Block of the day: @AlexGaggio is a "socialist" who spends all day on this website arguing with people and downplaying Covid studies (weird!). Search the tweets! It's really instructive. Sorry for interacting with this account in the past. Grabbed some screenshots, looks like they blocked me first! Jesus

THE RICH AND POWERFUL *ARE* PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM COVID. Their precautions are extensive & HIDDEN. When Biden gave a maskless speech last year at a school, they removed gym windows to rig this (temporary) high-end ventilation setup. Clean air for him, but not for your kids!

https://twitter.com/KoenigRMHS/status/1562898600426090500

Everyone needs to see this photo & understand what it means. Biden does NOT think that COVID is over. He knows #COVIDIsAirborne and #CovidIsNotOver! He'll let your kids get sick, but he's protecting himself. He is OK with exposing kids to COVID. Are you? parentscoalitionmc.blogspot.com/2022/08/biden-…

Last thought for now: to avoid being complicit in harming survivors, it is really, really important to watch out for people framing the act of blocking/muting on this website as somehow proof of someone else being sinister/bad. Everyone is allowed to decide their own boundaries. Making up stories or speculating about other people's motives/character, based on who they have blocked or unfollowed, is SO dangerous. Someone can be normal to you & abusive to someone else. If you truly believe this, stop framing people as suspect for blocking someone you like!

Y’ALL. People are *much* more receptive & reachable than you might think when it comes to learning about bad indoor air. Just had my first "air quality activism in public” conversation and it WENT GREAT.
🧵 I recently bought an Aranet when they went on sale & justified the expense by promising myself I would carry it everywhere & log readings on RavenApp. Mostly, I’m staying home right now (sick!). But today, I had to bring my dog to the vet.

There is nothing radical about self-obsession. There is nothing radical about self-worship. There is nothing radical about bowing down at the altar of YOURSELF. Love yourself. Love your community. But we are HUMAN. There is this genre of "radical" self-help / activism nonsense that is distorting the work of Black radical activists by saying we need to LITERALLY *worship* ourselves, and that healing the self alone will heal the world. But self-love without community love is violence.

Which artists (any medium!) are making thought-provoking art about the reality of the pandemic right now? Who is really engaging on this subject and making art that grapples with it? Tell me who is doing interesting work, I want to follow them @dirrhope is making provocative stuff!

https://twitter.com/LizWhatsherface/status/1647761069169946624?t=sqPaUur5Ct-VJkCOk-en9g&s=19

If we're going to build a movement like ACT UP, we need artists! I'm going to try to boost artists who are making interesting / provocative / inspiring art about the pandemic. Starting with this artist! As they put it, "art is sorcery." I absolutely agree.

https://twitter.com/dirrhope/status/1647729078085009410

@yesallcrops made an incredible zine recently that moved me to tears

Art school taught me so much and I'll never regret getting my MFA. Maybe the most important lesson I learned is that "do I like it or not?" is the least interesting question to ask about any work of art. A lot of people don't know how to move past this question! Binary thinking will really ruin your life and your art. I know this so deeply through being an artist. Disliking a person or a thing doesn't mean I should look away. It actually often means the opposite. A lot of people reflexively disengage with anything they deem "bad."

When people ask me why I'm not more "successful" as a writer & why I got so disillusioned with the lit world, I think about one former "successful" grad school classmate, who's writing a novel about ISRAELI SOLDIERS and publishing propaganda in The Atlantic. Literary success. LOL According to her website, she has been a Fiction Contributor to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference & the Tin House Writers Workshop. She's been published in Longreads and Narrative. She teaches at the U.S. Marine Corps University. Our former MFA program has her on the site. Success!

The screws I have in my spine (surgically placed in 2013) were not FDA approved / reclassified as safe until *2016*.

This is how medicine works. You cannot know if something is *safe* for our bodies to live with until it's been around for several years. ryortho.com/breaking/fda-r… I took a huge risk with my body. I agreed to have these non-FDA approved screws drilled into my upper spine so I could have shot at a better life (1 in 500 risk of paralysis or death). And I'm part of the medical study that helped this hardware get approved.
I risked my life.

tl;dr
I’ve watched a man write about watching people drown.
It goes like this:
Everything’s fine. Then either suddenly or gradually, he turns.
One second, you think he’s going to value human life. And the next, a massive riptide of cruelty drags him under. Barely a ripple. And he’s saying that the only thing we can do about the pandemic is save ourselves while the idiots drown around us.

People who act like this are not great people. But I’d still throw them a life raft, because we are all interconnected. And because I want us to fucking live.

Tern is a cruel, antisocial doomer whose covid posts are causing harm. His mindset isn't unique to him. But he's a great case study for the kind of person who will NOT help us right now or inspire action. In fact, he states his own hatred of humanity, over & over. THREAD 1/🧵 Tern's worldview is that the majority of people are stupid, mindless sheep & that Covid is spreading not because of organized abandonment by the state, but because we’re all selfish idiots. He’s also a priest, so do with that what you will. 2/