Can't wait for the narrative to be that "it was only a few kids" and not "perhaps we shouldn't have abruptly reopened schools"
In a sane world, this would be the last straw.
You cannot sacrifice the future, there's no where else to go.
That baby cease fire scene hits harder the more time passes and the more I see how the current world is
I can't even watch it without having to hold back actual tears anymore and I have a heart of stone
I've never seen that but it's on my list. How badly is it gonna fuck me up
I highly recommend it. It’s definitely a lot of doom and gloom, but it’s also full of hope and care.
I don't recall anything unusually graphic or disturbing about it, and although it's fairly bleak throughout, it's not all bleak (compared to, say, some Cold War-era "what if we launched the nukes?" movies). There are a couple brief shots that specifically evoke Abu Ghraib torture, but it's only in passing. Nothing as direct as what's in Zero Dark Thirty, for instance, which itself is pretty far from torture porn/body horror stuff like Hostel or Saw.
Not a light movie, but definitely recommended.
This is a casualty of not approving the vaccine for children ten thousand times more than it is a casualty of reopening schools. The FDA is willing to let thousands of children die to protect the sanctity of its own bureaucracy.
Are there any stats or research around the likelihood of this? I got Covid last year and sometimes I just feel kind of…weirdly dumb about things. But idk if I’m just imagining it
I am not an expert but they did fast-track the initial thing without any qualms no? Why would they want to protect their bureaucracy now?
the emergency authorization is actually very similar to the regular authorization in terms of testing, the only real difference is production and testing occur at the same time
here is a good info graphic for it https://images.app.goo.gl/zfw5jALmePbr7AxM8
I can imagine they saw what happened with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and didn't want the bad pr from something like that happening with kids.
Yeah, it's inconsistent, but I don't think there is any central decision making going on anywhere in the US when it comes to dealing with covid. Different people in different places not working together making decisions.
At this point, I look at it as choosing between potential long-term damage/death and impaired social development
I'd much rather have the latter
When I got my Moderna vaccine, the questionnaire asked if I had been infected within the past 90 days. The antibodies from that either could have made it ineffective or heightened my chance of a negative reaction to the vaccine, I forget which. I told the doc that I had a positive diagnosis and we had to go back on a calendar to make sure before she felt comfortable vaccinating me.
I bet vaccine approval is going to come within that window for kids who get infected going back to school. An initial surge to get them all vaccinated ASAP, partial knowledge of infection history because it presents more mildly and there are lots of other respiratory viruses that kids get, staged exposure for those kids as classmates come back from sick days.
the argument you will get from Dems and hogs alike is that since 4.4 million children have gotten covid and only ~100 have died (approx 1 in 440,000) that this is totally fine and a worthy sacrifice to the blood god of capital!
If watching the bodies of children being transported on stretchers at sandy hook couldn't convince America to implement the most basic of firearm regulation, then no amount of death will shake this country.
This. For the vast majority of parents it Will always be someone else's kid
Giving the future draft pool long term medical problems to own the left.
Before delta it was twice as deadly as the flu in children. Who knows what it's going to be after delta is done running through the population.
lethality isn’t the biggest issue with covid, it’s the serious long term side effects that are wayyyyy more common. Like the term twice as deadly as the flu sounds scarier than saying 50 turning to 100.
I think the only way you are gonna get ppl to care is talking about the more common complications, bc every parent is gonna go “MY BABY IS NOT GOING TO DIE, I RAISED THEM RIGHT”
"Lethality isn't the biggest issue with covid"
Yeah uh if you could just tell my PTSD that it would be great thanks. Saw more people die in six months than the previous ten years.
Also ICU beds filling up and fucking over people with problems completely unrelated to COVID. I don't know whether some people choose to ignore this or just couldn't care less
Not that they would do this ever of course, but hypothetically could Dems like kick Manchin out of the party? Ban him from being a democrat?
My dad has a slight variation of this where he says we can’t do anything because millions of republicans will do Civil War 2 if we do (which is possibly true). But it’s like, if these people are making change impossible, maybe they’re the ones who are actually in charge?
In addition to the possibility of serious illness and death, COVID-19 has been shown to severely impact cognitive development, on par with lead poisoning.
The whole article messed me up, but... fuck, maybe this will get through to some of the boomers I've been ranting at
Yeah, the boomers would hate for there to be a young generation with the same type of brain poison as them
I mean the ones I've been working on are well-meaning libs who legitimately adore children so it should. Last year they were just about ready to call for an armed communist revolution but unfortunately they've got terminal NPR brain and Biden winning punted them firmly back into lib land, which I've been working on. Hopefully will be able to get them hooked back up to Citations Needed soon, that did wonders until they had some life stuff go down and couldn't deal with the stress of seeing behind the proverbial curtain
That's important political education work and I'm proud of you.
Yeah, hoping it's not a 1:1 comparison, or that the effects aren't permanent or diminish over time or something. Shit's grim
There’s every chance his death toll is gonna be higher than Trump’s by next year. When questioned about it, Biden will simply get angry and say “cmon man, that was last year! Last year! It’s better now, we’re going to have a beautiful summer and I can’t wait to see my grandkids”
:brump:
Pretty sure he has pushed for in-person school this fall. Certainly hasn't done anything to stop it or, you know, plan for this eventuality.
Quiverfull movement
"Those mandatory public schools aren't looking so hot now, are they?" :very-intelligent:
Libs wont have the fucking guts to call for Fauci's head, they will probably praise him for helping kill their children
Absolutely. There is no floor. That should be written in the sky. THERE IS NO LIMIT
I wonder if there ever will be a way to build a "time window" where we can just look at a scene from the past.
I just want to know how many times the same thing has happened, with the same type of responses, throughout history.
Like, did the people during the black plague years in Europe have to deal with the same conversations that we're having today? Was there some noble who was saying, "Nah, its just lazy folks who don't want to work," or ,"Come on man, its just the sniffles. Its not like it even affects children! You all will be fine!" Were there people who where like, "Hey, how about we clean out our houses and stuff really well and see if this helps," and there were people who would go door to door screaming at people who were trying to clean their houses about how they were being sheeple?
My whole understanding of the plague years changed when I really understood what a flagellant is. There were roving bands of hundreds or even thousands of homeless men packed in a tight formation. They went from town to town breaking any kind of local quarantine measures where permitted. They whipped themselves bloody in public and then villagers would collect that blood and dab their eyes with it. It was done out of pure religious conviction.
I imagine being a bird doctor. Not really sure of what I'm doing but trying my best with the closest thing I've got to a materialist understanding of the plague. Painstakingly cleaning my uniform, checking the leather for holes, filling the mask with herbs. I go to my window for a brief pause before starting my day in the plague ward. What do I see? An antimasker rally spreading variants from around the country. It's one of those historical moments where I really feel the :agony-shivering: of the poor schmuck.
https://i.redd.it/e4dzcglaf5i71.png
There was a good podcast about that in particular but I can't remember if it was a socialist one, a science one, or a history one. It might have been one of Matt Christman's historical ones.
edit: Last Podcast on the Left: https://www.lastpodcastontheleft.com/episodes/2021/7/2/episode-459-the-black-death-part-iv-meet-the-flagellants
Long morning coffee post coming up.
A lot of people out there probably want to know more about the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe in the 14th century. There's a bunch of good books I can think of about that period—called the Crisis of the 14th Century—if you're interested. Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" is a little lib but still provides an excellent overview of daily life for most people in Western Europe at the time. A book like Gottfried's "The Black Death" is also lib but good. "Caliban and the Witch" provides a much more leftwing take on the transition from feudalism to capitalism but mostly deals with women rather than the plague. Wood's "The Origin of Capitalism" is also very good and useful, its basic point being that the creation of capitalism was far from inevitable.
There are a few major similarities between coronavirus and the bubonic plague epidemic IMO. One: nobody in 14th century Europe understood that the plague was caused by fleas. This is because fleas were already all over the place and just kind of a fact of life. The quarantines of various medieval towns and cities were pretty much useless though because of the lack of understanding. Everybody thought they were just being punished by god, which is where the flagellants come in. (Thanks to Monty Python people think the flagellants are kind of a joke, but they were no joke at the time, and consisted of basically hordes of thousands of people who would destroy any town they visited.)
Today with coronavirus, very few people understand that the disease is caused by capitalism—climate change, industrial factory farming, mass air travel, etc. Likewise, very few people (in the USA anyway) understand that enforced quarantines, shutting down non-essential businesses, and paying everyone to stay home is the way to stop the virus.
At this point, libs are kind of in love with this shit because they get to lord it over Republicans, blame them for their problems, and just think: "Well, if all the Republicans die of covid, it'll be much easier for us to win the midterms!" Libs never gave a fuck about all the civilian deaths in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, so why should they start caring now?
And although of course I'm in favor of vaccines, vaccination is just one weapon in the arsenal against the virus, and by itself is clearly not enough to stop it—yet vaccination is likewise the perfect neoliberal solution to the problem since it depends entirely on individual choice. For a society to implement this solution exclusively in a vast country of more than three hundred million people appears suicidal to me, however. The USA as a collective entity knows that it cannot continue and therefore wants to die.
The second similarity between the 14th century epidemic and coronavirus is that in both cases, the ruling class just doesn't give a fuck. The plague killed few members of the 14th century European nobility because (although they would probably be considered dirty by modern standards) they were clean enough to keep themselves safe from the virus. Today, as far as I know, not a single billionaire has succumbed to coronavirus. Essentially: the richer you are, the less likely you will have to deal with the consequences of societal collapse—for the moment, anyway. Plus, the richer you are, the greater the likelihood that you've gotten way richer during the pandemic. There is a huge economic incentive to keep the pandemic going if you're a billionaire or a mega-millionaire.
The plague broke out many times in Europe during and after the 14th century, although I think it was that first big wave that killed around a third of the population. That catastrophe was followed by centuries of peasant revolts and religious wars as well as the beginnings of modern colonialism, race-based slavery, capitalism, and genocide in the Americas. And although coronavirus isn't nearly as deadly as the bubonic plague was in the 14th century, it seems safe to predict that the overall situation across the planet and in the USA especially will just continue to be absolutely bonkers for the foreseeable future. This could culminate in the creation of a workers' state here in the former USA or some kind of techno dystopian neo-feudalism, or both, or neither.
Was not expecting an effortpost for my benign shower thought comment.
:sankara-salute:
I don't have evidence for this, but it seems like things got noticeably worse around the cold war era. Then you have the era of Reaganism, distrust of civil servants of any kind and strong emphasis on personal responsibility/complete demonization of the collective
