Logging back in from my break — hell of a time to return — just to to tell you this is very felt. I see your posts in the disability community mega. I never liked the "its just online, u can log off" rhetoric because, yeah, you sure can, and I do, but niche forums like this are (usually) more than some meaningless input-output feedback loop and whether we like it or not this is a space of human beings with lives and names we can recognize and that is called socializing, wow! I similarly do not have many means to "touch grass" because the grass touchers keep making the air toxic and doing nothing about it while telling me I'm the fucked up one. Whenever people say this (call me uncharitable, idgaf) I assume they haven't thought about COVID at all since '21 just like everybody else in the backwards goddamn world we live in now and that tells me all I need to know about who I ought to listen to. This old post I made sums up the "just organize" mentality, a thing I have done & attempted much more and for far longer than most here have even been "leftist":

My wife works in this little crappy Chuck E Cheese knockoff arcade downtown- pretty much the worst place to be all things considered, but we don't have any other choice for income and it pays well enough of any minimum wage job we've ever had. She's been there for a year and has never once taken off her N95 indoors or around other people for any of her eight hour shifts (and her combined three hour commute to and from the building). She has been the only one to do so. When she describes to her coworkers, the wonderful working class of the United States, that she does it to protect me, an immunocompromised person in her family, and when she describes the dangers, shows them the data we have surrounding current Covid trends, they will all say "yeah wow that's bad"- and then we offer them a mask from our personal supply of N95s and they go "no thanks" without hesitation, every time. They have mandatory "safety meetings" every few months and we've brought Covid and masking up at every one of them in addition to casual conversations with her coworkers. There is no plan to change policy. There is no plan for them to bother themselves for the sake of others, or even themselves, at any level of the social ladder, institutional or interpersonal. One of her coworkers talked about driving to Seattle a few weeks ago for a concert with someone who tested positive for Covid, but that they weren't worried because "it was probably a false positive". One of her coworkers complains that she started a couple weeks ago and has been sick twice. My wife has been sick that much the entire year she's worked there, because she wears a high-quality and well-fitting respirator at all times.

Last year we wanted to go to an event nearby and asked the organizers of what was planned to be about 40-50 people if they would require masks because I was an immunocompromised person and wanted the best chances to avoid infection as much as possible while still being able to participate. In their messages they sounded sympathetic, assuring me that they would and that those who saw what I said would wear them for me that weekend. We were two of maybe four people in masks there. They didn't do anything for us, and people who said they would mask were not wearing them. So we left.

sure wish I could go volunteer at my Communist Org For Building Communism like you and all your badass friends, except they (and probably you too bitch) are all carrying airborne death and won’t do anything about it. Fuck you.

So, like, yeah, it is just a website. But the real world has fucking abandoned me, and us, and at least I can say Hexbear was a spot where I didn't have to listen to anyone talking about COVID who would also pearl clutch about presinald trunt, or any number of other inane liberal bugbears, if they talk about it at all. It's at the very least a sanity check in times that are simply incomprehensible.

I’m sorry for coming so hard at you specifically, I like you a lot friend owl. You are funny and cheerful and I appreciate that, but I radicalized a lot younger than most people I know of and this is just the reality I have been experiencing for my whole life.

I am always looking for some light at the end of this tunnel, a hopeful answer to give, but I think what’s most likely to happen to empire now would be like what happened to Rome: the population dwindles — due to endless war & mass death, fleeing — until there is nothing left to churn through and things cease to function. Even that is optimistic. I do not put it above this country to blow the world up before that can happen, and regardless of anything else further pandemics are guaranteed as the global population’s immune systems get cumulatively destroyed by endless COVID and other unknown pathogens emerging due to increasing climate disasters altering the environment. Tuberculosis was thought to be, essentially, gone; it is now surging around the country in numbers not seen for something close to the last century. In all cases, the prognosis is still extremely dire to me. I don’t know how one can see what’s happening around them and deny it. We can and should build ad-hoc collectives and communities and extend that influence where we can, but I do not think that power extends beyond this small footprint until the complete and total collapse of empire, and I know that’s not a good answer, but until I find a better one (and I haven’t yet; I really, really am trying) then that is how I predict things playing out. This is the most optimistic thing I can say.

That doesn’t mean do nothing. Like I said, I still fight because I do not know how else to live. But god damn it am I sick of hearing this sentiment from “leftists” whose first taste of anything was Bernard fucking Sanders eight years ago. “Just organize”, “touch grass doomer”, “get involved with your community, lib” ad nauseum.

I mean, you can wear a mask and organise.

Let me tell you how well that’s going, because I actually have done this!

They call me a wrecker. They call me a fed. They tell me COVID is over, it’s just a cold, and I am overreacting. Only sometimes do they say they will accommodate, and then they still don’t. I show up to demonstrations & events I was promised would be “fully masked”, “masking enforced”, and there are no masks on any faces; there is no enforcement of anything. At best, single digit numbers among 40, 50 people, on average for the kinds of things I try to attend. Anything larger? Hell the fuck no they won’t. And this is in one of the most “progressive” cities in the country!

This is a thought-terminating cliche at this point.

Listen. I’ve been organizing, agitating, doing anything at all that I can for nearly two decades in this shitheap of a country. Do you know what I have to show for it? Piles of corpses and social murder galore. I got a world that is happy to tell me to get bent every time I have the displeasure of committing such a radical act as walking to the fucking grocery store. It’s not going to get better. @Diuretic_Materialism@hexbear.net is basically correct. After witnessing the general population’s COVID response, their response to ongoing genocide, the absolute bipartisan (universal!) public health collapse, and living in this atomized, individualistic hell for nearly four decades now, I have complete confidence in saying this. We should take advantage of this specific moment? Not a global fucking pandemic? Not an ongoing genocide? Not centuries of racism, slavery, poisoning of native lands, the earth we all share? None of this has been what makes us failures, apparently, but a Trump victory that everyone is replaying 2016 for is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, what really makes us dumbasses for failing to capitalize? We fail to capitalize because this population does not want it. Tell my immunocompromised, disabled ass to self-crit over this, whatever. I’ve done plenty. I’ll fight til there’s nothing left because I don’t know anything else, but you cannot make me have hope. I hate all of these people too.

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Thank you. It really is a matter of approach and hardening my information it seems, then, and maybe even accepting that reaching everybody might not be possible, which is something I am still learning to manage and probably always will be.

But that’s what I mean — is it really not doing harm if me, a white person, tells a Black person who says something like “this is all the fault of you people who didn’t vote for the Black woman” they’re wrong, actually? Because this is a real life thing I’ve encountered, and something my partner did too, and I feel like I just don’t know how to tactfully handle this. I know the correct stance, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are frustrated POC who are not looking for two white girls to tell them they’re wrong even if they are. I feel like this is not my fight, but at the same time, if there’s no one else to do it…I dunno. I gotta say something, right? But do I actually?

I have come across a somewhat uncomfortable scenario more than once this past week that I need some advice on from non-white folks here as a white woman in real-world organizing/activist spaces that do not necessarily lean very far left. I do not know how to approach BIPOC folks in these spaces (or even just in the general public I’ve encountered) espousing the virtues of voting Kamala Harris. I feel like @Angel@hexbear.net’s response to this in here is absolutely the correct perspective, but…is that even my place to say? I do not want to tell any non-white person how to express their frustrations and especially not as a white person, but…voting for Kamala was not it. It was never going to be it. I heard the same things back in the Obama days, too, and we have the benefit of hindsight now to tell us how poorly that goes. But I feel like I can’t be the one to say it. Is that the correct way to handle stuff like this? I feel very stuck.

This website is going to suck so much ass for the next few weeks

I have a t480 with the added battery and the thunderbolt dock for my desk and it’s great. Whatever you put on it these were the last computers built like this and it shows.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/01.wnl.0001051276.37012.c2

Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.

pretty easy to explain imo

If I could afford a couple I’d wear a bunch of ushankas around and I don’t care if it’s cringe they’re cool hats!

This write-up is correct but it needs to apply all these fancy descriptors the author has spent hundreds of words decorating only conservatives with to the other end of the game, too, and it does not. Shocking, I know! I guess this is what the “everyday, normal people” (liberals) will listen to, though, because they sure as shit ain’t listening to anything I have to say in this wheelhouse.

tysm for this comrade floppa

the very concept of solidarity becomes untenable as an organizing principle

This is where I'm at, yeah. How can you sit here and tell me this population has any solidarity with me, any revolutionary potential at all when they excuse genocide? When they don't wear masks because "their guy" said so? Say climate change is all right because "I didn't like snow anyway"? The social fabric is pretty rapidly being undone and it's all I can do to just cope with it; there is no fixing this without massive, sweeping cultural change and we can't (won't) even do the bare minimum.

to be honest I’ve kind of given up. I’ve spent nearly every day of the last 5 years constantly agitating in every social group I’ve been a part of in hopes of getting them to care any little bit at all about COVID — to speak nothing of all the rest of the very valid crises you mention — and none of them listen. None. They laugh at me. They spit (intentionally coughing) on me. They don’t say it, but their actions tell me to disappear, mortally or otherwise. I have two friends remaining of a previously not-insignificant social circle because all the rest abandoned me to catching COVID from them on repeat. There has to be a point when you realize you’ve lost and I think I’ve hit it. The reaction has won. I can’t do it anymore. I’m devoted to surviving and that’s it. I gave almost 20 years of my life mired in poverty, disability, and immense hardship to activism, learning, being involved where I’m able in trying to help these people and not a damn bit of it mattered, because in the end they all think they’re God and they won’t take no for an answer. All I have left to say is you won’t catch me crying when the chickens come home to roost.

Honestly I've had success faking them. Employee refs aren't obliged to share anything other than this person knew you, worked with you, and vouches for you, afaik, so ask a friend who is really good at acting, lol.

Fair enough; I am not a parent nor a teacher, so I'm willing to say this is not my wheelhouse. To my knowledge the idea of a prolonged summer break like that is not such a popular concept in other countries than the US so I believe when you say there is a concern, I just wish everyone was consistent instead of this mealy-mouthed crap where we ignore the massive elephant in the room for, I don't know, a tapir or something, and then it's not even all the tapirs in the room!

Kids lose progress just from not receiving instruction over spring break.

We don't see articles hand-wringing about this for years after the fact, though. There is no one saying that the whole three months (!!!!) every year that kids are out of school for summer is harming their development.