This logic has surfaced in strange ways during the Covid pandemic, such as when a prominent reporter, previously employed by the New York Times, announced on Twitter that he “wanted to find an antimasker and beat them to death.” A more measured version of this sentiment appeared in op-eds declaring to those who refused to cover their faces that “you don’t have a right to kill me.” If, throughout 2020, the unmasked were construed as threats to biological existence, the same discourse is now emerging around vaccination. The notion of “vaccine passports” explicitly defines the unvaccinated as a danger to society, who can be excluded from a variety of spaces on this basis—a prospect many liberal observers appear to relish.
Such biopolitical imperatives were intuitive to many on both the left and right ends of the spectrum well before Covid appeared on the scene. Consider, in the former instance, the frequency with which the term “lives” appears in political slogans. In the past year, we have seen the simultaneous prominence of “Masks Save Lives” and “Black Lives Matter,” though the latter first gained prominence some years ago. But similar phrasing also emerged several years ago in relation to another issue when the “March for Our Lives” became a site of gun control advocacy.
In 1977, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard exhorted the public to Forget Foucault in a polemic published under that title. Judging by his far larger impact in academia in subsequent decades, Foucault seemed to get the better of his rival. Nevertheless, his almost total absence from public debates around the Covid pandemic, and the political responses to it, suggests that, in spite of his massive influence, we did forget Foucault—or at least the parts of his work most challenging to our guiding political assumptions. The Left, which has spent decades poring over his oeuvre in its academic redoubts, has in the past year largely acquiesced to a dictatorship of expertise that might as well be using the Foucauldian account of biopower as an instruction manual. Its abandonment of the tools of critique offered by his work has been sudden and almost total.
I’ll pass.
Don’t need a headache.
Yup. People take any sign of defiance as personal threats, as if not wearing a mask is a deliberate plot to kill them.
First they came for the smokers; I did not speak out, because I was not a smoker.
It all started so innocently.
“let’s make sure packages are labelled with warnings”
“let’s limit their advertising”
“let’s buy ads to encourage people to not smoke”
“no more smoking indoors”
“no smoking with 500 feet of the doors”
“people who smoke pay higher insurance rates”
“let’s ticket people who smoke in a car with a child”
After all that has been done to smokers, how can you now draw a line. Why can’t they demand proof of vaccination? If they can refuse to seat you in a restaurant because you want to smoke, they can refuse to seat an anti-vaxxer.
Not the same thing. Smoke is a serious, “live” and immediate threat to people with asthma, COPD or other lung diseases. Being non-injected is not, though mamy people clearly believe so. There are millions such people With impaired lungs (I’m one). The issue comes down to smokers’ “need” to smoke in a restaurant or public building (outside is another matter, in my view) and other people’s need to breathe freely. You may as well force lung diseased people to wear masks….
Smoke is a serious, “live” and immediate threat to people with asthma, COPD or other lung diseases.
So is traffic.
The issue comes down to smokers’ “need” to smoke in a restaurant
So patronize a different restaurant.
So let’s see , using coercion to take an unproven GMO dose, where the long term side effects are unknown, but outspoken experts in the field, warn about auto-immune disease potentials, amongst other worrying potential bad effects.
Can’t go to concerts? Check
Can’t go to theatre? Check
Can’t go to lousy expensive NHL games? Check
Can’t travel overseas? Check
Oh well, won’t be in danger of terrible side effects either. The only thing I will miss is tropical vacays, but I got mine in the last few years.
Here’s anticipating next years cold and flu season, where vaxxed sheep will overwhelm the medical system!
I’m looking forward to the issues with blood supplies, especially anyone needing a top up on surgery who didn’t get vaxxed and maybe didn’t get vaxxed because of other medical issues. Oops. https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/the_facts_about_pfizer_and_biontech_s_covid_19_vaccine
Read the side effects. They resemble the same side effects if you’re taking certain cancer drugs. Then there is the dude(ette) who had the real deal, didn’t get vaxxed for obvious reasons, then has to get a frankenstab to go to Floreedah. ‘Cause Rules. And what’s with this “get vaccinated” prominently displayed with political folk on TV these days. It’s mandatory? Since when? For a “flu” 99.xxx% recover from naturally?
Popcorn, lots of popcorn.
With a bit of publicity you could use that the sell GMO grain to the sheeple
GMO foods will not kill you.
DanBC, “Here’s anticipating next years cold and flu season, where vaxxed sheep will overwhelm the medical system!’
Yup, my thoughts too.
assuming they live to next cold and flu season. I’m also wondering how the next three to five years might pan out as well.
Wha, he couldn’t subjectively experience good health after contracting AIDs? It’s almost like there’s some kind of objective reality.
Dante missed the boat. The worst Hell is an overpopulation of those expounding moronic beliefs and those that think they are the beautiful the smart and the good by thinking what they are told to think.
Please move on. Its clear that the vaccines work. There are less cases now that we are getting more vaccines, particularly amongst the vulnerable. If you dont want to get a vaccine, dont. In Western Canada, there are more than enough people who want vaccines in order to achieve herd immunity and reopen society. So if you dont want to get the vaccine, good for you, nobody has to shame you or anything of the kind. There are obviously some side effects of the vaccine, as there are with all vaccines.
But for goodness sakes’ please shut up about your choice not to get the vaccine. The bargain is this: if we dont bug you about your choice not to get the vaccine, you dont go on and on about your personal reasons for not getting the vaccine. Otherwise its like listening to a whiny progressive.
Dont get the vaccine and STFU.
If only it were that simple
it’s the 11th circle of hell with passive aggressive sprinkles on top
It is that simple. Dont get the vaccine and stop posting about how correct you are in your choices.
I had a CT Scan a week ago. First question I got asked was “had I been vaxxed”, while they got me prepped. I told the x-Ray tech I hadn’t been sick for years. I take blood thinners, make sure the IV is on tight. End of questions.
“if we dont bug you about your choice not to get the vaccine”… that’s a pretty big IF…
if we dont bug you about your choice not to get the vaccine
I’ve been bullied and harassed for not wearing a mask, back when I could claim an exemption. That was considered to be acceptable behaviour. If I resisted or voiced objections, I was threatened with being expelled from whichever establishment I happened to be in.
Your false nobility isn’t convincing.
Get back to me when there’s an actual vaccine. The only vaccine I ever had was for Smallpox (11yrs old) and it wasn’t a fun ride.
Calgary guy, go f$#@ yourself! People are dying from these experimental vaccines and it’s a crime against humanity. The Swine Flue vaccine did not kill as many people and it was pulled off the market in 1976. The Covid medical tyranny has caused people to die, businesses to suffer and children to be masked in schools which is just pure child abuse. Grow a set of balls, will ya?
The not-vaccine can not promote herd immunity as there is no covid virus present in the not- vaccines.
Shullenberger’s efforts to make Foucault palatable to conservatives leave me cold. It seems he devoted his youthful learning to these masters of postmodernism. Unable to embrace them as fully as he might have in their heyday, he makes efforts to see them as “ambiguous” thinkers who have much to say to conservatives. A rat like Foucault makes a damn poor ally. So too Marcuse and Lyotard who get similar treatment on his website. S. has a picture of Trump holding a book of critical theory as if it could explain his presidency. That is a tortuous path I’d rather not take without Virgil by my side. The last thing I need is to justify my understanding of the world through the mind of Foucault. One thinks of “I saw the best minds of my generation ruined by madness.” I’ll stick with the “ranters” he damns with glancing praise in his introduction: Peterson, Pluckrose, Liz Truss. Mr Shullenberger is an English professor. Perhaps some Matthew Arnold might be a better muse.
What’s that gotta do with the price of onions?
Foucault liked Tunisian boys, and power.
He, like Derrida, was a bent human. Their influence, coupled with Marxism, in academia over the last 20 to 30 years, has been key to the dystopic results we witness abounding in these latter days.
But, Brian, your paraphrase of Howl by Ginsberg escaped me as a reference.
Oh, and it was “ruined by drugs”, not “madness”, albeit similar ruination.
Matthew Arnold, indeed, along with Emerson, and onto Chesterton, if we want to talk about some worthy conservative influences….
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”