I get a lot of authors frustration, just wish after all her work writing about the symptoms she cant speak to why… Like she knows why, right?

After nodding along with her for awhile it was sad as fuck to have this at the end:

it feels wise to ask: How many times is enough to get a virus that – unlike our politicians – understands the power of rapid adaptation?

Uh no, that is not a wise question. That question has nothing to do with the rest of the piece.

Finish the thought, lib! Take it fucking home! You’re almost there! WTF!?

As much as I like to shit on liberals, I feel like her message is better than me and possibly other people here. Like systemic solutions such as ventilation, filtration, and time off for illness sell better that “wear a mask you lib”. Although ya please do wear a mask.

Kids in schools that operate without such policies or proper ventilation systems are, in Ontario, at the mercy of a Ministry of Education that once saw fit to float the notion that COVID doesn’t transmit in schools at all, and there is a persistent, convenient myth circulating among parents that infection is good for kids – preferable to vaccination, even. (For the record, all my infections came courtesy of my son’s school.)

Emily Oster and her consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

The next big teachers’ strike could get really interesting, but even though parents should be teachers’ natural allies in fighting for safer buildings, smaller class sizes, etc., parents are forced by necessity and precarity to side with Capital. We saw a preview of this during the Chicago Teachers’ Union actions in the winter of 2020-2021, and the demonization of teachers is going to be even worse during the next strike, now that almost everyone refuses to see Covid as an ongoing emergency.

I’m in rehab and have Covid. Not a fun time

Why do we have to keep getting COVID?

Convenient access to treats, sweetie.

Why do we have to keep getting COVID

because your criminal government decided we’d have to back in 2016 or something https://imgur.com/a/CRwan3nl

https://imgur.com/a/covid-19-was-us-bioweapon-CRwan3n

: “Small price to pay for Muh freedumz!”

el problema es el capitalismo

What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

Because line goes down slightly if we try to fight COVID in any capacity.

aka rich people lose money, so you need to get permanently disabled and/or die for them.

Even with my compromised vision, it’s clear to me that with governments doing less and less in the face of a complex virus, the multiple knock-on effects of this approach are coming at a high human cost. But who’s counting that cost?

For a mainstream article it’s not bad… calls out some issues like the school situation, somewhat calls out the government, but her prescriptions still avoid mentioning masking, ‘meaningful policies’ as a catch-all is vague… perhaps on purpose, she’s probably aware of the acceptable lib-lines at the paper and is staying within them. She got covid a couple times already and now some vision loss from it so I think she could go further with her critique. Wish there was more about long covid as well. Also I can’t quite articulate it but there’s an emphasis on the personal story aspect and not much on the possibilities of collective action, as if that lies beyond the imaginable in a rich western country (so in that sense it’s gaslighting the reader by hiding the range of options available).

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