With ruling elites making such a lethal mess of things, the pandemic is a kind of make-or-break for political satire - how to top powerful peoples' self-lampooning conduct without seeming callous or broad?
Enter @Scarfolk.
pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/rea…
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Enter @Scarfolk.
pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/rea…
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Scarfolk is a fictional English horror-town set in a looping 1970s, in which Thacherism rises and rises and rises. Today, Scarfolk tackles #cumgate, in which Dominic Cummings, advisor to the UK Prime Minister and architect of the lockdown, flagrantly flouted his own rules.
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Scarfolk's "Government Employee Eye-Test Slide" nails the law-and-order Tories' incredible leaps of logic that forgave Cummings conduct even as everyday people are enduring privation and violence to follow the rules.
scarfolk.blogspot.com/2020/05/govern…
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scarfolk.blogspot.com/2020/05/govern…
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As @mariafarrell writes on Crooked Timber, Cummings' cross-country drive needs to be understood in the context of the women who have been murdered by their partners because Cummings' own rules did not allow them to leave their homes.
crookedtimber.org/2020/05/26/fat…
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crookedtimber.org/2020/05/26/fat…
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Not least because Cummings' playbook ("deny all wrongdoing," "attack the victim," "reverse victim and offender") track so neatly to the way that abusers talk about their crimes.
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This Tory exceptionalism is no aberration: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/maf…
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pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/maf…
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BTW, if you're struggling to get your head around Cumgate, here's @maureenjohnson's masterful (and colorful) summary:
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