Society

Apps are the 21st century’s answer to everything, it seems to Cockburn. Faced with a problem, sooner or later some wiseacre will show up with one that will not only provide a solution but also vastly improve the lives of all that use it. The miracles of smartphone tech are now being used to deal with the poor, huddled masses who have fetched up in one of the many refugee areas along the US-Mexico border. With tens of thousands of asylum seekers caught up in a vast tangle of bureaucratic delays and no short-term fix in sight, everyone is getting understandably vexed. Enter technology.

There are some wondrous revelations in Dr Anthony Fauci's over-3,200-page email trove acquired by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people — particularly Republican politicians — are fixating on the several emails from other experts mentioning the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have been engineered at and emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are right to do so — but there are some other gems in there too. A tipster pointed Cockburn to a February 2020 email from then-New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr, in which he describes how Americans 'tend to act like selfish pigs'. In contrast, McNeil tells Fauci that 'a lot of average Chinese behaved incredibly heroically'.

In a Department of Homeland Security Senate hearing in April 2012 on ‘Biological Security: The Risk of Dual-Use Research’, Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the National Institute of Health partnered with the Department of Defense on controversial dual-use research projects. Dual-use research, of which gain-of-function research is a kind, can involve examining the ability to manipulate natural viruses to become more transmissible or possibly even a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research has found its way into the pandemic lexicon due to the resurgence of questions regarding the origins of COVID-19.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

The theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory has completed its year-long trudge — from fringe nutjob idea to mainstream and expert-approved opinion. Leading scientists and epidemiologists such as none other than Dr Anthony Fauci were so quick to dismiss the ‘lab talk’. It was first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media. Now it is seen as not only an acceptable theory worth more study, but one that has broken through into the mainstream. This has happened in a matter of days. Where does Sen. Tom Cotton go for his apology?

America has become a nation of butt fetishists. I’m not judging. I’m not calling for a moral crusade; it’s far too late for morality in America. I’m just observing the passing of one dispensation in manners and the establishment of another, like Talleyrand after the French Revolution. The bottom is one of the few areas in which the US can claim to lead the world. California, with its porn and internet industries, saturates the global imagination with images of the callipygous American butt in action. Rap videos, a hybrid of music and porn, teach twerking to the innocents of Asia. Anal sex has become so vogueish that Teen Vogue advises its readers on how to do it. This reflects the pornification of absolutely everything in the names of entertainment and personal freedom.

Since the early days of COVID-19, public health experts have been frequently wrong and unreliable. 'Trust the science' now sounds like a sarcastic joke. People want to know how long lockdowns and various mask requirements will last. When, or even if, they will get a vaccine. What about vaccine passports? The science doesn’t seem to know. So we listen to politicians. President Joe Biden recently shed some light by announcing that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors and outdoors, in most settings. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had previously weighed in with an executive order lifting all COVID-related restrictions statewide until a new law begins in July allowing him to overrule local governments.

Someday, we’ll count them like fallen soldiers: the online platforms that began by promising to be different, an escape from the grind of endless internet flame wars, and ended up like all the others, captured by memeified outrage. The trajectory is always the same. Tumblr, originally a home for cheeky fanblogs with titles like ‘fuckyeahsharks!’, was overtaken in a few short years by the ‘Your Fave Is Problematic’ brand of outrage archaeology. Facebook started as a place to collect your photos, share updates about your lunch and platonically ‘poke’ your friends, only to devolve into a wasteland abandoned by virtually everyone except a bunch of angry boomers battling over whether or not Hillary Clinton does, in fact, eat babies. Twitter...

Former first lady Michelle Obama told late night host Stephen Colbert this week that she suffers from 'low-grade depression' and anxiety. If you rolled your eyes at that self-diagnosis, you're not alone. Mrs Obama has joined the hordes of celebrities who have publicly spoken about dealing with anxiety disorder, including Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Cardi B, Adele and Jennifer Lawrence. Apparently this is supposed to make these mega-rich, ultra privileged individuals more relatable to the average human. I mean, who doesn't get a bit nervous before embarking on a worldwide singing tour or giving a 'thank you' speech after receiving an Oscar?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it,’ said Joe Biden. ‘It still matters.’ Sorry, Mr President, I disagree. After more months than I care to count of rigorously strapping a face covering across my mouth and nose, I’ve decided to shed the mask. Now, after nine maskless days, I can say that I have never felt so sensible, so liberated and so, well, attractive. In fact, I cannot recommend it enough. I first shed the mask by accident after getting slightly drunk one evening. Who cares, I thought, as I hurled myself on to the subway.

Your business may have closed, your kids still aren’t in school, nana hasn’t had a hug in 18 months, and your uncle drank himself to death from the crippling isolation — but the real tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the luckless fats are feeling stigmatized again. Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times detailed the tearful struggle of being grotesquely obese in the age of COVID-19. ‘Chrystal Bougon cried after the needle went into her arm. Not because her first dose of the Moderna vaccine hurt. But because, finally, being fat actually paid off,’ the article begins. ‘Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight.