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temporary_ wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by kinshavo in Help me, Chomsky invaded my house and now is pointing a Makarov to my forehead, forcing me to post this hot take by kinshavo

What I meant was that even if there is much to debate in relation to the pandemic, and I get your points, but that tweet sounds wrong in so many ways to me I would just ignore it, if he had referred only to China it would have made more sense even if I would still disagree.

West ®

Lazy choice of words on my part.

I disagree with this notion that they managed better the situation bc they "know" hot to handle cases like this.

You are right, I made it too simple there, but I still think they know better than other affluent countries. Prioritizing is key and I believe that realizing that a vaccine isn't a panacea and that pharma companies aren't our saviours means knowing better than countries who seem to do otherwise. And if affluent countries really wanted to solve this crisis through vaccination they could have worked at jabbing as soon as possible all the at-risk share of the global population, instead of first trying to vaccinate the not at-risk share of their peoples and then even putting in motion domestic booster programmes.

Can you explain me the reference to Chomsky? Is he still defending communist regimes? I thought he was more into liberal democracies now and that was the reason for him being despised by anarchists. And do his anarchist critics, for example the users of this site, usually dismiss his whole theory or just a part of it?

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kinshavo OP wrote

I agree the tweet is shallow and wrong as you put. Not a lazy choice of words, West is a fair word, I became used to write ® to emphasize the West in the common accepted metaphor.

It's a theme that draw my attention bc lots of Anarchists went confused after the pandemics regarding the state and other pressing issues. This lack of "theoretical certainty" among the millieu produced a field to entryism and other confusion that put some of them together with alt right and neofash. I don't claim to have all figured out but the people I talk irl or have the same discourse as this leftist tweet or the opposite right wing antivacx

The Chomsky referencia was a cheap provokation, but I am sure he defended the Khmer rouge before

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temporary_ wrote (edited )

I don't claim to have all figured out but the people I talk irl or have the same discourse as this leftist tweet or the opposite right wing antivacx

It's really a sad state of affairs. To me it renforces the conviction that the left and right dichotomy is a spook.

What some governments have done is incredibly alarming, just think about how devastating the introduction of the vax pass must have been to illegal immigrants and the like. Good critiques are starting to come out, Agamben approach is too lazy, problem is that most people are simply ok with these new forms of despotism.

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kinshavo OP wrote

Why do you think Agamben critique is lazy? Well I only read the couple of articles that were published. If you mean that they are somewhat preliminary (not sure about this word here) I would agree, but if we remember during the first year all libertarian (using here libertarian as. Anti auth) voices were silent to a problem that the nature was not social (a pandemic can and has been manipulated socially/politically though).

The degree of alienation and ignorance is inversely proportional to how we are feed fast information, like social media 5g is fast food for the brain. And that quote that says the censorship now is not about hidden content but is burying content in a sea of trash information. This is one of my reasons to think about pedagogy and prefiguration (my own interpretation of it) to respond to it. But then I do not have any illusions of the "inevitability" of a global anarchic utopía for the next 10.000 years, like someone told me once.

most people are simply ok with these new forms of despotism

Probably when one of those billionaire saviors appear with an AI to manage a country efficiently and sell it to Saudi Arabia or other Dictatorship people will claim to have those in social democracies too, I can even picture it.

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temporary_ wrote (edited )

I see Covid-19 as a serious disease that shouldn't be taken lightly, even if right now its effects are being blown out of proportion. Agamben dismissed the gravity of this pandemic from the start, as if this was just a plot to expand the ability of governments to control their citizens. I don't think that's the case, I believe some governments approached this as if it was just another PR nightmare, disregarding our health. Since people at the top are usually control freaks, they often chose to implement draconian measures, being unable of thinking of a different approach, and in many cases they kept these ineffective measures in place because they liked the power that came with it. Assuming that declaring it an epidemic of concern was just a trick to overreach seems wrong to me.

I find his analysis not that interesting, he doesn't seem to have studied carefully the situation, he just applies his usual frameworks to it. He really likes to compare the persecution of the unvaxxed to the persecution of jewish people by the Third Reich, I think that even if the two things have similiraties they are very much different and this difference must be understood. This form of discrimination is based on a choice, the refusal of conforming to the collective adoption of a new technology, not on an innate identity. I'm ok with holocaust survivors making the comparison, I know about a couple of them.

I don't remember his articles in detail, so I'm being pretty basic here.

Does this mean I disagree with all he says? No, I generally agree with part of it, I just think it rests on misguided assumptions.

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