The Viral Theory Of Labor
The Viral Theory Of Labor
A Gamified Ideal of Human Bodies
Preface: The World is Yours
The 2006 videogame Scarface: The World Is Yours retcons the original ending of the iconic Brian De Palma film Scarface, with the iconic Tony Montana actually managing to survive the assault on his mansion in a coke-fueled rampage tutorial that teaches you the importance of swearing & mowing down your enemies with an M16A1 assault rifle. You guide Tony on an adventure to rebuild his empire and get revenge on his former drug-trafficking partner, Alejandro Sosa, by slaughtering and cursing up a storm across Miami.
For elaborate power fantasies to work, they require a deliberate re-writing of facts and history in order to be believable and exciting.
"You serve the public, not the other way around”
In a previous piece titled "Everybody Hates Howie," we talked about a horrific personal attack retweeted and endorsed by Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya of the astroturfed Neo-Confederate & Tea Party billionaire funded Great Barrington Declaration. What I didn't mention were Jay's own words about his "review" of Dr. Jonathan Howard's, an MD who actually treated COVID patients in the spring of 2020, book We Want Them Infected, reviewed by us here.
Jay’s words are so awful & horrific they defy belief. Here they are, emphasis mine:
“I wasn’t going to comment on the inane Jonathan Howard book on the pandemic, but I ran across an unhinged claim by him that ilustrates perfectly a certain covidian mindset that is too perfect to pass up.
…
Living your life is not irresponsible. Absent tremendous laptop class privilege, there is and was no way to hide away from the virus forever without harm to your physical, psychological, and economic health.
The unspoken root idea of his is that the general public owed it to doctors to not get covid because it would place doctors at risk of getting covid. Of course this is an inversion. Medical professionals serve the public, not the other way around.”
"[You] serve the public, not the other way around," was Stanford Health Economist Smilin' Jay's snarky one-liner to Dr. Howard, who has actually saved lives instead of simply spamming social media from behind a computer screen. Ironically enough, as we hinted at in a previous piece titled "The Burden of Command," we talk about Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya's fetish for sending men & women to preventable and pointless deaths as he enjoys the luxury & comfort of his “tremendous laptop class privilege,” provided for by a small army of line cooks, delivery drivers, etc.
There's a rather bizarre sentiment shared by pro-viral influencers, displaying an entitlement to the lives of certain members of the public based on their profession - teachers and doctors, especially - to accept endless infections, health complications, organ damage, and even death to uphold "normalcy," because they "serve the public, not the other way around." As if one is not entitled to a safe workplace free from disease, disability, and death.
What is also bizarre is the attempt at separating doctors and nurses from the public - when they are absolutely members of the larger collective public. The viral theory of labor that Jay Bhattacharya and his sycophants are professing is one in which doctors and teachers are expected to blindly march themselves off a cliff in a blazing self-sacrifice, so laptop classholes like Smilin' Jay can rant and rave in safety and comfort, without real-world responsibilities.
There is a sort of power fantasy in gleefully sending underlings to their deaths, one most commonly explored in “real-time strategy” videogames.
Marching the Faceless Into Death
In South Korea, the world of "e-Sports" was born thanks to high-level Starcraft and Age of Empires players that can perform a very high level of APMs, or "Actions Per Minute." Starcraft and Age of Empires are both Real Time Strategy games; a power fantasy in which one fetishizes their ability to rapidly micromanage an army. These "professional" players recruit, train, and send countless nameless & faceless soldiers off into battle with little purpose other than to just die less than their opposing commander's forces. These soldiers lack names, faces, and individuality - as Starcraft and Age of Empires are both highly abstracted approximations of the battlefield.
On the other hand, the 2020 wargame Radio General about the Canadian Armed Forces’ contributions to the fight against the Third Reich, actually requires you to write casualty letters to the mothers and wives of the men you sent to die on the battlefield - leaving you with a lingering reminder that men with families followed your commands and lost everything in pursuit of victory.
Jay Bhattacharya and his sycophants have never expressed an ounce of sympathy or support for the healthcare workers who fought to save lives. Instead, they wrote off the deaths of countless healthcare workers as simply “inevitable” and not worth preventing. This is fictional, moral depravity of people with zero empathy or decency.
Do Teachers and Nurses Grow on Trees?
Many pro-viral advocates refused to accept the reality that teachers and doctors are individual human beings with families and human rights, insisting that they be gleefully marched into the virus head-first towards a fugue state of “normalcy,” before a vaccine was even available and when many educators had already paid the ultimate price. Like vultures, those who seek to destroy public education and outlaw teacher’s unions were already hard at work demonizing teachers, a predominantly female profession (74.3% of teachers are women) for refusing to throw their lives in front of a brand new deadly & disabling virus. 86% of American nurses are women.
The expectation of men like Martin Kuldorff and Jay Bhattacharaya was that predominantly female coded professions like teachers and nurses were acceptable casualties in pursuit of “herd immunity” and “normalcy.” America is now facing a dangerous teacher and nursing shortage, one that is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon - can’t you just feel the normalcy? Last spring, Education Week reported that 1 in 5 teachers have been struggling with Long COVID. Pro-viral contrarians like Smilin’ Jay insist that this is all an elaborate fiction by hysterical broads.
Of course, the fact is that in the court of law, on multiple occasions, Jay Bhattacharya has been the one found to struggle with honesty. In Canada, this Stanford professor "stubbornly refused to admit that his statement...was inaccurate" in a court of law. Even better, a Canadian judge has declared what we’ve all learned the hard way:
"Dr. Bhattacharya was reluctant to accept any evidence or opinion that may cast doubt on his opinions." -Honourable Justice B.E. Romaine
This lines up with the caricature of economic disparity under feudalism: the wealthy nobles partying and stuffing themselves like gluttons off the backs of a disposable, exploited serfdom, just completely detached from reality and celebrating their own grandeur. The end-game of the libertarian crusade is thus: a dystopian neo-feudalist hellhole in which the vast majority of the country wastes away as the disposable underclass for the luxury and comfort of a partying elite forcing their elaborate fantasies upon them, whilst a dying world loses the ability to sustain human life. Sadly, we are seeing the beginnings of this endgame play out in real-time.
“Human rights” are for a landed nobility, who are entitled to an endless stream of dead and disabled underclass serfs to preserve their temporarily luxury & comfort. Starting with teachers and nurses, predominantly female professions, is how wealthy and comfortable men with zero real-world responsibility are training the public to accept mass death and disability. That’s the hellscape your children are being marched into and have to resist if one believes a free democracy and civil society is necessary to survive our looming climate collapse.
