on respirator discipline

and why this is the way

not the way, not a respirator

for six months, i took off my respirator.

yeah i’m not proud of it. i was chasing a love i thought had some value, is the only excuse i have - and she was done with sars2, so i had to be as well.

in order to prove that i was now a safe happy sars2 minimizer, i started going to a gym. as long as i kept up a gym routine with no respirator, i was ‘mentally healthy’ apparently.

as i lay on the mat in the dank, listless airspace listening to the hoarse coughs around me, i waited for the fear of infection i had been informed was in fact an irrational hangover of bygone days.

that fear never came. what i felt instead was this: stupid.

i felt really, really fucking stupid - and i hate feeling stupid. no matter how i looked at the situation, clean air was just always better. so i kept wearing my respirator to do errands, on the bus &c - just to feel less stupid. clean air became something i had to get on the sly, something sneaky, something tacit and forbidden.

while i was clutching at the sputtering embers of a long dead relationship, she insisted that we go out again, pretending everything was normal. the one concert i’ll ever participate in without a respirator after 2020 was a dreary, half-assed repetition of another show i had already seen. not only was it not worth it - it ended up being just another datum on the ‘sars2 killed live music’ list.

my ex eventually found out about my secret respirator usage. and that’s why she’s my ex now - and when i go to the gym, i do it smart: in a respirator.

not a respirator

clean air is just always better, and this is true down to the level of each individual breath. every gasp of cleaner air lengthens one’s expected health and lifespan relative to every huff of dirtier air - and this was true before sars2. it has been true the entire time, and this truth only gets more pertinent each day as we hurtle over the precipice of a failed multi-century social project founded on zoning public airspaces as waste disposal.

once the value of clean air has been realized - getting it becomes a constant priority, because without clean air, no life.

not only is clean air always better, it is an absolutely necessary material resource in every second of our lives. located at the base of maslow’s hierarchy of need, clean air is and has to be recognized as a human right, if the concept has any worth or use.

the inherent superiority of cleaner air is a test of intelligence - but it is the material necessity of clean air that requires care, and this is the political ethics gom jabbar. merely understanding that clean air is better will lead to someone who cleans the air defensively, passively, for themselves only. caring about the universal material necessity of clean air (as a human right, if that helps) leads to respirator discipline as a virtuous practice.

so - what is respirator discipline?

respirator discipline is incorporating the knowledge of the necessity and superiority of clean air into one’s everyday life practice. and this means wearing an FFP2 or better respirator in all public social interactions - from now till collapse.

you’ll note that neither the necessity nor the superiority of clean air require any particular knowledge about sars2, or about airborne virus transmission.

so then why didn’t we do this all the time before 2020?

well, my only excuse is ignorance - i was raised in a backwards, ignorant subjectivist culture, and we just didn’t fucking know.

now tho - now i know. and knowing what i do now - every human on the planet should be handed a lifetime supply of n95s at birth.

clean air is that important, and n95s are good enough at cleaning the air to qualify as one of our most effective technologies, possibly ever. but most humans would have to reprogram their social conditioning in order to practice respirator discipline scientifically, as their current ontological boundary for their selfhood apparently stops before the faceholes. so even if we all had infinite access to post-scarcity respirators - very few would practice still.

not an evolutionarily acceptable adaptation, this.

not a respirator

it’s not a socially acceptable adaptation either, as no reciprocal relation can be established with people who will eagerly and gleefully spread deadly disabling disease for toys and snacks, which is what sars2 minimization/normalization amounts to. respirator discipline can never be just about making the smartest scientific decisions for one’s health.

lack of or refusal to practice respirator discipline during the sars2 event constitutes a violent act of bioterrorism - a plainly and explicitly stated hierarchy of preference in both theory and practice for particular human lives over others that amounts to casual democide, and the end of the hypothetical credibility of most public facing bourgeois institutions, codes, and structures.

facetanking is a practice that destroys any bodily autonomy, theoretical or otherwise, in everybody around the disease spreader - for a sars2 spreader is someone who is weaponizing the air in the lungs of the bodies of the other. this makes sars2 minimizers/normalizers probably the single most vicious totalitarians in history - creatures so terrifically self-absorbed no honest or intelligent entity can be in the same room with them without being damaged by their senility and ignorance.

public airspaces are shared spaces in the most radical sense imaginable - everymonkey sharing body fluids and particles with each other all the time. when you walk into an airspace with no respirator, you may as well be fucking everymonkey in the room without any prophylactics at all.

and then bringing all that shit home with you too.

still not a respirator

while i was off of the righteous clean air bandwagon, i was still hyper aware of my contribution to this situation. every time i saw someone in a respirator i flinched away, knowing what it was like to be on the other side of the democide, knowing that i could be making the situation better, but wasn’t - for love, ffs.

i began experiencing cognitive dissonance again, for the first time in decades. a deeply unpleasant reminder that if my ethics and my practice aren’t in line, then my mind can no longer be trusted - even by me.

it’ll never be a respirator

all of which went away immediately when i put my respirator back on for reals, at the expense of my relationship with a woman who no longer has the capacity to empathize or humanize with the people she casually social murders as a ‘career’. and now ofc i can really preach that good respirator news, having experienced both sides of the equation.

but there are no excuses, and to utilize love as an excuse is to defile it. i definitely hurt myself and others while i was participating in the garden of nurgle, and i’m sorry.

no.

respirator discipline then is an inherently dialectical practice, for in doing it we generate both internal health and external virtue. it is a feedback loop that can only have positive personal results, even if it inevitably results in the dissolution of false relationships with sociopaths, and collapsing nurglistic institutions with no credibility (like hospitals, churches, orchestras, prisons, restaurants, bars, schools, &c). sars2 minimizers/normalizers are complicit in the second largest crime against humanity in history after capitalism itself, and once somebody shows you that not only are they fine with that kind of ethical complicity, they’re also willing to destroy every organ in your body for their own convenience - then there is no more basis upon which to build any lasting trust or respect.

 and without trust or respect, 

           love is just an hallucination.

but the disintegration of fake relations is an opportunity to build new ones, and the good news is that with people who do and have been committed to respirator discipline for half of a decade now - well, that’s a whole lot of pre-built trust and respect now isn’t it?

ain’t a respirator tho

furthermore, in the absence of any coherent revolutionary subject/project in the westcores (despite their immanent demise) - the disabled subject remains one of the last universal subject positions. liberal idealism is structurally ableist, and so - so is the default commodifed subject manifest image template. able-bodiedness then already limits liberal universality to a vanishingly small minority, for we are born disabled, die disabled, and spend our lives being disabled by capitalist social relations.

this means that everymonkey has a(nother) split in their subjectivity - one between their abled-self, and their disabled-self. and identification with one’s disabled-self is necessary to access this dimension of solidarity.

it goes like this: when one is vulnerable, i am vulnerable.

respirator discipline will instill this in a subject automatically, as wearing a respirator signifies that one is disabled to the ableists. it really shouidn’t take much casual abuse to make the dividing lines clear: ableists are terrified of their disabled-selves, and that’s what respirator discipline reminds them of.

they feel fear when they see the respirator - and this is why they associate the practice with fear, altho it is more a correlate of courage.

doesn’t create a seal around ur faceholes

for be it the scientific surety of the superiority of clean air or an ethic against social murder, those who practice respirator discipline have shown themselves to be minimally capable of entering into post-capitalist, post-holocene relations by demonstrating their ethical resilience, mental fortitude, and capacity for independent thought every damn day, against a tidal wave of totalitarian ignorance and indifference. not only this - but you can see these virtues at a distance, eliminating a ton of ambiguity about pre-2020 commodified social relations. sars2 is functioning as an historical gom jabbar, and even tho the minority who passed this threshold is too tiny to make much of a difference - the gom jabbar does not lie.

being in the presence of a person who respects the air in everybody’s lungs equally is an impossible joy compared to the listless formalities that constitute socializing with nurglists. every tiny gesture, every moment becomes an expression of care, and an entire language of love, respect, and trust blooms eternally - all from the mutual reinforcement of respirator discipline, maybe the greatest trust building exercise available to us in our historical moment. relations based on respirator solidarity show up the other kinds of commodified relations available to us as worthless in terms of time investment - there is no social relation,

   but now, there can be.

insofar as these stupid things do anything at all n95s have it covered and then some so why do we make them in the first place?

so clean air is always better, social murdering is deleterious to the semantic integrity of the symbolic order for everymonkey, trust and respect cannot be extended to casual social murderers without becoming one oneself, and the virtuous feedback loop generated by withdrawing from obsolete social murdering practices opens up the path to post-holocene social relating built on a foundation of self-reinforcing trust and respect -

   is why respirator discipline is the way.

this is a respirator.