{"id":78800,"date":"2020-03-30T09:48:01","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T14:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=78800"},"modified":"2020-03-30T10:21:24","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T15:21:24","slug":"please-panic-sensibly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/please-panic-sensibly\/","title":{"rendered":"Please panic responsibly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francis Porretto<\/a>:<\/p>\n

At this time, America, like the rest of the world, is coping with the Wuhan virus. It\u2019s brought about a number of (hopefully) temporary alterations to our patterns of life. These have not been easy adaptations for most of us. Our vibrant economy is badly hobbled, our social mechanisms are largely idled, and our politics has…wait just a moment…great God in heaven! Nothing has changed about our politics!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Charles Hurt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The whole point of establishing the nation\u2019s capital in Washington was that it was a dismal swamp uninhabitable most of the year. The mosquitoes alone kept Congress out of session for long months at a time. This narrowed the amount of time each year that federal legislators could be in Washington wasting your money and destroying the country with their ridiculous ideas and votes.<\/p>\n

Then along came air conditioning, and that ruined everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nathan Pinkoski<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In reflecting on the COVID-19 crisis, we need not agree with MacIntyre\u2019s wholesale pessimism about our political and social institutions. We need not question shutdown measures in place, nor even subscribe to their \u201cbiopolitical\u201d critique. But if we care about the future of our societies, we raise a simple question: Do the managerial experts performing within the drama of this crisis have an adequate understanding of the hierarchy of human goods?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Giorgio Agamben<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What is worrisome is not so much or not only the present, but what comes after. Just as wars have left as a legacy to peace a series of inauspicious technologies, from barbed wire to nuclear power plants, so it is also very likely that one will seek to continue even after the health emergency experiments that governments did not manage to bring to reality before: closing universities and schools and doing lessons only online, putting a stop once and for all to meeting together and speaking for political or cultural reasons and exchanging only digital messages with each other, wherever possible substituting machines for every contact \u2014 every contagion \u2014 between human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joseph Moore<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Everything we do is a more or less educated guess, as far as what, if any, lives will be saved. It\u2019s always a balancing act. Decreased economic activity kills people, too, a notion our Left seems congenitally disinclined to understand, but which is nonetheless completely obvious upon inspection. So, make good decisions, knowing it\u2019s a trade off, seeking some less bad and essentially unknowable outcome that is largely independent of anything we may do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Severian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for us, speed and scale<\/em> have considerably broadened our notion of physical security. We know what kind of actions Mighty Pharaoh took in a plague. Given the technological limitations of his time, he could do no other. We modern folks, on the other hand\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u2026 well, look around. We\u2019ve decided, as a culture, that \u201cphysical security\u201d now extends to \u201cnever getting the sniffles.\u201d And we have, or soon will have, the technology to make that kind of monitoring a reality. The mud huts along the Nile didn\u2019t have two-way Alexas installed; the McMansions along the Mississippi soon will. The state of the art of government really does allow for 24\/7 individual surveillance. If we don\u2019t want the sniffles, this is the only way to do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Z-Man<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We live in an age where the unthinkable, like the fog, quietly creeps up on us until suddenly the unthinkable is the new normal. Just as \u201cshelter in place\u201d is the new normal whenever it snows, mandatory lock downs will be the new normal whenever too many people get the sniffles. The unthinkable not only becomes thinkable, it becomes impossible to think otherwise. It also means that everything unthinkable today is suddenly on the table, maybe even the menu, for tomorrow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

I’m not a virologist, and it would be presumptuous of me to make any pronouncements on the severity of the current apocalyptic threat and the best strategies for meeting it. However, I have observed human beings in action for more decades than I want to count, and can confidently say that, in matters of power and money, it is impossible to be too cynical. I suggest that, after your daily dose of hysteria from the medium of your choice, you see William M. Briggs<\/a> for a different perspective, in particular his Tuesday updates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis Porretto: At this time, America, like the rest of the world, is coping with the Wuhan virus. It\u2019s brought about a number of (hopefully) temporary alterations to our patterns of life. These have not been easy adaptations for most of us. Our vibrant economy is badly hobbled, our social mechanisms are largely idled, and … Continue reading “Please panic responsibly”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-and-fall","category-silly-people"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-kuY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78800"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78950,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78800\/revisions\/78950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}