William Essex
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Is Covid-19 "meant", and if so, what does it mean?

24/4/2020

 
No, I don’t think Covid-19 is “meant”. I do think it fits, though.

Follow the logic of Covid-19, and you end up with a smaller, younger, fitter population of mostly women.

The virus threatens everybody, but it seems to have a preference for older, overweight men with “pre-existing health conditions”.  There’s also, apparently, an ethnic component, but I’ll leave that out as it may be socio-economic and is almost certainly more complex than it seems.

I can’t forget a conversation I had before all this started (see also A virus too ordinary, 2nd April 2020) in which we agreed that all the problems of the world – from global warming down to finding a parking space – would be solved if the global population was cut by half.

No, we weren’t being serious, and yes, we were referencing a recent Avengers movie.

But I was also droning on about the collective unconscious, Gaia, blah blah, and wondering whether we’re better at imagining problems (insert your favourite scene from Contagion here) than consciously addressing them (and a clip from the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference here) – and also wondering whether all that imagining is actually the thought process before the collective unconscious … does something.

I don’t want to say “finds a solution”, but just as a precaution, I’d like to apologise if we’re all living in a Matrix-style simulation and I’ve dreamed up Covid-19 as a plot twist. My bad, but don’t you agree we needed something to confound the mulish certainties on both sides of Brexit?

Like I say, Covid-19 fits.

The virus does its thing, as above, and our response has been to turn off everything we do to harm the planet. Imagine – collectively, if you will – that this is a chance to re-run the history of the second half of the twentieth century, but without the toxic fluorocarbons, CFCs, the pesticides, all the science-improves-on-nature, and with videoconferencing and 3D printing.

I won’t mention Artificial Intelligence (which manifests as Artificial Stupidity, surely?) because nobody’s imagined a happy ending for that either.

I wonder sometimes whether that sense of “meant” represents an awareness of ourselves that goes beyond our day-to-day notion that we’re individuals with some measure of control over our surroundings – but that thought passes out of my mind quickly. I’m not Neo.

Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me.

If there’s a new normal coming, and it’s anything like the new normal described above, I think maybe I should put some laundry on. And find somebody to give me a haircut.

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Sorry, but I'm still mesperised by the lack of traffic. So many dead batteries.

After the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the rest of the Iron Curtain, the files of the Stasi were opened.

They revealed that many East Germans had been acting as informers for the state intelligence service. There was outrage. Many East Germans had some explaining to do.

I remember being vaguely outraged myself. I remember asking myself: would I have been an informer? Or some kind of heroic resistance person, holding out against the pressure through the hopeless years, then vindicated at last when the regime collapsed in 1990.

You can probably guess my answer.

But there’s an affecting clip of Christabel Bielenberg, an English woman married to a German, who spent World War II in Germany, talking through her own mea culpa. She was asked for help by a fugitive Jewish family … and thought of her own family’s safety … and said … no.

Watch the clip. In that situation, I don’t know what I would have done. [The World At War, episode 16; Bielenberg was an active member of the German resistance and, I would say, heroic most of the time. Just that one moment.]

Then yesterday I turned on the radio. They seemed to be talking about the Stasi.

In the old East Germany, the radio told me, people were arrested. They were threatened. But then they were offered a way out. They’d be released if they informed on somebody else, who could then be arrested, and threatened, and offered a way out …

The Stasi kept its performance numbers up. It recruited lots and lots of informers, who informed on lots and lots of – and so on.

Efficiency, right? But the regime collapsed.

I remembered a friend telling me once that there was only full employment in the Soviet Union because you had to accept the job you were offered. The numbers stayed impressive – full employment, yay! – but the entire edifice collapsed.

I think it’s very easy to judge. More importantly, I think moral hazard creeps up on us.

I think every society contains all the personality types necessary to turn it into … anything. I think they bob to the surface according to the circumstances.

The lockdown makes sense, but I wonder if some of the most zealous police officers at the moment are the ones who are, let's put it this way, okay with the idea of keeping us locked up.

In Cornwall, local authorities are inviting the public to inform them of any holiday-cottage owners breaking the lockdown by letting out their properties (to, for example, “escaping” Londoners). Can’t argue against that. Probably wouldn't try.

But no. Thank you. I won't.
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    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

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    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    There's a page for this, but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

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    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

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    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

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    Abuse
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    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

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    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

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    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


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    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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