dizastar posted:most if not all here live in parasitic states, being a novaxxer and being indirectly complicit in the killings of labor aristocrats is an updated revolutionary defeatism. u guys post day in day out about the united $nake$, amerikkka, capital export, fifth column and being a saboteur is organizing in the core etc but push comes to shove everyone became divided on some totally otherwordly debate between the peer pressure hysterical get the vaccine crowd and the 'im gonna wait for bourgeois institutions who make things OK for consumption to finally take the vaccine :)' crowd. both those positions are liberalism and reactionary. every other day i come across the lamentations of a poster 'ah i had to tal kto this reactionary guy from work'. why didnt you infect him? low-intensity warfare contains the word warfare in it, if we cant use bombs or guns we'll make it up by using germs get to work comrade and make sure the hospitals stay full
i like the part of your plan where the virus will also end up infecting non labour aristocrats.
lo posted:i like the part of your plan where the virus will also end up infecting non labour aristocrats.
cars posted:This is part of what I mean when I explain that it is objectively anti-socialist.
thanks for clarifying that. i agree that may be generally true, although the current situation is unfolding through an unprescedented intensification of the contradictions in capitalism, fortress nationalism, surveillance, media manipulation/coercion, social control/policing, and rapidly shifting balances in networks of power and collusion.
in your own posts on other subjects you sharply unpack that kind of nuance. i'm surprised that here you are showing hostility to others attempting to approach this similarly (misanthropic posts not withstanding). from how i'm reading it, i think there is a risk of empowering the kind of position you often criticize elsewhere; presenting 'science' as monolithic and unassailable, emerging from a plane of existence untouched by the influences stated above, an end and not a process.
i'm trying to make this post constructively by the way. you said yourself you are facinated by the difference in perspective outside the u$a. as the above dynamics are playing out asymetrically, i've also found it valuable to stay connected to others outside the eu/us. in doing so i've been reminded that what is 'correct' can also be highly contextual when figuring out what saftey/care/responsibility means in practice.
rather than a 'vax debate', what i'm more interested in is how to disentangle these complex realities from monolithic narratives presented to us.
Gssh posted:the current situation is unfolding through an unprescedented intensification of the contradictions in capitalism, fortress nationalism, surveillance, media manipulation/coercion, social control/policing, and rapidly shifting balances in networks of power and collusion.
in your own posts on other subjects you sharply unpack that kind of nuance.
it does us all a disservice to conflate the question of vaccines (do they work, is it right to be vaccinated and encourage others to do so) with all that other stuff. cars and i have been extremely consistent about this - we vehemently oppose allowing loose, superstitious talk about vaccine efficacy. practically everything else is up for debate and discussion and should be. just not nonsense like "my gut tells me that vaccine ain't right! and i have the gut of an engineer, do with that knowledge what you will!"
Gssh posted:web 1.0 ghettos like here
cars posted:tbh I just did not expect anyone to drag the conversation away from those realities and into what I'd already identified as ever-shifting far-right conspiracy theory. Like i expected someone to tote that business in from some other site they read every now and then, this is Rhizzone after all, but i didn't think anyone would try to advance it as anything but ironic clowning or trying to strike a Posting pose, i thought people here had been immunized against that stuff already. I'm very happy to go back to talking about the police state instead if all the rest of it is settled.
If your definition of the police state is so narrow it absolves the medical-pharmaceutical apparatus of any possible suspicion you're on shaky ground to be moralizing about "conspiracy theory", we know anyway the security state launders deformed bits of the truth through cultivatedly embarrassing figures precisely in order to immunize respekkktable amerikans against further inquiry
neckwattle posted:If your definition of the police state is so narrow it absolves the medical-pharmaceutical apparatus of any possible suspicion
if we want to treat this as a purely philosophical question (which again, we shouldn't, because science exists), let's break it down, shall we?
1. pharmaceutical companies are untrustworthy
2. pharmaceutical companies make covid vaccines
3. covid vaccines are untrustworthy
now i don't have a phd in logic but this doesn't add up for me. maybe we're missing some steps? we could do a pros and cons list perhaps. has anyone crunched the numbers on how much money pfizer stands to make if the vaccine turns everyone into lizards vs how much they make if the vaccine works as advertised?
neckwattle posted:If your definition of the police state is so narrow it absolves the medical-pharmaceutical apparatus of any possible suspicion
1) it's not
2) it doesn't
gay_swimmer posted:I've been reading a lot about tarot and chaos magick lately so I basically no longer have any criteria for evaluating information for veracity anymore, so this thread has been a lot for me to take in
From the mid 70’s to the late 2010s the number of hospital beds in the US dropped by roughly 30% while the population increased by about 50%. If the per capita levels of the 70’s had been maintained there would be twice as many hospital beds now.
During most of that period occupancy rates stayed relatively flat. More outpatient work, faster turnover, less resources being used in the books. Reminds me of the logic of “just in time” manufacturing that came to prominence over the same time frame. The logic of capitalist accounting that pushes down every little inefficiency, demands that every asset that can be counted in the spreadsheet be constantly in motion or leveraged, the whole apparatus tuned into a perfectly optimized and humming machine. Until there is one little unforeseen hiccup (or a fucking global pandemic) and the machine has absolutely no resilience or flexibility. Every “just in time” order becomes late at the same time, waves of shutdowns and then forced overtime passing through industry after industry, some few capitalists (through the luck or wisdom of stockpiling, or the brute savagery of forcing demands on workers and customers) making out with riches while most hardships are passed on the workers at both ends - layoffs, forced overtime, consumer good shortages or rapid inflation.
Edited by solidar ()
The vaccine actually has been effective in reducing the severity of covid infection. Most of the deaths and hospitalization due to covid after vaccinations have become broadly available in the west are unvaccinated people. It has failed to reduce community transmission at the level it was expected to, which obviously is a failure and doesn't help end the pandemic, but it was also unavoidable without taking the kind of transmission reduction measures that we saw in China and Vietnam. The way I understand it, it would have been impossible for vaccine makers and researchers to predict and deal with all the possible variants and mutations. But your arguments don't consider these facts, so in that void your vision of the tightly controlled techno-capitalist future leaves nothing but skepticism. If the vaccine "doesn't work" and the capitalists are so highly advanced in surveillance and social control, and they're using the opportunity of the pandemic to expand and deepen that control, then it seems like you're arguing that the vaccines themselves are nothing but a tool of surveillance and control as well.
I think it's more realistic to take into account how the vaccine genuinely does have positive effects on personal and public health, how the security apparatuses of the state are in general against the vaccine on principle, and how the type of social control in the name of public health you're describing never came to pass in the United States, and conclude that the vaccines are not suspicious in and of themselves. The worst thing about them I've seen so far is the west using them as an easy way to discriminate against migrants from the rest of the world (e.g. residents of San Marino got the Sputnik vaccine and now cannot enter Italy because the "vaccine passport" program only allows for the American, European, and Australian vaccines).
this is a failure of containment, preventative measures, and effective logistics for the vaccine rollout, because our governments have rendered themselves completely incapable of properly doing something for the public good. it's not a failure of vaccination as a strategy. I think that you're engaging in all or nothing thinking here that isn't really helping. there are so many other things obviously wrong causing the response to fail, and the science behind the vaccines sufficiently sound, that questioning the vaccine when you could be directing that energy at the real problems is baffling.
the longer the problem gets drawn out as our governments fuck around, the more successive waves of vaccination and booster shots will become necessary. that's not a flaw in vaccines, that's increasing amounts of vaccination becoming necessary the more we fail at everything else we need to be doing.
I think a really important thing to focus political work on right now is making sure pharmaceutical companies don't get an opportunity to monetize the followup booster shots, because that is absolutely something they want (they've openly said it) and it is absolutely going to ruin any chances of realistically beating this thing.
liceo posted:my skepticism of the vaccine
I wonder if one contributor to the temperature could be the rhetorical collapse of the various vaccines out there into a monolith, which I've noticed a few times. It might end up suggesting to readers a broader-brush posture than you actually mean to take.
From context I gather most of talk of "the vaccine" are in reference to the MRNA varieties. Do you have a different set of concerns over the viral vector versions (like J&J, AstraZeneca, or Oxford)? All three of Cuba's (Soberana, Abdala & Mambisa) are protein subunit vaccines, ditto Novavax. Sinopharm is a whole-microbe vaccine. These are all different technologies, pedigrees, production processes. They've all been assembled in a hurry, but I would expect our pre-existing infrastructure would present more challenges to some of these than others. But once it's all just "the vaccine," we've moved away from technical concerns and toward categorical ones that mostly have any lasting power due to a profitable subculture of quack-science enthusiasts.
Edited by Constantignoble ()
there's an HIV mRNA vaccine in the final stages of development that looks very promising and it's exciting from a scientific medicine perspective and it's very bleak from a basic human decency perspective because it's not going to be freely available
shriekingviolet posted:not because they're conspiring to make you reenact the last act of Akira.
if anyone gets word once this is available though, hit me up, exploding into an impossible mass of chaotic flesh is in my top 5 ways to go