Coronavirus: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Wed Sep 29 01:50:48 PDT 2021


>From 1984 and the land of retard we bring you...


Academia Is Establishing A Permanent Surveillance Bureaucracy That
Will Soon Govern The Rest Of The Country

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/academia-is-establishing-a-permanent

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1439639912450494464
https://mtracey.substack.com/p/theres-an-insane-australia-style
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/
https://mtracey.substack.com/p/lockdown-chronicles-why-im-going
https://mtracey.substack.com/p/in-connecticut-the-new-permanent
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1437957019055579137
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1440106732223705088
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1439436848435236869
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1440106732223705088
https://twitter.com/MDiamond8/status/1439914984729894920
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1439619768269615107
https://twitter.com/GYamey/status/1439951766854930435

Having now received a tsunami of messages from people across the US
(and a few internationally) about the surveillance regimes being
permanently installed at their educational institutions — in
contravention of earlier assurances that the current academic year
would mark a long-awaited “return to normalcy,” thanks to the onset of
mass vaccination - there are a few conclusions to draw.

First: unless and until COVID “cases” are abandoned as a metric by
which policy action is presumptively dictated, these institutions are
destined to continue flailing from irrational measure to irrational
measure for the foreseeable future. Just turn your gaze over to one of
America’s most hallowed pedagogical grounds: As of September 17,
Columbia University has newly forbidden students from hosting guests,
visiting residence halls other than their own, and gathering with more
than ten people. The stated rationale for these restrictions?
Administrators have extrapolated from the “contact tracing” data
they’ve compulsorily seized that a recent increase in viral
transmission is attributable to “students socializing unmasked at
gatherings in residence halls and at off-campus apartments, bars, and
restaurants.” (Socializing at apartments, bars, and restaurants in the
middle of Manhattan — gee, I can’t imagine anything more heinous.)

Just like Connecticut College and so many other institutions I’ve been
taking flurries of messages about, Columbia has already mandated
vaccination for all students, faculty, and staff, and is approaching
100% compliance. But as has now been made abundantly clear, for many
people in positions of bureaucratic authority, universal vaccination
was never going to be sufficient for a transition away from the
“Permanent Emergency” mode of COVID exegetical theology. The perverse
incentives are easy to grasp. These administrators have so much
invested in the infrastructure of “case” detection they’ve constructed
over the past year and a half — not to mention the wider ideological
project of “stopping the spread” at all costs — that it’s impossible
to imagine conditions under which they’d voluntarily move to dismantle
the surveillance systems over which they preside. And not just because
the new powers conferred by this infrastructure — the ability to
micromanage the private lives of young adults, track and adjudicate
the propriety of their movements, etc. — is probably creepily
intoxicating on a level these administrators may not be overtly
conscious of, and in any event would almost certainly never publicly
admit.

No, the infrastructure won’t be dismantled any time soon because doing
so would also require accepting a major paradigm shift in how COVID is
understood. And for certain segments of society, that whole system of
thought is just too all-consuming. Benign instances of transmission —
i.e. transmission that results in no severe disease, which is almost
invariably the case with vaccinated young adults at astronomically low
risk from COVID — would have to stop being portrayed as alarming
“outbreaks,” necessitating a never-ending stream of frenzied Zoom
strategy meetings and swift, all-hands-on-decks interventionist
tactics. The very word outbreak would also probably have to be
ditched, given its alarmist connotations. I would suggest instead that
outbreak be applied to these frantic upswells of bureaucratic
overreaction. Perhaps the epidemiological origins of this diseased
mentality could be “contact traced.”

Why should anyone be alarmed by an alleged “outbreak” of
overwhelmingly asymptomatic or mild “cases” among a population of
healthy vaccinated undergrads — “cases” which would never have been
detected at all if not for the superfluous “surveillance testing”
structures that these institutions require students submit to? And
before anyone chimes in with the standard “because they can transmit
to others” response: the “others” they’re surrounded by have had the
opportunity to get vaccinated at no cost for the past eight months.
Even the US prestige media is beginning to reject the utility of using
“cases” as a benchmark for anything of consequence, so you’d think
college administrators would eventually follow suit, but a combination
of bureaucratic inertia and weirdly flamboyant zeal appears to be
preventing that from happening.

Having read way too much administrative jargon recently, there are a
number of obnoxious rhetorical strategies they employ to engender
acceptance of edicts that more and more people seem to recognize are
wildly, overbearingly arbitrary. “We all have to hold each other
accountable,” these administrators will often pronounce, or some
variation thereof, which ironically shields them from accountability
for their own capricious and intrusive actions. Their orders are often
cloyingly filled with artificial appeals to “the community,” which
raises the question of who elected these surveillers and snoops to be
spokespersons for “the community,” and how they even define
“communities,” which seem to contain growing segments of unwilling
inhabitants.

One key thing to know is that despite their pretension of acting at
the direction of “expert” epidemiologists and public health officials,
the day-to-day decisions about practical implementation at these
places often come down to the individual discretion of officials who
in no sane world would ever be deferred to on questions of infectious
disease protocol, or really anything else of significance. The latest
restrictions at Columbia were promulgated by the “Dean of
Undergraduate Student Life,” one of those titles which you know must
encompass a whole slew of useless, indecipherable makework — and now
tends to include a never-ending cycle of COVID monitoring. In her
official bio, Dean Cristen Scully Kromm of Columbia is described as
having an esteemed background in something called “residence life and
leadership oversight.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of few
things more unappealing than to have my personal activity surveilled
by official busybodies who have dedicated their careers to learning
the majesties of “leadership oversight,” which sounds like a field
invented specifically for people who actually enjoy receiving LinkedIn
emails.

Thanks to my trusty network of informants, I was able to listen in on
a Zoom meeting held Sunday night by Dean Victor Arcelus, the chief
COVID decider at my old stomping grounds of Connecticut College. I
apologize again for the unrelenting focus on this obscure liberal arts
college in southeastern Connecticut, but it’s just become
irresistible. Dean Arcelus convened a panel of all his subordinate
Deans involved in the crafting of COVID rules; studying the
credentials of these people sure is fascinating.

One member of the ad hoc infectious disease task force, Ariella Rabin
Rotramel, currently serves as the College’s “Interim Dean of
Institutional Equity and Inclusion,” and is also Associate Professor
of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies, with a specialty
in “Queer Theory and Activism.” Here is Rotramel answering a Zoom
question from an anonymous student:

I’m sure they is a lovely person, but it’s unclear why Rotramel should
be endowed with authority to issue virology-related policy
pronouncements. Either way, they gave some indication that they is
perhaps not up for the task, describing the whole situation as
“exhausting” — that familiar exasperated rallying cry of activists
demanding acquiescence.

Demonstrating his unparalleled leadership abilities, however, Dean
Arcelus stated that he was “quite disappointed” at reports that
parties had been rudely held this past weekend at an on-campus
residential facility. “There will be conduct consequences,” he warned.
“Suspension is most definitely on the table.” Though the most extreme
variation of the Australia-style lockdown had been lifted just hours
after my visit last week, students are still being ordered not to
partake in normal social gatherings such as parties (gasp) or going to
bars (gasp).

“If you have parties, if you go to the bars, you’re not going to be
able to have everything else,” the Dean exhorted, threatening that
those who misbehave could prompt a return to lockdown for everybody.
However, he did leave a glimmer of hope, enticing students that “if we
were able to see that you all were actually being really good” about
acceding to his prohibitions, then “things could potentially change.”

“The power in preventing this from happening again is in you and in
holding each other accountable,” Dean Arcelus continued. There’s that
ubiquitous feature of the contemporary college administrator jargon —
presumably tailored to the sensibilities of “accountability”-minded
young adults. Again with the added irony that these invocations of
“accountability” serve to deflect scrutiny from those who wield the
real decision-making power. In the name of “accountability,” students
become scapegoats for the irrational policy choices of the people
actually in charge. “Accountability” is usually also demanded on
behalf of some imagined “community,” so you are not to comply solely
at the behest of Dean Arcelus, but rather at the behest of some
diffused assemblage of individuals who are claimed to represent a
unified community. There’s always this incredibly annoying pretense
that bureaucratic operatives and public health “experts” are alone the
most exalted guardians of “community safety,” and if you don’t agree
with them on moral, practical, or epidemiological grounds, you are a
menace.

“Moving forward, none of you should be OK with people not having a
mask on inside, or not having it properly worn,” the Dean inveighed,
again appealing to the shockingly pervasive snitch culture being
fertilized at this and other academic institutions. Deans at
Georgetown University and the University of Southern California have
also been sending out these imperious injunctions for students to rat
out the alleged violators among them, or as USC Law School Andrew T.
Guzman put it in that typically manipulative style: “non-compliant
members of our community.” What’s a “non-compliant member” of the USC
“community,” exactly? Someone who engages in unsanctioned indoor
“hydration.” No, I’m not kidding.

Do you find any of this arbitrary or ridiculous? Tough luck. Because
nowadays all public and private officials apparently have to do is
incant the magic word “Delta,” and people whose dictates about proper
interpersonal behavior would otherwise be ignored are suddenly imbued
with this awesome, unchallengeable power. Their decrees must be
obeyed, preferably with effusions of gratitude. Forcing masks on
crying two-year-olds? “Delta.” Forbidden to remove your mask for a few
seconds in order to take a sip of water at USC, even as a lavish and
unmasked Emmys extravaganza just took place right down the road?
“Delta.” Shutting down a special needs school in East Harlem less than
a week into the academic year? “Delta.” Concerned about the privacy
implications of being made to walk around with your health information
stored on mandatory smartphone apps, as is the current policy at the
University of Michigan, and being made to display this information on
command? “Delta.” Also, I just saved a bunch of money on my car
insurance by switching to Delta.

For all his foibles, at least Dean Arcelus nicely encapsulates the
mindset which is now running rampant at major US educational
institutions — the same institutions producing the graduates who will
soon be governing the rest of the country. At the disciplinary Zoom
meeting, the good Dean admitted: “I know all of us thought, going into
getting vaccinated in April and May, we thought that we would be able
to come back to campus and live campus differently [sic] having been
vaccinated… But as I’ve said multiple times now, the Delta Variant
just presents a whole new level of challenge to us. And that’s why we
can’t do what we thought we were going to be able to do back when we
got vaccinated in April and May.”

Well, there you have it. Vaccination was never the gateway to normalcy
it was presented to be, and the only option is apparently to instate
“Permanent Emergency” protocols with no cognizable “off-ramp” in
sight, as a Duke University “expert” helpfully conceded this week.
Reneging on these prior assurances is portrayed as some inherently
unavoidable fait accompli, rather than a conscious policy choice
undertaken to the exclusion of other vastly more sensible options.
Choosing another option would mean re-assessing the underlying logic
of constantly surveilling a 99% vaccinated population of healthy young
adults with these increasingly dubious “tests,” and gathering their
private data so as to opine about the permissibility of their social
activities. College administrators are totally committed —
politically, professionally, metaphysically — to that logic. There’s
also an entire financial infrastructure that’s been erected to sustain
the endless provision of nonsensical testing services. Ultimately,
these officials can’t or won’t extricate themselves from the scolding
surveillance paradigm — and why would they? That would entail the
relinquishment of power.


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