Catching Covid gave me time to think. · 2:31am Dec 10th, 2020
So I've been quiet the last few weeks, and that was mostly thanks to me recovering from Covid. Never mind the fact I did everything I was told from social distancing, to constantly wearing a face mask... I still ended up catching it. It wasn't pleasant, not in the slightest, but sitting in a hospital bed in a rather empty hospital made me start to think and question what was going on. As bad as it was, for me, it was a case of pneumonia which came with a constant shortness of breath. It was bad but not something dying over, which explains it's under 1% death rate world wide, but sadly it's still enough to cause chaos. Talking to nurses and doctors I quickly learned that people are too scared to leave their houses, and because of that lots of people are not coming in when they should be. Of course that's up here in Canada and it's very different in other parts of the world, but it did make me think that maybe we are overreacting to the pandemic as a whole.
Naturally one would fall to blaming their President, or in my case, my Prime Minister, for me catching Covid. I blame my wannabe socialist PM for many things, but I won't blame him for me catching Covid. I'll blame the country half way across the world for suppressing information about it when it first became a thing. Yes, I'm blaming China. considering that's where it all started. Does that make me racist? Sadly the word 'racist' is so overused by emotionally unstable people online that it's lost all meaning to me, so call me it if you like, because I'm at the point where i'll laugh at you and aptly tell you to go look in the mirror and punch the Nazi staring back at you.
During this time as well, I started to debate other political ideologies, starting from the Left. Neoliberalism was the first one, until you realize that Marxists, anarchists, and social justice activists will always undermine that course of action, so actually debating would be a waste of time until those prior three groups reformed themselves or had that state of mind outright disappear. The next step up would come to Neofeudalism and that's where I stopped; that's when I realized that's what the wealthy side of the Left seems to be pushing for. After all, the wealthy Left is pursuing to destroy small businesses, in hopes that their bigger, private businesses they pour their money into get that control. The next step would be letting private businesses control your own human rights. Given how much control the Left have over the US right now, it seems it's going to go very much in that direction. 
https://twitter.com/i/status/1335077635127435264 is a relevant point in this and that's happening into a wealthy democratic state.
Of course this may all be a big bowl of nothing, considering i'm seeing red states rally together to sue certain blue states. Maybe i'll get to see a civil war among my neighbors very soon. Part of me wonders if flying back to my birth place in France and living there would be better at this point.
I kinda know how you feel when you said the word racist lost all meaning to you.
You know how it’s that you say one word so many times but it stops feeling like word
For me it’s exactly like that.
Other than that it’s such a relief that you’re ok
Honestly, when the world is on fire and nihilism becomes apparent, racism, fascism and other offensive/cruel atrocities slowly stop holding so much weight. Not saying people aren’t important or shouldn’t take it serious, they do. But how many more decisions and greed until humanity starts to collapse. Fear is rampant, and this whole pandemic, to me, has shown how flawed and insecure we all are. I’ve lost close friends in my life this year than ever. I’m on the brink of losing family and my grandpa due to sickness.
I wish you well in your recovery, all things considered. But the end isn’t in sight once 2020 ends. Worse is most likely coming.
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I wish you and you’re family safe
Me and my family send all of our love and hop to you
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Same to you, friend. I appreciate the hopes and wishes c:
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Wanna do a PM
Nothing personal but I feel like I need comfort
If you don’t want to I’ll understand
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i.pinimg.com/originals/e7/f6/df/e7f6df1d951cbcbead8483755221c747.jpg
Viva la France!
I'm of the opinion that the US is both under- and over-stressing about Covid-19. We've got terrified people hiding in their basements and whole groups of happy Karens willing to keep them there until... well, forever. Then we have people who are sick and tired of lockdowns having maskless rallies to celebrate their freedoms... and more case flareups afterward. Then we have the George Floyd-type protests/riots and the less said about that the better. (because I'll get ranting and nobody wants that)
The press bears the lion's share of the blame, because they get better ratings if the world is on fire and they don't care who burns. So when the US first put travel restrictions on China, they howled and screeched about it not being needed, and that it was just a distraction from impeachment, which (unfortunately) a particular Pelosi party was more than happy to go along with, then they doubled back on themselves to scream about how nothing was being done (despite the obvious things that were being done) and the world is coming to an end et al... It didn't help that Fachi has the message discipline of a hyperactive golden retriever in a squirrel factory, and that reporters interviewing him *wanted* to get new and different angles on the global pandemic every day. Can you imagine how much different life would have been around March if the press and politicians had all been saying roughly the same thing in unison every day? "Wash your hands, wear a mask in public places, try to stay at least six feet away from other people, and for God's sake, don't leave the house if you are not feeling well. Isolate and get tested instead."
The lockdowns have been a spectacular failure at controlling Covid-19. Remember "Two weeks to flatten the curve?" All they've really managed to accomplish is to wreck the economy, destroy small businesses, and fatten big businesses. Oh, and turn the presidential election into a circus sideshow.
Hope you're feeling better soon, TS and that your family is safe and healthy.
Sadly, as one of your neighbors to the south, I believe you are correct about two things: 2020 won't be the end of the virus and unfortunately there are much worse threats coming.
I wonder if I could emigrate to France.
Love that cartoon. Dankula said in a recent video, "When you're down there licking the boot, it doesn't have nearly as far to travel to get to your throat."
That isnt the left chief, thats definitely the largest parts of Capitalists and such. Neo-feudalism is just the ideology that came before capitalism, capitalism overthrew it, socialism is the shadow of capitalism, etc etc. Every ideology will always have an antithesis. However, if you're talking about corporations becoming all powerful, thats just corporatism, capitalist-libertarian ideology.
I don't really have anything to add.
My country seems to keep pissing China off, China keeps buying property of my country then illegally kicking out locals and they adding more and more trade bans on the businesses owned here that import to China, involving Barley, Wine, Beef Seafood and even some Lamb exporters.
Still, credit where it's due, Scott Morrison did a pretty decent job of getting Australia's State Governments to handle the COVID outbreaks in their own ways, so that he could focus on keeping our economy from sinking too deep into shit, and we're effectively already recovered from the COVID Recession because of it.
Like most crises, the people in power felt an overwhelming pressure to Do Something™. That leads to actions that do good, actions that sound good but do nothing, and actions that sound good but do harm.
I put my blame on those who took deliberate actions that caused harm. Number one is China, who restricted travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, but not to the rest of the world, deliberately making it a worldwide pandemic. Number two is the people who ordered COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, which caused many of America's early deaths. Number three is those who deliberately created a rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me environment, including those that approved public gatherings for the "right" causes and political figures and celebrities who evade the rules.
Hope your recovery goes well. Glad to hear back from you.
The WuFlu confuses the hell out of me. It seems to just do whatever it wants. My entire family just had it, according to the test, and every one of us had different issues. Hell, my grandmother with no kidneys and diabetes kicked it in 2 days, it took me 4, my brothers on day 10 still coming up positive.
Can I have some consistency please XD. Hope your not too bored stuck in a room all day. And that you get better soon.
It's not racist cause you're not blaming every Chinese person. Many of them are suffering too and given whistleblowers all over the place, plus apparent videos of guys in the Chinese Government, outright bragging what many have been fearing. This ain't a real pandemic like the Black Plague, it's literally an artificially man made one by The Chinese Government to destabilize the USA much like the T-Virus was man made in Resident Evil an intentionally political. There's even a video apparently of them bragging about having friends in high places in the USA Government which heavily implies spies if not outright admits it. Plus the fact the lock down damaged our economy badly and they still want to push a second one, it's just very suspicious when put all this together.
Then there's all the censorship going on Twitter and YouTube now about the Election being a Fraud, like here's a video about it saying there's fraud nope its now banned you're not allowed to think otherwise here, ect. Which isn't cool on Susan's part and makes you wonder if she's involved herself. After all why would you ban videos of people's opinion on the matter if you didn't want to control the narrative? Even more so with video evidence surveillance/Security Camera specifically of a Mother daughter duo and their buddies, all democrats forcing the Republicans to leave the building in Georgia before pulling suitcases out and adding them to the voting machine all for Biden. After all if they weren't committing fraud, committing a crime, why shoo out the Republicans and then do it where they can't see what's going on?
It's getting very out of hand now and something needs to be done. Which if I'm understanding right, Trump's entire candidacy was a 4 year sting operation into this very thing and evidence is slowing being gathered for the Supreme Court so we should be hearing something by next year.
It's not racist to blame the government of China for hiding information that could have helped other nations make better decisions. As for France... I think you're better off in Canada. France is having as rough a time as the US on a per capita basis, almost mirroring our cases and deaths.
Hope you will be recovering soon.
Me and my mom also caught Covid and we still recovering, but all this situation change depending of the country, in my country the hospitals are at full with Covid patients and are literally a dead sentence been send there for treatment. And for what you say in Canada there are few cases that hospitals treat you correctly, literally you have the whole hospital for yourself.
If you ask me about Covid I would say is very dangerous, but if I ask someone from Canada or USA, or any from a first world, may be you ask me that is like any flu, because you are no really in danger.
Glad you're recovering from it, Titty. Your experience mirrors my own, when I caught it near the end of March and ended up in an empty hospital as well. At the time I was pretty scared; it had been a week or two since President Trump declared a national emergency, there was fear, misinformation, and doubt flying all over the place, and we thought it was far more dangerous than it's turning out to be. Before that point, I had been talking with friends from around the world, and we were discussing the videos we had seen come out of China of people literally dropping dead in the streets. We also found some network-accessible street-traffic cameras in Wuhan that were updating in real-time; the city was a ghost town, empty streets everywhere, enormous bio-waste storage and disposal buildings going up or already in place, and not a single car on the roads.
Fast forward to now, and it looks like it's a somewhat-dangerous disease being used as a political tool. We all saw double standards being announced by news media and politicians, even through to today: maintain social distancing (unless you're at a protest), use a mask (unless you're at a protest, and unless first responders don't have enough to do their work), indoor weddings are banned in some places, Thanksgiving dinners with family were banned in some places, walking your dog alone in the park is banned and will get a police drone following you and telling you as much (Thanks England!), non-essential businesses are closed (unless you're a politician who really needs her hair done). All of that added on to constant flaming of racial tensions by the media, and you have a populace that has never been more divided in the US; race, gender, orientation, religion, ideology, every single difference has been used to drive people apart into isolated "communities" that fracture the populace into easily-influenced voting blocs.
If you're staying in Canada Titty, I would recommend keeping enough things packed for being able to leave within a day or two's notice. The US is primed to descend into chaos.
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That isn't corporatism. What you're describing is control of the state by a small group of financially powerful organisations, usually acting at the whim of self-interested individuals, who aren't acting in the best interests of their employees. It's closer to Oligarchy, if anything.
I understand why you'd make the mistake."Corporation", broadly defined, means "group or body of people" (from the latin "corpus"), but it has also come to mean a statutorily defined business organisational structure. People see "corporation", and see "corporatism", and think "oh rule by corporations". Except In corporatism, the "corporations" aren't merely business organisations, and corporations don't rule. A corporatist society is defined as one in which common-interest groups are the base unit of society. Those groups could be things like extended families, clans, tribes, or they could be trades and professions, like farmers, office workers, scientists, and so on. This is in opposition to an individualist society, where the individual is defined as the basic unit.
Depending on the relationship between these groups and the state, a corporatist society can be anywhere on the spectrum from fascist to socialist. I'm skimming the details, obviously.
This is glossing over a lot, but I hope you understand where I'm coming from, at least. A capitalist society dominated by large business organisations isn't "corporatist", and "corporatism" isn't a synonym for "fascism".
I get a kick out of Ben Garrison comics as most of them are radical nutjob ones to me, but this one i can actually agree with for a change
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Oligarchies inherently is a similar ideology to corporatism, so its still a fair assessment to say corporatism atleast.
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And I wasn't trying to say corporatism was just a stand in for Fascism, that would be absurd.
Meanwhile, I'm also recovering from Covid, which is kinda ironic since I work in my country's equivalent of CDC and of course I got it at work (in fact, a half of my coworkers got it - in September we had two cases and back then everyone who had contact with them got quarantined. When new cases started in November, no one got quarantined because "we wear masks and distance ourselves". Guess how much that helps when the whole place is contaminated...)
Firstly you're definitely right: the reaction to the pandemic has caused far more damage than the pandemic itself at this point, and is being used as a political opportunity by various parties across the globe.
The twitter status you linked is a great example: those corrupt companies with government ties get all these benefits while the smaller companies get nothing. There is an argument to be made for preserving larger, more profitable companies in an economic depression because they can afford to take some losses and will stay afloat longer on less stimulus, so it's clear how they justify this, but to the current extreme degree they do it, that's just inexcusable corporate oligarchy cronyism.
You missed the point a bit though TS: It doesn't matter whether the left or the right is in control: the corporate establishment gets what it wants either way. Conservatives here sometimes point to Wal Mart and McDonalds as bastions of capitalism, but they're some of the biggest welfare queens in the country: Your burger would cost twice as much without US corn subsidies. So they're just hiding the bitter pill for conservatives who want to have their cake and eat it too, complaining about welfare while being the main recipients of it. So don't blame liberals or conservatives, blame the corporate oligarchy. Everyone else is just being used because they aren't paying attention.
But even then, blaming won't really get us anywhere. In any case our best play as individuals exposed to this system is to seek economic independence so that we do not have to do the objectionable bidding of the system in exchange for food and shelter. Basically find whatever way you can to avoid being a wage slave or debt slave and instead be self-sufficient, and build your own life instead of blaming others and asking for handouts. Not to say anyone's doing that here; that's just the correct approach to life. All the people complaining about particulars in an attempt to make the argument about those things are just afraid they couldn't survive without the global system, and playing into corporate hands because of it. We are all conditioned to think we need that job or that thing to make us happy but it's a lie.
relevant song
Oh and yeah, China definitely started this with their lack of proper protocols in the Wuhan virology lab. They tried to cover it up after one of their workers got infected all the way in last November, and they actually did get a handle on the disease, but then it came back in January. That's why they were so overconfident they could contain it at the time. Sorry can't provide a source for this one, in the interest of protecting sources. Just know that it has been shown beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's darkly amusing to see how butthurt the Chinese get about this though: in some ways they're even more fragile than the SJWs here. The move to paint facts as racist is a blatant chinese PR campaign in this case.
Ah so you're originally French... That explains a lot about your approach to philosophy lol
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Indeed: corporate oligarchy, just as I've been saying for the last few blog posts
Deadlyness of Covid-19 depends strongly on how good the medical equipment and personel around you is.
In Swizerland we have very good medics, but deadlyness is slowly growing (per 1000 infected), because the hospitals are getting full.
Politics in this time of emergency sometimes becomes a shit-show of: who can scream loudest and make the politic go his way. There are few countries, who don't have this problem currently.
Covid-19 ist still at least one magnitude(potency?) more deadly than a normal cough.
It's strange that I should pop in to see this right as the R-word is dropped in one of my story comments. I don't know what to think anymore, honestly.
Oh, and seems like my promise of disabling comments on new stories has been, as expected, of minimal consequences, at least for the first one. Sadly, it doesn't fix the things that needed fixing, personally. More stories under the new policy should provide useful data.
Glad you're feeling better. Stay strong, everyone.
If you want an example of the impact of COVID versus the impact of actions taken to try to mitigate the impact of COVID, I suggest looking for next year's report on (U.S.) Social Security, specifically the date for the exhaustion of the trust fund. (The changes in 1983 were designed to keep the system solvent for 75 years.)
On one hand, you have a novel disease which is most deadly to people past retirement age (current recipients). On the other hand, you have shutdowns that drastically reduced payroll taxes.
I figure the latter impact will be much greater than the former, and the date when the trust fund is exhausted will be two years earlier.
Long term economic consequences? That's Future Spike's problem.
I'm happy you were able to recover. My hospitals have floors that are overflowing with patients. You're lucky that your country handled the pandemic well enough that you were able to recover in a hospital. Where I am, that's only reserved for people with really severe cases. If you were able to get medical attention for a minor case, that's pretty lucky in my opinion and experience.
I don't think it's racist to point to international entities trying to minimize something that went completely out of control. It's irresponsible of them. It only becomes racist if you let your disdain for China's government actually affect the way you as a person treat people of Chinese descent. Or people who you think might be Chinese. That's my opinion. I think that's a fair definition to work from. If you're looking for one, anyway.
It's certainly frustrating to me that the press has focused all of it's efforts into the best ways to make money with gripping headlines, gritty content, incendiary rhetoric, and topics specifically intended to divide people. I'd think it's because of them seeing how the physical print medium is steadily dying across the world, and they're either struggling to adapt, or if they've adapted, keep a chokehold on digital press to keep their jobs and get the money. They gotta get the money, man. It's certain that they've overstated how risky it could be for the average person.
What I do believe is important to say though is that for the non-average person, the immuno-suppressed for example, simple precautions for everyone that can reduce risk are important. It protects those who struggle to protect themselves. It's really tough when there's no true black and white solution for these people to not get the virus. If there was a true perfect solution that would 100% prevent the risk of contamination, then we wouldn't be having the problems we have now.
It's hard to trust a lot of the rhetoric on the internet if there aren't actual hospital records to back the information. There's people out there saying their whole family died, which is hard to trust, and people saying they kicked it in hours, which also seems skeptical. Hopefully the medical professionals can take the details of your mild case and learn something from it. Because they're going to make more inroads to the virus than politicians or any of us on the internet ever will.
glad you recovered okay