I’ve tended to think of myself as a fundamentally optimistic person. This has been tested a lot over the last 18 months but I still don’t think I’m someone prone to seeing catastrophe around every corner. I’m nonetheless extremely worried about what this winter will bring in the UK and I’ve felt increasingly isolated in this feeling.
I thought this observation from Dylan Riley in the recent New Left Review was crucial for understanding the class politics of the pandemic. Particularly with regards to what I’ve come to think of as the lumpen-libertarian uprising which is unfolding as a reaction against elites, globalism and lockdown in a way which gets past the constraints which have held back the far-right.
Following my post a couple of months ago about objections to the anti-lockdown case, I thought I would share/save this formulation of the case against lockdown from epidemiologist John Ioannidis published in May last year as part of a superb exchange in the Boston Review.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last few days, as a result of recognising the sense in which the anti-lockdown case is sometimes dismissed as a matter of liberal common sense without a real engagement with the arguments. This is an initial attempt to seriously engage with […]
As often happens when I read older texts by Peter Sloterdijk, I’m struck by a sense of their enduring relevance compared to other thinkers who write in his register. In this extract from his Infinite Mobilisation (1997) he writes about the significance of those experiences when infrastructure struggles and we grind […]
I thought this advice from loc 814-829 of Pandemic! was helpful as well as charmingly earnest. It verbalises my own instinct about how to respond to this, at least after a week of drunken despair after I grasped that ‘normal life’ as I knew it simply wasn’t going to return. […]
There’s a familiar dystopian character to the (middle-class) experience of lockdown, conveyed by Slavoj Zizek on loc 384-396 of his Pandemic: Many dystopias already imagine a similar future: we stay at home, work on our computers, communicate through videoconferences, exercise on a machine in the corner of our home office, […]
