Um capitalism? Wonder how long before Liberals realize hey are as expendable to the ruling elite as the working class. But even if they did realize I think change scares them even more than the status quo.

  • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    I get a lot of authors frustration, just wish after all her work writing about the symptoms she cant speak to why… Like she knows why, right?

    After nodding along with her for awhile it was sad as fuck to have this at the end:

    it feels wise to ask: How many times is enough to get a virus that – unlike our politicians – understands the power of rapid adaptation?

    Uh no, that is not a wise question. That question has nothing to do with the rest of the piece.

    Finish the thought, lib! Take it fucking home! You’re almost there! WTF!?

  • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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    As much as I like to shit on liberals, I feel like her message is better than me and possibly other people here. Like systemic solutions such as ventilation, filtration, and time off for illness sell better that “wear a mask you lib”. Although ya please do wear a mask.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Who’s standing outside my house telling me to stop calling people libs for not masking? I will never stop calling people libs for not masking!

      Lol for real tho, I think as long as you’re willing to take the pressure of masking and lockdown off the board you’re never getting anything else. Besides the fact that there’s gonna be times when they’re absolutely necessary, this is just as much a psychological battle against Capital’s propaganda as it is against the virus. To expand on @umbrella@lemmy.ml 's comment, no one who’s refusing to mask is going be out there fighting for filters and whatnot. A mindset of healthy choices and looking out for one another needs to be sown before we’re getting anything else. And ya, calling people libs is not the only way to go about it, I admit, but it’s a language people around here understand. Plus, they’re a bunch of LIBs for not masking.

      • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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        Like I told the other commenter, you’re right, we should promote masking. I’m definitely a billion percent pro mask advocacy. I’m just thinking out-loud if possibly a systemic approach might sound better. But it’s all just empty pondering from me. And I’m mostly just questioning my own point of view, I wouldn’t judge comrades so harshly for so little.

        no one who’s refusing to mask is going be out there fighting for filters and whatnot

        Certainly. I’ll edit my comment.

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          I mean, no worries, we’re just chatting. fidel-salute-big

          I’ve been spending a lot of time over on /r/zerocovidcommunity and it’s become very apparent that just getting people to mask isn’t the answer the either. There’s a pretty non-insignificant number of folks over there who are just chomping at the bit for an opportunity to abandon this new community they’ve found themselves forced into. They’ve gotten a taste of the alienation and abandonment that immunocompromised and disabled folks have been experiencing and rather than learning from it and seeking solidarity, they’re begging their politicians to realize they’ve made a mistake. They think they’ve been accidentally forgotten, their ignorance of capitalism and neoliberalism hiding from them that they’ve been abandoned to rot with the rest of the expendables.

          Edit: forgot a word.

    • umbrella
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      i dont think people here are necessarily proposing masks as the solution. but more like how are we supposed to have systemic solutions if we get vehement resistance to even the stupidest, easiest stopgap solution like cotton masks?

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        The most exasperating thing is that if many more people start masking the government will literally ban masks, as they’ve already been doing in NY. So even though it is the most accessible bit of power against the intentional genocide of immunocompromised people and mass disabling of the population, it’s not gonna scale because of the pushback. I don’t mean to doom too hard, but it really feels like on top of the lib resistance to masking because they just wanna brunch, we have serious institutional resistance to caring about public health.

        • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          we have serious institutional resistance to caring about public health.

          You can thank Brandon for gutting the CDC and putting the High Priests of Nurgle in every position that he could. It’s not just COVID anymore, the CDC as an organization now basically exists to facilitate the spread of communicable diseases.

          They said kids should go to school with COVID, diarrhea, or lice! Thats fucking insane!!!

          • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.net
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            They are blaming child behavior problems on remote learning for half a year four years ago, and not the neuroinvasive virus they are repeatedly exposing kids to

            • SoJB
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              I encourage all comrades to never forget the sheer concentrated child abuse that was the push to reopen schools during the pandemic.

              For the first 6 months, entire classrooms were being ravaged with 100% infection rates. Kids were getting repeat infections 3, 4, 5+ times a month. And white liberal Karen’s in the office were just treating it as another “teehee kids, what can you do” moment.

              An entire generation completely fucked by long covid. Who even knows what the fuck that many COVID infections do on developing minds and bodies.

              I’m sure we’ll find out when they all start dropping like flies…

      • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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        Nah you’re right. I’m just more self-criting and self reflecting than anything.

        Some comrades of mine are doing a movie screening this weekend. I’m literally gonna show up, but a ticket, say hi, and leave. No way anyone else there masks.

      • Monk3brain3 [any, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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        And also any measures that cost public funds are anathema to conservatives and liberals (albeit to a slightly lesser extent. Harm reduction and all…)

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      ventilation, filtration, and time off for illness sell better than “wear a mask you lib”

      they sell better, they also don’t work. But yea that stuff too once people learn to put a piece of fuckin cloth on their face

      imagine walking into a shop that filters all their air through a HEPA and has 2300 windows but some guy literally just breathes in your vicinity.

      The tier list is:
      not being around people >>>>> masks >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> everything fucking else

      • Paid time off for sickness and free and easy testing are more effective than masks

        In which situation are you more likely to get sick? Being in a room masked with someone with covid? Or the person with covid not being there in the first place because they stayed home with a positive test?

        Really you want all of the above, and you can remove some layers if there aren’t cases. Improve filtration and ventilation, give paid time off for illness, frequent and cheap tests, vaccine mandates, and wear masks at least in high traffic areas like transit. Then if cases are higher, lockdowns and mask requirements in places that didn’t require them before.

        Basically, do China’s zero covid policy.

        • Hello_Kitty_enjoyer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          Paid time off for sickness and free and easy testing are more effective than masks

          No they’re not, people can spread it asymptomatically
          And the tests have a ~35% false negative rate

          But yes paid time off for sickness is always good and should happen, just not the best avenue for dealing with covid

          • We should be doing PCR tests again, not rapid antigen tests. Do routine testing, not just when symptomatic. Like we were in 2020.

            It’s better to have people with covid stay home than be out but wearing masks.

            China’s zero-covid policy should be the shining example.

            I’m not against masks, I wear my KN95 every time I go in public. But ultimately I don’t want to be wearing it at work all day. And masking in bars and restaurants is obviously not really feasible. Getting kids to keep them on in school all day is difficult.

            Masks alone will not stop the spread when bars, restaurants, and schools are all open.

      • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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        Time off, ventilation, filtration, and testing definitely work. Masking is an important tool, and yes it is a tool that needs to be employed more, but even the highest quality mask is going to let in viruses if the air concentration is high enough. I’m busy atm, but I’m happy to send sources of requested. Sorry that I’m not referencing my statements at this time.

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.net
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    Kids in schools that operate without such policies or proper ventilation systems are, in Ontario, at the mercy of a Ministry of Education that once saw fit to float the notion that COVID doesn’t transmit in schools at all, and there is a persistent, convenient myth circulating among parents that infection is good for kids – preferable to vaccination, even. (For the record, all my infections came courtesy of my son’s school.)

    Emily Oster and her consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

    The next big teachers’ strike could get really interesting, but even though parents should be teachers’ natural allies in fighting for safer buildings, smaller class sizes, etc., parents are forced by necessity and precarity to side with Capital. We saw a preview of this during the Chicago Teachers’ Union actions in the winter of 2020-2021, and the demonization of teachers is going to be even worse during the next strike, now that almost everyone refuses to see Covid as an ongoing emergency.

  • MelaniaTrump [undecided]@hexbear.net
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    Because line goes down slightly if we try to fight COVID in any capacity.

    aka rich people lose money, so you need to get permanently disabled and/or die for them.

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    el problema es el capitalismo

    What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

    This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

    from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

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    Even with my compromised vision, it’s clear to me that with governments doing less and less in the face of a complex virus, the multiple knock-on effects of this approach are coming at a high human cost. But who’s counting that cost?

    For a mainstream article it’s not bad… calls out some issues like the school situation, somewhat calls out the government, but her prescriptions still avoid mentioning masking, ‘meaningful policies’ as a catch-all is vague… perhaps on purpose, she’s probably aware of the acceptable lib-lines at the paper and is staying within them. She got covid a couple times already and now some vision loss from it so I think she could go further with her critique. Wish there was more about long covid as well. Also I can’t quite articulate it but there’s an emphasis on the personal story aspect and not much on the possibilities of collective action, as if that lies beyond the imaginable in a rich western country (so in that sense it’s gaslighting the reader by hiding the range of options available).