pogfan1996 posted:Cars predicted this 3 years ago in a cryptic paragraph in the conspiracy thread
cars posted:All of that is in spite of a gigantic system of surveillance and intelligence, the largest and most expensive in the history of the world. Knowledge gathered through digital surveillance, especially, is proving to be almost useless, because no one can herd enough cats to use it. Again, this may sound like I've been replaced by a pod person or something given my usual attitude, but I think domestic-surveillance opportunism by U.S. agencies right now faces few extra opportunities to exploit beyond what's already existed for the last year,
cosign all of cars' post but just want to tease this point out a little more based on the australian experience, remembering that australia often serves as an imperial core policy test bed on everything from neoliberal economic maneuvers to 'managing' the growing refugee crisis
in the early days of the pandemic, the federal government here rolled out a half-baked smartphone app they wanted everyone to install for contact tracing purposes. i'm rattling this all off from memory so details may not be perfect but it was based on something originally developed in singapore and relied on bluetooth to detect and log 'close contacts' in case of an outbreak. this had obvious flaws for anyone mildly familiar with the technology involved. bluetooth is a notoriously fickle protocol; the system relies on basically everyone with a compatible phone opting in; the prolonged proximity needed to register contact was unlikely in most scenarios. the biggest problem was that limitations at OS-level prevented the app from operating as advertised on iphones unless the device was unlocked and the app running in the foreground. on top of that, security experts expressed concern about not only a lack of clarity in the enabling legislation around who could access the data, but also about the security of the cloud platform itself. the government of course pretended everything was fine and continued to push the public to use the app, repeatedly using the example of being unknowingly infected while standing in line at the supermarket behind an elderly woman, a scenario obviously not covered by an app that would require granny to have the app and be stood near you for 15 minutes.
anyway, we have since moved on to using QR check in apps, which have been deployed by state governments in their own jurisdictions, since public health systems (everything from hospitals to covid testing and contact tracing) are administered here at state level. i never installed the harebrained federal "covid safe" app, knowing it would drain my battery, compromise my privacy, and achieve nothing. i happily comply with my state's QR system, knowing that it only generates data i tell it to, and that the data is useful for contact tracing and ONLY contact tracing. the fact is that my QR check-ins provide zero useful information over and above that already generated by my phone, sent to google et al, and accessible to whatever agencies decide to care enough to log it. data which is mostly useless anyway if for no other reason than there's too much of it. knowing the exact time i entered the local supermarket adds nothing for the hypothetical big brother who can already see that i was in the area and put a loaf of bread through the checkout 2 minutes later, went straight home, and spent 15 minutes scrolling the front page of youtube trying to choose a longform video about japanese games to watch while doing the dishes.
while class interests underpin the opportunistic looting, collusion and shifting legal frameworks, it's felt more difficult to gain clarity about the dynamics closer to the ground.
perhaps it's productive to consider how this might have played out differently had it happened 10-15 years ago... without the widely adopted networked communication platforms, devices, bandwidth, just-in-time food and product delivery logistics, media and entertainment. all of which made possible a 'lockdown' approach while ensuring the reproduction of bourgeois society, or at least a sufficiently functional facade of it.
it's a challenge to discuss this productively with the current discourse(s) adaptively controlled/poisoned/censored. i think we can easily miss the forest for the trees in limiting our discussion to 'surveillance infrastructure', rather than the broader and more insidious technosocial encirclement that has rapidly accelerated.
it was very surprising for me to learn from candid discussions with a number of people (labor aristocrats), that despite having all the conveniences of being able to 'follow the guidelines' while working remotely, getting paid, watching netflix, playing games, having food delivered, etc.. their experience of the last year was defined by one word they all echoed: 'traumatic'.
while my gut reaction was to roll my eyes at this and their following lack of criticality about their situation, i think there is something of value to learn...
the technological dis/embodiment of relations leads to a particular kind of victimization; one that bears some resemblance to the kind suffered in an abusive relationship, where the the victim is increasingly unable to value, learn from or respond to their experiences and becomes complicit in their own abuse through their perceived lack of agency.
similarly, when this phenomenon is emergent/deployed in more complex structures, such as institutions or families, the effect is further reified through dependency, complicity and further cycles of abuse.
recently i was reflecting on two different experiences of death/grief. both were family funerals, one of which i was able to be present at, and the other only remotely via the internet.
there was something ungraspable and healing about the experience of being together with the body of my dead relative laid out in front of me, a visceral recognition that 'they are NOT here'. which was complemented by another recognition; 'but we ARE here'.
my experience of the remote funeral was instead completely defined by my own disembodiment and absence, rather than that of my deceased relative. there was no space for grief to grow into healing or reaffirmation, instead it solidified what would be an intimate moment with others into a final memory of insurmountable disconnection.
i think my point is that, whether resulting from purposefully designed affordances or military/capitalist provenance, this kind of erasure and dis/embodiment feels central to how our communities and cognition are being actively restructured at the moment. after so much time unable to easily do something as simple and essential as hug someone else closely, it feels harder to account for how much our sense of self and relations have changed.
following from this there is a perverse redirection of our drive for re/embodiment towards further digitization; an emergent biopolitical subjectivization where both personhood and participation is defined not by irl presence but rather the consolidation and primacy of massive and disparate datasets.
these datasets do not end at the skin; the particularities of a fingerprint, iris, gait or voice are insufficient. within this logic the body itself must be datafied and cryptographically signed. this is a massive shift in intensity/penetration, although not in its character.
i recall a phrase i read once in relation to the development of satellite imagery and 'dual-use' technology; 'one does not map a territory they do not also consider annexing'. similarly, i think it's important to center the purpose of 'surveillance' as a step toward annexation, in this case of all that which is embodied and the spaces we inhabit in between.
it feels like a very long gameplan that depends on our psychosocial behavioural entrainment, tech development, legal restructuring, and various geopolitical gambles. most of that is out of any one persons awareness, much less control. but in the personal and relational there is some room to maneuver, learn, share, reaffirm, build and retain strength through small acts of resistance and care.
Gssh posted:a eugenic and counterinsurgency apparatus
this is strong language. i could make some guesses but i'd rather ask directly: what exactly do you mean by this?
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:Gssh posted:
a eugenic and counterinsurgency apparatus
this is strong language. i could make some guesses but i'd rather ask directly: what exactly do you mean by this?
i'm referring primarily to function, rather than intent. similarly to how i say above, whether by design or provenance, i think it's not difficult to see how public health policy has grown from a counterinsurgency paradigm... put people under house arrest, trace and map social networks to uncover 'superspreaders' / movement leaders, prohibit gatherings, suppress information. if i understand correctly, in sydney suburbs you currently have troops patrolling streets enforcing a lockdown?
regarding eugenics, i think it's not even controversial to say that in many countries there has been a policy of overwhelming institutional negligence of those with disabilities, elderly, and/or undocumented.
i'm just someone on the internet, so if you know anyone that is either themselves disabled or cares for someone with disabilities i'd suggest asking them what their experience has been like in the last year.
from my experience, whether it's the drastic reduction of social care infrastructure during lockdown, day centers closed and care duties passed to kin that is unequipped economically or logistically, or in the case of live-in situations, in which elderly care homes became de facto prisons, the results of these and other more sinister policies condemned many to unnecessary suffering and death.
the particulars of all this are obfuscated or justified by the 'SCIENCE!' discourse cars refers to, but as a clear example; in the uk both hospitalized patients with cognitive disabilities and care-home residents were issued with do-not-resuscitate orders across the board.
the above policy decisions are taken by the same class of people colluding in billion dollar private contracts for the type of useless half-baked app you describe.
even if we are to accept the mainstream narratives justifying all of this as inevitable/necessary/good, the fact remains that governments in the core are hoarding vaccines to use on their entire population regardless of individual risk/age. this effectively denies these touted solutions to all actual vulnerable people in the periphery.
as we rush to be first in line, whether through coercion or enthusiasm, we become complicit in this abuse.
Gssh posted:it's a challenge to discuss this productively with the current discourse(s) adaptively controlled/poisoned/censored.
it feels like a very long gameplan that depends on our psychosocial behavioural entrainment, tech development, legal restructuring, and various geopolitical gambles.
The United States is actually experiencing the exact opposite from most Western countries, where not even the most BASIC levels of precautions are getting enforced, in nearly every case. I mean, forget stuff like vaccinations as legal & state-enforced requirements for e.g. hospital employees or actual reporting of spread within communities AS communities, because cops in the U.S. aren’t even enforcing stuff like anti-spread laws passed by Democrat-controlled state legislators.
In most states in the U.S., anti-COVID laws like that don’t exist in the first place, while the corresponding executive offices have ceased giving orders entirely on the matter, with both executives and legislators seeing enforcement as political suicide. (If you’re outside the U.S. and wondering how that could possibly be, look up “2016 United States electoral map”, and you’ll have your answer; realize the difference between that map and the 2020 one that got Biden elected are razor-thin margins in many of those states that won’t help many races further down on the ticket.) And in most of those states, counties, cities and towns are legal creatures of the state governments and have no real power themselves over this stuff.
Like: if you’re outside the U.S. and you read about “masking orders” and “stay-at-home orders” there, you can be forgiven for thinking these are actually rigorously enforced by law enforcement in the U.S.
In most places? They just… aren’t.
It probably matters that huge swathes of the cop lumpen in the U.S., just like huge numbers of the nurses of the U.S. medical system, are politically opposed to all measures to control or contain the virus, thanks to a layered complex of right-wing conspiracy theories. These have enjoyed mainstream acceptance in the U.S. to a degree (speaking here in terms of poll-quantified opinions) remarkable among its global peers. And their loci of support have included many professions directly involved in any state intervention in an emergency.
That’s maybe also one of the untold stories here in terms of a true critical perspective: how other Western countries really ARE seeing a massive expansion of the police state through public health over COVID-19… while the United States is revealing that its public health infrastructure, also one of the priciest in the world, cannot do its job, let alone mobilize law enforcement in such a pursuit. The bare minimum of “enforcement” in the U.S. will almost certainly fall to employers as the proximate exploiters of workers who are not yet vaccinated.
So, it’s not that these measures won’t be used to surveil, control and exploit people in the U.S. because of “freedom-loving” or whatever. It’s just that it will take on a different character directly enforced by multiple employers networked in part through the bourgeois state apparatus, rather than by the state as a direct coordinated enforcer, an army of cops and doctors and public health officers, for the bourgeoisie.
I know people posting here know enough to think as poorly of United $naKKKe$ as it deserves. But a couple friends outside the U.S. right now like... one's an expat Amerikan and the other's native to their current country of residence, which is... not exactly ignorant of its own far-right conspiracy mongers... and they hear about this shit and they're both like, It's REALLY like that in the U.S. right now though? People are actually listening to these governors in the news right now? Washington's doing nothing? And you're not just exaggerating it because you're you? Are you sure, and i totally understand why they'd respond that way, it's slightly unbelievable to me too...
But I mean... first off, when have i missed a chance to talk crazy about the invasiveness and opportunism of the U.S. police state when and where it actually happens, and second, like............ Reminder to Amerikans: Your Government Wants You to Die
toyot posted:i went to a pizza party and an intro session, saw cameras everywhere, and peaced out. why would i volunteer to be under surveillance?
yeah lol. i try to be fair to anarchos as an ex-anarcho who is mostly contemptuous of them because proximity breeds contempt. But then like... there's always this shit happening. Most of them, give them something or someone new, a new idol or toy of the moment, and they immediately get so excited about it they forget everything they claim to know beforehand. And the cops USED to have to actually introduce a real, living, physical cop into the group to get them do it. now they just auto-cop themselves at the slightest prompting because someone showed them the Auto-Cop 2000 and said something like "D E C E N T R A L I Z E D" at the same time
招瑤 posted:a couple hospitals started forcing doctors and nurses to get vaccinated and are facing intense public condemnation
A private hospital nearby did the same thing because a nurse got COVID and spread it to all the other nurses, and then she got fired because she'd violated the hospital's social media policy... by sharing patient information on a Facebook group for COVID denial conspiracy theories that included other nurses. And they're trying to enforce a vaccine requirement REALLY quietly to prevent a freak out against the hospital over it but it's probably futile.
Like, the cops are not taking advantage of this, not at that level at least, they don't want to and they don't have to and their bosses agree with both... but that's possible because the DIRECT power of employers as enforcers for the bourgeoisie in the country—exactly because of the availability of health care through employers—has become so dominant that the entire debate has now shifted to be around what your employer can and cannot do to you...
..........and this is happening in true Time Of Plague, like, 600,000 dead and more on the way, the situation when most right-wing "libertarians" in the U.S., up until very recently, have said, like, Oh of course in giant deadly disasters you have to restrict Freedoms, that's just 9/11 Horse Sense. And that was crass fash opportunism, of course, but exactly because of that, it's disturbing that they're not even bothering to take the opportunity, because they the purest death drive beckons, the Death's Head beckons, so why accept the next-best prize of mere thanatic control over the living.
i suppose this is time for me to gloat at length and dig up links over my previous Cassandra-ism on here about how there is no reforming the U.S. health care system, even to provide inadequate poor-man's public/private-hybrid universal care, because of peculiar historical developments that set it apart from pretty much every country in e.g. Europe; about how even a baseline of treating illness in the country on par with its peers will take physical unseating of the government and state & how that fact may well be the eventual agent-catalyst for that event if it ever happens; about how the private health care system, its HMOs/PPOs/EPOs/etc. and their revolving doors with the federal legislature and supposedly non-cop executive agencies ARE ALREADY the use of deadly force to discipline labor in the U.S., in a direct and daily way. But i don't feel like doing that so i'll just humblebrag in one para like this instead and look like a sick fuck at 1/10th the Medicare price.
Marilyn Buck, the settler anti-imperialist urban guerrilla, exact same thing with her.She became a fugitive, escaped from prison, etc. They put out a government wanted poster. Photograph from what i could tell came from an old college newspaper, kind of like a junky social news article or something. Absolutely would not recognize her after many years in prison and the struggle from that photograph.
Whereas today, there is so much positive reinforcement to sharing deeply personal struggles and personal details that a significant number of younger radicals give away everything that an intelligence agent would need. Drug use, anxieties, worries, important biographical details, etc are all part of gaining followers and shit on TikTok and they also empower any state actor to infiltrate someone's life. It's really easy for an agent to be someone's friend if they know enough biographical details and preferences to mirror their behavior and create a common bond.
This state of things actually empowers clandestine organizations and clandestine actors, there's an overwhelming number of easy targets for intelligence agents to go after so anyone keeping a low profile is going to get ignored. This has also impacted the US war machine effort, they substantially downplay human intelligence factors in favor of investing in technological advantages that create private profits. It doesn't matter how many Afghanistan resistance camps the US has bombed because the on-the-ground organizations and relationships matter more.
An area for revolutionaries today is finding a balance between technological integration where mass work is needed and technological avoidance where secrecy is needed.
liceo posted:the imperialists knew full well that if trump said or did one thing, the cul-de-sac science-trusters would do the opposite at all costs. this means signing up for any and every surveillance, state-serving program imaginable. and that's exactly what happened.
And more. Certainly online, but also in person, I’ve had self described socialists point towards the failure of the police to act, a failure of more harsh and direct government enforcement. With some prompting one might be able to get them to admit that “yeah well we need M4A, rent relief, more government assistance, etc” but the immediate vocal reaction of a whole swath of folks that a year ago were cheering for BLM and “defund the police” has been to demand more cop power
liceo posted:i think that what you're missing in your analysis of the amerikkkan social response to covid (i.e. not the top-down enforcement) is that you are too focused on the roughly fifty percent of the population that is semper fidelis, DON'T TREAD ON ME types who are, in fact, the enforcement itself. obviously i agree with you in that part of your perspective. the important group to pay attention to is the other half of the amerikan public who is actually very eager to be surveilled because they think that their submission to the state is what makes them Good People. this has been moralized into crystallized political identities beyond belief. the imperialists knew full well that if trump said or did one thing, the cul-de-sac science-trusters would do the opposite at all costs. this means signing up for any and every surveillance, state-serving program imaginable. and that's exactly what happened. i am not writing about the banal 'politicization' that mass media prattles on about, but instead about a seeded methodology for utilizing identity-contradiction for social control. and this leads to:
liceo posted:as an amerikan expat in germany, i again think you're missing the mark on this one. people here do indeed talk about that (same with guns, medical costs, student loans, and every other boring complaint that the imbecilic normal euro person wages against the U$), but they talk about it only insofar as they are completely blind to the fact that their governments are, in fact, also imperialist states who are as equally guilty as the U$. life is just as insanely capitalist-chaotic here as it is in the United $nake$. in other words, it's the same moralized political identity as amerikan democrats, but reinforced by a few decades' worth of excellent public transit, reasonable or free healthcare, better pension policies, and the other spoils that members of the imperialist core enjoy at the expense of the total destruction of the global proletariat. germans and presumably most other western europeans are again happy to participate in surveillance, so long as the government upholds their commitments to e.g. GDPR Datenschutz ordinances. it's exactly the same problem. about half of the population simply trusts their government because they think that it serves them (just as dems think that biden serves them). they think that there are good rules in place that are in their interests and they truly believe it.
...could you explain how you see this as in contradiction to anything i'm saying? I'm genuinely asking here. I assume you've seen my posts on this exact topic, the German police use of the far right as irregular forces and how it coincides with genuine far-right-ism among German police forces. So you know i really am curious about what you see happening.
That said, what I'm offering here isn't really about European attitudes; that's sort of a side note where I'm suggesting people not talk past each other. The substance I'm providing is the perspective from the U.S. and how it's different in ways that outstrip attitudes about it as epiphenomena. And, as I said, I'm hardly denying the pervasiveness of surveillance in the U.S.!
What I'm asking here is for a clear mutual understanding of the difference between what's being done with that information right now in different places. There is sometimes an urge, I say this as someone who feels it, to treat the police efforts of the entire imperial "core" as singular, in both domestic and foreign policy, because of the linked and interdependent nature of agencies' efforts and projects. This is, I think, a tactical response to the propaganda idea that there is no imperial project at all, and I sympathize with the tendency to go too far in countering that propaganda instead of brooking bad-faith efforts to dissemble about it through vagaries.
In my case, though, I think you can assume good faith, and I'm also trying to get down to specifics rather than abstract away to the vague. Often these projects are not unified, even inside a country and even when directed at the periphery, e.g. we've discussed about how truth & reconciliation efforts in places like South Africa have found that even genuine criminal conspiracies between imperialist security and intelligence agencies often involve angry communications (stuff like UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld's plane getting shot down, where the NSA apparently didn't know beforehand about what was almost certainly a CIA-enabled operation and sent a cable demanding that Brussels be made to ground the assassin so he wouldn't mess up ongoing operations in Africa.)
So what I'm saying, and, again, I don't think you're arguing with it necessarily, is that you have to get pretty esoteric to compare what's being done in the U.S. to e.g. selective enforcement of lockdowns in the UK or of mask orders in urban France. Because when a lockdown/curfew order or a mask order comes down in the U.S., it's almost certainly getting enforced selectively when it is enforced, but that's a minor and incidental aspect to how such an order is, in almost every case, barely getting enforced at all, opportunistically or otherwise. This is completely expected by pretty much every group and individual in the U.S. outside of right-wing conspiracy theorists. And now such orders have almost completely disappeared from the majority of the U.S. at the same time that cases are rocketing upwards among the unvaccinated, because the conditions of campaign funding have made that politically wise among those in state government, and it is no secret at all, open or otherwise, that key campaign constituencies include state police organizations.
I think the empirical evidence for this difference is difficult to dispute, because it's literally hundreds of thousands of people dead and ~500 more dying every day in the U.S. To touch on what you brought up, the attitudes about it, this is why the right-wing conspiracies have to keep shifting to keep up with material facts as subjectively experienced, i.e., how the proportions of people in the country who 1) know someone who's contracted COVID and 2) who know someone who's died from COVID both continue to increase at a rapid pace. So: COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon engineered to wipe out the white U.S.; COVID doesn't exist and COVID wings of hospitals are sectioned off because they're completely empty; COVID is real but the COVID vaccine is both a fraud that does nothing and also more dangerous than the virus. That European attitudes among the far right are following their U.S. counterparts on this is certainly a worthwhile development to track and discuss, as it aligns with a reversal of post-WWII flow of Nazis and fascists and their conspiracy theories to the West, probably dovetailing with the long-standing frontier-fantasy romance with North America among the European bourgeoisie. I think it's interesting stuff to discuss, so I do.
But the difference here in enforcement over COVID is indisputable, and it has necessarily resulted, in the U.S., in a lot more people dying of the unchecked spread of the disease. And the proper counterpoint to that is, cops in a lot of Western, Northern and Central Europe have used much more vigorous enforcement of public health orders as a means of racist oppression and disciplining of labor, and that's not the only downside to it. That more vigorous but politically selective enforcement has led to stuff like the UK press and state pointing to headlines on variants to explain "backsliding" that is likely at least partially due to that selective enforcement. jools loves to Post about this lately. And the thing about epidemics is that you don't have to chase down the purposely-concealed, purposely-abstracted mobility of capital to see the oppressive results. A plague ship spreads plague at every port, and nowadays, at every airport, and the U.S. is currently the world's plague ship.
Both of these bourgeois state approaches to COVID are bad, I mean, that's obvious to everyone here I'd think... this is the nature of the bourgeois police state, and it's pure ideology to compare the two and judge one as better than the other or pretend that's necessary, judging one form of murderous oppression by the bourgeoisie as the "virtuous" sort because that's all there is in a bourgeois-owned society. That approach is not Marxist and erases class. But they're still not the same, and the difference does matter, for a lot of nerd reasons but also because it's literally hundreds of thousands of people dead.
This, like... I hope I don't come across as sarcastic when I say that stuff counts as material conditions of history. It's why I tied it back to this whole question of labor as a ratio of GDP and how every business and financial white paper attempting long-term forecasting is obsessed with that. I don't think anyone really knows what a global plague of this sort will do to those predictions, and more importantly, the bourgeoisie's faith in those predictions as they understood them up until the beginning of 2020 or so, which has so far worked to shape imperialist policy. And that's just one aspect of this with implications for Marxist and socialist politics as concerns imperialism.
liceo posted:i totally agree with the first quote but i think the point where we are missing one another is in the second. i am arguing that because of how these measures have been (or have not been) enforced in the U$ (relative to the EU, which is the average democrat's model of a capitalist utopia) means that individuals themselves have already shown to demonstrate that they will be willing to play the role of fascist police if the actual fascist police do not.
the role of fascism is to save the bourgeois from the inevitable crises that arise from contradictions of a parliamentarian capitalist democracy. the outer trappings (secret police, crushing dissent) are secondary and not even unique to fascism. the idea that private citizens can be goaded to perform its role reminds me of the theories that emerged in the wake of WWII about the nature of fascism in liberal circles, where fascism was ultimately an expression of the "brainwashed masses," totally belying its actual inner logic.
if the US' covid prevention efforts (social, state, or otherwise) were fascist, then it was very bad fascism, because rather than alleviating any potential crisis, it has made it 100x worse. this is not at all a victory for them, it is an unmitigated disaster. and not just because of all the deaths (because, as we have established, the Government Wants You Dead). but because the necrotic insitutions of an 18th century slaveholder country collided into a disaster that it was uniquely unable to handle, despite their massive wealth and technological advantages.
and it tends to be the case that the most powerful individuals are those small few who also run companies with one another. this sets a model for enforcement that will eventually, and probably in the close future, function no differently than, for example, the european states do. in other words, as i and others have already posted, the state doesn't need to make people wear masks or get vaccines or stay at home, so long as people won't be able to access their livelihoods.
you cannot say you understand the American situation and then post something like this. cars posts that Covid has not given any more meaningful United SnaKKKe$ any security or surveillance powers than it already has. the response is "but companies can now fire you if you don't get a Covid vaccine, that's de facto enforcement!"
i mean yes, it is technically true, but this is not at all a new power because, with few exceptions, all jobs in the US are at-will, and any company can fire you at any time for looking at them sideways. unless you are dumb enough to explicitly say "i am firing you because your Mongoloid skull is ill suited for the rigors of accounts receivable" (and even then, good luck finding a judge that cares) you have 0 recourse.
US companies don't want to mandate vaccines because of some desire to be Hitler Incorporated (outside of what they already do), it's because they realize that 100K+ infections a day = the wheels of an already shaky economy grinding to a halt.
the best evidence for this, in my view, is the incessant social pressure to become vaccinated. no matter how you spin it, getting an experimental drug put inside of you by mega-companies who have wrecked far more lives than the coronavirus has or will is frankly a personal medical decision that absolutely nobody needs to know about.
you are confusing a thing with its particular historical time in a particular mode of production. nobody is questioning the evilness of American pharmaceutical companies, but to conflate that with "medicine is evil" is a backflip of logic usually reserved only for anarcho-primitivists.
it is particularly ironic considering that countries like Burkina Faso began massive vaccination drives almost immediately after their revolutionary victory, because even a history of CIA chicanery and malicious negligence from pharm companies does not erase the desire to prevent needless communicable disease among the people.
in germany, people don't ask you whether or not you've been jabbed because they know mostly everyone falls into line because, as i wrote above, they trust their government's behavior. in the U$ however, this is not the case, so friends, family members, colleagues, bosses, and professors ask extremely intimate questions as a way of policing the people they share an environment with. i know this not from distant witnessing, but first-hand accounts of friends, family, colleagues, and my own experiences (i was back for a big part of the last year).
these experience cannot be directly translated. there is already a "it's not my business to ask about my neighbor's vaccination status" among approximately 50% of the country. not because of the expectation of falling in line, but because half of AmeriKKKans believe in a Holy, Inalienable Right to bring about the Death Cult Armageddon.
not only that, because the pandemic has already acquired a particularly amerikan corporate structure, people are willing to broadcast #pzifergang or #modernamoms on every social media platform. this then directly contributes both to social policing and to the state having a database of people who are vaccinated because, as you posted about, the medical system in the U$ is utterly pathetic and incompetent. and so it all comes down to attitude.
uhhh, they absolutely do not need FB posts to tell who has been vaccinated, your info is already put into a database the moment the needle goes into your arm. and social media does not rely on posts, it relies on a complicated amalgamation of geolocation and graph-network processing to divine all sorts of information about you. but again, it is a complete failure that the US essentially has the most sophisticated public-private surveillance system in the world, and was completely unable to use it to do basic things like contact tracing, instead of sending you advertisements for Weber Grills after attending your friend's backdoor BBQ.
people in germany don't need to acquire a police-mentality because the police do what they are told for the most part and the people that tell them what to do follow a particular line. if that line was different (as it is in my state, where the AfD is a powerful part of regional parliament) the police do different, less "effective" controls of the pandemic. accordingly, you see more cashiers responsible for enforcing the mask-rules whereas that occurs by cops in other regions. on the other hand, the regional govt had repressive and frankly pointless curfews for the greater part of the last nine months that were heavily enforced by bored riot cops. and what happened? roma, syrian, afghani, bulgarian, and other basically homeless refugees were arrested, fined, imprisoned, and beat up by cops who had nothing to do because the germans do what they're told. how is this in any way better than 600k amerikkkans dying? it's not and i argue that it's worse because it positively enhances the image actually armed, powerful facet of euro-fascism that, again, has destroyed far more lives than the virus ever will.
yes, thank God we live in America, where the police cannot use COVID as an excuse to destroy homeless encampments and terrorize minorities, and thus these things never happen.
so, for me the difference is that europeans already know how to follow the rules and amerikkkans are still forming that reified necessity in their heads. it doesn't matter how many people die, but what matters is that people, at all costs, do not start doing the job of a fascist state. in this sense, i suggest that nothing whatsoever should be enforced that serves a hegemonic state, even if that means hundreds of thousands of lives.
then again, you are suggesting it's better that hundreds of thousands of people die rather than vague, inchoate ideas regarding fascism come to pass and the U.S.A. acquires powers that it already has, so perhaps you really do understand AmeriKKKa
liceo posted:this watery quasi-humanistic sentiment ruined the rest of your post and shows that you didn't read the other posts in the thread
lmao between this and your half-baked "asking about the vaccine is the same function as a fascist state" it's like an Althusser parody account
especially in light of the fact that the only reason vaccines are in use for coronavirus is because real, functional, successful treatments for the virus have been ignored, suppressed, and taken out of public and political discourse.
ahhh, ok, now it all makes sense
it was not designed to treat or cure the virus.
my dude, surely you are not this dense
they are barely stopping it from spreading and both hospitalizations and deaths are rising, even with increasing vaccination numbers.
great, now do the hospitalization and death rates for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people
but the more pertinent metaphor is encountering the internet weirdo yelling "HYDROXOCHLORIQUINE REMDESIVIR IVERMECTIN" and feeling as if the second-hand embarrassment was meant for them personally
For example, Denmark that has 75% of its population vaccinated has COVID daily deaths that look like:
https://www.statbank.dk/SMIT1
July/August:
Daily hospitalizations:
Denmark is the most highly vaccinated in europe so that's why I picked their numbers, but there's a pretty stark difference in results from Denmark compared to the US South where most of the population hasn't had one shot.
