Member-only story
- Human beings are capable of building and planning within certain parameters. We’re good at isolated feats of engineering. We can build things in laboratories and workshops. In certain ways, the human capacity to create tools borders on the miraculous. What we can’t do very well is predict or control complex systems, like biological systems or social systems (and this is probably a good thing). Our Covid response, however, the kinds of responses employed by the governments of almost all wealthy nations, falsely infer that our capacity to build fabulously complex tools translates into an ability to manage fabulously complex, hierarchal interactions between viruses and societies and everything in-between. Essentially, the infamous experts have imagined the world as a laboratory — a closed, predictable environment — when, in fact, it is the world: a holistic chaos far, far beyond our reckoning.
- Common sense decays into taboo; common sense has a half-life.
- The ‘news’ disables thinking — displaces it.
- Does American culture seem to make people worse or better than they could be?
- Predictability is not stability or safety; only dead things are predictable.
- There is nothing more repulsive than financially-secure lockdown leftists, firing off their righteous missives about social justice to further enhance their own social status from the security of their well-appointed homes or condos in gentrified coastal neighborhoods.
- We have put entire civilizations on a ventilator.
- Our era is the after-image of real life.
- Lockdowners are modern Xerxes, whipping the sea which refused to obey them.
- Democrats have become the conservative party: a coalition of institutional insiders.
