Masking Reality

... with VR goggles that only show you things that fit into your very, very narrow view of the world.

This essay, We Are No Longer A Serious People, by Antonio Garcia Martinez, is terrific. Here are the key tidbits if you don't want to click over to it.

(I)n the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?...

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game...

(T)he irony highlights the real civilizational difference here: one where combat is via prissy morality and pure spectacle, and one where the battles are literal and deadly. One where elites contest power via spiraling purity and virality contests waged online, and where defeat means ‘cancelation’ or livestreamed ‘struggle sessions’ around often imaginary or minor offenses. And another place where the price of defeat is death, exile, rape, destitution, and fates so grim people die dangling from airplanes in order to escape.

Tim has asked me why I'm so hung up on the masks. It finally dawned on me that it's not the masks, per se, that drive me bananas, it's what they represent. It's a flight from reality showing a preference for moral pornography. A mask isn't a medical device, it's a simple filter. It's a mechanical thing. Are the impurities you are trying to filter out larger or smaller than the gaps in the filter? If they are significantly smaller, then the filter is a waste of time, particularly if the impurities are more or less evenly distributed. That's before you consider the massive gaps in the filter's seal through which 95% of the fluid flows.

At my church, masks are optional, but right before Mass, the head of the choir gets on the mic and harangues us to wear them. She always says, "If you've already been vaccinated, we ask you to wear a mask as an act of charity." That drives me right up the wall. An act of charity to who? How? Vaccinated, I'm an inert node in the network and the mask is useless in any case. Why not call it an act of Egg McMuffin? That would make as much sense. I hate it.

And yet, here we are, with the head of the CDC saying that men can have babies and we should all employ utterly useless filtration systems. The American Lactation Society, or some such group, is using the term, "milk-giving humans." Climate scientists are howling about the end of the world as if we can do something about it when China and India dominate CO2 production. We are changing the name of our local high school from Junipero Serra High to something anodyne because it's said Serra was a racist and exploiter when instead he was, like so much of the world, from a culture our Elites can't comprehend.

The idiocy goes on and on and on.

I'd change one line in the excerpt above. It would read, "The cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of their own neuroses."

A serious country's executive leadership would not produce something like this.