Covid showed that a managerial class skilled only in manipulating symbols can no longer recognize a real, material event as material. At least this can be fun! 220 tons of matter wedges in a canal and we all ask in unison, "What is this about?" and answer: 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.
The Boat is of course only incidentally a boat, and primarily a manifestation of the online mind's inability to quit take-making and be about anything other than itself. It is the collective large adult son of The Discourse.
This is a great take, someone pay me to write this up.
"Taylor Swift is a grown woman and a successful recording artist; if she wants to transform herself into the fundamental substance of the entire Symbolic order that’s her business." –Sam Kriss in 2015
Today the substance is Stuck Boat, tomorrow it'll be something else.
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McMurtry complained of the love for Lonesome Dove: "I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man's Inferno, filled with violence, ...
.... faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time."
It's strange here to see McMurtry underrate the power of the deconstruction and demythologization of the West he produced.
One of the things that struck me about Lonesome Dove was the jaggedness of it. Characters you expect to be redeemed aren't. Characters who deserve a happy ending are killed randomly and unexpectedly. Loves romantic and filial go unrequited.
Abbott ending business restrictions can surely be argued, but there’s just no good substantive reason to end the mask mandate, unless accompanied by clear messaging that it’s still a strongly urged voluntary measure until herd immunity is reached.
Lockdowns are brutal; masks are just annoying. Even given uncertainty, the probable benefit-to-cost ratio is better than perhaps any other measure except vaccines. It’s stupid to participate in tribalizing it, which Abbott seems to be doing.
Even if you believe true career destruction is still a rarity (I wouldn't), the mere threat of it leads to a much broader dynamic: You certainly *can* voice opinions outside the orthodoxy on certain subjects, but to do it, you pretty much have to make a career of it.
That very high cost of entry — which applies to anyone hoping for a sustained presence in public life — distorts the intellectual marketplace in ways that entrench conformist, pitchbot-predictable takes on left and right alike.
Much of the public health community now sees its purpose as achieving a capacious, daily-shifting definition of justice more than as healing medical illness. It either refuses to see that one can conflict with the other, or does but considers this a sign of devotion to the cause.
"We made a world-historic breakthrough silver-bullet vaccine? Say, this seems like a good opportunity to settle some scores."