Original merged post from @rob staszewski:

"G'day folks, I won't pretend to be other than from down under and it looks like we've been reasonably lucky so far. Thus I've no idea exactly how I'd be coping in the States or Europe, still a couple of thoughts. Our national government has formed a so called national cabinet with all the heads of our states and territories and it seems to be a considerable help in seeing things through. These leaders come from both major sides of our peculiar form of politics and indeed our, till now, very conservative national leadership have had no trouble working with our union leadership as well as business both large and small. I'm not sure but the Germans seem to have it reasonably together as well.

Now to the tricky part, I'm distressed about the current tragedy occurring throughout the disparate regions of the USA and dreading what the future may hold in store for the poorer regions of our world. Brazil already shows ominous signs (pardon me if I've just stood on sore toes), but here I go. Citizens of the States are you happy with your leadership? Both Trump and Biden appear not only unappealing from here, but close to disastrous. Is there a possibility that concerned folks could pressure the leadership of your nation to start working together? How about Congress dropping the Democrat/ Republican divide and getting the immense resources of your nation going? Your rich are incredibly so, yet your poor are dying, it really does not seem a good look from the outside. Britain does not seem much better, I just hope not too many people die.

I know Australia is small cheese, (is California's GDP larger than ours?), our manufacturing base is pretty much zilch these days, but what could the focused productivity of the States, China, Europe, Japan and India achieve, if quickly harnessed, to prevent tragedy in the poorer societies in the world? "

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

We too, elect them into power.

There is occasionally talk about the Americanization of Australian politics. Which is of course the worst possible thing that could happen because who wants to end up that like third rate POS country.

This was cathartic and bloody glorious - "A bunch of billionaires getting wiped out? Who cares?". The host's face of incomprehension is the most delicious thing ever.

Lol The US Constitution is a bunch of shit and the US is a shitty country that has forcefully exported its shitty oligarchic ideology to the detriment of most of the world. The universe is a worse place because the US exists as it does.

And the OP is simply talking about democracy, which, of course, the US barely has; or has in a degraded, utterly stilted form.

Mm fair enough.

The short version is, most members of the public who use them don't use them properly, and there's a shortage so they should be saved for people most at risk. — Michael

Yeah that's what I figured, though it seems to be mixed in with a message about masks actually being somehow ineffective - although a bit of dancing around the point on that last part. Suspect it's a matter of not trusting the public in some manner.

Yeah, the discourse around masks has been very confusing and unclear. I get that the lack of availability means that, as a matter of priority, masks should go towards primary care providers, but the idea that masks just flat out provide no protection seems contrary to commonsense. In the article: "the organisation maintained that while masks could help limit the spread of the disease, they were insufficient on their own" - which suggests: masks can be one part in an overarching strategy that, taken together, will limit the spread. I dunno, I'm puzzled by it.

Separate post on phenomenology, or rather, psychoanalysis:

I find myself with friends, just compulsively explaining things. A few years back, I got hip to what was going on, but couldn't quite stop it. I realized how lonely it made me, but I couldn't seem to 'snap out of it'.

I think this is because relying too heavily on this coping device meant I didn't develop other ways of interacting with the world or other people very well. When I sense that someone is trying to 'reach me', reach the me behind the explanatory monologue, I reflexively withdraw. This, in turn, leads me to rely even more heavily on explaining. What I've found is that it's very difficult for me to develop other ways of living. This makes me feel helpless and frustrated and makes it more tempting to return to 'explaining' (or drinking, or making ironic jokes). Again, this looks a lot like how addictions function. — csalisbury

I mean, I'm no Analyst obviously, but this is drive at work no? This element of being 'caught' on something non-vital, which for all it's pain, nonetheless provides these little bursts of impersonal jouissance and feeds into a certain consistency of self.

(Z: " We become "humans" when we get caught up in a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it. This rotary movement, in which the linear progress of time is suspended in a repetitive loop, is the drive at its most elementary. This, again, is "humanization' at its zero-level: this self-propelling loop which suspends or disrupts the linear temporal enchainment. This shift from desire to drive is crucial if one is to grasp the true nature of the "minimal difference": at its most fundamental, the minimal difference is not the unfathomable X which elevates an ordinary object into an object of desire, but, rather, the inner torsion which curves libidinal space and thus transforms instinct into drive").

(Also Deleuze: "How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow - or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death").

And as for the element of exhaustion ("I feel slightly dazed. I have a rumble of aggressive inertia... icky mood") - I mean I totally relate to this. It's the effort, it seems to me, of trying to keep things kaleidoscopic, of making the entire machinery shake even as it's just this tiny corner of discourse which is being discussed. It's exhausting. There's also depths of jouissance (I don't know any more appropriate word for it) that can be plumbed for ages, and which provides your subjectivity with a certain graspable coordinates. I also don't know how to 'break' it. I don't know that it needs to be broken, maybe just channelled differently, put to use in a different manner somehow. The Deleuzian in me says: put it in connection with things, other things, other people, other practices (hard to do right now, I understand). Don't reply to this if it's better to not.

The 'third term' is a way of determining how, and in what 'region,' x will be brought into the space of reasons. — csalisbury

But this does not have to be a one way street (gustatory). The integration here can and should modify the space of reasons into which it is brought as well. There's a great paper by Reza Negarestani which I constantly come back to, and which I think is pertinent here, where he notes that there is a way of understanding in which:

"Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal.

...The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the juxtaposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interknitting multiplication between localities that while it acknowledges their particular specifications (parameters and orientations), takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. In this respect, universality becomes the operation of productive locality which is globally oriented". (cite).

I grant that the above is not easy to do, nor does it comes naturally. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep the whole structure supple, mobile, responsive. It can, on the contrary, rigidify, such that one is always looking to 'bring things back' into the prefab fold (apokrisis was this kind of 'explainer', par excellence, almost to the point of parody). This is explanation as lego-set. But explanation can also be kaleidoscopic in nature: you add a piece, give it a shake, and the whole thing changes (a Deleuzian vocabulary might talk about intensive and extensive approaches to explanation).

I see the Ultimate Because as the rigidifying of this structure, an attempt to 'fix' it and find its Final Form. This danger is real, but it can be mitigated.

Are Americans really this stupid? — VagabondSpectre

Yes.

Not entirely their fault. They live in a failed state.

Probably, it could be reasonable to frame the three ways of thought that you discuss by using the concept of the image of thought. — Number2018

Oh that's great, I never thought to make that connection! But yeah, now that you mention it it's obvious that thinking-of is indeed a representational model of thought, or what I referred to as thought with a correlate.

Your point about it not simply being a 'natural' way of thinking is well taken as well. It is, I'd perhaps prefer to say, a way of thinking about thought that comes only thought is taken as an explicit subject of thought itself. As in, for the most part, our everyday, waking, living, loving thoughts do not conform to that model - we are constantly thinking-with and thinking-for, our modes of thinking are constantly engaged in the world around it, modulated by and engendered by our various encounters. But it's that dis-engagement, when thought bears upon itself and becomes inward-dwelling that thinking-of tends to become predominant. There's a kind a Nietzschean 'genealogy of modes of thought' to be written here, the story of how thought becomes 'interorized', turned upon itself and then serving to dominate the other modes of thought (the revolt of slave-thought over master-thoughts, as Nietzsche might put it!). Thanks for your post, really good.

A solid chronicle of failure, and a good response to any waste of oxygen that would like to simply devolve blame upon the states. I do wish the 'blame' were not so personalised though. It obscures the systemic failure that's led to what's happening, of which Trump is nothing but a symptom. Still - a great piece for tactical purposes.

Sure - multiply and proliferate- if you can give subsrance to it :)

knowing-with — Janus

Tell me more!

And coherent? — bongo fury

I don't think it's a question of coherence (what indeed would it mean to ask this?) so much as a question of situating it's significance in the right way. There's nothing particularly 'wrong' with thinking-of: we do it all the time, it's an important part of thinking, it has it's uses, etc. My worry is more its overdetermination of thought as such, the way it can occlude how thought can and does function in different ways, for different means and ends. Once it becomes possible to acknowledge thinking in terms of thinking-for and thinking-with (and not just thinking-of), one is confronted with different kinds of questions about thought, about its 'relation' to the world, about its nature - and different 'answers'.

Don't underestimate the move of re-situating ("casting the net-wider") - it has retroactive effects that modifies the apparently 'local' as well. It changes the significance of 'thinking-of', and all one would like to associate it with.

@csalisbury I've been meaning to write the above for a while, but your thread on explanation prompted me to finally get around to it. Can be considered an indirect response.

My immediate reaction to the OP is that the *kind* of explanation at issue (broadly: Why X? or What explains Y?) is too broad and underdetermined. What I mean: explanation is usually on the order of: "explain X about Y" or "why is it that X now and not later", or "why does the phenomenon of X take place at all?". In all three cases there's something like a 'third term' involved: you're never just 'explaining X', you're explaining something about X. (in the back of my mind - Deleuze: not 'what?' but: who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?).

I think the metaphysical illusion - the Ultimate Because - comes about when we think we can dispense of this third term. What the third term introduces is a kind of naturalized perspectivism: it introduces a motive, something that animates inquiry, it puts the inquirer back into the inquiry, and dispenses with the idea that there are 'neutral' questions. Explanation is always relative to a frame of inquiry (which doesn't mean it's 'subjective' - a frame of inquiry is largely determined by the phenomenon itself: asking the right questions is as much a matter of 'getting the answer right' as... getting the answer right).

So w/r/t explanation existing prior to philosophy - yes, but also no. I wanna say: there's always an implicit philosophy in any explanation, and the 'spontaneous' frame of reference is egocentric bodily life: why does dad hit the bottle? Because he suffered abuse of his own, because life is shitty, etc (implicit: can I use this info to avoid his outbursts of rage in my day to day?). Philosophy, when undertaken explicitly, 'de-indexes' inquiry from egocentric concerns and 'attaches' them to other 'third terms': what is the phenomenon of dads hitting the bottle indicative of? Should it be treated sociologically? psychologically? Does it tell us something about 'the human'? etc etc.

Philosophy multiplies frames, makes them proliferate, introduces new 'third terms' motivated by [anything whatsoever] (in the back of my mind - Brassier: "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living": again - not a matter of 'subjective inquiry', perhaps the opposite - but not 'objective' either). My line of thought is that once explanation becomes de-coupled from a 'view from nowhere', once explanation is always 'from somewhere' then the kind of aporias and anxieties you outline if not dissipate, are at least transposed elsewhere.

Last one for the evening - why anyone who thinks what is happening is a 'return of big gubberment' is a living a fantasy:

"Fighting the pandemic in this individualistic way is a neoliberal fantasy. The confinement measures are seen as an end in themselves and an opportunity for our heads of states to showcase war-time leadership, while neglecting to implement all other measures requested by the World Health Organization, such as setting up massive and systemic screening for the infection, training of personnel and building new health infrastructures. The strict enforcement of confinement via law-and-order measures while also not implementing rigorous testing and tracing regimes thus amounts to coronavirus ‘greenwashing’ – doing the absolute least with maximum fanfare. There is no deficiency of competent advice, which is largely being ignored. Thus, despite much rhetoric about the “return of Big State”, Western governments remain trapped in the very neoliberal policy logic that brought us here.

...Our hospitals are overwhelmed not because this is a rare natural disaster for which no government can ever have on-hand capacity to cope, but because, unlike South Korea for example, Western governments have been under-funding public healthcare for decades, neglecting medical infrastructure, and outsourcing the production of key ingredients to countries with cheap labour."

https://www.iwm.at/closedbutacitve/corona-focus/albena-azmanova-our-neoliberal-war-on-the-pandemic/

From the author of my favourite book published last year:

"It is now rapidly becoming clear that the “spontaneous order” of the market cannot save us from the medical, economic, and social emergency at hand. Whether we like it or not, large parts of the world are already moving toward a partially planned economy — or at least a much more state-guided or state-directed one — in order to deal with the extraordinary challenges of the moment. The only real question is: Will the emerging economic model take the form of a business-friendly “disaster capitalism,” geared toward preserving corporate power in a more nationalist and statist shell, or will it take the form of an internationalist “disaster socialism,” geared toward protecting workers and preserving the fabric of our democratic societies?"

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-capitalism-disasters-socialism-economic-collapse

Implicit in the above: it's not a troglodyte question of: 'is state intervention good or bad?', but 'what state intervention, to what ends, for whose benefit?'.

I need to quote more:

"What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next."

You asked about India earlier. I was wrong to treat is as a celebratory case. So wrong. The brutality of what happened to the poor over there was worse than anything out of the horrorshow that already is 'the West'. Via Arundhati Roy:

"As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view."

https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-05/spanish-government-aims-to-roll-out-basic-income-soon

"The Spanish government is working to roll out a universal basic income as soon as possible, as part of a battery of actions aimed at countering the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Economy Minister Nadia Calvino.... But the government’s broader ambition is that basic income becomes an instrument “that stays forever, that becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument,” she said."

Woahhhh.

What?

coronavirus is illegal — wiyte

What?

with a crisis that is NATIONWIDE, why would you not invoke the full powers of the federal government? — schopenhauer1

Oh the idea is quite simple. In the interests of continually sucking on Trump's balls, devolution of blame must go to the states, despite them having generally done much more than the federal government in trying to ameliorate the effects of the virus. The utter incompetence of the federal government, no longer possible to deny without one coming off as a total miscreant, must instead be excused by shifting blame downwards. It's simply the new narrative that's at work right now, which NOS is dutifully relaying. The best example of this devolution of blame is the rewording of the National Strategic Stockpile website which overnight went from this:



To this:



After Jared Kushner - somehow in charge of the National response despite being a failure at any endeavour in life - fucked up his description of the stockpile on live TV. Anytime NOS says something stupid - which is all the time - you can be assured he is following a script, handed down from above that sits upon his open-mouthed face.

Er, no, don't be stupid.

India acted proactively and unlike most of the "developed" world, instituted lockdowns long before numbers even reached 1k+. Modi is a cunt, but on this he was way ahead - quite literally - of the curve.

I think most modern wars can be called the American war if that's the standard.

How on earth could politicians have been ahead of the game without time machines?

No. We prepare for what we know and understand. We leave the unknown alone until we get to it. — frank

Except that anyone who knew anything about disease had been warning that this or something like it would happen. In the US, the government's own reserve stockpile of PPE - which Bush2 had begun to set up in 2005 - was at 1% of what the targets that the government itself had set. This idea that this was some 'unknowable' event that governments needed 'time machines' to predict is reality-unbound trash made to defend the indefensible. Not only did the relevant people know and understand, there were plans in place to react to this. Moreover, anyone with a pulse understood just how shit the US healthcare system is and remains, a topic so prominent that's it's the debate of the democratic primaries, not to mention household knowledge that makes the US a laughing stock of the world. The idea that 'no one could have seen this coming without a time machine' is so stupid and belied by facts at every turn that anyone arguing it has zero credibility.

It's true though, that among the many lies exposed by CV has been the lie of the island-individual: the island-individual is a construct, a limit-case that can only exist under certain social conditions without which he withers like a dead flower.

Yeah he's an extreme minion!

Or as explained by Twitter:

My suspicion is that individualism and libertarianism are not what it says on the tin, that they are merely anti-socialism which is as social as socialism, but more disorganised and unpleasant - like a Mafia is a disorganised and unpleasant government.. — unenlightened

"The epidemic overturns the cliché that if I love my fellow men or women I should hug them, kiss them or stick to them like sardines … Today I display my love for the other by keeping her or him at a distance. This is the paradox that collapses all the lazy ideological frameworks (ideological not in the Marxist sense) of the left and right, not to mention of the populists.

The edifying propaganda of some politicians and the media appeals to our selfishness as well as to our altruism: “If you avoid others, you are protecting them, but yourself too.” Now, very often this is by no means true. It is now common knowledge that young people can be infected like everyone else but that it’s quite rare for them to fall ill; it’s also common knowledge that this pandemic is a geronticide,that those really at risk are the over 65s.

A young friend of mine keeps me at a distance of at least three meters and smiles. I very much appreciate this non-gesture of his, because I know that it is mainly he who is trying to protect me; because I’m old. It’s true that he’s also protecting the elderly in his own family: his father, his mother… But in any case I’m grateful to him. The more the others keep at a distance from me, the closer I feel to them.

...In recent days I came across several people who did not respect this secure distance and didn’t even wear gloves or face masks; and they expressed their scepticism on the gravity of the disease… I could gather from their arguments that they were basically cynical and ultimately antisocial individuals. Today the sociable avoid society."

Sergio Benvenuto - Forget about Agamben

Two ways the current situation could break, politically:

"The difficulties experienced by national populists are unsurprising given they are no friends of the issues at the heart of this crisis: health, welfare and science. On the health front, the crisis reveals the folly of decades of underfunding and privatisation of the health system. Trump, Johnson and Salvini have embarrassing questions to answer in regard to their record as enemies of public healthcare. Furthermore, the crisis calls for a sea change in economic policy that is at odds with the ideological premises of national populism, which combines chauvinism on the cultural front and ultra-neoliberal policies on the economic front.

The glaring need for state protection of strategic national industries, starting with health equipment and pharmaceuticals, is no anathema for national-populists who have already embraced trade protectionism. But the populist right has strongly opposed welfare measures that are becoming a matter of necessity to avoid social catastrophe. Having repeatedly branded these policies as “dangerous” and “anti-patriotic”, these politicians find themselves in the embarrassing situation of having to espouse them.

...If the coronavirus crisis has momentarily disoriented the populist right, this does not mean it is vanquished. It would be misguided for the left to believe that this crisis will work out in its favour. ... The authoritarian measures implemented on Monday by Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with the suspension of parliament and the introduction of government by decree, may be the shape of things to come. In Italy, Salvini had no qualms about applauding Orbán’s move. We are also likely to see an exacerbation of anti-Chinese rhetoric. Trump made no apologies for calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, while Steve Bannon argued that Covid-19 is a “Chinese Communist Party virus”. Salvini has proposed that “if the Chinese government knew [about the virus] and didn’t tell it publicly, it committed a crime against humanity”, and allies in Brazil and Spain are adopting a similar line.

Given the ties among national-populists, including their botched attempt to establish a “nationalist international” under the auspices of Bannon’s Movement, this synchrony should not be taken as accidental. It has all the look of a coordinated strategy to channel the rage and despair caused by the crisis’s brutal human and economic toll towards a racial and ideological enemy conveniently identified in the Chinese government. Along with self-proclaimed socialists, all opponents are likely to be smeared as “Chinese collaborationists”: centrist US presidential candidate Joe Biden has already been termed “China’s choice for president” by the conservative National Review."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/01/populist-right-coronavirus

---

The above has already been disseminating into the public. In the Australian context:

"The “don’t come” signs popping up in regional towns are a sign of it, and this week’s alarmist language from federal agriculture minister David Littleproud, who called caravans the “cruise ships of the outback”, doesn’t help. The crackdown on Bondi backpackers is part of it, too. As is rising racial abuse, which Victorian premier Daniel Andrews today called out, tweeting: “A health crisis is not an excuse to be racist. We’ve seen some disgusting behaviour directed towards Asian-Australians over the past few months. And it’s getting worse.” Rising Sinophobia is also part of it, and the prime minister was on thin ice with 2GB’s Alan Jones this morning, agreeing furiously about the health threat from Chinese wet markets."

https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2020/03/2020/1585889237/corona-phobia

--

Precepts for action: continue to embarrass the right (and the centre), and continue to radicalise all those for whom COVID has exposed the utter morbidity of the current system and its (cheer)leaders.

No, you're quite literally fantasizing about alternate realities. Try not to hurt yourself in your own head, it's apparently quite dangerous in there.

If you want to argue over fantasies, be my guest. I'll keep talking about what has and currently is taking place in reality.

Uh-oh, the algorithm is malfunctioning again. Seems to be repeating itself.

As opposed to a society where capitalist parasites don't fuck workers at every opportunity and especially during crises? Is this so hard to fathom?

True, but I will never stop driving the point home that capitalism is ruled by parasites that will fuck workers not just at every opportunity, but especially in times of crisis when things are especially terrible for everyone. Although asking people to die for the dow should have made this plainly obvious.