Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real,
are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is
on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of
viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf
of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a
governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can
deliberately compose itself.” This is, as the late Alex Cockburn
once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”...<<<Read More>>>...
