Thread by @PnictogenHorses

Western civilization has failed.

there's no way to avoid this. #COVID19 proved to be the "final straw", as they say—the West's general response to the challenge of the Covid19 pandemic was to abandon its commitment to public health. the next pandemic will scythe us down.

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https://twitter.com/MackayIM/status/1618799056045871104

the breakdown in the West's ability to respond to crises of disease has been ongoing—many decades in the making.

#capitalism has been corroding and corrupting the apparatus of Western health care, especially in the United States, which became a vast reservoir of #COVID19.

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the needs of *public health*—measures to ensure that ALL inhabitants of a nation receive some acceptable minimum of medical care of all sorts, including mental health care—conflict with the needs of #capitalism: the more _profitable_ #medicine is, the more costly it is.

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it seems ludicrous—it beggars belief—that this obvious truth hasn't pervaded the #journalism and #media of Western civilization: the more profit you skim from a business, the more money must be charged for goods and services. the #profit has to come from somewhere.

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and the easiest way to increase the #profit skim is through stinginess and cheapness.

keep cutting operating costs down more and more and more—squeeze workers' pay—abandon promised support, breach contracts, do whatever it takes to rake off more dollars for the *skim*.

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@elonmusk has been attempting to keep @Twitter afloat through such means; so far he's been able to manage it, but undoubtedly Twitter is less secure against a breakdown in service thanks to Musk's miserly management. it's caused awkward moments.

seattletimes.com/business/lawsu…

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this is the inevitable long-term fate of corporate management in #capitalism, because the managers and owners in capitalism are *completely* dissociated both from their workforce and from the good and services that corporations provide. the owners live in their own world.

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the elites of #capitalism inhabit a bubble universe in which everything, literally *everything they touch*, has been reduced to monetary transaction. everything is a competition, a game, over quantities of money. #business journalism transmits this culture downwards.

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hence when a capitalist mismanages a corporation (like @elonmusk mismanaging @Twitter), they're completely detached and disconnected from the consequences of their management—which THEY see solely in terms of quantities of money moving around. nothing else is real to them.

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this antic, unreal culture of #capitalism and games with #money *cannot* sustain a civilization.

none of the core values of corporate #management and #executive leadership, above all the fixation on skimming ever-increasing #profit, are conducive to a stable society.

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we are seeing the truth of this unfold all round us. #COVID19 furnished the world with a particularly stark example of what happens when a society devoted almost exclusively to chasing profit attempts to deal with a pandemic capable of spreading to most of the population.

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the end result? Western society has decided that its citizens' health is their "personal choice—one may recall that @RonaldReagan, figurehead President and champion of "personal responsibility", himself enabled the #HIV pandemic.

if we get sick or hurt, it's our problem.

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#Christianity is partly to blame for this—most of the sicknesses of Western civilization are direct or indirect products of antisocial values encouraged by Christianity. #Christians habitually regard sickness (or any mishaps) as evidence of a sinful nature.

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therefore #Christian civilization—and "Western civilization", if that word means anything, means the civilization arising from the Christianized post-Roman world—has tended towards irrational responses towards disease. sickness is often seen as deserved punishment.

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(#Christians, especially right-wing bigots of the @dalepartridge sort, believe in Hell with unhealthful fervour, but that's not enough for them—they need to see suffering and torments on *Earth*, too.)

Christians fought Salvarsan; they continue to fight #HIV treatment.

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and right-wing #Christians have fought the hardest to destroy Western society's commitment to public health—if you believe that only *evil* people get sick, then why would you want them to get any health care?

and thus, the West has thrown public health in the trash.

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Western #media and #journalism has followed suit; they give copious bandwidth to every right-wing fringe cause that aids in the overall #conservative goal of destroying public health (and all public services). they amplified #COVID19-denialist talking points without fail.

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eugenicists like @charlesmurray of the @AEI and @EPoe187 of @Quillette have furnished specious justifications for Western abandonment of public health. *they* view the #COVID19 pandemic and other deathly diseases as a needed purgation of "dysgenic elements" from society.

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it all adds up to civilizational collapse. the West has failed. Western society, #Christian society, is openly harsh, callous, and cruel to its own citizenry: we the people have been cut loose, to fend for ourselves.

we are sliding backwards into barbarism and despotism.

~Mona

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