karphead posted:my commute takes me across the mouth of the Puyallup river, over the Fish Wars Bridge, thru the Aroma of Tacoma. every day for the last 3 months. they should bottle that smell and call it amerikkka.
the edmonton core features quintessentially Albertan forward thinking urban planning: a combined sewer/storm drain system that was never meant to handle a city even 1/4 of this size and will waft up a complex bouquet of rancid sewage from the drains during certain weather conditions, or all the time on certain blessed street corners
The people taking ivermectin and other "alternative medicines" for the novel coronavirus of 2019 aren't desperate people on the verge of anything but a self induced psychotic break. They're following the same ideological, political, and cultural trends that created the Qanon movement. Many of them, especially the leaders, are seasoned veterans of that movement. They have the means to avoid this situation easily. They have the knowledge on how to avoid this situation easily available to them in every format possible. They are so deep into a right wing, white supremacist, anxiety ridden, extremely individualist worldview that not only do they disregard provable material facts about the disease and the "cures" they kill themselves with, but they claim these things were made up only to subjugate them. Absent any actual subjugation, they delve into a fantasy world where simply wearing a facemask to prevent the spread of airborne disease is an unacceptable tyranny.
Buying into their cries that they're the real oppressed minority is not the antidote to the culture that causes others to laugh at people shitting their guts out. Humoring their individualist delusion is not an act of compassion. You're only letting their disease chip away at your own mind.
toyot posted:they make themselves sicker / self-induced / they have the means to avoid it / they have the knowledge to avoid it
it's a highly-contagious virus dude that's just in the species now. who exactly is buying into individualist delusions here?
To clarify, I mean they can avoid destroying their stomach lining by taking quack conspiracy theorist "remedies", not covid. Obviously, the responsibility for the spread of covid lies squarely at the feet of the state for refusing to take the proven public health measures that countries like China and Vietnam took at the beginning of the pandemic. But the responsibility for suffering organ failure after taking quack medicine peddled by the same right wing conspiracy theorists that believe those proven public health measures are a communist plot to subjugate white americans is at least half on the person that took that shit. Half is on the grifters selling it to them, sure. Maybe you should stop defending the objectively ineffective and sometimes deadly "treatments" that are killing the people you're performing sympathy for before the responsibility comes to you as well.
toyot posted:the reason amerikans find their new joke funny is because they believe such suffering is deserved
I don’t think the average Amerikan is thinking about the exploited masses of the world and if we, on this forum, thought it was so funny and wanted everybody to get COVID why would we be saying China and Vietnam did a great job
It's sad when people die but we're talking about pig-ignorant first worlders gleefully stranding into danger. I'm not going to make myself crazy grieving for people who can't be helped.
toyot posted:'well you didn't do this, you didn't do that'. kind of a monstrous, post-christian morality
China has managed to enforce this exact same morality (do this, don't do that) without the slightest Christian tradition so it doesn't seem required or even effective
toyot posted:but again that's the amerikan character: mass-scale social suffering given individualized blame.
Not seeing the link between American violence abroad (which most Americans are, again, blind to), and the unabated joyful glee purportedly experienced by all liberals when somebody doesn't get vaccinated and then suffers the predictable effects of an incredibly contagious, deadly and debilitating disease.
All the hardship faced over the last year and a half was not at all worthwhile. People will say that there was nothing we could have done.
The basic failures of the US to react to something that affects the "public" as an entity are parallel with its inability to grasp the concept of "public" to begin with.
since it's a shitty society we are saddled with a new endemic epidemic, & everyone is liable to catch it even if they do all the personal rituals and get their shots etc. its not surprising that someone who has been doing everything right & proper, staying isolated, getting vaccines, but still comes down w covid feels emotionally agitated, upset, and could be rude to people online & try to cast blame for their infection, even though it is as normal and predictable as the sun rising. i imagine a similar sort of thing, but from a more defensive angle, runs through the minds of folks who were too smart to get a vaccine, got sick, and now expect to be razzed about it because only dumb folks and bad decision-makers get covid in the eyes of gleeful & cruel other amerikans. but it's not like they weren't likely to get sick regardless: it's an epidemic in a shit society, everybody should expect to get fucked over
There is misinformation out there, it's true. There's also public health authorities struggling to counter that disinformation, but it falls on deaf ears. I've been told I'm pushing the government narrative, blindly believing what the media tells me, ignoring that this is all a ploy by Big Pharma to make money...
Those all sound like left positions, right? We all know the government and the media lie all the time. But in this specific context, it's being deployed cynically by reactionaries, with no materialist basis, to deepen the chaos of this stupid pandemic. For what purpose, I can't say. But we are clearly struggling to deal with the consequences.
Yes, there are people coughing to death in ICU beds right now. Some of them are threatening the doctors and nurses trying to treat them because they think covid is fake, or they're not being given the real medicine. Some of them have friends and relatives protesting outside the hospital harassing the people coming in and out. This is antisocial behaviour and it should be criticized rigorously at every opportunity.
this though is just funny funny :
Y’all what the fuck is wrong with this city 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/kr7qH5PRSl
— ......... (@__lilgem) September 18, 2021
toyot posted:so how is ideology structured during a plague response failure? plague response failures are dangerous to class control so we should expect ideology to be working hard to excuse the deaths. we get a good example of what that looks like from colddays. i said first that i thought laughing at the sick was disgusting, and i thought i was preaching to the choir, but serves me right. instead here's colddays about why it's fine: the people trying to heal themselves today are all rightwing scum who deserve their organ failure
The people taking ivermectin and other "alternative medicines" for the novel coronavirus of 2019 aren't desperate people on the verge of anything but a self induced psychotic break. They're following the same ideological, political, and cultural trends that created the Qanon movement. Many of them, especially the leaders, are seasoned veterans of that movement. They have the means to avoid this situation easily. They have the knowledge on how to avoid this situation easily available to them in every format possible. They are so deep into a right wing, white supremacist, anxiety ridden, extremely individualist worldview that not only do they disregard provable material facts about the disease and the "cures" they kill themselves with, but they claim these things were made up only to subjugate them. Absent any actual subjugation, they delve into a fantasy world where simply wearing a facemask to prevent the spread of airborne disease is an unacceptable tyranny.
all you learn about the dead and desperate is that they're all qanon scum who weren't worth burdening a hospital worker for. ideas like this happen to excuse amerika's covid failure, where the dead don't count because they got what was coming to em. the real story about facing this crisis without a national healthcare system gets transformed into a death-justifying story about how it's only deranged people who are self-medicating, poorly. and we are given permission to laugh at them. the ideological apparatus is working in the present to justify the mass covid death toll, and this is what that looks like. some people do it without even getting paid for it.
idk the elaboration you edited in here still seems insufficient to me. colddays describes with apparent frustration an intransigent group of folks who reject medical treatment; you characterize this as saying folks who are sick, dying, desperately trying to heal themselves are deranged and deserve to die. that's a p uncharitable interpretation; it sorta comes off like you're putting words in their mouth in order to get self-righteously angry at them
& both you and i were desperately trying to heal ourselves via self-medication recently. considering the whole population of folks dealing w being sick with covid, the hyperbolic conflation of horse paste eaters (who are subject to often tasteless ridicule) with all sick people is fuckin.. wild
moreover, i think it's possible to separate the joy of critique from the circumstances of the thing. part of thinking dialectically is being able to hold various aspects of things both together and apart. Marx spoke mainly of bourgeoisie and proletariat, but we are able to say that the middle classes exist as they do because of different degrees to which they participate in the life of one or the other (or the peasantry, etc). we accordingly consider these both as unity and as totality.
we can sympathize (even empathize as the case may be) with people who've been led down a dark path by social forces beyond their reckoning, while simultaneously saying that the ideas they espouse are Wrong, and the ones we uphold are Right. we might even transform that rush into a laugh at first blush, too, because ideas connect to other ideas, and it's very silly that the ridiculous shape of a horse also barges into the picture at some point.
none of what i've described constitutes mocking someone's suffering. though, if we're only observing an event at the surface level, and without any sort of charity of interpretation, i guess it can probably seem like it came from whoever is behind the "herman cain award" meme, which is obviously in poor taste.
so, i think it's simultaneously correct to note that if essence and appearance were the same, there'd be no need for science, and to say that it's also probably smart not to comport oneself in a way that could be mistaken for the bad liberal positions that we're all exposed to constantly outside of this setting, even if only because a casual reader is not going to be able to make that distinction handily. we're all anchored and primed for that shit, and bringing those automatic reactions in here generally makes things worse, rather than better. and, lastly, that we shouldn't keep looking for the bad liberal position in one another's posts if people have already clarified that that's not what they were trying to express.
instead, let us reflect on Stalin's approach.
cars posted:
cars posted:tfw you realize Snake used Stalin’s Method to discover each and every secret of Metal Gear
i've seen other people on the post-left, after having made a million 9/11 jokes (and who are almost always vaccine skeptic themselves by sheer coincidence) get self-righteous about these observations and i find it funny because the people being made fun of, as right-wing amerikkkans themselves, will always be more absurdly cruel than the dumb DSA poster on twitter sipping blue bottle as he makes another zinger or whatever. point in case is this lady who died from cancer, complaining of having trouble finding a spot in the hospital because it's full of the unvaccinated, happened to get the booster shot a few days earlier. tell me these comments from the noble heartland even compare in their ignorant cruelty.
So still waiting to see a doc although they have run tests. Still no room in hospital or in ER bay. PA announcement just said ER could not accept more patients. This is a BIG hospital. Damn the unvaccinated. They have made life hell for a lot of people.
— Karen Croake Heisler (@KCroakeHeisler) September 14, 2021
toyot posted:i'm still looking for the good communist position in the popular colddays post that says people should take individual responsibility for their healthcare choices. it would have been so easy to just say "sorry you got sick" or "yeah amerikans are sadistic". instead, a belabored defense and denial of US sadism.
part of what you're looking for might be tucked away in the bit you didn't quote. e.g.:
colddays posted:Buying into their cries that they're the real oppressed minority is not the antidote to the culture that causes others to laugh at people shitting their guts out. Humoring their individualist delusion is not an act of compassion. You're only letting their disease chip away at your own mind.
i'll let colddays correct me if i'm wrong, but i didn't read that as an endorsement, let alone a celebration of, the culture in question. why would it need an antidote, if it were nontoxic?
if i'm right, that would mean that you're on roughly the same page on this issue, but using phrasings or mental models that are bouncing off one another. that shit happens all the time; nothing insuperable unless we make it so. hell, it's plain enough to see what people are respectively responding to: different flavors of hateful bullshit from different wings of the Discourse that are so manifestly unpleasant that they've generated an almost traumatic swat-reflex.
raise issues with transnational capital's pharmaceutical practice, that means you're antivax. demand the USA not bomb or sanction another country, you earn whatever this week's new epithet is to the effect that you're in favor of genocide by barrel bomb or whatever. if you say not to laugh at someone's pain and desperation that means they're secretly your spouse. if you say a cultic ideology of white-supremacist obstinacy deserves ridicule, you're also making fun of Black community members who've suffered at the hands of the white medical establishment for centuries.
it's all a race to the bottom, so why rush
Edited by Constantignoble ()
toyot posted:i'm still looking for the good communist position in the popular colddays post that says people should take individual responsibility for their healthcare choices.
this is bitterly ironic considering what you had to say about your choice not to get the vaccine:
i'll wait for approval like i do every other drug. good luck with your life decisions everyone.
sure sounds a lot like you thought it was reasonable to make that decision on an individual basis and fuck the wellbeing of the collective. but i'm sure you believed you were being a good communist, right? i guess what i'm saying is be as judgmental a prick as you like, this is a web forum after all, but don't shit on my leg and tell me you're communist
toyot posted:what point were you making again?
read my post again, as slow as you need.
the great thing about the asynchronous discussion mode of forums is we have all the time in the world to play this game where you pretend not to understand me, try to redirect, and i say nice try but refuse to engage