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kin 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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