The Grinders
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!
Meanwhile the wonderful not-a-fascist Jacinda Ardern demands speech limits on the open forum of the Internet to prevent âmisinformation and disinformation online,â like a T-1000 Nina Jankowicz sent from the future to kill John Connor, except that in this case âJohn Connorâ is a euphemism for âwhatâs left of your soul.â
Weâve had every one of these discussions over and over and over and over and over and over again, for years. The Biden administrationâs 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 shouldnât we have some kind of, I donât know, government board to put a stop to that?
Every conversation is the same conversation. Itâs a Chuck Norris joke come to life: The technocratic managerial elite doesnât sleep â it waits. Youâre yawning and pouring your first cup of morning coffee and THERE THEY ARE, #BringBackMasks! Masking is caring DONâT YOU DARE RUN FROM ME.
They just keep coming back. Theyâre tedious, theyâre inane, they have no substance but slogans and status anxiety, and they never stop. Itâs 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. Didnât see that one coming, I bet.
âWe need to put guardrails on our discourse to protect our democracy.â â Hillary Clinton, March 4, 2059
If youâve read the news at some point in the last several years, youâve read all of tomorrowâs news that isnât a hurricane. The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, Version 104.0.5255.134.
Weâve 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 theyâve 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. (âWe must take steps to protect our democracy.â) 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.
Pronouns in bio, Ukranian flag.
That was easy.
Like a retard, I clicked through on both of the tweets.
There is seriously the same hamster-wheel arguing about mask efficacy.
The NPCs responsible for these tweets seriously argue that masking was some scientific breakthrough discovered in 2020. One compares it to the eye-rolling and skepticism that was first delivered upon hand washing.
I'm starting to think there really IS something to the NPC meme- that there is some baseline code that a lot of people run on, and it's starting to break down because of database bloat or something.
To exhaust the zombie meme a bit more, zombies as a literary device (like in movies, rather than from folklore or theology) were originally conceived of as representing the Marxist concept of lumpenproletariat- faceless NPCs. (There was a surprising amount of arrogance in Marxist theory visited upon the lower classes, despite Marxism allegedly despising class.)