This is fucking depressing. The government has been repeatedly lying about how many doses of vaccine it's going to have when, and how long it will take to get people vaccinated.
If the government's original figures had been correct, and not just lies, I would have been vaccinated by now, as would many of you.
Instead they decided to waste their time on Brexit, making everyone poorer and destroying lives and inducing an unnecessary economic crisis, rather than actually do the things necessary to make people safe in the greatest crisis for a century.
It's almost as if voting for people because they have stupid hair, can say funny things when given funny lines by TV scriptwriters, and promise to get rid of all the people of colour, is a really fucking bad idea.
I just want to be able to leave the house again, ever. I just want to see another human being who isn't delivering stuff again, ever. These should not feel like unachievable aims that can never, ever happen.
But because I live in a country where 52% of those entitled to vote, on one day in 2016, decided that racism was more important than anything else, and where not one elected official of any party since then has had the guts to stand up to that...
we are now run by people whose only qualification is that they can be more racist than anyone else, and so tens of millions of lives are being ruined, and hundreds of thousands dying unnecessarily.
Anyway, no political party has covered themselves in glory in recent years -- not Labour, not the Lib Dems, not the Greens, none of them -- but if elections are ever a thing that happens again, vote for literally any of them over the Tories. Remember this.
The Conservative Party in the UK, like the Republican Party in the US, is no longer a broad-ranging coalition that contains some people with whom it's possible to disagree respectfully. It is a death cult and needs to be treated as such.
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I've been following the rise of the far right for years, and I can tell you exactly who many of them are. They're people *exactly* like me. They're not poor, they're not uneducated.
The *most* dangerous people in the far right now are middle-class cis het men between twenty and fifty, highly educated, usually in good jobs, with tons of spare money, but no social skills.
People who have spare time but nothing to fill it with, who don't have many friends or a girlffriend and don't understand why because on paper they're a good catch.
This. Even I, an allocishet white man who uses his real name pretty much everywhere online (and any alts are very connected to my real name) found this the squickiest thing about FB and the main reason I dropped off it.
Not just the "real name" thing, but the way it assumes that all your friends know the same version of you.
I'm an honest person, and not someone who context-switches very much. I have one of the most stable identities of anyone I know. But I am still a *different* person around my queer and disability-rights activist friends than I am around the people I know from Beach Boys fandom.
This is amazing, and it looks like the same technique might also work for other inflammatory illnesses, as if MS wasn't enough by itself. It might (NB *MIGHT*) be possible to use this for ME/CFS, arthritis, maybe depression and some forms of cancer and heart disease.
If this technology lives up to the potential I think it has, we might be looking at one of the big breakthroughs in medical history, up there with the germ theory of disease, the discovery of antibiotics, vaccination itself, and aseptic surgery. Maybe more important than those.
(And even if it doesn't live up to that potential, well, preventing MS and reversing some of the damage in people who already have it would still be an astonishing thing in itself, given how utterly fucking awful a disease MS is. This is amazing news. Just amazing.)
Whatever happens with covid19 -- and I hope that as few people get sick or die as possible -- I'm already thinking about *after* the outbreak, and what happens then...
Because most of the changes that are being mooted (or in some countries made) to deal with the crisis are changes that would be genuinely good things for the world on a long-term basis.
A lot of the stuff to reduce infection this time will also reduce infection the *next* time there's a pandemic.
And a lot of things like people being able to work from home if their job is one that could feasibly be done from home are accommodations disabled people have wanted.