On all sorts of confusion – Jenny Turner in LRB:

“Naomi Klein, who has had reason to make an extremely close study of this story, sees her collapse into conspiracism as sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, but having taken a sickening lurch in the Covid era: ‘tainted, murderous vaccines’; the World Health Organisation in league with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a ‘transnational group of bad actors’; ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide’. And it’s been no better since Wolf was allowed back on ‘X’, as we must now call it after Elon Musk took over Twitter. ‘Ed Dowd Reveals Astonishing Death Rates in the UK,’ her feed had pinned the last time I looked. Dowd is the author of a book that claims Covid vaccines are killing people, especially the young and apparently fit.
Klein herself, by contrast, is famous for the calm and poise with which she mainstreams a clear, solidly leftist political-economic critique: brands and marketing in No Logo (1999), the neoliberal takeover in The Shock Doctrine (2007), corporate greenwashing in This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. the Climate (2014). And yet Klein too found herself unravelling during the Covid era, as her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane, £25), relates. ‘“Gather together, find your footing and your story.” That is the advice I have been giving for two decades about how to stay out of shock during moments of collective trauma ... Solid advice. But Covid made it so very hard to act on.’”

(…)

“Klein had already noticed a habit, among the inattentive, of getting their Naomis mixed up – ‘We both write big-idea books ... We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blonde from overhighlighting ... We’re both Jewish,’ and both have enormous followings online. But the pandemic changed an occasional irritant into a full-on mind-fuck. Nine months into her rock-life new normal, Klein angrily responded to a Twitter user who had accused her of comparing government vaccine mandates to Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars: the algorithm, it turned out, was so accustomed to the word ‘Naomi’ being followed by ‘Wolf’ in such contexts that it was autocompleting it. ‘Which also meant that anything I did to correct the record ... would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more.’”

(…)

“It’s a huge mistake, Klein thinks, to see Wolf in recent years as having ‘lost it’. The New York Times no longer calls her, so she took her followers with her ‘over the edge’, where she found the new and even bigger audience of virus denialists and anti-vaxxers, wellness gurus and religious fundamentalists that Bannon was gathering in his twice-daily War Room. Bannon took it as a ‘badge of honour’, according to Stuart Thompson of the New York Times, when the Brookings Institution declared his talk show misinformation superspreader number one. ‘How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views?’ Klein asks. ‘If volume is the name of the game, these crossover stars who find new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.’ Wolf, as Klein says, may well still think Bannon is ‘the devil’, in which case she may be some sort of Faust. ‘She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror.’”

(…)

“The social industry, as Richard Seymour calls it, doesn’t just produce new doubles with every keystroke, it also enables casual sadism. ‘Come for the nectar of approval,’ Klein quotes Seymour. ‘Stay for the frisson of virtual death.’”

(…)

“The LRB last reviewed a book by Klein in 2014, when Paul Kingsnorth was unpersuaded by her case that climate change could be, indeed had to be, indeed was, best opposed by an unwieldy combination of Blockadia – the word she was then using for direct action of the Keystone XL-Ende Gelände sort – and a globally managed economic transition to social justice and green jobs. Kingsnorth’s piece was tremendously elegant and well-informed, but it left the reader with a worry. If he is right and it’s all too late already – what then?”

(…)

“Kingsnorth, meanwhile, moved to the west of Ireland to farm a piece of land with his wife and children. At the end of 2021 he published a series of essays collected in an e-book called The Vaccine Moment (2022), about his decision not to get vaccinated or comply with Ireland’s ‘vaccine passports’, and his horror at what he called ‘vaccine apartheid’, ‘a drumbeat media consensus’, ‘the systematic censoring of dissent’. ‘So we had to sit and watch all the newspaper columnists calling us neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists,’ he reminisced this May in a conversation with Freddie Sayers at the UnHerd Club, which I watched on UnHerd’s channel on YouTube. (UnHerd, for those who spend less time on the internet than I do, being a London-based purveyor of online content started in 2017 by Tim Montgomerie, who also founded ConservativeHome.) ‘So that was nice,’ Kingsnorth continued, looking sad.
Around the same time, Kingsnorth said, he was ‘stalked’ by Christ and has now converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. He’s done a talk about it, ‘What Is There Left to Conserve?’, also available on the UnHerd YouTube channel. The challenge, he says, is to choose your religion: ‘And if you don’t choose, if you try to avoid that challenge ... you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age, which is the attempt to build God and replace nature through technology.’ Everything in the world, Kingsnorth says, is religious ‘in a really fundamental sense’, but people have forgotten that in the dash to build ‘a digital Tower of Babel’, with the result that there’s nothing much of spiritual value left.”

Read the article here.

If you want to save the world, chances are high that you will be stalked by Christ or a Christ-like person.

As to “the nectar of approval” and the “the frisson of virtual death” this is the dirty secret in the corner of the room: other people’s pain is our pleasure, no, our people’s pain is our biggest pleasure.

Not always of course, not 24/7, if you see a female beggar on the subway with a child on her back you feel pity and most of other people’s bad luck is just slightly disgusting to people with less bad luck.

But then there are specials cases, those people falling from their towers, or just enemy soldiers, those who believe what should not be believed, those who haven’t seen the light and will never see the light, their pain is better than steak frites or a celery steak.