Dear Ed,
Thanks for your email about Umair's latest article.
I couldn't locate a free online copy either.
But...
Consider this.
I don't know if you need to join Twitter (which is free), or if you can access Umair's account just by googling.
In any event, here's a sample "thread." (Be sure to read the three tweets referencing a "failed state," "Caligula and Nero" and "gestapo tactics that are nightmarish and surreal.")
portraits of a collapsing civilization
Quote Tweet
Victoria Beckham, who’s personal handbag collection is worth £1.5m and who is valued with husband David at £335m, is billing taxpayer to furlough her 30 fashion company staff. How does she sleep at night?
Quote Tweet
the tech industry has generally shied away from meaningful investments in new government, civic and physical infrastructure to invest in ad- or subscription-driven business models that can achieve enormous financial returns within a decade
Didn’t really wanna tweet today (do I ever?), but this stuff is alarming even to me. And I live in a kind of state of...you know. Seeing the future burn
Americans may not be learning the lesson of being a failed state, but you can bet the world is.
After all this is over, America’s going to be seen as a nation to run away from, not do business
or make allies with. (Alan: Emphasis mine.)
All this is genuine fall of Rome level stuff. It takes caligulas and neros maybe to do what America’s gov is doing, blocking supplies during a pandemic. And it takes a populace lulled to complacency by myths of exceptionalism to numbly accept it (Alan: Emphasis mine.)
Meanwhile, you have the lunatics out in force wanting to be”liberated” from lockdown in a pandemic, in a spectacular textbook example of being a literal death cult that even sci fi can’t really improve on
I’m not even really sure what to call a government that actively stops supplies reaching hospitals during a pandemic. Authoritarian certainly doesn’t cut it. Fascist is almost an understatement. America’s reaching levels of being a failed state we have no real vocabulary for
It is actually unbelievable, I think if in any other country the government was blockading shipments and interrogating doctors it’d fall in days. But Americans shrug and go on. And the nightmare just this continues.
Nobody really seems capable of knocking sense into Americans so let me just quietly observe that other governments are inept and incompetent and clumsy, sure. But not a single I can see appears to be malicious to the point of weaponizing a pandemic, after barely responding to it
Americans accept way too much failure from the leaders and institutions and my feeling is they’ll shrug and normalize this too. But the government blockading shipments of supplies and interrogating doctors during a pandemic is not normal. It is jaw dropping levels of failed state
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