Tomorrow I’m going to get tested for COVID against my will. I’m completely healthy and it’s all stupid theater anyway. If I test negative, how do we know I don’t pick it up on my way from the testing facility? Or the next day? The PCR test is ridiculously unreliable, and even the guy who invented it is horrified that the test is used diagnostically.
None of this makes sense if you think it has anything to do with preventing anybody from getting sick.
But it does if you understand that this is biopolitics. Some outside authority decides if you are entitled to participate in society based on some obscure physiological metric that hides inside your body and that you can neither perceive nor measure. You have no control over the process and your input isn’t solicited. It’s all decided completely outside of your knowledge, understanding, or control. The label of a “good, acceptable, essential body” is as seemingly random as the label of a “bad, unneeded, unacceptable body.”
As Zygmunt Bauman said 15 years ago, the real power is the power to assign the role of superfluous, unnecessary human beings.
That is total BS! Everyone should have the free-choice to choose whether or not they participate in this! It is your life and NO ONE should have any say over your own!
I’m sorry to hear this!
Maybe you could accidently get lost for a little while tomorrow! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Get this, they are also trying to force us to upload some dumb app on our phones. Obviously, I’m not an idiot and won’t do it. The phone is my private property. But so many people are total robots. They’ll upload the app and get themselves in a sea of trouble because this way the employer can spy on them constantly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ya, people aren’t as bright as they once were!
LikeLike
When you throw in the high rate of false positives, it’s a bleak picture. If you simply require someone to be tested often, a positive test is almost inevitable, whether the person carries the pathogen or not.
LikeLike
Are you being forced etc or do you mean that you would prefer not to be tested but do not want the consequences of refusing?
LikeLike
It’s all right. The sniveling gits sont totalement finalement impuissant. Everything is forever and very fine. Drink a bottle of wine. Then pray while listening to this:
https://sonichits.com/video/Ramsay_Midwood/Feed_My_Monkey
LikeLike
I’ve been thinking about the culminating absurdity of everything lately (ridiculous craven COVID mania, Trumpocalypse, China Dough Lameass Psyops Joe, etc.) and all I can say is that if this is the segue to elite transhuman transcendence, it’s pretty pathetic. Claus Schawb, Soros, Gates and the rest can’t even manage a “pandemic” well.. It’s like watching Raelians invading Stalingrad.
Bunch of silly effete twats. And they think the are going to win.. what? What are they going to do with my contempt, my burgeoning dissent? I understand why Ignatius of Antioch went to Rome now. At a certain point the vulgar bully must be met with defiant disdain.
In the meantime, I’ll drink more wine and listen to funky recidivist folk.
This just came up in my mix, and since it’s Ninth Day, I am compelled to share it.. Merry Christmas:
LikeLiked by 1 person
As somebody who experienced life in a totalitarian regime and witnessed its collapse, I can say that you are absolutely right. This travesty ends when we stop taking it seriously. Mock it, despise it, scoff in the dumb, earnest faces of the little totalitarians. That’s your best weapon.
LikeLike
“Bunch of silly effete twats.” Biophobes, every one of them. When we march on their neighborhoods, we should arrive in charcoal warpaint with truckloads of manure, junebugs, worms, live crickets, frogs, lizards, crawdads, water-snakes, and if we’re feeling mean: roadkill and dandelion seeds.
They’ll all run screaming for their safe-rooms.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a beautiful image…
Oh, and a bunch of happy grimy maskless kids who’ve been playing outside this whole time.
LikeLike
I will have to get tested 2x a week when I go back to in-person teaching in a few weeks, otherwise I won’t be able to get into the building. It’s like they want to disincentivize teaching in person.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Exactly. The people who teach in person are bullied, burdened and guilt-tripped constantly. The ones who don’t want to come back to the classroom and barely show up even for Zoom classes (a 15-minute Zoom class is not uncommon with the rest being PowerPoints uploaded to the learning platform) are the heroes of the situation.
LikeLike
Holy moly! Are they making you pay for the tests? Those run about $180 a pop! My husband got a stomach bug a while back, and we had to pay to get him tested before he could go back to work: more than a day’s wages!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have state insurance. Because the state of Illinois isn’t in enough debt already, we now have to pump more state money into private pockets.
It’s insane that your husband had to pay for it. What a scam.
LikeLike
Insurance is supposed to cover it if a doctor orders it. I’m surprised — if your husband had a stomach bug, he would have qualified as “symptomatic” and someone should have ordered it.
Of course, if anyone doesn’t have insurance, and no access to a free state testing site, they’re SOL. Because why would we allow people to not pay for something increasingly seen as necessary?
LikeLike
We don’t have insurance in the traditional sense. We have a healthshare that covers catastrophic hospital expenses. It doesn’t cover things like lab tests and doctor visits. Actual insurance of the most basic type (which still wouldn’t cover labs and doc visits) would cost us over half our income. We can’t afford it.
LikeLike
…we did have access to a state testing site, but it was a weekend, would have taken an additional 3 days to get tested, and potentially a whole extra week before he could go back to work.
The kicker: this only happened because my husband is an honest man, and reported to his boss that he had a fever. For most people in our situation, there’s a huge incentive to simply not report that you are sick.
LikeLike
God, that’s awful. I have a friend who went through a similar situation—because of the surge in testing in our area it took him two weeks just to get an appointment at the state site. They lost his request three times.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ours was closed on a Friday due to inclement weather.
LikeLike
Wait a minute. You have to get tested twice a week to teach, but I, a hospital employee, can have a positive in my household, and as long as my own test for one particular moment in time is pending or negative, I am told that I need to come to work.
Also I sincerely hope they’re just doing rapids and not sending them out to a lab, because this would be a waste of swabs, reagent, and manpower.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s supposed to be saliva-based.
(I have three more weeks till school starts and have way too much to do anyway in these three weeks, so I am trying not to think about the testing for as long as I can.)
LikeLike
A nearby school used saliva tests this semester. They are quick and hurt a lot less than a swab, at least.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In my university, we have to get tested once in 12 days to be able to teach in person. And it’s all swabs which are as you know slightly painful.
Students also have to be tested once in 12 days if they are living in dorms or coming to campus. They can get suspended if they have not been tested for 16 days.
I really don’t get what we are putting people through!
LikeLiked by 1 person
“I really don’t get what we are putting people through!”
learned helplessness through submission to irrational and unpredictable authority….
LikeLiked by 1 person
They send them out to a lab. It’s like the goal is to make the process as expensive as possible to bill insurance larger amounts of money. Rumors are that our governor owns shares in the testing service.
LikeLike
Кошмар — New Year in occupied Lugansk – the post is in Russian but the numerous photos speak for themselves:
Новый год в оккупированном Луганске.
https://mirovich.media/638317.html
And those people are not in jail and likely to die in their own beds…
LikeLike
Clarissa, have you read Byung-Chul Han? He also used the term “biopolitics” back in May and seems to be the most respected and famous thinker that I have seen, whose views align very well with yours. Check out this article:
“In the face of the pandemic, we are heading for a biopolitical surveillance regime. Not only in our communication, but also our bodies: our health will be subject to digital surveillance. According to Canadian author Naomi Klein, the crisis is a moment that heralds a new system of rules. The pandemic shock will ensure that a digital biopolitics takes hold globally that, with its control and monitoring system, seizes control of our bodies in a biopolitical disciplinary society that also constantly monitors our state of health. Faced with the shock of the pandemic, the West will be forced to give up its liberal principles. Then the West faces a biopolitical quarantine society that permanently restricts our freedom.”
“And our Pope Francis? Saint Francis has hugged lepers … The fear and panic of the virus is exaggerated. The average age of those who died of Covid19 in Germany is 80 or 81. The average life expectancy in Germany is 80.5. Our panicked reaction to the virus shows that something is wrong with our society.”
https://www.efe.com/efe/english/destacada/byung-chul-han-covid-19-has-reduced-us-to-a-society-of-survival/50000261-4244328
LikeLike
Absolutely, he’s one of my favorite thinkers. I’ve reviewed his books here on the blog.
Thank you for the link! It will be perfect for my book. I haven’t been checking what Han had to say about the current situation and I see that I should have.
LikeLike