@PacificNic
Well it had an effect on me and my co-Directors. After having lovely days taking exercise, cycling in the sunshine and obviously keeping out of everyone's way:
Shut down our automation software company after 25+ years of trading. 50 hrs/week.
Got fitter, more into music and reading.
Got a part time job. 20 max hrs/week.
I'll never view the capitalist merry go round the same way again. Nor will I EVER trust a UK government of any stripe again. Fucking crooks
@PacificNic There are some people who don't know that Sars is Covid, and Covid is Sars. Media, being what they are, looked for a shorter word than Sars_CoV2 or Novel Coronavirus. Gradually, the source was shuffled to the back.
Thus, we have people saying 'Oh, I'm not worried about Covid. If it was SARS, or MERS...' 🤦♀️
@PacificNic
It's really relieving to have a certified expert for #revolution on the #fediverse. It's falling from my eyes like scales: The only reason why revolutions haven't occurred yet, is that people hadn't enough time to think! 😂
@messaroundmarx LOL. I hope people don't actually see me as an expert. I'm so full of shit about this stuff. Literally just throwing out hunches like they're facts e'ry day.
@messaroundmarx@PacificNic people are allowed to post about things they're not experts in. Do you have degrees about everything mentioned in your posts? Or 15 years experience?
@susankayequinn@PacificNic Yep, this is one of my 3-am-is-it-any-wonder-I-can't-sleep scenarios, too. We know what the morbidly wealthy will make our so-called leaders do: feed us into the meatgrinder to maintain their status quo.
@PacificNic I agree 100%, but I specifically meant the next virus that comes along that's not a variant SARS-COVID-19. Something completely cough NOVEL... and our reaction will be what? Absolutely informed by the fact that we accept people dying at excess death stats rates as just the "new normal." The mass disabling. All of it primes us to just stumble through our lives and not do anything when an ancient virus gets liberated from the permafrost (or more likely bird flu hops to humans).
Yeah, one of my pet doomsday scenarios is if bird flu with its, what, 50-ish, 60-ish percent fatality rate, makes the jump to human-to-human transmission. In a broadly immune-compromised global population.
Even if "the powers that be" wanted to fight it… they've just devoted half a decade to demolishing, undermining, and sabotaging all the tools that would enable any sort of defense.
I can't see the outcome there being anything less than apocalyptic, and not in a slow cumulative way.
@Aviva_Gary@paninid@tunguska@susankayequinn@PacificNic@dalias the answer is that people, sufficiently terrorized, will spontaneously organise in the vacuum of government inaction. I’m not saying it will be enough to prevent carnage—of course not—I’m just saying it will happen (and did early in the covid pandemic).
@susankayequinn tbh I still see it happening: Ordinary people realizing that the government isn't their friend or protector, and taking some kind of action in response.
I think we focus on the people who took negative actions, like joining the pro-pandemic team, or commiting crimes, and ignore how many people took a sewing class, or learned about their local food bank and donated, or checked on their neighbors.
@holyramenempire I think there's a hardcore group that learned important things in the pandemic & are still doing them, including masking (I count myself). But VAST majority of people stopped masking, decided the pandemic was "over" & went back to their lives. The government simply gave the people what they wanted at that point: to pretend.
Next pandemic: hardcore folks will be ready, but everyone else who didn't sustain that change will not be
I think it's important to keep in mind also that people were very, very much told what to want. AFAICT, the glimpses of real solidarity, of doubt in the whole edifice of capitalism, etc, scared the shit out of the tiny billionaire class who own all the governments, media, social media, employers, real estate, and everything else. Thus, since somewhere around a year and a half in, there's been this massive anti-public-health blitz on every front: propaganda, lobbying/legislation, funding, regulatory capture, the whole nine yards.
AKA "manufacturing consent".
All accompanied by a dramatic acceleration of the push toward open fascism -- which is a coordinated project driven (and lavishly funded) by the absurdly rich, no matter how many times all the Very Important Journalists say "populist".
It'll be very interesting to see how the energy of ordinary people ends up directed as the collapse gets less slow and cumulative, and more into abrupt and un-ignorable system failures.
Well, however much energy people's ongoing regimen of 2/yr-ish COVID infections leaves them with, that is...
@tunguska People's instincts in the crisis are good... it's the long term they can't sustain. That's where we need better stories, better models, better infrastructure, social and otherwise. We need to build resilience in social networks because shit is going to get BAD as climate change, climate refugees, the rampant enshittification of tech and end stage capitalism, the rising fascism in response, all gets much much worse.
All true. I think I'm inclined to assign somewhat more of the blame to the effectiveness of propaganda (including subtle astroturfing and algorithmic manipulation, and yes, starting way before the full-frontal assault I referred to) than any inherent inability to sustain solidarity or community in the long term than it sounds like you are.
Overall, though, yes. Very much agreed. We're absolutely going to need all the resilience we can get, mostly local and small-scale (as big brittle hierarchical systems fail hard). And I'm right there with you on the need for better stories: how do you work toward building something if you don't even have the language to imagine it?
As far as I can tell from a lay reading of some climate papers, this is the big one. If for-profit fascism sabotages a rapid global abandonment of fossil fuels (over the objections of a brainwashed and disease-weakened populace worldwide), well...
I really wonder how widely people are aware that the stakes may very plausibly be literal extinction, decided by this fight, between capital and humanity, over the next decade or two.
@tunguska "more of the blame to the effectiveness of propaganda...than any inherent inability to sustain solidarity"
If I didn't believe in that inherent ability, I'd be lost. :) We are so swayed by stories, what we believe is possible, exactly that language of imagination. That's what we need to actively build. It's slow work but it's already happening. People instinctively know we need something different and are reaching for it.
I was in the thick of essential worker life during 2020. On the grocery end. So many workers who have been treated like servants all the way up the ladder saw that they were viewed even more that way in a crisis.
This HAS to change. The effects continue to be seen and will fuel future issues. Workers are beyond burned out.
@susankayequinn@tunguska@holyramenempire@Aviva_Gary@PacificNic@dalias The gaps and fissures are more obvious than they've ever been and businesses are trying to figure out how to avoid the actual solutions by actually fighting unions, giving raises that don't match inflation, continuing thr clopening tradition that brutalizes immune systems by cannibalizing sleep schedules and downtime, the list goes on.
And workers are cutting corners in food safety more than ever, which, yeah...
The propaganda is just the icing on the cake of something that's been happening out of sight because essential translates to taken for granted but desperately necessary.
And, it's a shame because the work is incredibly fulfilling when CEOs don't actively try to cannibalize you. Being of service is actually very joyful in its way but not when that's a euphemism for something dehumanizing.
Really, I think it's all part and parcel of a system in which human value is reduced to how much you contribute to fattening the bank account of some (fascist by definition) billionaire who owns the hedge fund that owns the bank that owns the conglomerate that owns your boss. And if that value falls below a certain threshold, you're literally kicked out into the street to die, by an unaccountable armed gang (with badges!).
People's imaginations are deeply poisoned by total immersion in a system in which you really kinda do have to be willing to knife the poor fucker next to you just to stay an inch farther from disposal yourself. Is this truly a separate thing from propaganda, or are we describing facets of the same thing, viewed from different angles?
Being of service, taking care of people, these things are indeed deeply rewarding. That's a point of paramount importance — honestly, if there's hope for humanity's future, I think this fact is right there in the heart of it.
Your existence being defined as a resource to be consumed by the profit-extracting machine of some morbidly wealthy resource-hoarder whose name you don't even know? That is an atrocity.
Which is why any attempt to say that fascism can be a way to structure a society is wrong. A society requires it's members to obey certain social contracts that enable the various benefits of living within a society.
@tunguska@susankayequinn@holyramenempire@Aviva_Gary@PacificNic@dalias I think we've argued too much with people who don't want to live in a society over the details of the rules of social contracts. But, in essence, no one can hoard all the benefits--eventually no one has the knowledge to supply anymore of those benefits, eventually everyone's bodies and minds are worn out.
The "natural" order involves a lot of things that aren't strongmen.
@tunguska@susankayequinn@holyramenempire@Aviva_Gary@PacificNic@dalias There's immense strength in care and humans give birth to some of the most premature infants that need the most care. We build societies because we are inherently the opposite of what fascism declares us to be.
Humans also have many members who are weak in one area but are given roles that work on their strengths in ways that ultimately bolster the whole.
@tunguska@susankayequinn@holyramenempire@Aviva_Gary@PacificNic@dalias Final little thing to add because I've had to have this argument with men in my life in the past but reproductive success is NOT about getting someone pregnant. It's about Grandma and Grandpa helping their daughter/son who just had a baby. It requires many healthy generations.
Fascism flattens survival in ways that promise that no one will survive and those that might will be too traumatized to be by definition, fit.
Oh, absolutely! Fascism (AFAICT) has little in the way of consistent/coherent ideology, but its essence is fundamentally antithetical to the creative impulse, and thus (being unable to produce anything itself except violence and hate to justify the violence) it's always totally reliant on the scapegoated "other" who can be ruthlessly cannibalized to keep the machine fed.
As it consumes and annihilates conveniently distant (or otherwise distinct) "others", it must always redefine more and more of those who were in the "in group" as "other" to keep the cannibalistic extraction going, until eventually it self-destructs as the last fragments of the core kill each other squabbling over the ashes.
(In this sense, I don't know that capitalism-without-fascism is… even a coherent concept, let alone possible in practice.)
And there's a massive irony in the fact that it's only thanks to eons spent successfully practicing a sort of loose, horizontally federated anarcho-communism that humanity survived long enough to invent the authoritarian extractivist state that has since devoted itself to violently imposing the idea that its paradigm of vicious individualism is the only possible — imaginable, even — model for human society. Mind-bending, really.
@tunguska Oh, I agree with the manufacturing of consent, but I also think it was a joint project (billionaires & populace) & it started much earlier in the pandemic. Basically immediately. Remember "go back to work for the economy!!" & "the only people who are dying are those with pre-existing conditions!" (that one stuck around cuz people liked it a LOT). People I know aggressively demanded the "return to normal". Smart progressive people.
What this really meant was that if kids went to school, parents could go back to work. There was terror among the business world and governments that the economy would "collapse".
So kids went to school, got sick, and carried the virus home to their families and pretty soon so many adults were sick that there was a shortage of workers. Entirely predictable!
Politicians then gloated over the rise in job vacancies! 😳 This relentless spin in favour of what suited business rather than what preserved lives was just detestable.
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