The Grinders

2022 is a zombie movie, and it sucks

This week, #BringBackMasks is trending on Twitter. A conversation you were tired of hearing by June of 2020 at the latest is still burning like a prairie fire in September of 2022, in the same nudgescold caring language that was so grating two years ago. I just want to forcibly hug your face with this mask, because hugging is love!

Dr. Giorgia Tropini, MD MSc CCFP 🇺🇦 (she/her) @DrGTropini

Like many HCWs, I often wear a 😷 for hrs at a time with no breaks. I do not understand why masking in indoor essential services (eg grocery, pharmacies, transport) hasn’t been implemented to protect vulnerable people. Masking is not a hardship. It’s caring. #BringBackMasks

Dalia Hasan @DaliaHasanMD

Bring back equity Bring back safety Bring back health #BringBackMasks

Meanwhile the wonderful not-a-fascist Jacinda Ardern demands speech limits on the open forum of the Internet to prevent “misinformation and disinformation online,” like a T-1000 Nina Jankowicz sent from the future to kill John Connor, except that in this case “John Connor” is a euphemism for “what’s left of your soul.”

Wittgenstein @backtolife_2023

PM Jacinda Ardern calls internet freedom a “weapon of war” in most recent UN speech. Calls for a new type of internet with “rules and transparency”. “How do you tackle climate change if people don’t believe it exists”. Source: t.me/FreeMediaNZ/594

We’ve had every one of these discussions over and over and over and over and over and over again, for years. The Biden administration’s dank little disinformation commissariat was smothered with a cultural pillow, so here are a thousand more tedious midwit wokescolds furrowing their brows and doing worried noises about the disturbing fact that people are still allowed to say stuff online, and shouldn’t we have some kind of, I don’t know, government board to put a stop to that?

Never forget that we all lived through this together

Every conversation is the same conversation. It’s a Chuck Norris joke come to life: The technocratic managerial elite doesn’t sleep — it waits. You’re yawning and pouring your first cup of morning coffee and THERE THEY ARE, #BringBackMasks! Masking is caring DON’T YOU DARE RUN FROM ME.

They just keep coming back. They’re tedious, they’re inane, they have no substance but slogans and status anxiety, and they never stop. It’s an argument with people who never tire of having the same argument. By the way, Hillary Clinton just said that Trump and his supporters are exactly like Nazis. Didn’t see that one coming, I bet.

“We need to put guardrails on our discourse to protect our democracy.” — Hillary Clinton, March 4, 2059

If you’ve read the news at some point in the last several years, you’ve read all of tomorrow’s news that isn’t a hurricane. The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, Version 104.0.5255.134.

We’ve somehow evolved a set of cultural performers who do not get tired of ritual chanting. They grind at their talking points, and they appear to like it. Journalists type up the story they’ve written daily since 2016, and feel satisfied to have put in a good day at work. Politicians wear a somber mask, and warn in urgent tones that online disinformation is an emerging threat that demands a response. (“We must take steps to protect our democracy.”) There was a season of Westworld like this, with robots that kept waking up in the town again right before the new gunfight, and it was so painfully boring I had to run through the living room when my wife had it on the TV.

I did not anticipate the possibility of actually living like this.