Dude was chill, growing and using cannabis in his 80s. A master gardener, he kept cacti alive for 40 years in Canada through nasty winters. He was kind, generous intelligent and thoughtful.

His son caught covid at his workplace, and passed it on to my FIL. FIL was hospitalized around December solstice due to complications of that covid, and other non lethal problems He passed on a couple of days ago.

He did not die, he was killed by capitalism.

Capitalism requires people to work or starve, so they have to be on the job spreading diseases when they should be at home fighting them.

Capitalism rewards the pharmaceutical companies that decided it was more profitable to treat Covid than to eliminate it, attenuate it rather than eradicate it.

The oligarchs that use capitalism to enrich themselves turned precautionary measures that would slow the spread of Covid into ammo for the culture wars that keep the working class fighting each other instead of slitting the throats of the oligarchs.

Yes, I am very angry.

  • WhyEssEff [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    99·
    10 months ago

    If you want a proper term for it, if you aren’t already aware, Engels calls this social murder.

    When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

    Rest in piece, shit fucking sucks.

  • sharedburdens [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    46·
    10 months ago

    If you press libs on the mass slaughter of the elderly and disabled required by our ‘public health’ response, some of the more depraved ones will think to remark on how this is actually improving the long-term viability of social security. barbara-pit

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    311·
    10 months ago

    Every death from COVID in the US since Biden took office can and should be blamed on him personally and I genuinely want him to be tried for hundreds of thousands of individual cases of first degree murder. I then want him drawn and fucking quartered on live TV.

    I’m so sorry for your loss. He did not die, he was murdered, and his murderer will almost certainly never see justice.

  • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    10 months ago

    I’m so sorry for your loss, comrade. Every life taken by covid is another crime to pile at the feet of those in power when their time comes.

  • Vncredleader@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    10 months ago

    I’m sorry to hear that comrade. We must hold capitalists and all their enablers accountable for every social murder. If you want to read a good work of someone struggling with this exact fact I highly recommend Connolly’s “The Re-Conquest of Ireland” which is essentially him spelling out the daily and yearly death-toll and infanticide of capitalism with statistics that barely conceal a burning fury. That was at a brief time when he really was trying to approach things from a more reform oriented argument, not in action, but in the sense of how he was trying to reach people. A friend of his wrote the forward to it or Labor in Irish History a few years after his execution and spelled it out that Connolly viewed every moment these types of social murders occurred as unacceptable, each one weighed on him heavily and eventually not doing the Rising became tantamount to infanticide for him. Tragic as his fate was, it is a good example of how brutal the weight of this shit is.

    Never lose that righteous anger, I know you don’t need me telling you that, but for everyone else, just keep that in your hearts.

    Here is Robert Lynd’s introduction

    To Connolly Dublin was in one aspect a vast charnel-house of the poor. He quotes figures showing that in 1908 the death-rate in Dublin City was 23 per 1,000 as compared with a mean death-rate of 15.8 in the seventy-six largest English towns. He then quotes other figures showing that, while among the professional and independent classes of Dublin children under five die at a rate of 0.9 per i ,000 of the population of the class, the rate among the labouring poor is 27.7. To acquiesce in conditions such as are revealed in these figures is to be guilty of something like child murder. And to Connolly capitalist society as he saw its effects in Ireland was simply organised child- murder. We endure such things because it is the tradition of comfortable people to endure them. But it would be impossible for any people that had had its social conscience awakened to endure them for a day. Connolly was the pioneer of the social conscience in Ireland. He was, like many pioneers, rude and destructive in some of his methods. But let those blame him who have realised with the same passion of unselfishness the lot of the poor child born into an inheritance of not enough food, not enough clothes, not enough warmth, not enough light, not enough air, not enough laughter, not enough cleanliness, not enough of anything except hunger and sickness and funerals. Connolly gave up his life to the fight with the evil conditions which exacted this tribute of human victims. His death was a prophecy of the liberation of an earth which only a system of imperialism and capitalism — aided, to be sure, by the Devil — keeps from being a home of kings and heroes and golden plenty.

    • asg101 [none/use name, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      The atrocities of imperialism and capitalism are truly unending. Silence is certainly complicity. If there is any “bright side” to any of this is the certainty that an unsustainable system is by definition unsustainable. The “dark side” is that the oligarchs have the means to destroy anything they cannot steal, and are doing it already.

      My only hope is that any survivors remember who was responsible for the suffering.

      • Vncredleader@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        I mean look at me, I partly became a communist because my Papap worked the mills for the steel industry and was a loyal union man immigrant, who I never got to meet because that job literally tore his lungs apart with metal from the inside. metal fibers coated the inside of his lungs. Despite my dad being conservative and my mom’s parents being small business PMC, I eventually realize that I never even got the chance to meet my father’s father because of profits even with a strong union. The man never even knew I existed and yet I survive him and remember who was responsible for his death, cause I know what they took from me

        I think of this scene from a British mini-series about a socialist winning PM and getting couped, especially that final note https://youtu.be/Aj8qIRxQ5aU?t=245

        “Don’t forget, I have ancestors too”