yeah.

this is maybe so obvious that i missed it altogether, but, obviously, solidarity cannot be a universal value shared across humanity. how does a slave stand in solidarity with it's master? rather, solidarity requires an external force to act against. so, anybody interpreting solidarity as a universal truth would be kind of missing the plot.

slave owners would stand in solidarity with each other against slave revolts, as bankers would stand in solidarity with each other against regulatory agencies. that's not any less real than working class solidarity, or any other type of it.

so, rather than being some kind of universal truth, individuals need to pick who they are in solidarity with and who they are in solidarity against. so, for example, as an openly transgendered person, i cannot stand in solidarity with religious groups, as they do not acknowledge that i exist - they are my political opponents, and i must stand in opposition to them, not in solidarity with them. to suggest otherwise would be for me to act against my own self-interest.

and, no, solidarity is not the abstention of self-interest, it's the realization that self-interest is best obtained by working together with those that have the same self-interests.

are we all in this together with this disease? no, we're not. this isn't about working together to achieve common goals at all, it's about forcing through laws by gunpoint that only benefit 1% of the population. and, pointing that out is not right-wing, it's left-wing. i am not under any threat from this disease at all, so i am being forced to suffer dramatically from these measures, with absolutely no benefit. none of this is in my self-interest. so, why would i stand in solidarity with something that harms me, and i gain nothing from? you can assign romanticized concepts to such behaviour, but it just strikes me as stupidity. there needs to be reciprocity, or what's the point?

worse, what we've done has been brutally ineffective in protecting the people that require it. this is supposed to be about protecting the elderly, and the fact is that they're still getting killed by this thing at high rates. so, not only is supporting these policies at my expense not in my self-interest, but the fact is that it's not even smart policy - it's not working, and it was predictable that it wouldn't work.

solidarity should be measured by results, not by intentions. supporting very targeted measures to actually protect the weak that would actually work, which is what i argued for, is a stronger level of solidarity with the weak than supporting these ineffective lockdowns that it was obvious from the start would be pointless.

maclean's is the asshole of canadian journalism, and everybody knows that. but, let's not reduce solidarity to stupidity. let's try to be a little more thoughtful than this.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/what-solidarity-during-coronavirus-and-always-it-s-more-we-re-all-together-u-t-expert