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The virus is the first interesting post-historical supervillain If we can beat it, history will restart If not it’s end-of-history reruns for the rest of time
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It’s kinda funny how people are attacking it with all the traditional virtues that worked against human adversaries in the past: strength, honor, intelligence, compassion, imagination... each defined a century or three of history. None really works as the locus of response.
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What kinda works is a bizarre kind of arbitrariness (distancing and masking) that requires adopting a kind of dumb-somatic identity that feels insulting. You’re a sneezing-coughing machine capable of projecting droplets a certain distance. That’s all the virus *can* see you as.
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It’s insulting in the same way being used as a doorstop is insulting to a book. 99.99% of your identity is irrelevant to this battle.
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It’s not just Trump who can’t bully it... The wokies can’t cancel it The nerds can’t science the shit out of it The entrepreneurs can’t disrupt it Davos crowd can’t PowerPoint it The military can’t nuke it QAnon cannot red string it Jihadis can’t suicide bomb it
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You are massively shifting the goalposts (the timescales) here. "Sciencing the shit out of stuff" (and for that matter, "disrupting" industries) generally takes multiple years; closer to a decade. This thing has been around for <1 year and vaccine-candidates are in trial.
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