I’ll put a date on this post. I am currently writing this on Sunday, the 12th of April, 2020. I am, like pretty much everyone the fuck else, stuck at home, not doing anything. That’s just the way things are right now, and I will have to deal with it. Fine.

I’m actually doing really ok with all this quarantine bullshit. So far, me and my flatmate are getting on super well, having a relationship that consists largely of

• talking about working.
• being pleasant
• sharing memes.

You can’t ask for better than that. Having opposite schedules means that write now as a type this she is still snoring in bed (she will deny this later) and I have been awake for hours trying to better myself as a human being.

Or write my shitty blog.

I popped open the scheduled post called “a simple syllogism” and had a think about it.

If there is anything I hate about our current situation, its all the fucking time we have to think about shit. I think I’m doing a bit much of all this thinking.  But I thought a bit more about my super-smart volunteer, and all the dumb shit she said.

I thought a little bit ore about what being smart is, and maybe a bit about being whatever you think the opposite of smart is, which I am just going to call ‘not smart’ to stay in line with good philosophical practices.

Back in January, when I was still stuck in that god awful volunteer house, the corona-virus was just starting to become a newsworthy thing. “Smart’ people, or at least people who in hindsight where dead fucking correct, where already starting to worry. Not my very smart volunteer though! She knew that this whole corona-virus thing was overblown. Media sensationalism, she exclaimed.

In the words of my flatmate, ‘loljokes’.

She elaborated about how the death toll for this coronavirus thing was lower than the regular seasonal flu. I called shenanigans on her bullshit right away. While we have a shit tonne of data on the flu, these things are looked at in a much broader perspective (yearly), and plus we only had about two months or so of this virus really contained in just one country (again, this conversation happened in January). On top of that, the country in question was fucking China, which isn’t exactly known for being forthcoming about, well, pretty much anything.

Loljokes indeed.

What is particularly funny about this is that three months on from the conversation I had with this person and experts seems to be in vast disagreement about it now. But I can tell you what, sure fucking doesn’t look like ‘just a normal flu’ to me.

I want to conclude this post with a suggestion. Is it possible that the best all of us can start recognizing that the smart answer is actually to just keep our fucking mouths shut. I work in a sub-field of linguistics. Lanugages have been an obsession of mine since I was a teenageer, and its pretty much what I got my degree in (technically not but let’s not go there). I would guess that my hit rate with linguistic questions is about a 70%. I am a fucking C- linguistics expert, at best. That’s not very good, and that’s about the shit I am actually passionate about.

So what’s the mortality rate of the corona-virus?

I DON’T FUCKING KNOW, AND NEITHER DO YOU! Go ask a fucking expert, and wait a while.