McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 18th 2020

• It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t think Johnson and his team are malevolent; rather, I think they simply cannot see the way things could be. They see themselves as “Us” and the people as “Them”. Politicians are there to command in the Subject story, to serve in the Consumer story; but they are always separate from the people.
  
  The Citizen story rejects this separation. We are all of us citizens, and some of us for various amounts of time take on the tasks of politics. It is a spectrum, not a binary distinction. Lots of good ideas and useful ways of talking about the sort of ideas I've already got.
• How Boris Johnson refused to fight the virus. A depressing reminder of why we need the new approach in the previous link.
• Nightingale Chronicles #2 – failure. A more specific account of the Government's failure with their pop-up pandemic hospitals, from one of the worker's in the London one.
• A twitter thread from Jay Rosen showing how "exposing" the lies of politicians isn't the right task we need our media to do. We need to get better at holding our unscrupulous politicians (i.e. the politicians who lie and cheat, not all politicians are unscrupulous) to account.