And instead of futilely reiterating these thoughts in Pandemic! 2, Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek introduces us to the Worldometer. Hmph. It's seemingly self-explanatory, but one finds an edge of sadism attached to its referencing, as if Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek wanted to rub reality in our faces. (Full disclosure: I find Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek wonderfully scatological in this book, but sometimes he seems like a crypto-fascist.) These stats in the face are borderline Mussolini. If the birth rate (he shows real time -- how, I don't know) is double the death rate, then Covid-19 just ain't up to the task IMHO. He seems to say.
Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek continues to see us responding to Covid-19's almost-luna-like influences on our tidal alpha waves, as if we were possessed (I'm thinking Camus, but he doesn't seem to be), and by way of the Guardian and CNN, chews his cuttlefish over crazinesses happening in Stuttgart and England. He scribbles:
"[O]n June 21 German authorities were shocked over a rampage of an "unprecedented scale" in the center of Stuttgart: four to five hundred partygoers ran riot overnight, smashing shop windows, plundering stores, and attacking police.
Smashed glass in Stuttgarrt to protest racism -- like Nazis who've Broke Abbie gone kristalnachting -- for the hell of it! Putting fascists on the cattle trains to Disneyland where they're forced to take showers spraying nitrous oxide. Ee-Ha. Pass the bong.
And similarly, on the beaches of Dover -- what's that? -- I mean, on beaches across England, lads and "ladies" were kicking up a sandstorm for no apparent reason, brazenly bronzing while ignoring social distancing. First Brexit, now 'breaks it.'
Protests, during a pandemic. Can you believe it? Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek opines that these days there are only two kinds of protests going on -- the sentimentalist-driven, retro-Tiananmen Square type,
catch-up protests that enjoy the support of Western liberal media; for instance, those in Hong Kong and Minsk. On the other side, we have much more troubling protests that react to the limits of the liberal-democratic project itself, such as theYellow Vests, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion.
And the real protests of ords barely eking.
Add to that the putsch Trump 'pushed' in DC recently that got him naughtily impeached a second time for his troubles, Nancy doing that done-and-dusted thing with her hands and demanding that her podium be returned by the Florida nutjob who nicked it. "What the f*ck would a Trump illiterate do with a podium anyway," she is said to have remarked, her mascara running, as if from her, "Yell duh and doh and dese and Dems?" And you can almost see, with those sentiments, why she was a target.
Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek compares these two protest types to the Achilles and the Hare legend made famous in modern times by the Elvis song, "Confidence." I really don't a clue why he so compares. But here the mighty mind of Z. clarifies matters:
"If we replace Achilles by "forces of democratic uprising" and the tortoise by the ideal of "liberal democratic capitalism", we soon realize that most countries cannot get close to this ideal, and that their failure to reach it expresses weaknesses of the global capitalist system itself.
Well, my grandpa used to say: time
wounds all heels, and the only reason why "slow poke" won that race is because
Achilles had a bad heel, but unlike Trump, with debilitating toenail problem that prevented him from serving in the military but not from droning an Iranian general to death with drone-thrown steak knives, Achilles manned up and went to Troy, and became a hermaphrodisiac's delight
getting grease-rubbed whenever the movie action lagged, riveting men and
women alike. F*ck, that's a lot of olive oil, I thought at one point.
I dunno, sometimes I get lost in Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek's maze, as when he starts talking about Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror and referencing "inert, humid matter," and then, the next thing you know, as in Pandemic!1, he's bringing masturbation to the table -- again. Quoting Tarkovsky's father ("A soul is sinful without a body, like a body without clothes."), and then, BAM: "Masturbating to hardcore images is sinful, while bodily contact is a path to spirit." End of chapter. Whoa. Let me down easy, Slavoj.
Things get kinkier, as you'd expect them to, when he begins to muse about the future, trotting in Elon Musk's smelly pigs to hallucidate the situation. Elon Musk's taken some hits in recent years, starting out as a Flash Gordon, at least in his own mind, then releasing bad vibes into the already traumatized ecology. A while back, Melon asked for volunteers to sign up for a one way trip to Palookaville (i.e., Mars) and 200,000 people signed up for the horrific suicide. Suddenly, he's like the Pied Piper of Hamelin with the rat problem. Then, he mouthed off about a spelunker who helped rescue Thai children stranded in a watered-in cave, referring to the Brit hero as "suss" and "the pedo guy" on Twitter. What an a**hole. And now, Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek was worrying us with Melon's latest seemingly misanthropic venture into pig mind control, no doubt with a view to eventually taking out anyone who hadn't volunteered for his Mars venture.
Specifically, Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek, reading a piece in the Guardian, is worried that Melon's Neuralink project could lead to human mind control. Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek writes,
Musk emphasized the health benefits of Neuralink (skirting over its potential for an unprecedented control of our inner life), and announced that he is now looking for human volunteers.
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