So there's a pandemic


⇠ back | date: 2020-04-02 | tags: culture, politics | duration: 01:40 minutes

(Note: this article was written as is, but never published. I decided to retro-actively publish it because I felt it was important to have it in my log of articles, but I also don't think I can really add much more to this now since the political climate has shifted quite hard.)

I've been meaning to publish this article a lot sooner, but here we are. The last month has been kinda bonkers. Reading this in the future might feel either funny or wistful. Reading this in the now must feel redundant.

Anyway, I've been working on a few things, and also have been thinking about a few blog posts that I've wanted to write. (One has already gone up, so once again I'm a literary genius with getting my ordering right). I'll try to write a bit more, and care less about each article being as polished as previously. I feel like I've said this before, so I'll try not to become too spammy. There's still Twitter…

In this pandemic I've seen a lot of rhetoric mirror the security discourse post 9/11. Additional restrictions on public life are being advocated for, because they will save lives. Checkpoints, new rules and regulations, everybody has an opinion on how things should be running and very frequently run to the state to enforce anything "health officials" say might work.

Ultimately this virus is the perfect threat: you can't see it, you don't even know if you have it, you can endanger people by moving around freely. And there will never again be a time when "but what about a virus" won't bu used to justify restrictions on the lives of people.

And please don't interpret me saying these things as there being some conspiracy to enact authoritariasism, as much as that sounds like a novel you'd read, that's not how the world works. This isn't plotting, it's simple fascist opportunism.