It’s October, folks :yea:
Good thing the public hasn't been lulled into a false sense of security... oh, oh no:what-the-hell:
I saw Biden without a mask and hes basically my protector like a father figure sort of, so if daddy says its safe then its safe and I'm going to do commerce with my face
There is no voice more authoritative when it comes to following the science on COVID than a 79-year old man who has shown visible signs of cognitive decline for years, told voters it was completely safe to vote for him during the primaries, cut all the federal unemployment benefits and ended the eviction moratoriums, and said he would veto Medicare for All during the middle of a pandemic.
Thank you for all that you do to keep us safe, President Biden. :biden-alert:
At night I ride my bike through town just to be around people, and maybe every 100th person is wearing a mask. I rode past an Applebee's last night and saw through the windows that it was packed. I'm beginning to deal with my first real creeping tendrils of misanthropy. I know it's reactionary and intellectually I know it's reductive and unhelpful to blame these people for being lied to by a sociopathic government, especially when most of them just want some respite from their precarious shitty jobs and lives. But at the same time, I can't get the 1,250,000 plus dead people out of my head. What would they say if they could see the absolute lack of impression, the seemingly negative lessons learned, the utter refusal to stop consuming for a second or even just put on a fucking mask? It chills me, the casual brushing off of this mass murder, the capitalist response that straight up amounts to eugenics. When I pass by people on the street at night, crucially at night, those on their walks with their dog or their partner or just their thoughts, I seem to see an honest sadness and exhaustion in many of their faces. I wish I could talk to them, but what would I even say? It's all so obviously far gone at this point, and if they knew how bad it really is I don't know how they'd react. The truly checked out ones, the ones I see packing the clubs at night, I regard with a strange mix of pity, horror, envy and anger.
I think that for all I may feel about the people immediately around me, I must always remember who and what is really responsible for these years of horror. That's what separates us from the reactionaries. But god is it hard sometimes.
Just wanna let you know you're not the only one horrified to the societal indifference to the mass suffering, disabling, and death brought upon by COVID. I get the same misanthropic thoughts from time to time since hardly anyone gives a shit about the pandemic anymore, but deep down, I know that propaganda works and these people are being gravely misled about the nature of the pandemic and the ongoing danger.
I genuinely have no idea what the fuck to expect in the future, and that's the scary thing--I don't think any of us can predict how things are going to go down. I'm just so jaded by the societal callous indifference and normalization of mass death and suffering. I don't know what it would take for more people to start taking things seriously again. An escape variant with a noticeably higher fatality rate? Perpetually overloaded hospitals? More anecdotal stories of people knowing someone who died from or was disabled from COVID? Long COVID eventually manifesting in much worse ways than what we currently know?
Where is the line though? Should I pity racists, homophobes, nationalists, US soldiers, cops, I mean its the same system that instilled those beliefs. Maybe it's useless and self righteous but all the "fuck yeah science!" libs now out spreading disease in the name of capitalism can get fucked. I hate them lol.
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality." -Che
Hate them if you must, but the revolution is to free everyone, comrade. Whether they like it or not.
One way to handle your very reasonable misanthropic response is to categorize this cultural sociopathy as just that: a symptom of deeper cultural problems well outside any one person's control. You can hope for how people do not actually need to be that way, but are made so by society, by our social relations, and the dominant forces around them, and those things can and will all change.
But it does mean that 95% of your society is easily manipulated into sociopathic prioritization of slight inconvenience over folks' health and the continuation of a pandemic. I think they could also be easily manipulated into the exact opposite response, if we removed the reins from capital. And hell, eventually we could create our society in a way that required no manipulation for this to happen, where we can build up ourselves and each other into truly empathetic and thoughtful people.
AIDs has killed more people than covid but you probably already have gotten to a healthy place thinking about that in terms of not blaming people living in sickening times for getting sick. The same will happen with covid for you, given time.
When does it get a new letter? I think it probably deserves a new letter by now.
The new subvariants are nicknamed "Cerberus" and "Typhon", which imo are far cooler than just a letter.
Sloppity Bilepiper only his skin is Caucasian and the fluids dripping from his sores are red white and blue
That's after we finish Final Fantasy bosses derived from ancient mythologies. We'll be done with these mid-2023 so be patient.
They keep trying to not give one as part of their general “go back to greasing the wheels of production with your long COVID blood” propaganda
Seriously, there is zero good reason why the new ones are “sub variants” without naming; they literally added a criterion on the fly about genetic relatedness explicitly to not give them one
no see he meant the pandemic was over now it's endemic :brainworms:
Honestly feel like I've caught it at some point in between getting the vaccine & boosters and just suffered through asymptomatically - or at least didn't notice any symptoms - but am still like :side-eye-1: because holy shit we are letting this thing do a speedrun of Pandemic 2 and I am immunocompromised.
Unfortunately it is obvious the US has collectively shrugged its shoulders and decided that maybe getting long covid and reinfected over & over is perfectly fine, so..?
Went to vote the other day (let me stop you right here comrade and explain to you that I only did so because my recovering lib - ironic to say I know - friends were like 'pls vote' but i digress) and the polling place, which was the community center, had a fucking this $800 no contact thermometer tablet from amazon next to the entrance that was reading 97.3 on empty air inside the building. Some part of me was like "wonder which cop was like 'I bet we can use this for facial recognition data harvesting' and had the city wheel it in" and another part of me was like "the city probably just was like 'we should do something to make sure we don't kill all the boomers coming to vote' and just lazily said 'fuck it, whats the amazon login again?'"
Either way - no one in the building was wearing a mask, the people behind the front desk were looking at me weirdly for wearing one and for taking the time to actually read the sign next to the facial recognition data-harvester about making sure I wasn't symptomatic, so I just walked past it without stopping since it clearly wasn't working properly and I didn't want my picture stored on some tablet (surely in the magical cloud too). :covid-cool: :amerikkka:
Honestly I blame Joe Biden for not doing more but...
:mission-accomplished-1::mission-accomplished-2:
I know a LOT of people that haven't had it, me included. TBH the "everyone's had it" line of thinking really minimizes and ignores that taking basic steps to protect yourself actually works!
voting is fine, there are always things worth voting for it's not like every single ballot is just rimjobbing obama
in the Cyberpunk universe most people have to get some sort of cyberware just to survive and replace failing organs due to how destroyed the environment is by pollution and climate change, and how fucked the biosphere is by ever-evolving superbugs. They deliberately wiped out all avian life in a 50 mile radius of the city and routinely sweep the city for any animals who somehow survive the harsh conditions and aren't being cared for by the community, and flood the sewers with nerve gas to fumigate for mutant rats (and homeless people) twice a year. People need to bolster their immune system, carefully control their hormonal balance, replace body parts and organs damaged by disease or radiation or their terrible diet of literal human kibble and SCOP (single-celled organic proteins) burgers.
At least they got cool robot arms and shit. What do we have? The Metaverse. Wow.
The number of reported Covid cases is currently a quarter of what it was at its peak last winter. But Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, estimates that only 4% to 5% of infections are being reported, because so many are uncovered through at-home tests and aren't reported to public health departments, or they aren't being detected at all. He expects to see infections start to increase next month and continue to rise through the winter.
https://twitter.com/LauraMiers/status/1584549330110713856
more than 5,000 deaths last week
what would it take to get in the headlines. 15,000?
I think Biden passed a law that the Pandemic is over so this must just be fake news.
Holy fuck the US is not ok (we can't talk though our top deaths peak was this winter. We started at a much lower baseline though, less than 1/6th of the USA per capita even now.)
I finally caught covid for the first time a couple weeks ago, I was trying to see how long I could avoid it but alas
We better change absolutely nothing about how we do anything because if people don't cram into tight places with poor ventilation to buy useless trash they don't need for other people they can't stand the economy will collapse
October: :1917:
:biden-alert:: "We've got October at home, Jack"
October at home: :corona:
Does the Omicron booster prevent infection of Omicron variant BQ? No? Then why are we calling it Omicron?
Have any of the vaccines prevent infection? I thought we were only getting milder symptoms?
Before Omicron, mRNA vaccines were advertised as decreasing risk of infection 8 times over, and if you got COVID despite being vaccinated, it was considered an outlier "breakthrough infection".
You know I live in NYC and I haven't heard anything about this, because nobody knows anymore
