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alt view: For vaccination, without ruling resistance to be "despicable cretinism"

#1
C C Offline
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/covid-is-boring

EXCERPTS (Justin E. H. Smith): I turned to my iPhone, and opened “Alarm”. A pop-up screen informed me that this function is now part of “Health”, and that in order to set the alarm I would first have to set up my “Sleep Goals”. My immediate sleep goal being only to go back to sleep, I was of course enraged...

[...] Another e-mail had been an automated message from the University of Connecticut, identifying me as a “Husky Vendor”, and telling me all sorts of new state regulations that were now to govern the relationship between me, a human person, and them, a corporate one. The message invited me to click a link, to enter into my “Husky Portal” and to make sure all of my contact information was up-to-date.

[...] I hope I don’t need to provide any further argument that this, like being a “Husky Vendor” or like specifying my “Sleep Goals”, is a bunch of bullshit, and the somewhat recalcitrant behavior on my part is not so much a sign of immaturity, as humanity. It is the same humanity that often leaves me, within a few seconds of interacting with a customer-service bot on the telephone ... saying: “F### you. Give me a live customer-service agent.” It’s not that I want to hurt the bot, not exactly, but that I know the bot can’t be hurt [...] It is the same righteous instinct as the one that will soon have at least some brave rebels vandalizing and disabling robot police dogs.

It seems to me moreover that the absurd, dehumanizing, automated management of human subjects has been given its own Great Leap Forward with the rise of the new covid hygiene regime. Those of you who see covid as a culture-war issue will be relieved to find me adding that I am strongly in favor of mandatory vaccination. In fact I think much of the current theater, much of the current profiteering of the sort the private labs in London are now enjoying, and much of the aggressive implementation of new mechanisms of social control and surveillance, are the consequences, intended or unintended, of states being unwilling to infringe on their citizens’ supposed right to remain unvaccinated.

The uncertain vaccination status of any particular person in a public space has enabled governments to treat each of us as if we were, individually, in need of constant monitoring and shakedowns of the sort I endured at the Gare du Nord. It has enabled states to implement an unprecedentedly vicious form of inequality, between the app-savvy and the preterites, between those who know how to flash a QR code like cosmopolitan pros, and those who lag behind, who can never quite get their papers in order (i.e., can never fill out all the fields on the screen correctly).

I am for mandatory vaccination, and I am also continually alarmed by my bien-pensant, progressive, educated friends who seem to have abandoned altogether their appreciation for Michel Foucault over the past two years, and who take resistance to vaccination as nothing more than a marker of trashiness and despicable cretinism. It was not long ago at all that the same people raved about scholarly work such as Nadja Durbach’s excellent 2004 study, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Durbach compellingly portrays Victorian working-class opposition to the state-enforced violation of the skin with disease-laced needles as a form of righteous resistance against the state’s biopolitical overreach — quite apart from any consideration of the epidemiological soundness of vaccination policy.

But this “quite apart” is the sort of critical move we are increasingly discouraged from making in public discourse. And the reason for this, in turn, is that what we call “public discourse” occurs almost entirely on social media, which in the end is really just a public-discourse-themed video game, underlain by algorithms that for their part are essentially of the same sort as those that yield up the steady stream of bullshit incitements to state my “sleep goals”, to update my “Husky Vendor” status, to have a “Day 8 Test” delivered within a kingdom I have long since quit.

Much that is happening in fact seems an evident postscript to certain central theses of Foucault, and if the progressive left relinquishes him to the right, or at least to the “post-left”, they are only depriving themselves of a valuable analytical lens for understanding our contemporary world. Consider the argument of 1975’s Discipline and Punish. In the early modern period, people still enjoyed seeing gruesome spectacles of execution [...] Such spectacles fell out of fashion, and corporal punishment of any sort eventually came to seem unenlightened...

[...] We may in turn be moving now into a new era of even further sublimation of the will-to-punish, which might on the face of it appear to be an era of decarceralization, but which will only have been made possible by the rise and proliferation of digital monitoring technologies. This is further confirmation of Foucault’s enduring relevance. The modern state just keeps finding new ways to look nicer, just keeps rolling out snazzier apps with the help of its corporate partners, but behind this is an ongoing search for more effective, because more subtle, exercise of power.

It seems to me plain, moreover, that it is in the nature of states to exploit crises of this sort in order to impose new regimes of control that subsequently have less and less to do with the initial circumstances that justified them. In this respect, the new covid theater really is much like the airport security theater that emerged after September 11, 2001. It is true that there is terrorism, but whether I remove my shoes or not has little to do with that truth. It is true that there is a pandemic, but my Day 8 test, which I will not take and which will go nowhere, has nothing to do with combating it.

Stopping anywhere short of a mandate, I believe, serves the state’s interest in making the current theater into a perpetual regime, just as it has evidently done with the security theater of the post-9/11 era. This is a regime of social control through tech: we won’t require you to get vaccinated, but we will require you to have an app that monitors everything you do, and that could be adapted in the near future to serve as the basis of a system, explicit or euphemized, of social credit.

And meanwhile so many of my friends and peers, heels dug in so deeply on the side of anti-anti-vaxx signaling, refuse to acknowledge anything worrisome about the new high-tech hygiene regime, about how hard it might be to dismantle it once it has outlived its purpose, about how it might sprout new purposes that are inimical to human thriving... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
(Sep 21, 2021 11:08 PM)C C Wrote: ...and much of the aggressive implementation of new mechanisms of social control and surveillance, are the consequences, intended or unintended, of states being unwilling to infringe on their citizens’ supposed right to remain unvaccinated.

That's like saying "we have to avoid infringing on rights by infringing on rights." It's the sentiment of impotent people already whipped by government control.

Again, if the vaccines are so effective, why are any of the vaccinated afraid of the unvaccinated? That only makes sense if you have no faith in the vaccine, contrary to any of your claims to the contrary.
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