my conservative neighbor refers to covid as “That Flu” as in “____ also went to the hospital with that same flu that took out ____”
my more progressive friends refer to covid generically. as in “yeah I’m sick again” or “my cold turned into a bad cough” or “I’m the only one in my house who isn’t sick with what’s going around right now”
not only did we scrap masks and tests we legit scrapped the word covid
@seachanger yup. I have old friends who if I mention anything about Covid and the remaining risk, they just ghost me out in messages.
I try not to bang on about it too much, but also I suffer with long COVID symptoms… so it very much adds up to feeling like they would rather ignore my disability and me, too.
This is the chair of Communication Studies at the American University in Washington DC, spreading misinformation about Macklemore, just FYI https://aoir.social/@aram/112558970521935998
@seachanger consider: if covid continues spreading as it is, we won’t have the collective brainpower as a society to actually chase the lab leak idea or its antithesis (being the natural zoönosis hypothesis) without fear or favour.
“Because of my Jewish origin, because of my love for Mexico and because I feel like a citizen of the world, I share with millions the desire for justice, equality, fraternity and peace, and therefore, I can only see with horror the images of the state bombings,” she wrote at the time, adding, “No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians … Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”
just to expand on Arendt's whole banality of evil thing: this entire climate crisis, gaza genocide and a great deal of past and modern white supremacy and colonizer bullshit coasts on social processes made possible by careerism and respectability politics. the road to right now has been so polite, so professional
to speak up or oppose the genteel norms and processes of colonization with any kind of consistency makes the truth seeker a 21st century untouchable. it's not that any of this is corrupt or wrong, it's that you personally are too weird too angry too insane
@rimu following the current trend lines, it’s hard to imagine a series of events that could alter the history and scope of that momentum, but I’m interested in what else they can imagine!
@seachanger The hard part of "capitalist planetary sovereignty" is the "planetary" bit. Basically nation-states would be agreeing to give up some sovereignty to a UN-like structure. It's not a given that they will succeed at that, look at the useless COP process.
2 other alternatives the author calls "Climate Mao" & "Climate Bohemoth" are not great either. There is a fourth which so far the author is being coy about (I'm less than halfway through).
my artist friend talks about how cool it is that the world speaks emoji now, a universal language of stylized pictures. and I was thinking about how almost everyone who uses phones uses the circle face emojis to express feelings, which only works because we evolved over millenia to communicate with our faces. it’s weird but also amazing: I can look at a tiny circle with a few lines and instantly be feeling, more or less, what you are feeling
finally read this older piece from Sarah Kendzior on trump & garland et al that one of you posted and just, yikes
“… It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.”
my intuitive take on the Democratic Party is that it operates like the mob. like organized crime. but I think this misses the point. members of many mafias do actually control much of the federal government, its major legal responsibilities, and have for a very long time. in this way the US is just kind of synonymous with organized crime, even if it’s hard to follow the various and shifting alliances in real time
“I can’t be any happier that I’m alive to see something like this”
Beautiful audio postcard of the Tlingit canoe delegation’s landing in Petersburg this week on their long, traditional paddle up the Inside Passage to Celebration in Juneau, a once per 2 years event where Tribal people from our region come together for song, dance, parade etc
“We need the canoes now in order to stay connected to our ancestors and to stay connected to our ecosystems and to stay connected to all these other communities”
A longer Alaska public radio story about this journey from Wrangell’s KSTK
“It’s pretty exciting to be going on this journey for the first time in our own canoes from our own community and meeting up with a lot of other communities on the way,” Hamar said as he worked. “I think, hopefully, it’ll bring a lot of inspiration to the people and hopefully get some folks excited about maintaining the traditions.”
from KRBD in Ketchikan about a Haida carver and paddler in this year’s canoe journey to Celebration from Kasaan, 250 miles to the south
"Over Memorial Day weekend the IDF dropped 60 2000-pound bombs on a displaced persons camp in Rafah, burning tents and the refugees sheltering inside.
This does not make anyone safer – neither Palestinians nor Jews. I know what it means to fear the rising surge of antisemitism. I am terrified– I feel it every day. [but] making Jews the face of an unrelenting, genocidal campaign only puts us at risk even more."
The act of dehumanizing particular groups can lead to genocide, we’ve seen it on every continent. which is a reminder that none of the protest and outrcry about Gaza should be about Jewishness as an ethnicity, personality, or religion.
Taking critiques into actual antisemitism is gross, yes, but it also serves to obscure our own human capacity for violence & othering. Plus for those in the US, it hides how we have chosen to allow our govt to be captured by bomb profiteers & their puppets
Without the largest annual infusions of free modern weaponry the planet has ever seen, the modern Zionists are just another cult jockeying for power and land in a chaotic world. It is the rank corporate corruption and glorification of military violence inherent to the modern US that has turned this into genocide
Ironically though, genocides occur when a dominant society pretends their subordinate has a uniquely animal propensity for violence — justifying domination by labeling others as barbarians turns out to be the quickest route to barbarism yourself!
And in this case Israel gets a free ride thanks to the rank Islamophobia of North America and European