TOTW: PANDEMIC! Redux

Back in March we had a very active TOTW conversation about the global covid-19 PANDEMIC with a number of fresh thoughts, ideas, and predictions on the then newish subject.

Nearly a year and over 1.3 million deaths later, as multiple cities, states, regions, etc. are facing a second or third (or fourth?) wave of coronavirus cases—along with temperatures dropping and the approach of influenza season in the Northern Hemisphere—some of these same areas are considering implementing (or extending) further lockdown procedures and restrictive measures on the general public. Combined with the promise of a 'completely safe and effective' vaccine 'any day now' from totally trustworthy pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, how have your thoughts on the pandemic changed since March? If you had only known nine months ago what you know now about the state of things, what would you have done differently and what are your predictions for the year to come?

When a coronavirus vaccine is finally released to (or forced upon!?) the general public, will you rush out to get injected with its delicious vaccine goodness or will you antivax like a champ (chump?) and resist, resist, resist!?

NB: Obviously the questions above are intended for an anarchist audience and could each be tediously prefixed with "from an anarchist perspective …" or "as an anarchist …." However, this temptation has been resisted in favor of perhaps less predictable responses.

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Hindsight being 20/20 I would have spent the past year getting myself and my comrades out of the city and onto the land project that our networks maintain.

I will likely not be taking any vaccine simply because I have no faith in the people pushing it or the institutions that are telling me it is safe.

One is imploding because the boomer with the deed is forcing people to wear masks.

Fuck that vaccine nanotech tracking device. Nice try FBI

Is your dwelling space open to other @s for refuge? I'm looking to join some off the grid primmy-ish living project this is outside of babylon.

Tedious prefaces avoided, one would hope it would automatically favor of perhaps less predictable responses.
The process to attain a surprising result might be, if not tedious in itself, tedious to discover.
The "new normality", which is brought on by more than just covid (all the consumer tech and desire for control and management was always leading to this) has become a more limited routine that is more tightly circumscribed along the permitted places and behaviors. The constraints on freedom (of movement and otherwise, just a small taste of the hell prisoners have always faced) it shrinks the imagination. A lot of babble with flashy talk has been thrown around, the script is not catching on. People are getting exhausted of constant hysteria and panic media cycles. Only the followers of conspiracy theory can last a bit longer than most running on that fuel, and many from the general population will turn to that.

I wonder if the vaccine will prove to be enough to wash away the mental conditioning that has turned people into these appendages of appliances. The city is like a vending machine that dispenses workers. Will people who take the vaccine immediately coordinate a massive orgy or big dance party since now they are covid-free and covid-proof? Or do they have to remain just as pious and go back to their virtual monastery of private mail-order consumption?

Will there be travel discounts for those with vaccines? Vaccinated only flights? Vaccinated only cruise ships?

Also another question related to anti-vaxxers: Before people were preoccupied about sending their kids to school if other kids weren't vaccinated and many if not all states require vaccines to go to public school and colleges. Now, since most classes are given virtually: Will this encourage more people to go forth with anti-vaxxing (particularly for non-covid vaccines) or will this whole situation make them make the exception for covid?

The few people I've asked so far have told me they will wait a few days or up to a month after someone they know has taken the vaccine, to see how they react. What if the vaccines run out in their area by then? Will they rather risk getting a vaccine first or risk not getting it for a while?

Ultimately, this is all a trap. An overview along these lines (https://illwilleditions.com/no-future/) is taught in many universities introductory social science courses (nothing special, and the conclusion, or lack there of, is specially lacking, pardon my redundancy) but it does point to the logic of management of risks and futures that is not escaped in all these calculations. The definite break that would have to happen now is normally rejected in favor of hedging bets and playing it "safe". Even those who anxiously want to escape the clutches of these logics submit and play the game. Common people think they're playing it smart when they put on their technocrat hats, everyone's a politician, a general, an economist, an epidemiologist, everyone wants to play with populations on a 4-d chessboard. And those who just go along without vicariously enjoying and participating in all of the analysis and prognosis of specialists regurgitated by talking heads on TV or on your favorite alternative lefty mouthpiece, do not break out of it by going with the flow or coasting by.

There are some ideas that everyone has thought, but everyone is too quick to discard. Things repeated ad nauseum but so rarely tried out, everyone dismisses them -as if they were exhausted/spent just because a handful of people do them each decade- while diving head first into the avalanches of repetitions that are their activist routines or even the accepted routines of the new normality. Isn't it the time to really try? To really go out tonight not minding if you'll return, not if the vaccine will be out next week or ever? What are people saving themselves for? What is the future present they want to preserve by continuing as they are? Inertia is GOD.

Wait. Are many anarchists antivaxxers? This is some straight up imperialism that will hurt the most vulnerable. Anarchist community vaccination collectives should exist instead of relying on corporate vaccines but vaccines should be basically mandatory!

I worked in a covid icu in August, all my patients died but one. They ranged from 30s to 80s, most were people of color, many indigenous. Get the fucking vaccine, or you'll just be another vector with misguided ideals like your colonialist ancestors.

i don't know about any native people that had vaccines before your colonialist ancestors arrive there.

Some blood rites, such as the simple cut finger and place bleeding thumb against other person's bleeding thumb allowed for the exchange of DNA data which developed the antibody production. So the indigenous people had already developed advanced immunization programs way back in the neolithic era. How else would we have survived against sabre tooth tigers and other dangerous predators. Also some pĺants contain antibacterial properties.

you sure are talking about a lot of different people here! The indigenous chinese? Indigenous north americans? Indigenous europeans?

given that humans may have originated in africa, isn't any human who moved somewhere else not indigenous??

:-p

Same old "we are all natives" bullshit trick?

American Natives have been here for thousands of years, and beyond this argument, their ways of live was adapted and adaptative to the natural environment. Which also makes them native. Yours is very likely NOT.

then by your dumb logic the word "indigenous" by itself is a trick. Earth to hyper-suspicious internet anarch: the only people who tend to use that word are anthropologists. Get out of your head.

protip: identity isn't "real", it's mostly just politics and the terrible ways others treat you for no good reason.

connection to the land can be pretty real tho!

and fool when I'm just talking out of my ass like practically everyone does. I was born in __________. Who's to say I'm not an indigenous ____________? Trying to tell me there is some objective way to use "indigenous" is an actual trick.

Indentity is fine unless it's imposed by someone, nothing wrong with me climbing on top of a building and saying "I'm gay!" or anything like that. Queer identity has become a stumbling block for many people but there's some evidence to show that having some sort of proud identity is therapuetic...my issue is the pride part. Pride means you've become attached to same aspect of yourself. Trying to use identity on other people will typically end in someone lashing out at you...so yeah i agree, fuck identity.

BEEP

"Indentity"

Fuck indentity!

I hear that. There's a good version of that discussion, then there's the unfortunately more common bad version and then there's just shithead trolls being dicks about anything and everything in bad faith. I see no reason to doubt your motives here.

that everything is "useful til' it isn't", being proud of being gay certainly helps with the fascists in your head, but then when you deny yourself the pleasure of things outside the gay category (not talking about women here, i totally believe there are guys that don't want to have sex with women...)?!

My definition of indigeniety extends beyond just physical land and location to a set of social values which emphasise connections between animals and features in the landscape which have significance in resources and survival and with deeper empathic relationships between members called kinship. Their history is concerned with ancestors and their deeds which often form the basis to their mores and lore which told in stories to children instills within them values, codes of behavior such as respect for people, animals and rivers, which all lumped together forms a type of unwritten constitution for a tribe or clan.

vaccines are another way that humans bend the earth towards their selfish and strange desires...

Selfish and strange desires like being alive? You know, like every other organism on the planet?

Oh the narcissism of survival!

Are you yourself alive, Jo Jo Rabbit, or are just surviving within a mountain of compromise and accomodation with the techno-industrial society? Do you eat, fuck, shit and dance outside of these enclaves defined and secured by capitalist bureaucrats? No, you do with within walls.

Outside of these walls, life is being killed, not by Covid but by this society you're gladly serving headfirst with your Zoom meetings and your Gates-Fauci cult. I look outside and life is fucking dead. It's just cars, cars, and more cars. This is your "being alive".

Covid actually has a low body count in this huge second wave, lower than during the first wave, regardless of proportions. Why? Because it got mixed up in the stats with lesser-deadly viruses like influenza? Who knows for sure? My friend's son was discarded when the doctor found he just had the seasonal flu... Medical experts don't have a political pressure to honor their Hippocratic Oath these days. Most of those I dealt with are careless privileged fucks who treat people like statistic.

These are the people you trust!? lol

BEEP

Covid-19 is sending Black, Latino and Native American people to the hospital at about 4 times the rate of others but whatever be a sociopath...

Are you going to tell people not to go outside and protest, or just moralize about people no wanting to be forced to take a Vaccine?

The Minneapolis uprising proved people can protest safety if they wear masks. There was no increase in cases after the spring and summer protests. So don't falsely equivocate. Refusing a vaccine that could save the lives of those more vulnerable than you is the ultimate test of collective responsibility. Your parents probably got you vaccinated and you didn't get a host of nasty childhood diseases because of it. There is a place for science, modern sanitation and public health within anarchism... you just want to play the devil's advocate without real reason so fuck you.

> "Refusing a vaccine that could save the lives of those more vulnerable than you is the ultimate test of collective responsibility. "

not "playing devil's advocate" here, but what about the millions of lab animal lives? what about the fact that big pharma and the capitalist death machine is needed to produce and distribute this vaccine that you are lauding? when do you refactor your "collective responsibility" fiction to consider these things?

There is nothing homeopathic about all these people dying of covid in icus, if your beef is with the medical industrial complex the pandemic is only feeding it. Taken to extreme mass human extinction would be pretty good for the natural world... but I wouldn't advocate committing suicide...

my "beef" is with the narrative—with the moralizing and outrage—that is a massive waste of energy and a huge misdirection from living anarchically.

No, I am serious, you can't force people to take a vaccine, If you want to take it take it, if you don't, don't

You can’t force people to not murder. If you don’t want to murder then don’t murder, if you do, do.

This is true as well.

I don't get why this is so controversial especially on an anarchist site?

Sure you can! Force people to not murder, I mean.

By offering an equally credible threat of murder in exact proportion! Think mutually assured destruction in nuclear war but like, on a personal level. That's how power functions in its most honest and ancient form: the watershed of most politics and most of human history in general.

If you try to murder me, I might get you first so you'd best not try.

the only defense anarchists can have against murder...i think the fact that cops rob people of their ability to murder people and roam freely means that a lot of disputes don't get settled the right way...

If you put someone in a padded cell on their own you've made them not murder themselves or anybody else, problem solved!

I think I could kill myself in a padded cell wearing a straight jacket, easy, just do headlong charges into the wall with my head turned slightly to the side resulting in a broken neck sooner or later. I'm always one step ahead of the man, no authority can beat me, I've got a defense against everything, cos I'm always thinking of hypotheticals, mom always said I was a winner.

But that is on an individual level, right? If I don't want you to murder me I either stop you or don't, If I don't want you to murder someone else I either stop you or don't... If someone doesn't want to take a vaccine they don't and if you tried to force someone to talk it they have two choices, either submit or fight.

This was in response to your straight-up doublethink in here:

"Anarchist community vaccination collectives should exist instead of relying on corporate vaccines but vaccines should be basically mandatory!"

So basically there should be anarchist community vaccination... or else let's allow the State to do it by force!

Good lord.

if you don't take a vaccine when it's cheaply available then people are going to hate you for it...but probably just trolling, "mandatory anarchist vaccine" is totally an oxymoron! It's like having an anarchist parliament, or an anarchist house of representatives!

The funny thing about calling a random unidentified group out for imperialism due to antivax feelings, is that a large portion of those that say they won't take a vaccine, AREN'T WHITE. The black population in the US leans antivax fairly heavily, and largely due to earned mistrust of the medical industry following awful shit like the Tuskegee experiments, which was the intersection of colonialism, racism, and medicine.

The simple fact is if there is a world of worlds(anarchy and panarchy-freedom and plurality) There will not be mass modern vaccinations though they will still exist for those that want them on varying levels. Mass vaccination only exists because the modern world can control such a huge mass of people.

My view on them is agnostic overall. I think they work but they probably increase epigenetic risk factors toward things like autism and other physio neurological injuries. They probably are tertiary causers of these things and not primary. I myself am on the spectrum and I have nervous ticks that exist to this day. In addition to being vaxed I was also in a certain risk group. 44 year old seeding father 34/35 year old seeded/birthing mother. I suspect the vaccines that I did get may not helped in certain conditions that I have today.

All in all I think there's a place for vaccination even in a post-modern more anarchic context. There needs to be more frank science on what they are and do however. A vaccinated/non-vaccinated study would be very helpful last century. I myself subscribe to Jamie Cunliffes non-germ theory morphostasis hypothesis. It holds that there is no such thing as an immune system but a morphostatic system that operates through commensalization and immunity. If you hold to his hypo then you can conceive of their being such a thing as too much vaccination or vaccine overload. When you combine his theories with Ray Peat's you come to accept that the adaptive immunity theory is wrong(though innate remains correct) The theory of adaptive immunity is basically what drives over vaccination. The process of toxic stress commensalization is something that is novel in nature, qualitative not quantitative. I very much think alopathically engineered commensalization can be a thing but not to the degree that the modern vaccine ideologues think it can where you load people up at birth.

The holistic long term solution is to detoxify and destress the human animal world that drives these diseases to begin with. Non human animal captivity on large industrial levels does not help in inhibiting stress born diseases and likely drives species spillover diseases(I see it as communicative stress and not an exogenous evolutionary agent). Less stressed captivity has to be a goal. If you can do this you can basically sunset the need for vaccines though I think the science should always be used to SOME degree.

Though the practical impacts are tiring and wearying, my views haven't changed very much at all in this time. The only real differences have occurred in my observations. Initially I was intrigued by the panicking of the state machinery, while now I find scope in the broadness of power plays and recuperations, and toward the possible outcomes of what has seemingly become an exceptional sociological experiment. Although like the instigation of this disease's popularity, I consider all these more within the remit of the leviathanic pathogen.

Apart from the innate roots and lived experiences coming from sharing a beautiful planet of wonderful beasties looking to have me for dinner, my particular lack of investment in this particular disease are due to infections and deaths within my locality and circles disclosing no hype. My personal gauge for concern is almost wholly sighted upon intuiting viral loading. My eyes continue to be set far more intently on the brutal, lethal, and distinctly Homo sapiens' indulgences of caging, coercion, exploitation, acquiescence and apathy. So it is, I keep myself fit and tempt fate whenever I can toward more dramatic and novel ways of dying.

Since day one I've regarded the rhetoric of the "science community" as unknowing yet coddling to prevailing political narratives and economy. The method is a wonderful endeavour, however, due to its investments, the acting suffers the uncanny valley. The limits of my investment here extend only as far as prophylaxis. At the moment this magic involves medicinal herbs and a blithe and antagonistic spirit, but might include bromhexine or whatever the fuck if/when those around me clearly begin to ill.

I'm not stoked about the vaccines. I may get the jab (being as it is a whatever the fuck), though I also might not. I currently find little motivation to want the needles. As alluded to above, things will need to change much for the worse to compel me. Much as 1.3 million is a massive, tragic, worlds-lost fuck of a number, I find the current odds of this horse winning only worthy of inconsequential copper shekels. What are the odds on the other "horses"? What are the odds on debilitating fear? What of confidence? What of the fire and flood?!

As things come to pass, I will probably be the proverbial super-spreader. I refuse to let any wanky unknowing distract me. Those who need a hug, a smile, a hand or an ear will find one with me. I'll dance with those who dance. Maybe I'll come to regret these, but I don't think so.

You seem stupid and young so you'll probably be fine but take down many elders and more vulnerable folks without knowing it

I'll not patronise anyone. Elders and vulnerable folks can tell me to fuck off. That's their prerogative. They can also welcome me. That's their prerogative.

“I keep myself fit and tempt fate whenever I can toward more dramatic and novel ways of dying.“

Yeah, you can’t die of covid if you die from something else first.

There’s a difference between dying or killing due to negligence, carelessness, incompetence, than doing it very deliberately, meticulously and according to plan, with plenty of ethical considerations and only if risks are acceptable margins.

In our culture, everything is subject to control, uncontrolled and unpredictable variables are undesirable. You have to plan your own death, spontaneous contagion due to bad luck is not a tolerable option, someone must be blamed and punished for negligence.

Cooperation, mutual aid, we keep us safe. For what? For the sake of the economy and the continuation of the new normal? To wait it out for a post-covid “after” in which you will go out and march with a banner without social distancing?

Clearly there are those who claim to “resist” but all they do is merely survive and help others do so within the ever more reduced margins of acceptability, by submitting to humiliating conditions of servitude.

This is not to say that you should stop feeding and caring for yourself and each other, but this is just a very bare and basic need. You could put each person in a bubble in a row like a dairy farm and give them nutrients and inject them with antibiotics and vaccines while they churn out content or productivity. There is no freedom in that, it’s just the bare minimum for survival. If you don’t break the cages it doesn’t matter if you’re well fed, or if a nice young activist brings food to your door and waves from across the street. Prisoners do hunger strikes, because sometimes they are being fed, but they have other needs that merit sacrificing that in order to be met. We don’t have to settle to be herded and farmed and prodded in order to eat and survive. If we stay in the farm, only trying to improve our conditions there, the managers could decide to “cull” our population, just like they’re doing with the mink.

So yeah, nice comment Liminal D; even with covid we can choose which way to go.

lockdowns, pushes for social distancing, for several years. It's going to suck but humans will, in a general and broad sense, will not be prevented from doing the normal stuff (which is mostly abhorred by anarchists) that they normally do...

what's going on right now does not surprise me at all given that i payed attention to a lot of the agitation that went on back in april/march...there's going to be many waves of people getting the illness and places like the US will not develop much herd immunity for a long time because it's so rural and people are isolating themselves, yet not to a tremendous degree higher than when nobody was afraid of COVID.

Before anyone responds to this...i just want to let you all know that i always make predictions fully aware they are likely to be wrong...i like the criticism but not the childish insults thnx.

i really don't have any capacity whatsoever to make predictions about the vaccine, medicine has been saying that covid vaccines are only likely the last a few months, and if that's true then were in for some very comical and ritualist waves of covid that will last the rest of humanity, but they were saying that researchers don't really understand Cov-Sars-2 so having anti-bodies that last that long may not be an issue since the human immune system is pretty vast and militaristic...

“If you had only known nine months ago what you know now about the state of things, what would you have done differently and what are your predictions for the year to come?
When a coronavirus vaccine is finally released to (or forced upon!?) the general public, will you rush out to get injected with its delicious vaccine goodness or will you antivax like a champ (chump?) and resist, resist, resist!?”

I’m not sure if possible or how it could have been done differently while still maintaining a normal semblance of life, but the cuarentena has been pretty rough, especially lately. Missing friends and family and hanging out with people, while dealing with a shitty ass job, and faltering anarchist space or lack thereof is extremely depressing. Not everywhere has been a party, and even the places that have, what little beauty there to show after. It does help stoke the rage and desire to participate more with anarchist friends and have those difficult conversations and arguments with others who I may not have once been so open with before, like work people and casual friends, although today that leads to more of an argument than not as everyone knows everything, while we live in a fact free world.

When this all started my brother and I called each other up and had somewhat of a panicked conversation because our mom who we love so much lives in a long term care faculty. We didn’t want her getting trapped there, but to be honest couldn’t do much ourselves not having the kind of money one might require to provide for a dear family member who needs help in daily activities. She’s been trapped at the faculty without any family being able to visit for almost the entire pandemic, by herself – other than the workers there who frequently test positive for covid-19, setting back any brief in-person visitation. Life is terrible at moments, but I can only imagine what it must be like for people like my mom who are there, thinking, but in need of care that this life hasn’t allowed one to easily provide for her, similar in ways to our locked up anarchist friends who are also struggling. I hope there is a vaccine so people can connect with their dearly loved ones that they have been separated from, but the whole spectacle of everything certainly makes one doubt because science is capital.
***
I see, an iceberg
Floating towards me
I swim out to it and lay upon the cold
Drifting off into the darkness

Wow, placing your mom in a facility, that is soooo freakin Western capitalist values, so shallow sense like empathy rolling off a duck's back. That is sooo cold iceberg would feel like a warm sand beach.

didnt want to live in the same house as him?? Wow...plenty of low-empathy people to go around...

anyway, sad anon, im sure if you were a little aggressive you could see your mom in person. I dont know about your brother though...you all seem to have some hardcore baggage. In latin american society the children often dont need nursing homes because the children take turns serving their grandparents.

comment baggage
no understanding of someone's reality
generalisations
try leaving a heartfelt comment,
to only find
two middle fingers up
at society

the problem with commenting on other people's situations online...fuck everything, fuck everybody

If you are stupid enough to open the family can of worms on the internet then by golly, you deserve every bit of sarcasm, ridicule, and dark insult that's out there! Mama's stone-cold sons like hitmen using agecare facility as murder weapon!

please do share more about this family can of worms!

no family, they were born in a test-tube and isolated from socialization until their teenage years

i only stuck my neck out for og anon because ive faced similar situations and know these kinds of choices arent easy to make. Nursing homes are "abandonment" but sometimes in western society they are the only solution because its hard to take care of a dieing and possibly mean person all by yourself. My grandmother asked me to kill her when i tried to do that, and when i put her in a facility (not without very frequent visitations...) the doctors wouldnt even talk to me about the possibility of taking her off some of her medications since when i visited her she frequently told me she wanted to die. Euthanasia is illegal in the states but not professional opinion...

and yeah your right if your only talking about me. My level of empathy is about as high as my level of patience, its somewhat shallow but im always trying to figure out how to improve it...

and thanks for showing me how i like the flat out fake troll insult every once in a while!

in the state where i was helping her at least half the population is strictly anti-abortion.

Fucking libs, taking somebody off heart medication isn't illegal in any state. Why don't you try being sympathetic towards generalization for a change. You could actually say that there are a few states where it is legal, but nah you're just a troll, you have no empathy towards any of the people who you force your borderline ("i have to step on egg shells to be around you") personality on. You sit on your laptop, kick off your shoes, and tell people they are lazy because they didn't research every single word they typed into their dumbox! I'm only sensitive towards the whole "everyone is an evil white supremascists" type thing because it's largely a part of american cultural heritage.

And thanks for teaching me something i already knew! Yes, in the state of my g'mas facility, euthanasia is very illegal.

ughhh...this whole thing of "don't respond to the trolls" oft translates to "never get angry", but bein' dumb and mad feels so good....when i'm dumb n' mad i'm like woah a super troll.

why do you think you are smart enough to remove any comments whatsoever??? Is it cuz you programmed the website?? Nope! Wrong? Human language != computers!

""Euthanasia is illegal in the states" nope. you're wrong."

yeah im glad you removed the comment that this one was responding to without removing this one. You fail as auschwitz super soldiers!

am i losing my mind or it just the alcohol...i guess i shouldn't consult you for any of this shit.

I'm taking a lead pill, final bowtie, forward dive off a cliff in the tuck position if its looking like a bedridden fade away.

yet the elderly often aren't able to do much of anything anymore, and so they drive the people around them insane when they aren't nice.

and actually in the eyes of normal people yes suicide is illegal, if you try to do it they're not gonna be like "Okay, well, fucking do it", they're gonna call the police, and the police will come and "save" the person...isn't it cruel how that works??

The only tool she had was self-starvation, which i told her that she could do but really she was just being manipulative and complaining as-nauseum because she had dementia

Dumbass to cold sociopathic son ----Wow, she was 2 generations removed from you and by your logic therefore deserving half the empathy, but divide that by 2 by each grandson 25% empathy. Since you're selfish divide that by 5 for all the other hassles you encounter everyday, like the homeless guy who asked you for a dime while you were sitting with your brother having a latté outside the mall, that's now 5% care which you use up making phone calls to nurses asking is there any quick legal way to end the old hags life.
You could have just taken her home with you and kept her in the storage shed out the back with the vicious guide dog you have for an affectionate companion.
Yes, the modern Western consumerist democrat follows the herd on their shallow vain pursuit of irresponsibility and hedonism.

i actually busted my ass and tormented myself to make her life a little more comfortable even though the rest of my family hated her, people should not judge others on situations they don't understand, its a very low empathy tactic. Just because you realize that other people have a hard time taking care of people who are miserable and physically debilitated is not a justification for you to lash out at other people on the internet.

also, taking care of the elderly can have very complicated dimensions:

-elderly people often cant control their bowel movements. I didnt even try to do this with my grandma cuz she would have said no and i on one level would feel this to be molestation.

-elderly people often cannot do things that younger people can like jump in front of trucks.

-all elderly people have a little bit of brain degeneration

-sometimes elderly people verbally abuse their caretakers

hence, sometimes when helping the elderly it isnt wrong to accept a little professional assistance.

Care to list some things you did for your family recently? No thanks, i have no reason to listen to a sociopath bitch and moan about how terrible their life is.

what happens hereafter regarding covid is irrelevant. it will be less than a few years (quite possibly while covid is still lingering around the mucous membranes) before the next "pandemic" virus/bacteria/fungus spreads its wings and mutates for a few rounds. humans continue to reproduce and increase populations, guaranteeing that crowded urban life is the only way for the multitudes to survive. more people crammed in the same space equals more physical and psychological/emotional illness. more population equals ever greater control exerted by authority. humans are fucked.

vaccinate your mind.

"... it will be less than a few years ..."

let's say in 2021 things in the "libertarian" country known as the US mostly return to normal, and a lot of the fear of COVID has dissipated. However, everyone will remember, WW2 ended almost a century ago yet the monuments remain of the atrocities. They've preserved poland's Aushwitz yet there's this big conservative and gay-hating movement there. Clearly the attempt to "increase consciousness of struggle" had little effect on the simple minded and afraid.

but whatever, I know that when people use COVID or some other disease as an excuse to abuse or enrage...those people will be standing very close to the fires they started. People can hide, but they can never hide from the things that they do. If this seems like poetic bullshit, let me ask you this: do you envy Donald Trump? I sure as fuck don't! He probably even did himself a world of good by ruining his image with his particularly ignorant and retarded populism...

Humans are fucked because they continue to fuck the world. people want a vaccine so they can go back to consumption and progress and destruction of the planet and the ecosystems. humans caused this on themselves

Wise comment. Unfortunately not all anarchos understand that today's religion is humanism, believing that human made sciences (like medical science or political science) can solve all the problems mostly they create...

indeed, loki.

industrial technology will eventually solve all the problems that industrial technology has created. right, i'm holding my breath on that.

Preliminary findings from research conducted at Cardiff University found that mouthwashes containing 0.07% of cetylpyridinium chloride showed "promising signs" of reducing COVID-19.

Today I wiil be initiating the Ego-Anarch-Anarchy Mouthwash Collective and welcome all true Ego-Anarchs interesting in rinsing their way to Anarchy.

i wonder how many millions of lab animals were tortured and killed for this "life saving vaccine"? the fictions we create to make ourselves feel better are simply ridiculous.

"I wonder how many millions of lab animals were tortured and killed for this "life-saving vaccine"? the fictions we create to make ourselves feel better are simply ridiculous."

All this

Do you feel like anti-humanism necessarily precludes struggles for social justice? Modern humans are such shit, I can't imagine why tf I would ever give a fuck about their movements for greater representation within civilization. The same people who whine all day long about social justice are the same people who eat meat, live in cities and perpetuate the technological system of doom over the natural world. And when you point this out, they say, "nO eThiCal cOnSuMeRiSm uNdEr cApiTaLiSm!!!" to wash their hands. They are fucking hypocrites.

The sjw are the leftist liberals, and yeah they are hypocrits mostly. Words or movements mean shit, like the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. I would LOVE to do a study of the daily habits of all the activists and just see how bourgeois and consumerist their real values and lifestyle is, how big a carbon footprint they actually leave, how much they use modern industrial capitalist medicine to extend their tenure on this planet.
Just that some of their spokes people still cling to titles like professor shows that they respect hierarchical and elitist institution. Makes me roll on the ground in spasms of cynical confirmation of my opinions of the human race and the humanism they cover their weakness and failures with. Uurgh!

There are genuine compassionate activists who live humble vegan existences who don't fall into your Trump-esque anti-left description.

MAGAtards been a growing trend over Anews and the Aplanet chat lately. It's all about decrying the Left and ANTIFA TERRIRISTS as butthurt for how their führer got pwned, fair and square, by the same electoral system the brought this shitbag in the oval office...

And they pretend being the ones that are anti-politics? Fuck off back to the trailer trash, you big know-nothings.

No one mentioned Trump until you brought him up. That said, from an accelerationist pov, he’s certainly who I would prefer in office. Both are shit, but Trump is overall a greater corrosive influence to the american political system as well as anti covid fear whereas Biden is more... “stabilizing” for the american project, very pro covid fear and will almost certainly usher us into a high tech ultra controlling surveillance state.

That’s very different from MAGA type shit. Either way, Im an anarchist no matter which asshole sits in the big chair.

But yeah, leftists suck. For more or less the same reasons fundamentalist christians suck.

Biden represents the new version of the old regurgitated guard against radical change and uncertainty, against freeflowing social re-aggragation. Using Covid as the catalyst for what 22:07 calls the high tech ultra controlling surveillance state.

MAGA hasn't been growing recently, and the election results show that people in the US hate that guy so much that they were able to overcome the republican gerrymandering advantage. Dumb right wing politics has always been a part of nation states and especially the US, europe and canada also have a big problem with racism and oppression of immigrants, the indigenous, and the poor.

You're such a bigoted piece of shit, you know that? Your dogmatic and liberal thinking is why i see some major hopes for syncretism. Anyone who is critical of standard white racism and uses "trailer trash" in the same sentence is a star example of a hypocrite.

yeah, speaking as mostly white trailer trash, hope you choke on your champagne bottle your MAJESTY ;)

The exception. Not the rule.

humility and veganism are not the panacea you imply there. most vegans rely on heavily processed and packaged foods that largely come from soy, one of the most massively monocropped foodstuffs around.

compassion is something i can get behind, when it is warranted. that, of course, is completely subjective.

your reply was going fine and then you made shit up and blew it...

> "most vegans rely on heavily processed and packaged foods that largely come from soy, one of the most massively monocropped foodstuffs around. "

you don't need to do this, 11:02.

who grow everything, yes, the packaging itself is pretty terrible, whales in the ocean choke on human plastic, expecting there to be plastic industry without carelessness is strange. It's very hard to live with a "no harm" ethic and don't know if more than a few people ever did, but i appreciate vegans for trying.

I didn’t say they need to, I said most do.

Soy grown hydroponically in every persons backyard can de-monopolize protein ownership and reduce carbon emotions. A 2 child per couple ethic will reduce population gradually. Closer of jet-tourist culture will renew atmospheric purity and virility.

I would LOVE to do a study of the daily habits of YOU to see what kind of a self-righteous hypocrite you are.

Our nation is Covid19 free! If you EAT FISH every day, then your nation will be free like all of us here on Pitcairn Island. Aloha.

I'd be happy to get the vaccine if its a choice, but if compelled... something stubborn in me says to run. cross that bridge when its there.

less a prediction and more a wondering, but i feel that there's never been as sudden and total a divide of society (at least, mine) into completely different realities as coronatimes brought. the media (social included) is caught up in the war of liberal vs conservative OPINIONS about what to do with it all but the debate has pretty much always been from the perspective of middle and upper class social distancers (whether willing or defiant) working and video chatting and coping from home, or going out to Chili's with the boys as a fuck you to the deep state. outside that narrative, amongst my co-workers, my neighbors and the punks and anarchists ive actually been spending time with, the reality's looked different as fuck... more or less, the world as it was, just more desperate and shitty, with fewer options and more dangers (and the occasional motherlode of free government bucks) but nothing like what we see on TV as the new normal. I'm wondering what the culture shock will look like when the socially distanced whether they like it or not and those whose daily lives have made following CDC guidelines impossible meet up face to face again, if ever.

I get what you're saying, though I'm looking at it from the angle of a smaller privileged population in Western nations being shocked/regulated into an existentialist mindset analogous to that of the underprivileged nations, who have a sangfroid nonchalant approach to daily desperation and shitty options.
Also the State's hysteria concerning economic depression displayed the significance of the libidinal economy to the capitalist consumerism machine and how dependent it is on marketing illusionary desires and needs to fuel its voracious accumulation of wealth for the few.
All up, covid19 has been a refreshing and much needed assault by nature upon a destructive social virus called capitalism which is killing the planet.

lol covid19 user review 5 stars *****

although this version failed to make a serious dent in civilization, a refreshing and much needed assault was made!
would recommend pandemic again. eagerly awaiting a sequel!

*thumbs up emoji*

Hahaa, yes, you would love my reviews of colon cancer and thickening of the arteries, thanks Macdonalds and fastfood corporations Regards, your ol' foolish friend.

I think that the window is closing for anarchists to prepare to face the unthinkable, repressive measures coming soon under the guise of public health and public good. In the USA the new administration if going to massively clamp down on free movement and individual liberties. Liberals will be all become stoolies and narcs to the new blue regime and those with means will receive luxuries and freedoms and treatments while those without suffer and be locked away or simply perish. The right wing will be crushed under the might of the state but mostly perish from pandemic denial. The elites will live in hermetically sealed techno utopias. The biosphere will continue to die around them. Within two year covid-19 will have morphed into something else uncontrollable and then the global famine will come for the rest. Amazon dot com will thrive and Jeff Bezos will be elected emperor of a dead planet.

"the window is closing" - then break it

"new administration i[s] going to massively clamp down on free movement and individual liberties" - too late yo

"Liberals will all become stoolies and narcs" - you serious? will?! always were you mean?

"right wing will be crushed under the might of the state but mostly perish from pandemic denial" - I wish! HA

"elites will live in hermetically sealed techno utopias" - ... ... ... again, old news. you're really bad at this, hey?

"those with means will receive luxuries and freedoms and treatments while those without suffer and be locked away or simply perish" - again ... already happening for my entire life and arguably for centuries. where you been? what's your deal?

"you serious? will?! always were you mean?"

did you seriously just omit the word "new" from the sentence, 09:44? reading comprehension much? SAD!

There's no issue with the reading. Libs have always been those things.

Seriously tho ... almost the entire paragraph suffers from a none-of-this-is-news-to-anarchists problem.

The writing has a narrative tone quality to it like perhaps they're just discovering some of these things? I don't mean to criticize that either, it's fine if that is the case but the perspective comes across as only just realizing a lot of grim implications that many of us have been aware of for a long time. Thought they might like to know that. But probably they'll get very defensive instead.

There is an issue with the reading.

"none-of-this-is-news-to-anarchists . . . the perspective comes across as only just realizing a lot of grim implications that many of us have been aware of for a long time"

You've known all these thing for such a long time and have done what exactly? You're doing a great job, lumpentroll. A fount of anarchist wisdom.

so you're the writer then? lets not bore each other with venom my dear. I have no feelings for you to hurt so why waste your time?

but uhm ... were you serious when you wrote that Bezos inherits a dead planet within a few years? do you seriously not expect any pushback on assertions like that?

What's your prediction of what is to come, lumpentroll? How do you think anarchists of experience can or should approach what's coming?

Me? I predict anarchists will go to work, shop, eat, stress, sleep, die, repeat. Some will fuck but not many

Can I jump in here and answer for lumpenthing because he's hypnotized by the mystique about capitalist economics and doesn't comprehend that the what is to come during recovery is really just a resumption of the mindless work to consume libidinal economy.

well the mods deleted my last post. anyway, I don't like forecasting or making sweeping prescriptive statements, both of which are usually foolish for obvious reasons. thank you for your interest tho!

It seems that most of the anarchists around here were fooled,
There are no meaningful answers to the wrong questions.
Can the fucking collective explain why you didn't publish the text: https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-r... was not published here? We submitted it.
If any analysis that is not made from a position of fear or dumb fooled social worker leftist mind set is censored i guess anarchists soon will be just dumb pawns of political and economical elites.
The use of the classification of conspiracy to dismiss any critical view in whatever is being discussed is mental laziness at best and a spitting of brainwashed crap at worst...
It is sad but nowadays you find more radical people in any corner bar (when they were open) than in anarchist spaces.
Virtual book-fairs!? Take-away vegan social fish-fingers?!

i don't see why they don't publish that one, did you submit it through the add content tab? They make it real easy to submit under the "add content" tab, i did it once and they made it a forum post. TLNGR...but i would like to hear thecollectives opinion on the matter.

"Can the fucking collective explain why you didn't publish the text . . ."

Because fuck you. that's why.

Websites are not anarchist "spaces". Get over yourself.

Sincerely,

TheCollective - Niger Delta Motherfuckers - HGS United

anews publishes winter oak articles all the time. cool your beans, hot stuff.

Meh... Just been listening to Schwab (swab?) himself and he's your typical neoliberal Eurocrat doing his bland PR with updated buzzwords that may make Qanon retards go ape but really serve to reinsure investors that things will be fine as far as they reboot the 'conomy with Zoom n Starlink n shit.

It's an old story that there's no big leap down to Hell for mankind; through these people's controlled 'conomies it's more like a slow cascade down the hill, with back and forths and experiments... Fascists are rather small these days, even if they're still a major problem. The scariest trend is instead all those pretend radicals or progressive trying to make us dive headfirst into the worst proprietary tech out there, starting with our beloved R & Bs. Soft power is more dangerous than hard power! Wake up.

soft power also has worse long term implications. In the short term, the fascists are clearly very threatening in the wrong situation but they can't do as much damage in the long term. Some people try to argue that if it wasn't for a few false moves, hitler and the other axis powers would have achieved world domination, but hitler's goal was a problem from the start from a couple of different angles. The most troublesome thing about the axis powers was that they weren't really working together, globalist capitalism fixed that one...

I'd specify that in the current context, soft power is more dangerous and pervasive than the hard, due to the confluence of current technological "progress" with neoliberal politics, where even the role of neofascism through social media looks like sock-puppet scapegoating (by either useful idiots and/or trollbots) in order to make totalitarian neolib views more acceptable to a wider public.

My worry is how even we are with the situation from 100 years ago, where we got a clear resurfacing of EUGENICS (through gene editing and transhumanism) through mostly the neoliberal progressives, which could eventually end up in the same hellhole than during the '30s.

Of behavioral eugenics, might be more dangerous than voluntary gene editing. I find a lot of hope in the failure to develop many scientific fields...

Behavioral eugenics is extravagant overkill. Conformity and blind faith make 99% of the horde behave according to a behavioral script already, to assume that one can profile even a serial killer accurately has proven to be a failure, and only DNA has proven true.

i'm just saying that's the result, that the field of psychiatry shapes the genes and gene expression of people through changing who gets to reproduce, and using drugs to "erase" forms of behavior and opinions, yet like with gene therapy, doesn't really work. The understanding of how genes shape things beyond physical traits is very limited.

That's as vague and obtuse as saying that Western civilization and its aggressive conquest mentality is caused by alcohol being the accepted universal behavioral catalyst.
The trillions of possible combinations of genetic combinations may arrive at breeding blue eyed blondes or people resistant to cancers, but it won't control the likes of pirates like Skylar Deleon from being reproduced.
And The Boys from Brazil was pure fiction.

psychiatry is used to change people and their behaviors, having been a patient its creepy and kafkaesque, it feels like eugenics how they want to control you, how often mental health professionals just try to keep you running in a circle, and becoming a practitioner is like becoming the supreme patient. I don't know about any of this other stuff you are talking about, i certainly don't see how linking what i said to alcohol being the main behavioral catalyst is accurate. I've never seen the boys from brazil...

i really have no idea what all the experts, the scientists, the cops, the military, really want out of what they do. People frequently develop these weird conspiracy theories and sinister motives, i think more often than not people are just victims of their fate and readily believe that whatever institution they work for has good motives, i think more often people become racist as cops because they have to in order to continue obeying their orders rather than people becoming cops because they think white people are the supreme race.

I'm not particularly scared about the transhumanists or genetic engineering either, but it's pretty scary what they seek to do in the same way that psychiatry is a creepy and scary subject matter. I discovered that practically no psychiatrist actually understands what the drugs they prescribe to people do and that overall they aren't any safer than illegal drugs, with the exception that so many street drugs have fentanyl mixed into it which is incredibly dangerous...but every single psychiatric drug has lots of side effects and I never found them to be very helpful. They should just stop trying so hard to control people...that's kinda a rough take because so many people in the US look to psychologists to keep their violent children and crazed kids from hurting people but in the end the field of mental health service is just this mill that everyone benefits by using it in a limited fashion and then just disregarding entirely, it's psuedo science, the only thing it really has going for it is therapy and a hope for the future. A few might need the drugs but I have not seen any shining examples of recovery, it seems to only be capable of curtailing some of the scariest symptoms of sanity...

That's an interesting hypothesis about alcohol use. Certainly the Vikings, Angles, Saxons, the Ancient Greeks and Romans, a plethora of early imperialist states did propagate the culture of masculine rampage and orgy fuelled by alcohol and which influenced policy. A Dionysian extreme warfare model involving murder, rape and pillage, alas, even the Christian ritual of drinking wine and cannibalizing Jesus's flesh has sanguine connections to the morals and missionary zealotry. All conquest of the unbelievers in the name of God is insane.

I don't get your conflation of behaviorism or psychiatry with eugenics. Unless with the recent trend of neuroscience attempting to update psychiatry...

Behaviorist psychology was on the contrary developed as an constructivist response to the deterministic eugenics (modifying the psyche through a psycho-linguistic reprogramming). It just got way extreme in the wrong direction early, of course.

Both schools are a form of socio-sanitary control of the individual. But if I had to solve some issues going on in my head (like getting rid of screen addiction, for starters), I'd be all the way for a behavioral therapy, instead of that insane gene editing Frankenstein crap

it has nothing to do with what weve been talking about...it mostly involved doing experiments on animals...

anyways, i think that any attempt to change people in to something they are not has similarities to eugenics, but originally eugenics was basically just a racist form of pseudoscience, it arguably has nothing to do with genetic engineering.

There were plenty of experiments on humans and this school has shown to be somewhat effective with treating several kinds of addictions in humans, as well as making sociopaths into somewhat nicer people.

which is why i wasn't making any claims about it, i have seen psychiatrists and therapists though, certain therapy was helpful but was never too fond of the drugs they all thought i should be taking.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy has helped people with their problems and addictions, but behaviorism is a school of thought...

that incredibly weak people have major issues with tolerating complaints and suffering from others, i just want to say, will you just stop? Nobody needs to add to other people's suffering. Maybe your just a resentful prick, don't take that out on other people, maybe you need a therapist or to talk to someone.

they might need a therapist, but you definitely need a dictionary and a lesson on how to use commas

Which anon is this directed at, punctuation and spelling seems alright to me.

13:46
"existance" and "your" and commas acting as either periods or semicolons...

The state of California has a 10 PM mandatory stay-at-home curfew order. All Californians out past 10 PM except in service of the bourgeoisie will be vaccinated on sight.

Covid-19 is a noctournal party animal confirmed.

and all the U.S anarchists will comply because they want to be seen as good in the eyes of the left

It definitely loves bars. I remember sitting near a window in a bar with the late afternoon sun shining through on 2 drunk guys blabbering on about cars or football and they were literally spraying eachother with drops of saliva like sex without noticing it. Hilarious their faces 12 inches apart ranting like morons made me think of masks with straws just for the aesthetics of looking good in a bar.

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