smoking, others don’t. The 2007 ban on smoking in pubs is widely held to have killed the pub trade, before covid did it better, but again I’m not convinced: I go to pubs more now there’s no smoke, as do some friends. Smokers bemoan being unable to smoke; I used to bemoan my eyes stinging and clothes stinking- another time when one person’s freedom impacts upon others- though I do think a better solution than the ban may have been possible, allowing everyone to co-exist.

Free speech is another angle: I’m free here, to post, pretty much, anything I like, within reason. If I post anything defamatory or classified as hate speech, I leave myself open to legal action, but generally, I can post my opinions. If you disagree, you can post a comment, because I leave comments open most of the time, and you don’t need to be a registered user. I could, of course, delete or edit your comment: my house, my rules, (and my responsibility) but then, there’s nothing to stop you setting up a site and plastering the web with your shite too, which brings us on to Parler.

Parler, the so called free-speech social network. When people discovered they couldn’t incite hate and racism on Twitter, this is where they went. Until the storming of the Capitol in the US, when, surprisingly, the thugs that wanted democracy, but only their form of democracy, where Trump won, were found organising terrorism via it, and Google, Apple, and then AWS pulled the plug. A lesson there for you: you may have the right of free speech, but you don’t have the right to host it on someone else’s platform, you are not beyond law, and you don’t have the right to not be challenged.

As an interesting indicator of the level of people using Parler, since the app was pulled from the app stores, they’ve been accidentally downloading sex-chat app Parlour instead.

The concept of Libertarianism gone too far (and blaming the results on immigrants) has been parodied by The Simpsons, and in a case of life imitating art, the town of Granton, New Hampshire, found out the result the hard way. These bunch are generally extreme small-state, free market, low taxation types, and their experiment in Grafton culminated in an undersized police force that couldn’t run their one patrol car, and an invasion by bears, because the town’s public services ceased to function. This is generally the point at which people tend to get upset, having forgotten that if you want total freedom and minimal taxation, then you also gain a heap of responsibility for stuff that the state would otherwise do, rather like in Britain where people willingly use the NHS but the notion of paying for it sticks a bit.

The simple fact is that most of us are to one degree or another selfish, and therein lies the problem: we want freedom to act as we like, and fail to see that in doing so, we prevent others acting as they would like to. This is why we can’t have nice things, and this is also why (along with dazzling governmental incompetence and a lack of support for workers) is why we’re in a 3rd national lockdown.