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luka

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They're all fat they only eat McDonald's suckled on the corporate teat. Fluoride zombies.

image.jpeg
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Lot of Americans are pretty massive, I guess?

there seems to be a relation between those ending up on intensive care stations and overweight. dutch news is reporting that 90% of all people on intensive care have overweight. apparently the virus attaches to so called ACE2-receptors. the lungs and the stomach have a lot of those and so have fat cells.
 
there seems to be a relation between those ending up on intensive care stations and overweight. dutch news is reporting that 90% of all people on intensive care have overweight. apparently the virus attaches to so called ACE2-receptors. the lungs and the stomach have a lot of those and so have fat cells.

Yep. America's going to have this worst of all, worse than Italy, given the state of the majority of people there. Obesity, diabetes, general lack of respiratory health and dependence on pharmaceuticals.

I'm curious about how statins affect mortality, not seen any data on that yet.

From Le Figaro:

Are overweight or obese people more likely to develop severe forms of the new coronavirus ? Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department at Bichat hospital in Paris, makes the observation: "More than 80% of those under 50 who are in intensive care at our home because of the Covid-19 are in this case". His colleague Xavier Lescure, infectious disease specialist in the same hospital, abounds: "It is the most common factor for people who develop a severe form of the disease and who have no other history." An audit by the Intensive Care National Audit and Resource Center in London on people hospitalized in several British establishments also goes in the same direction: 72% of people placed in intensive care were overweight (with a higher body mass index BMI at 25) or obese.
 
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version

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I just read an intriguing little post about Baudrillard's simulacra in relation to coronavirus and how our mental image of what a pandemic looks like and how to respond to one has for a lot of us been almost entirely formed from depictions in art and pop culture and that mental image is about to collide with the real thing. Notice people keep saying it "feels like something from a film" or it "doesn't feel real".
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I felt something like that the other day when we went shopping and I looked around and suddenly it hit me that everyone was wearing masks and gloves and stuff. Or alternatively it was the opposite, I'd just noticed and accepted it as the new real until that jarring moment. It's like it switches between real and bizarre at random moments. Good news is we'll have plenty of time to get used to it.
In other news, I notice that Duterte is keeping his citizens safe from dying of or even catching the Coronavirus by, er, ordering police to shoot dead anyone who breaks quarantine.
 

luka

Well-known member
I just read an intriguing little post about Baudrillard's simulacra in relation to coronavirus and how our mental image of what a pandemic looks like and how to respond to one has for a lot of us been almost entirely formed from depictions in art and pop culture and that mental image is about to collide with the real thing. Notice people keep saying it "feels like something from a film" or it "doesn't feel real".

I don't understand this post. Can you post the link so I can read it?
 

luka

Well-known member
I thought the initial plan was the use Hyde Park but I guess it's easier to use the poorest place in the country.
 

luka

Well-known member
I highly recommend this essay on the virus.

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2020/03/gobblydumped-simultaneity-crown-of.html

"All systems, political, economic, healthcare, social, psychological, ecological are at this very moment in free fall. No encompassing narrative is satisfactory. Did it arise from a biological weapons laboratory, an exotic wet market, a vaccine accident, a meteor, a media panic? From the Other -- the Chinese or the Americans or an endangered species? Is it a hoax, hysteria, prophecy, judgement, nightmare?

It is chews up and spits out conspiracy theories just as fast as it devours any established narratives, the latter in recent years having already become as fractured as the former. Global terrorism seems so solid and understandable compared to this, almost nostalgic. Every witness has become a participant. Mental anxiety and panic, disrupting sleep and well-being, compromises our immune systems and invites in the “virus.” The world is flying and screaming towards oneness and the long-suppressed Shadow is bursting out from every crack. Aleph and false Aleph present and absent in each cell.

The plunge or upswell or overflowing was inevitable. Our bodies and minds, extended to encompass the entire planet, have woven us all into a single fabric, a single individual containing multitudes. Nature has already accomplished this millions of years ago, of course, and Chaos has always been this, but it has taken a long hard time for us to make this a conscious and personal realization, to connect all of our stories together.

And by no means has the swamp been drained yet. Even now, the Secret Hypothetical Object is just barely in view to some. A new Incarnation invades our dimension, a Beast and a Minotaur and a Starchild, but only a growing few recognize its outline and echo. We don't know yet if it brings peace or a sword or both. We don't know yet if we are diving or drowning.

But the method, the novel way of reading, of simultaneity, of epiphany beyond synchronicity, is our practice in attempting to see the entire symbol. To grasp it all at once. It is both adventure and a survival skill. A means and ritual to change the nature of time, and to heal the self and the world. A voyage through Faerie and the mundus imaginalis that lands us right back home, in this room at 1:28 in the afternoon."
 

version

Well-known member
Can we look at the Covid-19 situation in the context of Baudrillard's simulacra?

I only have a very rudimentary understanding of this concept so I'll just outline it and I'd be interested in other people's thoughts. I'm interested in the fact that a large portion of society has quite a well constructed mental image of what a pandemic looks like, from a vast amount of pop culture and art produced over the century since the 1918 influenza pandemic, but probably very few people have experience of the real world situation.

It seems that our experience and even the actions and policies of our elites may be guided and constructed through these simulacra.

Note I am not suggesting nor do I believe that the pandemic is not real and is constructed in the sense of The Gulf War did not Take Place. I just find it odd that we all have such a well defined mental model of what a pandemic looks like without ever having experienced one before.

And here are some of the responses,

I think you're onto something in that the 'mental image of what a pandemic looks like' is about to encounter 'the live experience of pandemic.'

It’s not that the virus isn’t a serious threat but people’s interpretation of current events is colored by pop culture representations of pandemics. Baudrillard presented the simulacra as a coercive tool that elites use to manipulate the public. Maybe this is happening with covid. There has definitely been sensationalization in the media but the virus is definitely real and there is no vaccination. If anything, I think they may be using our understanding of apocalyptic pandemics (brought to us by pop culture simulacra) to inspire an exaggerated fear in the public.

Regardless, our brains are being warped right now. And thinking about these ideas is as important as ever. This is a great conversation to start.

Besides the contrast between our borrowed idea of a pandemic and the reality of it - I think there is something real in people getting a strange joy out of "living in the end times". This is the Freudian Death Drive that gives us a thrill watching movies like Contagion, that keeps us discussing and watching the news. We all know we're going to die one day so activities that bring us closer to it makes us value our lives and the lives of others more, esp. in the heat of the moment. But since we sit back and watch these shows on screens, we are cut off from instinctual behaviour that would engage in and release this death drive. The death drive becomes stagnant, we become cynical, nihilistic. We end up knowing how horrible the deaths of others in this world are but we can't really BELIEVE in how horrible it is. Knowing something is true doesn't mean we act like it is true. We end up not being able to be bothered by the inundation of info, of tragic facts broadcasted from the end times...

It's very difficult for people to see beyond the simulacra. Communication depends on description, but the map is not the territory. The trade-off for this world of omnipresent real-time communication that we live in is that the map is all-encompassing, all-engrossing, and the scary thing is - one you are exposed to the idea of a thing, it takes the place of the thing itself in your mind.

We are rapidly losing track that there ever was a terrain.

There is a way out, but it involves psychological depth work (introspection, analysis) - which few are prepared to do, preferring the fantasies in which they live to the starker reality that lies behind it. But the reality still exists, even if people can't see it.

We talk about living in virtual reality sometime in the future, but we've been living in virtual reality for a long time already now.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Yes the virus caused the markets to crash. The virus caused us to print tens of trillions of dollars. All of this needed due to the shock caused by the virus. The virus caused massive reduction in demand for gasoline. all the gasoline we once wanted we dont want it anymore because of the virus. We have started buying corporate bonds with the direct proceeds of the printing press (electronic) because the virus caused such a lack of faith in everything that all of the prices fell. the virus is a direct cause of people buying gold and silver right now due to their anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties. It is no longer possible to find gold anywhere because people are very very sick right now. you have to stay at home and your movement must be tracked by gps etc etc because the virus.

that is all

A kind of martial law has taken hold and we all were OK with it. Because in the movies, that's what we have to do. Weather or not it's right, the reason people aren't fighting it is because it's what is expected of us, although none of us have any experience with this.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't think it's the death drive exactly. We willed on the catastrophe but not because we wanted to die but because we wanted to bring the world back to life.
 
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