Because antivaxx sentiment is strong in some of the circles I move in, I’m seeing people go down like flies. Fit, strong, healthy people getting hospitalised, while recklessly endangering the lives of others.
Please friends, get vaccinated.
I’ve had several interesting conditions.
Including cancer and cerebral malaria
I’ve been stung into a coma by hornets
Severely assaulted
Blue-lighted with hypothermia
Almost drowned
Been pronounced clinically dead
But I’ve never taken as long to recover as I did from Covid-19
Let's not be
After all,
I think we should be honest about this: something weird is happening in the counter-culture we know and love. While most people have stayed true to their leftwing, curious and sceptical roots, some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon.
There's been an uncritical absorption of far-right beliefs by some "alternative" people, who often seem entirely ignorant of their origins. Antivax seems to be part of a package, often imported from the US. I hear right-on types mouthing the tropes of white supremacists.
The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc. Bannon was a master at this. Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it.
The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism, which happens to suit corporate and oligarchic power very well.
It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism. This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right.
Left and right political parties have swapped their language.
Now the right talks about liberation and revolt.
And the left talks about security and stability.
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1. This is a thread about a new form of political organising, which proved spectacularly successful in this election, and that other constituencies would do well to adopt. It’s a means of navigating our unfair, unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system. 🧵
2. It’s the People’s Primary model developed by some very smart folk in my own constituency, South Devon. They set up the @SDevonPrimary. This article explains how it works. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
@SDevonPrimary 3. There was a great deal of hostility, from the Conservatives, Labour and even the LibDems (the ultimate beneficiaries). Why? Because the model enables voters to take back control of the electoral process from political parties. They hate that.
#IDthought 6: At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵
It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.
There is no means of refining our choice, of accepting some items and rejecting others. With one decision, we are presumed to have consented to thousands of further decisions. We do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵
Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.
I don’t just mean housing rents. I mean all *access fees* to essential services that have been captured by private wealth: water, energy, health, railways etc. And the interest payments arising from the financialisation of higher education.
#IDthought 1: Throughout the media we see an unremitting, visceral defence of capitalism, but seldom an attempt to define it, or to explain how it might differ from other economic systems. We propose a definition that seeks to distinguish it from other forms of economic activity
I did produce a neater definition, which has the virtue of parsimony, but the disadvantage of being incomprehensible to almost everyone.
"Capitalism is an economic system that both creates and destroys its own n-dimensional hypervolume."
1. This week’s column is about something we badly want to believe, regardless of the evidence: that livestock farms are benign and harmonious. Why? Mostly, I think, because it chimes with books and cartoons we see as very young children. Also: a threadtheguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. It discusses a film enjoying unexpected success in UK cinemas: Six Inches of Soil. In many ways, it’s a good film. But it tells us a story we want to hear, and in some respects is misleading and wrong. sixinchesofsoil.org
3. This is especially the case with the carbon calculations for the cattle farm it features: first we see a temporary, cyclical gain reported as making the farm carbon negative. Then entirely hypothetical figures treated as if they are real. Both cases are serious misinformation
1. There’s a telling sequence in the Netflix docuseries Raël. A completely mad cult claims, without a jot of evidence, to have cloned a human. And the world’s media fall for it, hook, line and sinker. All it took to fool them was 2 people in white coats and some lab equipment.🧵
2. What do we learn from this?
A. That the media is as susceptible to evident BS as the members of the crazy cult.
B. That it has a massive diversity problem – and not just the one(s) you are probably thinking of.
3. In any major newsroom, just about the only people with science degrees are specialist reporters. Almost without exception, the senior staff and main decision-makers have non-science degrees. Their knowledge of basic science is approximately zero.