Re: <nettime> CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing,

The difficulty from the oppositional left - I do not speak about the left that dissolved itself into the neoliberal discourse and practice - to clearly stand out from the extreme-right discourse, to courageously refuse the terms imposed by the extreme-right hegemony, is one of the most worrisome symptoms of our time, it will lead to war actually. Thus, we have two ennemis, not one, that is to say two fronts: the neoliberal one, and the neonationalist one. Facing both would require two clear lines of demarcation.

Fortunately there are some excellent texts, I recommend this one:
https://lundi.am/Sur-la-catastrophe-en-cours-et-comment-en-sortir
and this excerpt, for instance:

"C’est à cet endroit précis que nous avons commencé à perdre la partie. Alors que le virus venait révéler la faillite évidente de notre civilisation depuis ses fondements mêmes, nous nous sommes laissés traîner sur le plan de la gestion, bonne ou mauvaise, moins pire ou catastrophique. Au moment où l’idée même que l’on se faisait de la vie se trouvait acculée à être repensée et réinventé, on a critiqué les politiciens. Quand le gouvernement masquait si difficilement sa panique et son incapacité à exercer sa fonction fondamentale et spirituelle, prévoir, on a entendu certains gauchistes même anarchistes caqueter : si tout cela arrive, c’est qu’ils l’ont bien voulu ou décidé. Ironie cruelle, même lorsque l’État se retrouve dans les choux avec le plus grand mal à gouverner, il peut compter sur ses fidèles contempteurs pour y déceler sa toute puissance et s’en sentir finauds."
[translation DeepL] "It is at this very point that we started to lose the game. While the virus was revealing the obvious bankruptcy of our civilization from its very foundations, we let ourselves be dragged down to the level of management, good or bad, lesser or catastrophic. When the very idea of life was forced to be rethought and reinvented, we criticized the politicians. When the government was having such difficulty masking its panic and its inability to exercise its fundamental and spiritual function, to foresee, we heard some leftists, even anarchists, cackling: if all this is happening, it is because they wanted it to happen or decided it to happen. Cruel irony, even when the state finds itself in the cabbage with the greatest difficulty in governing, it can count on its faithful contemptors to detect its omnipotence there and feel finicky about it."

See also when they speak about the necessary "mise à dispositions des techniques de fabrication du vaccin" / the provision of vaccine manufacturing techniques.

My best,

FN

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On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 7:05 AM David Garcia <[email protected]> wrote:

There are certainly important questions to be asked about the ways in which the science is being framed and sometimes manipulated at a time when ‘knowledge’ is increasingly being seen as central in what we take democratic politics to be. Boris Johnson’s original attachment to the ‘herd immunity’ (famously declaring let the bodies pile high) was being justified at the time as “guided by the science”.

Richard Horton, the editor of the respected medical journal the Lancet, worried that “the relationship between the scientific advisers and politicians in the early phase of the epidemic was strangely collusive”. And James Wilsdon, (professor of research policy at Sheffield University) has been arguing for some time that “The entire science advisory system feels as if it has been fundamentally – perhaps fatally – compromised by the pandemic.”

I don’t know how the data was communicated in the Netherlands but I certainly shared Wilsdon’s discomfort that from the very first moment I saw those press conferences “with Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, flanking the Prime Minister” [like a pair of praetorian guards] “which rang all sorts of alarm bells, in terms of lines of accountability and the blurring of the distinction between advice and decision-making.”.

These questions will only increase in importance as we move into a new political phase where the science behind of net zero target will become the new frontline of politics..

David Garcia

From: <[email protected]> on behalf of "Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid)" <[email protected]>
Date: Thursday, 20 January 2022 at 12:07
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

Your knee-jerk response is an excellent example of elitist and false-oppositional ‘left’ thinking that has completely fallen for the government and big-pharma propaganda, and forgets to think critically about power structures, knowing very well that right-wing and left-wing, while also entertaining huge differences, are not pure opposites. Baudet would be proud of you; he can rake in the spoils.

Cheers, Ingrid.

From: Florian Cramer <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, 20 January 2022 13:00
To: Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: <nettime> CfP: Critical reflections on pandemic politics: left-wing, feminist and anti-racist critiques

- Government propaganda and censorship around lockdown and vaccination
[...]
- The role of mass and social media in anti- or pro-lockdown or vaccine propaganda, political polarization and forms of media virality (eg. via covid-19 memes)
[...]
- Mandatory vaccine rollouts as assaults to the feminist appeal to bodily autonomy
[...]
- Ethical considerations regarding mass experimentation, moral shaming and lateral citizen surveillance
[...]
- Teleological and theological narratives of science as salvation (eg. via vaccinations)

All beautiful examples of a "Querfront" discourse where extreme right positions are packaged in left-wing rhetoric. Not a single point, however, on minorities and vulnerable people and communities endangered by anti-vaccer egoism, and neo-Darwinist politics - for example in the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, of "herd immunity" through survival of the fittest.

You should invite Dutch experts Willem Engel and Thierry Baudet as keynote speakers.

-F

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