Everyone wants in-person learning (obviously! Clearly!!) but—and hear me out here—you don’t have to be a lockdown-fetishizing doomer liberal paranoid bubble wrapped Howard Hughes shut-in to see that maybe the CTU may be on to something here
There are difficult trade offs but the glib “it’s just the flu” crowd seems increasingly disinterested with new information at all. Clearly a policy choice was made and we’re just gonna ride it all the way to the end
Either way whatever we’re doing is clearly not working at all. A false dichotomy has been set up to either have Zero Covid or just let er rip and it seems like SLOWING the spread with certain measures could be a prudent third way
Anyway I find it fascinating there is an absolute 1-to-1 direct correlation between scary stories about evil Chinese authoritarian covid measures in NYT, WSJ and CNN and dead Americans. Whatever happens we must sooth our national ego while waiting for a $40 testing kit for 3 hrs
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If the poll doesn’t say “temporary” or “targeted” it’s utterly meaningless. Teachers unions and students are not pushing for remote learning indefinitely, they’re pushing for remote learning until certain safety requirements can be met and/or the current omicron surge recedes
If this keeps getting framed by high status media types as teachers simply loving remote learning for the lolz then yes it could be bad for democrats because it’s a fake thing
Why is remote learning repeatedly presented as some abstract policy preferences independent of the conditions on the ground? Of course no one likes it, no one likes any of this goddamn shit
There’s no genre of take more tedious on earth than the hand-curated “Road to Damascus” take where an editor seeks out someone who ostensibly used to hold a different position but has now recently converted to the one the editor wants to publish to pander to their readers
You’ll be surprised to learn the only evidence (again!) showing dems exiting over school closings is that zombie Third Way focus group that’s been cited nonstop for months that’s a focus group of EIGHTEEN Biden voters that EXPLICITLY SAYS IT CANNOT BE USED TO REPRESENT ANYTHING
Have any editors actually read the focus group??It’s eighteen random people polled by an anti teachers union front group.
They just wont do any more deficit spending because of ideological commitments to worker discipline and/or threat of capital strikes (d/b/a “inflation”) so austerity covid politics is all we have regardless of what covid does. Everything flows from this unmovable reality
They say it’s because the vaccine changed the dynamic which it ofc did. But it’s also not about the vaccine, and some of the key dynamics remain, but the tool of mass public spending for even targeted or temporary lockdowns is just not an option & it has zero to do with “science”
This is why disciplining labor right now is so essential and why they will absolutely not budge one inch regardless of how many hockeystick hospitalization graphs emerge, new studies or new considerations or even mild mitigation efforts are demanded. They have to hold the line
This is the only line these people have. It’s like clock work. It ignores:
- There are dozens of horrible outcomes other than death, we are learning more everyday
- Children under 5 can’t be vaccinated
-there so much more those in power could do to MITIGATE beyond vaccinations
- Offsetting responsibility to individual ignores massive social failures
- many cannot physically get vaxxed for reasons that are not a moral failure
There’s much more but I just can’t any more with this simplistic partisan talking point, it’s killing me
As hospitals fill up and long term effects and other negative outcomes emerge are we just gonna keep saying “get vaxxed” as if it’s the ceiling for what can be done
We get this shit sometimes and it depresses me to no end. All economic systems & countries—Cuba, France, China, Sweden—use vaccines just as they use microchips, germ theory and gravity. Big Pharma monopolizing an industry doesn’t make the basic science of the industry wrong
Lots of powerful corporations control essential functions of our life, the solution is to weaken their stranglehold on these essential function not to act as if the functions themselves are a sinister plot made up out of whole cloth
Again, find me a scientist in Cuba who thinks the mRNA vaccines are sinister poison. Find me just one. You can’t because no one credible in the global south thinks they’re a problem, it’s a made up, largely American YouTube-induced brain disease