Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

i thought the hallmark of this place was the customary ribbing of one poster by another when they say something silly or, indeed, for no reason at all. has covid taken that from us too? find out in my 5000 word medium dot com post about capitalism, public health & the death of laughter

i like to get mad and yell, but i don't like it when someone i respect seems to be actually hurt by it. something something thesis antithesis synthesis.

liceo posted:

trying to talk about how cures have not been an aspect of this

cures don't seem to be as big of a priority with virii in general; with most common viral infections, since antibiotics don't work, standard treatment falls to making symptoms more bearable until the immune system can tough it out -- sort of a microcosm of the right-wing societal approach to the pandemic. i'm not deeply learned in these matters, but from what little i've gleaned, antivirals are a wildly different sort of thing than antibiotics, where each agent identified as effective against a virus can't be counted on to work for any other virus, given the differences of behavior. straightaway one should be able to tell from this that antivirals are not a profitable investment, which maybe creates a way to connect in our minds the insane cries for laissez-faire during a pandemic with the conventional advice to Just Have Some Chicken Soup For A Few Days & Get Well Soon, something something ideology pervasive and subtle

anyway, given this starting point, i don't think it's much of a surprise that cures are not well emphasized. hell, it would not surprise me if many people think they're not even possible on the basis of some permutation of conventional wisdom.

anyway, i hope you are correct liceo that maybe one has been identified in this case, though i gather from shapes bringing up the chemical in question before you named it outright that maybe it's already a bit of a goiter in the Discourse. i'd be curious to hear if the contrary take is also marshaling studies or if some anti-vaxxer poisoned himself on it or what.

pogfan1996 posted:

the imperialist core basically assumed that militaristic lockdown measures until a vaccine would be able to be implemented would suffice to control COVID.

still important to realize though that this doesn't apply in the domestic United States. there simply were no "militaristic lockdown measures" enforced while waiting for a vaccine in most parts of the country, not anywhere other than certain parts of a minority of urban areas, certainly not in most major cities even. I have seen attempts to reimagine the U.S. domestic response this way through rhetorical gymnastics and it just never works. I think critics of the U.S. and its very real police state need to engage with this fact productively and directly, so I will probably keep bringing it up.

pogfan1996 posted:

yeah, i was more thinking about france's racist harassment when writing it.

cool gotcha. and yeah again like... i don't want to dissuade that sort of talk in that context, i WANT to hear about what's happening in e.g. France.

in part it's because it seems like that stuff, what's happening in France, in Taiwan, even in the UK which has had a path relatively more similar to the U.S., etc., will have a lot to say if there's a change in position in the U.S.

Because the current bourgeois party in charge of the U.S. executive branch, the people at least ostensibly in charge of the fed-cops (outside of the extralegal security/intelligence-agent "community" with its own bourgeois constituency) has depended on this maintain-the-margin strategy to hang on and not lose their power. And that strategy says, let shit get bad because if 2016 and 2020 demonstrate that if we piss off 1% of the people that voted for us last time by making their lives inconvenient over COVID, we're fucked. Right now it doesn't look like they're going to depart from that.

But if the people who back Democrat campaigns say:

This needs to be taken care of... This will hurt productivity if it keeps up like this... and the worst part of that is how unhappy we'll be as your patrons... You know, we've been talking with people on the other side about strategies to cast new COVID measures as keeping the scary blacks and Chinese in line, and you know the Trump voters just wait around to be told what to believe, that's what you told us and we totally believe you... and at heart they love cops and the military and will 180 on all of this if it looks like they'll get to see some skulls stomped for white power... and that strategy might take a while but we'd need to get started right now on our end..... Your window here is closing.......

If the Democrats then shift to a strategy that relies on greater influence by fewer constituencies, and if they can find people in the fed-cops amenable to that shift—and I think they absolutely can, I think most of the "intelligence community" and certainly the FBI are ready to hard-push the Democrats that way, in fact—well then... There has been rapid normalization in the U.S. media and among the Democrats' voting blocs of the idea of the FBI and CIA and friends directly intervening in policy well beyond their supposed expertise, thanks to their successful re-casting of themselves as the brave anti-Trump pro-democracy team. I mean, the federal pigs have been tasked, at their own request, with closing out a global epidemiological investigation in 90 days over this very issue, which is batshit. The people backing it actually, literally, no-fooling went out to give interviews, to blast out through their Twitter accounts, the message, We don't need doctors and scientists on this, they came to the wrong conclusions already, we need to make sure the CIA is in charge of it this time. And normalizing that sort of stuff is not some novel development in the U.S., but that specific instance of it is recent and they will build from what's recent and what worked recently.

So if for whatever reason (such as continual or increased "labor" problems) the sector of the bourgeoisie backing the Democrats uses its campaign-finance leverage to push for a major about-face on COVID policy, for the Democrats suddenly doing a bunch of the stuff with executive orders that the White House is currently saying they can't do because "It's illegal!"... and if the enforcers, who now are allowed to straight up tell the Times and Post that they're the ones setting policy, agree with that and promote going as far as they can with it, as they almost certainly will... they are probably going to start looking at models where they can enforce behavior and maintain votes by selling the idea, hard, in the press that these models have worked elsewhere and will cure the dysfunction of the United States.

If that happens, the White House and the top cops are going to lean on the vague Europhilia of many college-educated, likely-voter Democrats, and of fashionable Democrat celebrity pseudo-socialists. They'll say, Let's do this like France, let's do this like (insert Scandinavian country with the most militarized response at the time they make the announcement), let's fill the streets with cops or soldiers, especially those particular streets full of filthy plebs who can't be trusted because they're not reading the news stories where we're quoted saying so. And they are going to lean on Democrat CNN-stoked Sinophobia and Republican Fox-stoked Sinophobia, and say, We can do this the Taiwan techno-surveillance digital fence way, the good upright democratic way with Techs and Apps... or the Red Chinese way that will be a totalitarian nightmare and also won't work because the Commies are secretly all dead and pretending to be alive, and plus, Commie ray guns are what make people sick in the first place. Those "allies" and client states are likely to be their models for any newly aggressive cop-ism, adapted into what they'll simultaneously pitch as a unique and superior "American" model taking advantage of the media's continued absurd presentation of the intellectual superiority of U.S. doctors and public health officers.

So it is a pretty good idea to see the results of policy in different parts of the world for a lot of reasons, especially in the imperial core and its direct clients. This part, U.S. domestic policy's possible future, is admittedly a relatively minor reason why at the moment. But, given the U.S. military and "intelligence community", it's going to become a question of global importance very quickly if that domestic policy is used as a means of highly state-policed xenophobic fascism in the streets with corresponding avenues of imperialist foreign policy. Again, that’s not because it will make the U.S. "more" imperialist somehow, but because it will inform the specific paths of imperialist aggression that result. And what I'm saying is, if that shift in COVID policy happens in the U.S., it will almost certainly happen that exact way.

No one, certainly no one in the White House, really thinks this is some matter of rule of law binding their hands, that the Washington-governed police state somehow CAN'T change course. And if they do, the cops—the alphabet-style top cops, the state cops, all the way down to the local traffic stop cop—will take EXTREME advantage of it IMMEDIATELY once it's clear to everyone that's just how things are gonna be. The people distributing funds will make sure of it Because look at where COVID money has gone already, those big block grants: it's been like 50% or more to local cop departments, and most of them have been using it to gear up for a repeat of summer of 2020 instead of enforcing any sort of COVID measures. Now imagine if "COVID funds = cop funds" became a patriotic tautology in the U.S. news press instead of a juicy shock story... if all that cash was topped up all over again, so that the cops who are currently paranoid-rightist conspiracy theorists were offered the necessary big-time incentive$$$ to change their minds...