temporary_

temporary_ wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by veuzi in Celebrate good times by Ant

Thank you. I know a couple of people who are into this school of buddhism. I assumed it had a longer history, but from what I'm reading it's a rather recent movement, even if based on the beliefs of an ancient priest, so now I'm not sure if there is a clear distinction between the institution (SGI) and the school of thought known simply as SG.

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temporary_ wrote (edited )

Makes me think about what happened In Taiwan in the spring of 2020: masks at the time were rationed and one day in a certain district there were only pink masks, so a young boy called the relevant institution and complained that he feared getting bullied. The next day all the medical officers participating in the daily press conference wore pink masks, and it became a new popular trend.

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temporary_ wrote

That sounds like a cool book, never heard about it before. But what did you expect from an hollywood movie? The whole industry is based on creating new unsustainable realities, as if our world wasn't already polluting enough.

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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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temporary_ wrote (edited )

As a young teenager when those platforms come out, I didn't have a lot of experience on the internet back in the days, my parents were not tech savvy

I reckon I come off very unsympathetic sometimes. Maybe we should be more indulgent toward teens falling prey to these attention traps. But I strongly suggest you to stop using ig or fb ASAP, in case you didn't already. You can do it. :)

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temporary_ wrote

Reply to comment by Fool in I Can't. by TheNerdyAnarchist

I think you shouldn't trick yourself into believing you can play such a role without getting corrupted by the structural pressure inherent to the system you'll become a part of. If you want to provide support to inmates you should simply do social work, although in some countries it has become nearly impossibile since the start of the pandemic and the restriction that came with it.

In any case, the cops patroling the streets are way worse than prison guards, I doubt anyone who tells you otherwise has ever studied prisons on a serious level or has spent a substial amount of time inside one. In countrie like mine, where the prison system is higly dysfunctional, guards have a very high suicide rate, nothing comparable to the one for the inmates, but way higher than the one for normal cops. Prisons are meant to hide the realities of our society from the minds of the common folk and the guards are part of the small group of people who can't ignore those realities, the results of this forced promiscuity in some cases are complex and ambiguous. Cops on the street just ruin your life and forget about the day after.

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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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temporary_ wrote (edited )

I feel terrible when I read about people young enough to have been born into this shitty smartphone culture. Must be a nightmare and I can't imagine finding the required willpower. Nonetheless I'm suspicious of the people like the author of this piece, it's not a bad article but minimizing individual responsibility seems like a justification to keep indulging in his beloved social media. If you were already a teen the time when smartphones and the Facebook generation of social media were introduced, you could have easily avoided getting into it. Seem to me like this kind of articles, a genre in itself, never seem to address individual responsibility, what does raddle think? A network effect in reverse seems like the best solution to me.

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temporary_ wrote (edited )

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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temporary_ wrote

Don't know what there is to debate here, it's just a wumao talking about three random countries ignoring the fact they used different approaches and had different results, but yeah I guess Vietnam and Cuba did good, the last one being famous for its superior health sector. China did a terrible job managing the pandemic, but since it has a lot of clout within the international community western countries fell for its propaganda and looked at it as a positive model, the disastrous results of this can still be seen.

Meanwhile, many countries saw good results with their strategies, including the liberal democracy of Taiwan that was one of the most exposed nation considering the constant human flow between the island and the chinese mainland, which increases around new year. Ironically, Taiwan could be seen as having benefitted from its exclusion from the WHO. Most of the countries in Asia and Africa seems to have done a good job, but the West can't accept this so it pushes the idea that the entire world was completely fucked over by this virus and that China is the exception. Wrong, especially because China's handling of the pandemic has been criminal and I'm sure many of its citizens lost trust in the government, but at the start of 2020 many of them were silenced and after that most foreign journalists with any integrity have been kicked out of the country, today it's very difficult to know what's going on there thus it's very easy to post baseless claims on twitter.

It's like when media and intellectuals from the West say that chinese citizens don't care about privacy, meanwhile when it comes to facial recognition a domestic poll showed around 80% of them is worried about data leakage. Also, China is pretty fucking good at ammassing biopower.

And only corporate drones use terms such as "anti-vax". A huge share of the population in South Africa doesn't want to get jabbed, more than in most western countries, to the point that the government kindly asked big pharma to stop sending doses, instead of coercing their population into giving away their rights on their bodies. South Africa is also one of the countries who had the most issues with the absurd demands advanced by the pharma companies providing the vaccine, the indemnity clause was seen a requeste to surrender their national sovereignity. I guess they have enough respects for their citizens to avoid belittling them only to please greedy corporations, at least in this case I mean. Meanwhile, South Africa just abolished the need to quarantine for asymptomatic patients, because they know how to manage this kind of crisis, unlike the hysteric West that can only think in terms of jabs and restriction of individual freedom, both things more effective at enriching who is already rich than improving public health.

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