we've been abandoned by our government (not that they cared anyways), and we're forced to go to work because of that fact. Individualism and american exceptionalism has poisoned the country, no one gives a fuck about each other, and we're all gonna fucking die because of some fucking rich colonials that thought we were special
Honestly I am really internalizing the reality (which was always the case, but not so blatant) that people who are chronically ill, like me, are not at all valued and in fact considered 100% expendable.
Don't flatter yourself. Everyone is considered 100% expendable by Capitalism, some of us just have more plausible deniability than others. Increasing ecological destruction and factory farming are going to make these pandemics more frequent, and plenty of us "healthy" people are going down as well.
It's like seeing the future of how the rest of our existential threats will play out.
Get out of there ASAP comrade. I'm hopefully almost out. I have to use a nebulizer because of getting sick while my fucking store wasn't requiring masks. It sucks.
NGL, the scale of it all has really been a shock to me. The US Covid outcomes have not only just been bad... but like, worst in the world bad. Worse than developing countries with far fewer resources. Worse than other countries with their own far right demogogues in power. It's almost like they're deliberately trying to cull people.
I mean, the government has really dropped the ball with disaster response in recent past... Hurricane Katrina, Flint, BP Gulf Oil Spill, Hurricane Sandy, California wildfires... but at least there there was the plausible deniability that those were regional issues... or surprise, surprise, a government that overwhelmingly represents corporate interests DGAF about the poor and marginalized... who were disproportionately hurt by those events.
Covid effects literally everyone. Like, it's objectively bad for global capital and it's got the supply chain seriously screwed up. The petty bourgeoisie are livid and the government has completely lost control of the narrative, or any sense of authority. As much as the media wants to overrepresent the "Covid is a hoax" crackpot stuff... I think that's just wishful thinking on their part and... the sentiment on the ground is actually far more sinister and desperate.
It’s almost like they’re deliberately trying to cull people.
👁️
Not so much from the amount of people that have died, but more with how few fucks many people seem to give in spite of all of that death.
Me too, this is the ultimate manifestation of the "percentage small enough that I can write it off" sort of mentality that has been pervasive in America for a while now, the same attitude that let us just passively accept all the people already dying without healthcare and all the homeless people and other horrible shit happening in the country. If it's a small enough percentage, and that percentage is drawn from the people at the margins of society, it's fine. Evil shit.
One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. 300,000 dead Americans is still less than 1 out of 1,000. Most people don't know 1000 people well enough to be that consumed with grief. It's a lot of dead people, but spread out over a relatively long period and effecting mostly people you "expect" to die (old, sick, etc). That's how you get a crisis where most people only feel a vague sense of unease, if anything at all.
how few fucks many people seem to give in spite of all of that death
Libs think Hillary is a slay queen for trying to do a corporate coup of healthcare and probably kill this many people.
And Biden’s plan is to get contact tracing going, which doesn’t work in America because nobody answers the phone anymore because robocall telemarketers are still legal
Mind you, the spread is now so uncontrolled that even if everyone answered their phones / followed contact tracing rules religiously, it wouldn't help much. Contact tracing for covid works, sometimes, but only if you do it very early. The only thing that can slow down the spread at this point in the US is a serious, constraining, nationwide lockdown (all bars, schools and non essential stores closed nationwide, etc.) - which the US won't implement, and in fact I think genuinely doesn't have the capability to implement due in part to the individualism OP mentioned. It's not only a monstrous country, it's also a failed one.
lockdown
I think it's too late, most cases spread in homes or between close proximity people. Shutting down for another year will just slow the curve lol
I meant lockdown similar to what many EU countries (such as mine) did, where even family gatherings and the like are officially forbidden - almost impossible to enforce of course, but it was relatively well-followed here (probably wouldn't go that well in the US of course). No private parties, no marriages and the like. You're physically with the persons you live with for the duration and that's it. Can work from home, you do it, can't and non essential worker, you don't and the state pays your salary for the duration. Under those conditions, if followed by a large enough majority, I believe the virus incidence would decrease quickly (worked here in France).
In a large part you're not wrong, especially when it came to anticipate a second wave, but take France for example. A new lockdown was instigated on the 28th of October; check the daily new cases and consider the incubation period; there is a net, and rapid, effect. In other words: even if your country is quickly becoming plagueland because you refused to listen to scientists for the benefits of The Line, it is possible to decrease spread relatively quickly even starting on an out of control situation by implementing a full, serious lockdown.
Per that link, France has had basically the same deaths per capita as the US (48,000 out of 60 million vs. ~260k out of 325 million)
France did not do a "lockdown". Schools and factories are open! They did exactly what the US is doing, just sooner and slightly harsher, without real productive things like "test the whole city" or "isolate positive cases in special, purpose areas to minimize spread".
That's the way that it had been the whole pandemic. Europe and the US have completely failed, and then only debate is on how miserable our policy of "total failure" should make the population.
Yes, this time schools stayed opened (which I agree is stupid); and yet our curve is noticeably going down, yours isn't.
The US had a curve that lagged Europe by 2-4 weeks last time, and it's shaping up to look exactly the same as before.
The idea that Europe did "so much better" is liberal bullshit, and frankly anti-Asian racism because it hypes up countries that did just as bad as the US, while ignoring countries that did much, much better in Asia (all of them)
I mean, Europe fucked up very badly and nobody's saying that, say, Vietnam or China didn't react to this infinitely better - they did. Yet I still think Europe did better than the US.
We're somehow at a point where I know multiple non-chud people who are planning to take flights across the country in the upcoming weeks/months. These are people who are mostly fully aware of the situation, not denialists or anything, but they have weddings and family or whatever and are just going for it anyway.
basically the apocalypse
the "unveiling" of the hidden occulted truth: workers are disposable
There is no society,
you're 40 years too late on that
Super cool going to the store and only seeing the cashiers wearing masks
I'm waiting to struggle until we hit a million official deaths, then I'm gonna have a real nice good old fashioned struggle with all the trimmings
Wait until a couple years from now when Covid is still endemic in large parts of the world, but there's also new Zoonotic bugs and antibiotic resistant bacteria emerging as well.
The mid-to-late 20th century was a historical anomaly. History is beginning again.
I go back an fourth on it. I was really hoping this would be the thing that got all the senators that lived till 90 because we banned smoking. Like, deep down I wanted this to be the big catastrophic thing that broke the back of the world and let good stuff start happening. Like how some historians talk about the black plague being one of the major antecedents to the renaissance. It's blackpilled, I know, but there is no way this is going to have a happy ending so hope feel s foolish.
It is hard to see the results of it so I just feel numb sometimes just knowing somehow it is churning through people faster than ww2 when I am not looking. Like, maybe if I turn around fast enough I can see the world rotting out of the corner of my eye type stuff. I just feel the pressure building up somehow.
I think that this does represent some kind of of paradigm shift. Just try figure out what it is, and try to prepare for what comes next. The economy hasn't even finished bottoming out you know? We got climate change putting up some big numbers. Another strain is possible. It is going to take a decade for this to all sort out, easily, and there is no way I know what the world will look like at that time yet.
Our ancestors thought the same of leopards. I think that most people in most of thr world have felt like tbis for a long time and ws are just learning to remember it.
Is bad as it sounds, we are only a year into this. I could be wrong, who tf knows, but we are probably just at the start of all this.
i'm having stress dreams about it. not loving this whole thing but I've been staying home for a long time so at least i'm used to that. but my housemates aren't really staying home because retail and restaurant so it's pretty bullshit.
Oh yeah, any dream that has other people in it 100% of the time now involve me freaking out if they are standing too close.
My nightmares involve me literally just going to restaurants or bars and people getting too close to my face.
We're going to be like this forever. They have scarred our psyche.
It's definitely worse for people who already saw capitalism as a horrible death cult because now we're just seeing how right we were but also just how many people will die because of it.
I'm having the same thing. Every dream starts normal and then at some point I remember the pandemic, realize I'm very close to a bunch of people without any of us wearing masks, and then panic. Last night I dreamed I was on a date until I had this moment, and then (horror of horrors) the girl proudly informed me she was an anti-masker.
I do wonder a lot how it will feel when people can get closer to each other again. Right now I want to hug every single friend I have but maybe once it gets down to it, it'll seem too scary still.
People close to me just flipped from trying to hand-wave millions possibly dying to claiming all lives matter.
I have been in deep despair for a while now. I am constantly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of suffering surrounding us.
I gave up any hope I previously had about 3 or 4 months ago. At this point, I know I'm probably going to catch it and with my pre-existing medical conditions, it will likely kill me. Watching all this unfold and how bad our government and ruling class have handled this, but not just that, seeing the everyday common people retort to the usual class war of blaming each other and other sub divisions, I have no hope. Help isn't coming. Even after all this, it's just going to push more bricks into the road of fascism. We're seriously counting down the days we enter fascism.
I was pretty mentally prepared. Noticing in high school history class that most people live through a plague, listening to the warning signs from epidemiologists for the last ten years, evaluating the state of the US's health care system[1] when coronavirus won the gets-to-be-our-pandemic lottery. So far it's been going better than expected.
The thing that does get to me though is watching liberals keep doubling down on individual action, not doing anything, and hoping somebody else fixes it.
[1] Illegitimate, as all states are.
