• 4 Posts
  • 100 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 28th, 2023

help-circle


  • Yes I wear a mask when I’m indoors away of my home. I do this for the safety of myself, my family, and others. And you should too. And you should be advocating for others to do the same if they can.

    A better world is possible. One where we treat communicable illnesses as something to mitigate/eradicate. It is morally right to protect others, the indigent, the youth, the imfirmed, the vulnerable. Wearing a mask indoors while away from your home when there is an ongoing pandemic, one that causes systematic harm to the body and immune system, is the least you can do. Each COVID infection is a roll of the dice. It’s a chance for mutation in a disease that is known for mutation. If you feel personally inconvenienced by a mask then you should reconsider a lot of things. Accepting disease as simply part of life is uninformed. It denies that we live in a global, interconnected community. It is as fatalistic as accepting the unending supremacy of capital. That myopic view has no place in class consciousness. The pandemic is without question the fault of the owner class. They rely on our complacency, accepting preventable death whether by war, climate, or disease.



  • So i desperately tried to explain why black people commit more crimes

    I’m almost black people commit crime at relatively the same rate as other racial groups.

    not due to some abstract cultural difference between white people and black people, but because they live in absolute poverty, desolation, and often literally have no other choice.

    This only loosely explains why black people are more likely to be charged with certain types of crime.

    The reason black people make up a larger percentage of the US prison population and are more likely to be charged with crimes in the first place is because police target black people. This is a systemic and ubiquitous phenomenon in police departments. Many factors contribute to more convictions for black people, but next time you might want to lean into how black neighborhoods and towns are over-policed.



  • Absolutely.

    I don’t think I articulated my point about parents being entitled well enough. I assume their entitlement is born out of an unconscious understanding that child rearing requires community support. But we are so atomized by capital infused lifestyles that some parents seem very entitled when their kids enter school. I think that us educators have to realize that school is, for some of parents, their first interaction in their adult lives with community support. So we get parents who want us to raise their children because they might be exhausted by their own efforts. They’re trying to impart the labor of child rearing onto the education system. And I don’t blame them at all for that. That entitled behavior can be very negative though.

    In a sane society, we would attempt unburden the education system by providing housing, free childcare, walkable neighborhoods, health insurance, etc.


  • One of my last posts on Reddit was related to this. I frequented the r/teachers sub because I’m a teacher. But I hated that sub. So many burnout educators blaming parents, and only parents, for their students’ poor behavior. There was always a thread about “why are kids so poorly behave nowadays!?” The main complaint about parents was the letting smartphones raise their kids. But like you said, they miss the point entirely.

    To paraphrase myself, there is a clear through line that links poor parenting skills to economic precarity and social atomization. Parenting takes a lot of physical and emotional energy. If you’re overworked, under-employed, worried about the next paycheck, uncertain about the future, or whatever AND you have a precision engineered, scientifically perfected, rectangular instrument of distraction in your pocket at all times it’s no wonder to me kids’ social/emotional needs are being neglected. Overworked parents in ages past might turn to the bottle. Now we’re all overworked and our liquor cabinets fit in the palm of our hands.

    Liberal teachers love to complain that parents are too entitled now. Parents want teachers and schools to solve their kids’ problems, prepare them for the future, protect them from the scary real world, to raise their kids, blah blah blah. Teachers complain, but continue to show up to school day after day because they’re stuck in the same precarity as the parents. But even they know, deep down, that it shouldn’t be this hard to raise children. They just can’t figure out why it’s so hard.







  • I’m always amazed by how much of the neoliberal economy is held up by ads. Producers want people to buy their products so bad that they literally throw away hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars so that 1.0% of us rubes might click a link or go to a drive-thru.

    My brother works in marketing. He’s explained the ROI for ads. I just don’t believe it. It’s a fucking shell game.







  • This is just my particular situation. I am fortunate enough to have some property on which to grow food. I try to keep abreast with current predictions for my locale. I know that my area will continue to get hotter and more humid, and flooding will increase. So I’m learning permaculture practices for climates that are already like that in anticipation of the changes. I also make as many connections with local produce growers as I can.

    This is a very privileged answer to your question. But maybe looking at predictions for your area and meeting producers near you could ease some stress.


  • I can only tell you what worked for my partner. They were very politically apathetic for most of our relationship. They care deeply about the health of me and their family. They work in public health too. COVID has been a radicalizing force for them. I had already developed a pretty robust sense of class consciousness by 2020, so all I did was just engage them in conversation about public health. They know more about it than I ever will.

    I work in education. We talked about the intersection of public health and education a lot that summer. During the protests and uprisings that summer, she remarked on how she appreciated the protestors wearing masks even though the science was undecided about their necessity outdoors. I told her about how it’s also a safety concern for the protestors to protect their identities. When schools in our area resumed with practically no safeguards, they took an interest in the understanding the reactionary forces that would place children in harms way. Independently they read about the successes combatting the virus in places like Vietnam and the devastation withholding vaccines did/continues to do to the global south.

    As the pandemic continues they continues to use public health as their loadstone. They understand the connection between capitalism and ignoring public health. They are not a self-described socialist. Political theory does not interest them. But they’re a comrade.