Cory Doctorow: “Reasonable covid food-safety advice: Sanitize your hands and your cart, practice social distancing, and…you’re done.”
This pretty much matches what I’ve read on Consumer Reports, and what I did when I went out grocery shopping Tuesday.
Also, I’m saving up grocery shopping for big runs. Normally, when I run out of something, I go out and get it. However, I’m running out of apples now and I’ll just do without apples a few days until I have a lot of stuff to buy.
Cory Doctorow: Right-wing extremists who denounce their opponents' incivility are using the same arguments as advocates of slavery in the antebellum US.
Cory Doctorow: Real-estate plutocrats are making a killing on the Senate stimulus. And guess what business Trump is in?
Cory Doctorow: [The US is now the epicenter of the pandemic] a: “Trump wants the country to go back to work by Easter, because in his version of the Trolley Problem, the most important thing is saving the trolley.”
In cruel irony, the bulk of the people who die will be older Americans – the Trump and Fox news demographic, Cory notes.
But so many people will die because of this. Old people. Young people. People with disabilities. People who just had very bad luck. Kids.
And that’s before you get to all the people who have car wrecks or heart attacks or slip-and-falls and can’t get treatment in overloaded hospitals.
When Hoover fucked up by giving in to plutes and crashed the economy, he got tent cities, or “Hoovervilles.”
Trump’s fuckup will end with mass graves. Trump Mausoleums? Mar-a-Plague-Pits?
We will get through this. But Trump will have murdered so many of us before it’s over.
It’s quite possible that by the end of all this, almost every American will know of someone who has died. A relative, a friend, an old high-school classmate … the names will pop up and migrate through Facebook as the weeks go by, and in a year’s time, Facebook will duly remind you of the grief or shock you experienced. The names of the sick will appear to be randomly selected — the ones you expected and the ones you really didn’t, the famous and the obscure, the vile and the virtuous. And you will feel the same pang of shock each time someone you know turns out to have fallen ill.
You’ll wake up each morning and check to see if you have a persistent cough, or a headache, or a tightness in the lungs. This is plague living: witnessing the sickness and death of others, knowing that you too could be next, even as you feel fine. The distancing things we reflexively do — “oh, well, he was a smoker”; “she was diabetic, you know”; “they were in Italy in February” — become a little bit harder as time goes by, and the numbers mount, and the randomness of it all sinks in. No, this is not under control. And no, we are not in control. Because we never are.
And this will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.
I know that I was a different man at the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning,
Sullivan says: The epidemic could bring out the best in us, and we could create a more fair and humane society. Or it could bring out our worst, and make us more socially isolated, xenophobic, and authoritarian.
I suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic. National crises, even when handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses, and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own sickness and death. And in emergencies, quibbling, persistent political opposition is always on the defense, and often unpopular. It requires pointing out bad news in desperate times; and that, though essential, is rarely popular.
Watching Fox News operate in real time in ways Orwell described so brilliantly in Nineteen Eighty-Four — compare “We had always been at war with Eastasia” with “I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” — you’d be a fool not to see the potential for the Republican right to use this plague for whatever end they want. If Trump moves to the left of the Democrats in handing out big non-means-tested cash payments, and provides a stimulus far bigger than Obama’s, no Republican will cavil. And since no sane person wants the war on COVID-19 to fail, we will have to wish that the president succeed. Pulling this off as an opposition party, while winning back the White House, will require a political deftness I don’t exactly see in abundance among today’s Democrats.
On the other hand, even further incompetence or failure on Trump’s part could finally, maybe, puncture the cult, and deliver the White House to Biden and the Congress to the Democrats. And the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans.
A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work
This article compares current conservative calls to sacrifice older Americans against the Obamacare “death panel” scare. But that’s rubbish because the death panels never existed, whereas this kill-the-olds movement is real.
Hillary was right. A good percentage of Trump supporters really are deplorable.
We do not sacrifice the weak and old to protect society. The reason we have society is to protect the weak and old.
Not even three weeks on lockdown and the people who were once sneering at this as being no worse than the flu are now wetting their pants and planning on turning old people into Soylent Green.
Attorney Scott McMillan brought the wrath of the internet on himself when he tweeted: “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.”
Yes, it’s wrong and appalling but so what? Cut him some slack.
Internet shaming and death threats are never the answer.
I have a special interest in this because McMillan is in La Mesa, the San Diego, CA suburb where we live.
His statement is wrong and appalling because we do not measure the value of people by their productivity.
And the flood of deaths that will follow ending the quarantine prematurely, like Trump and McMillan suggest, will be a million times worst for the economy than extended quarantine.
Also, McMillan says he doesn’t want the younger generation to be like the generation that grew up in the Depression. That generation includes my parents. They turned out fine. They went without as kids, but sacrificing their grandparents’ generation would not have made them better off.
If people have to die to support the economy, then fuck the economy.
Any micro.bloggers in San Diego?
