Several online situations today where I think I’m going insane so I might as well document them.
I listened to the last episode of Bungacast with the authors of the new book “The Covid Consensus”.
https://twitter.com/BungaCast/status/1625430144897671168
Both the book and the episode are highly questionable. There is little more there than pandering to the COVID sceptic horseshoe left 1 by fishing in the murky pond of anti-authoritarianism, pseudo-science and neoreaction.
Now I wouldn’t think it weird that COVID nutters would write a book. What is odd is that Bungacast would give that much prominence to something which is obviously dumb. Not sure if it’s a cynical play on the alternative/controversial left or whether the podcasters truly believe this way of looking at the world has any merit. In any case, for me this is Schluß with this particular pod.
A while back I had listened to an episode of Politics Theory Other which has long been a favorite podcast of mine where Richard Seymour utterly demolishes that very same book. PTO is actually serious, actually left, actually critical and very much recommended.
That episode is well worth a (re)listen and I’m now a fan of Richard Seymour who comes in like a sledgehammer.
https://twitter.com/MattNoahSmith/status/1625900511223484416
If I lift this one level, the so called “Lockdown” is being used as a scapegoat for anything and everything that people don’t like. Here in Europe the lockdowns felt very long but were brief in retrospect. The longest probably being the 3 month school/daycare closure at the start of the pandemic during which we also suffered immensely. Real hard lockdowns happened in a country like China. Claiming that the relatively mild restrictions that we had for a couple of months (and then twice more) created irreparable damage in the general population is very fucking rich.
They may be right about Lockdown in one way that the concept of it has become big enough and detached from reality enough to house whatever theories or madness anybody wants to house in it. As such, lockdown was a huge psychohistoric event.
Those on the far left who would be far right if only the wind would blow from a different direction that day. ↩︎
