The Southern states were so much more dignified and reasonable when they were going through their seasonal COVID wave in August. As the wave begins in the Northeast, we should brace ourselves for the drama-queenish overreaction of the big babies up North. By April, they’ll find another magic cure and calm down until the next COVID season. Hopefully, after a few more seasons they’ll figure it out.

Putin just released “the national standards for mass graves.” Their official title is “Urgent burial of corpses in peacetime and wartime.” Here are the details of the guidance. It makes a great companion read to NYC’s proposed legislation to inter groups of people in unnamed facilities because the governor thinks they are dangerous. First, you inter them, and then you arrange them in 4 neat layers as the linked document proposes.

It starts to look like they think there are too many of us and we are getting in the way. To understand what’s going on and why, I highly recommend Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives. It was written almost 20 years ago, yet it was already clear back then where things were trending.

I’m not planning to watch the Sex and the City remake – there’s a limit to how much plastic surgery I can tolerate on screen – but I saw this scene somebody kindly placed on Vimeo.

It’s set in a comedy club, and a comedian is delivering one of those extremely unfunny woke comedy routines.

Gay people are promiscuous!

Use correct pronouns!

There are too few transgender characters in movies!

At the end of the excruciating routine, the comedian erupts in a paean to fluidity. Change everything! Change your name, address, job, friends! Nothing is certain, and that’s great. You can always choose everything. And then change your choice. And so on. (“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”)

People like these will be on a million anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds but they’ll never figure out the connection between their misery and the compulsion to keep choosing and changing. What’s worse, they aren’t capable of accepting that “everything is fluid” is not a great principle to organize the life of the polis.

The entire political conflict of our time is between the people who want to force everybody into the model of endless fluidity and unconstrained choice where the only thing you can’t choose is to stop choosing AND the people who don’t want to participate. I definitely don’t want to participate because it turns out that worshipping everybody’s right to choose everything all the time leads to loss of freedom and dignity for everybody.

People sit in front of an open door and ask pitifully, “how do we exit? And when? When can we finally exit?”

Nobody is going to set you free. Nobody is going to return the freedoms that were taken away. The whole problem happened because people like you sat there waiting to be told what to do and where the exit is. Stop waiting and exit already. Because it’s only going to get worse until you do. (See preceding post).

A bill in front of the New York State legislature:

Forget COVID. Remember, the greatest public health threat is structural racism. And absolutely anybody can be guilty of it without having to do anything. This means that any group can be sent to “an appropriate facility” by order of the governor to “save lives.”