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I have the uncanny and disturbing feeling that all of this has been entertainment: that we exist now for the purpose of being entertained — that the pandemic is just the highest rated panic on the Internet.
A frightening possibility: that a map of our brain would reveal a map of the Internet — that the two have become one.
In the 19th century, politics was powered by debate; in the 20th, advertising; in the 21st, meme-ing.
We are actively weakening the immune systems of the very young, who are forced to live in sterilized environments. In exchange for ‘controlling’ the pandemic in the present, we fragilize the future. Immune-system blindness.
A necessary distinction: between institutional and non-institutional elitism, which are always conflated.
Lockdowns are revenge-porn enacted by the expert class who can’t get over the events of 2016.
Too much energy goes into preserving meaningless ties, unnatural addictions. Too much of the human spirit is wasted on anxious gossip about the present moment.
Biden is the candidate because he is the most compromised candidate: his candidacy is in debt with so many interest groups, so many donors, and perhaps more, that he was structurally inevitable. #NeverTrump ideology, not incidentally, made the class interests of the Democratic elite possible: #NeverTrump literally means voting for anyone else.
The behavior of most governments during the pandemic can best be described as an auto-immune attack: an attack, provoked by an intruder, by the system against itself.
