Add new comment

IT IS NOT THE FLU !!!! no! NO NO NO keep this edgelord idiocy on infowars where it belongs.

first: symptoms are flu-like, but this is the tip of the iceberg. in short, it is both deadlier and MUCH harder to control for a variety of reasons, and it seems to be significantly more lethal than the flu (at about 10x); there is no vaccine, there are not enough tests, there are not enough respirators and other supplies for hospitals to take care of the amount of people who will be critically ill. so...not the fucking flu. at all. (and it's not true that it "only" kills the elderly and disabled, and btw...are you really saying old and immunocompromised people are just like, human waste and you dont care what happens to them? ALSO, 'just' the flu killed 50-100 million in 1918, and also, the flu is not fucking canceled this year, and neither are car crashes, heart disease or anything else that could land people in need of medical help which is over stressed.

and anyway- it's not just the direct toll in human suffering but the fucking economy is imploding in case you haven't noticed. if you're spending all day on the internet, fucking learn something instead of wallowing in conspiracist garbage that would be well at home on #maga twitter. it looks "not that bad" right now because the first big wave was in a country that has very strong centralized control over its citizens, health and manufacturing sectors, etc. meanwhile we are, well i am anyway, in a country with the most ineffective healthcare system in the world where the president has been calling it a hoax and the roughly 1/3 of the country who worships him has been running around licking door handles to own the libs, and a lot of those libs are still going out to bars. the spread is increasingly seen to be largely driven by asymptomatic carriers, ie the young and healthy who a few weeks ago in italy were still out and about, just like in our biggest cities this past weeked, where hospitals could be entirely overwhelmed soon. i strongly suspect that although president is certainly a fucking idiot who loves performing for a fundamentalist base who hate 'science', the management of this situation was to some extent deliberately tanked under the assumption it would kill more people in cities, prisons, 'blue' states...and the dems were still encouraging people to go vote today.

ITS NOT THE FLU
ITS NOT A HOAX
it's not a time for clever anarcho hot takes about "can't quarantine our passions" or whatever. inhabit (and im not a big fan) is right to try to analyze the stepping up of control. but if typhoid mary is your idea of being an anarchist i don't really know what to tell you.

it's time for mutual aid, or at least, for bunkering down and doing egoist shit, or whatever you're into. at any rate, a time for conscientious harm reduction, not a time to fuck around and find out. to be smart and not just a smartass. to get prepared and/or organized. this is seismic, historic. things are about to get a lot worse. i hope i'm wrong too but i don't think the normal human bias towards expecting things to keep being, well, normal, is an informed attitude at this point or befitting of so-called radical social critics. at any rate, we'll find out pretty soon.

there is another possibility to consider here: the emergency measures which are already happening or potentially imminent - the suspension of evictions and arrests, release of prisoners, dispensation cash aid and free medical care to the populace, etc etc - all make very obvious and very public exactly how shaky so-called normalcy always was; if all these things that 'just happen' all the time 'because they have to' suddenly don't have to happen, if existing political logics are turned upside down, well....it is a sign they weren't necessary or natural to begin with, and as they say once entitlements are granted they tend to be hard to take away. the bubonic plague in 14th century europe is widely considered to have been a watershed event in the end of serfdom. of course the c19 death toll is not projected to be anywhere similar but the way it's already halfway destroyed the economy is certainly impressive, and suggestive.

it's a really instructive 'all-in-this-together' moment.