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transmutationisms · 2 months

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Feel free not to answer this ask so you dont have to step into this particular hornet's nest but do you have any thoughts about people sharing inaccurate science about COVID in order to push for more COVID regulations? I agree that COVID is being neglected and we need better policies but I'm also a biochemist so it pisses me off to see people cite research in a way that makes exaggerated and terrifying claims. Two years ago, I was warning my colleagues against this condescending "just trust the science" approach but now the same crowd pushing that has shifted to pushing "don't trust any of the positive science, only my catastrophic interpretations of it". Can't we mask without also trying to convince each other that COVID is a guaranteed one way ticket to death and permanent disability?

you must be new here haha i swing bats at this hornet's nest like once a month. yeah i think the current state of covid communication sucks a lot. i mean the truth is that "follow the science" is always a disingenuous sentiment; Science doesn't speak, and scientists disagree with one another. and it's naïve to pretend majority consensus is a reliable mechanism to identify truth—anyone who has followed the covid aerosolisation about-face will recall that although linsey marr was not the first researcher to challenge medical orthodoxy on airborne disease transmission, even well into the covid pandemic the idea of aerosol transmission was marginalised by global health authorities because it was politically inconvenient, out of favour with powerful established academics, and reminiscent to some of pre-pasteurian miasma theories of disease. those who would "follow the science" were not presented with a convenient dichotomy between reasonable evidence-backed expert consensus and fringe peddlers of heterodoxy; to evaluate these positions required actually, yknow, reading and evaluating the arguments and evidence from multiple competing positions, and deciding which had the greater explanatory power. which is good epistemological advice only insofar as it's so obvious as to be trite.

fundamentally a huge driving force of this situation is the social, political, and institutional forces that make expert knowledge (a generally good thing) all too often synonymous with inaccessible knowledge. i don't mean inaccessibility caused by knowledge being specialised; obviously this is inevitable to some extent simply as a result of the fact that no one person will grasp the entirety of human knowledge. but the fact that knowledge is specialised, specific, highly technical, and so forth doesn't automatically mean, for example, that it has to be monetarily gatekept from all but a select few with the resources to persevere through a highly punishing, nepotistic, hegemonic university system; this is a political problem, and one that additionally has the effect of enabling and sheltering low-quality work (see: replication crisis) behind the opaque walls of university bureaucracy and the imprimateur of the credentials it grants. in lieu of an ability to actually engage with, read, or challenge much of the academic research being generated on any given topic, the lay public is supposed to rely on signs of reliability like possession of a degree, or institutional reputation. what we in fact see again and again, and with particularly high stakes in the case of something like a pandemic, is that these measures are instruments of class stratification and professional jockeying that don't inherently ensure quality information: MDs can and do peddle anti-vaxx lies and covid / long-covid denialism; the CDC and WHO can and do perpetrate bad and outdated scientific advice, like that masks are unnecessary and isolation periods can be shortened for convenience. many of these are just blatant cases of kowtowing to political pressure, which arises from the capitalist logic that counterposes disease prevention to economic growth.

this all leaves us in a position where it is, in fact, smart and correct to evaluate the information coming from 'official' and credentialled sources with scepticism. the problem is that in its place, we get information coming out of the same capitalist state-sponsored scientific institutions, and the same colonialist universities; the idea that some chucklefuck on twitter is telling you the secret truth just because they correctly identified that the government sucks is plainly absurd. where covid specifically is concerned, the liberalism of academic and scientific institutions is on display in numerous ways, including the idealist assumption, which many 'covid communicators' make, that public health policy is primarily a matter of swaying public opinion, and therefore that it is always morally imperative to form and propagate the most alarmist possible interpretation of any study or empirical observation. this is not an attitude that encourages thoughtful or measured evaluation of The Science (eg, study methodology), nor is it one that actually produces the kind of political change that would be required to protect the populace writ large from what is, indeed, a dangerous and still rampant virus. instead, this form of communication mostly winds up generating social media Engagement and screenshots of headlines of summaries of studies.

meanwhile, actual public health policy (which is by and large determined at the mercy of capitalist state interests, and which by and large shapes public opinion of what mitigation measures are 'reasonable', despite the CDC repeatedly pretending this works the other way round), remains on its trajectory toward lax, open exposure of anyone and everyone to each new strain of covid, perpetuating a society that is profoundly hostile to disabled people and careless with everyone's life and health. this fucking sucks. it sucked that we have treated the flu like this for years, and it sucks that we are now doing it with a virus that we are still relatively immunologically naïve to, and that produces, statistically, even more death and disability than the flu. and it sucks that the predominating explanations of this state of affairs from the 'cautious' emphasise not the structural forces that shape knowledge production under capitalism, but instead invoke a psychological narrative whereby individuals simply need to be sufficiently terrified into producing mass action.

#michael hoerger hate blog #covid

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akindplace · 1 year

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The former president's supporters invaded our National Congress and causing chaos and depredation after the former extreme right president lost the elections and left Brazil to hide in the U.S. the act is clearly inspired in the capitol's invasion after Biden won. Many of them came to the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, in November, set fire to buses, cars, have been camping outside army headquarters asking for the army to take over power in a military coup.

Those supporters also planned to blow a bomb at the international airport, going so a far as to set it but the police intervened. They came over in caravans last night planning on attacking the city today, the national congress being public patrimony that is representative of the democratic power in Brazil, and those people are trying to incite o violent coup. The local government of Brasilia is already being accused of not taking enough measures to keep those violent anti democratic protesters out of the area. So far, it seems there is no police there yet, the cavalry seems to be on their way.

Please don't support these people claiming the elections were fraudulent. We have one of the best electoral systems in the world to avoid fraud. The ex president was from the extreme right, defended torture during our past military dictatorship and was in favor of said dictatorship. He is already being accused of one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the country. He lost the elections fairly because of his extremism, corruption and incompetence as president.

Also remember the former president has left the country and all his supporters to hide in the US. As said, he is already being accused of several corruption crimes, including regarding the pocketing the money that should go towards buying of covid vaccines and letting 700k people die while the health system collapsed.

Translation of the cnn headlines: "just now: protesters invade the national congress".

For now I can't find sources in English because this just happened now at the beginning of the afternoon of this Sunday, January 8th, but as soon as there are, I'll post them.

#tw violence #tw political coup #tw covid #tw death #tw fascism #tw genocide mention #tw política #tw bomb #Brazil #Brasilia

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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The super-rich got that way through monopolies

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Just in time for Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:

https://www.balancedeconomy.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Davos-Taken-not-Earned-full-Report-2024-FINAL.pdf

The rise of monopolies over the past 40 years came about as the result of specific, deliberate policy choices. As the report documents, the wealthiest people in America funneled a fortune into neutering antitrust enforcement, through the "consumer welfare" doctrine.

This is an economic theory that equates monopolies with efficiency: "If everyone is buying the same things from the same store, that tells you the store is doing something right, not something criminal." 40 years ago, and ever since, the wealthy have funded think-tanks, university programs and even "continuing education" programs for federal judges to push this line:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

They didn't do this for ideological reasons – they were chasing material goals. Monopolies produce vast profits, and those profits produce vast wealth. The rise and rise of the super rich cannot be decoupled from the rise and rise of monopolies.

If you're new to this, you might think that "monopoly" only refers to a sector in which there is only one seller. But that's not what economists mean when they talk about monopolies and monopolization: for them, a monopoly is a company with power. Economists who talk about monopolies mean companies that "can act independently without needing to consider the responses of competitors, customers, workers, or even governments."

One way to measure that power is through markups ("the difference between the selling price of goods or services and their cost"). Very large companies in concentrated industries have very high markups, and they're getting higher. From 2017-22, the 20 largest companies in the world had average markups of 50%. The 100 largest companies average 43%. The smallest half of companies get average markups of 25%.

Those markups rose steeply during the covid lockdowns – and so did the wealth of the billionaires who own them. Tech billionaires – Bezos, Brin and Page, Gates and Ballmer – all made their fortunes from monopolies. Warren Buffet is a proud monopolist who says "the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power… if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business."

We are living in the age of the monopoly. In the 1930s, the top 0.1% of US companies accounted for less than half of America's GDP. Today, it's 90%. And it's accelerating, with global mergers climbing from 2,676 in 1985 to 62,000 in 2021.

Monopoly's cheerleaders claim that these numbers vindicate them. Monopolies are so efficient that everyone wants to create them. Those efficiencies can be seen in the markups monopolies can charge, and the profits they can make. If a monopoly has a 50% markup, that's just the "efficiency of scale."

But what is the actual shape of this "efficiency?" How is it manifest? The report's authors answer this with one word: power.

Monopolists have the power "to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers." They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

These chokepoints let monopolies usurp "one of the ultimate prerogatives of state power: taxation." Amazon sellers pay a 51% tax to sell on the platform. App Store suppliers pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make with their apps. That translates into higher costs. Consider a good that costs $10 to make: the bottom 50% of companies (by size) would charge $12.50 for that product on average. The largest companies would charge $15. Thus monopolies don't just make their owners richer – they make everyone else poorer, too.

This power to set prices is behind the greedflation (or, more politely, "seller's inflation"). The CEOs of the largest companies in the world keep getting on investor calls and bragging about this:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

The food system is incredibly monopolistic. The Cargill family own the largest commodity trader in the world, which is how they built up a family fortune worth $43b. Cargill is one of the "ABCD" companies ("Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus") that control the world's food supply, and they tripled their profits during the lockdown.

Monopolies gouge everyone – even governments. Pfizer charged the NHS £18-22/shot for vaccines that cost £5/shot to make. They took the British government for £2bn – that's enough to pay last year's pay hike for NHS nurses, six times over,

But monopolies also abuse their suppliers, especially their employees. All over the world, competition authorities are uncovering "wage fixing" and "no poaching" agreements among large firms, who collude to put a cap on what workers in their sector can earn. Unions report workers having their pay determined by algorithms. Bosses lock employees in with noncompetes and huge repayment bills for "training":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Monopolies corrupt our governments. Companies with huge markups can spend some of that money on lobbying. The 20 largest companies in the world spend more than €155m/year lobbying in the US and alone, not counting the money they spend on industry associations and other cutouts that lobby on their behalf. Big Tech leads the pack on lobbying, accounting for 82% of EU lobbying spending and 58% of US lobbying.

One key monopoly lobbying priority is blocking climate action, from Apple lobbying against right-to-repair, which creates vast mountains of e-waste, to energy monopolist lobbying against renewables. And energy companies are getting more monopolistic, with Exxonmobil spending $65b to buy Pioneer and Chevron spending $60b to buy Hess. Many of the world's richest people are fossil fuel monopolists, like Charles and Julia Koch, the 18th and 19th richest people on the Forbes list. They spend fortunes on climate denial.

When people talk about the climate impact of billionaires, they tend to focus on the carbon footprints of their mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.

The good news is that the tide is turning on monopolies. A coalition of "businesses, workers, farmers, consumers and other civil society groups" have created a "remarkably successful anti-monopoly movement." The past three years saw more regulatory action on corporate mergers, price-gouging, predatory pricing, labor abuses and other evils of monopoly than we got in the past 40 years.

The business press – cheerleaders for monopoly – keep running editorials claiming that enforcers like Lina Khan are getting nothing done. Sure, WSJ, Khan's getting nothing done – that's why you ran 80 editorial about her:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

(Khan's winning like crazy. Just last month she killed four megamergers:)

https://www.thesling.org/the-ftc-just-blocked-four-mergers-in-a-month-heres-how-its-latest-win-fits-into-the-broader-campaign-to-revive-antitrust/

The EU and UK are taking actions that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Canada is finally set to get a real competition law, with the Trudeau government promising to add an "abuse of dominance" rule to Canada's antitrust system.

Even more exciting are the moves in the global south. In South Africa, "competition law contains some of the most progressive ideas of all":

It actively seeks to create greater economic participation, particularly for ‘historically disadvantaged persons’ as part of its public interest considerations in merger decisions.

Balzac wrote, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Chances are, the rapsheet includes an antitrust violation. Getting rid of monopolies won't get rid of all the billionaires, but it'll certainly get rid of a hell of a lot of them.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

#billionaires #wef #climate #monopoly #world economic forum #competition #antitrust #consumer welfare #inequality #corruption #davos #guillotine watch

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foone · 7 months

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So I dreamed my wife had taken a job where she was designing acrylic protractor looking things, but they had stuff like calculus on them? She was remaking old math guide things, redesigning them in some vector drawing program so old designs from like the 50s could be made again. In her spare time she was also designing one that had a guide to lesbian sex (?) on it. You know, for Math Class Yuri, I guess?

She also had a naked woman tied up in her office, which was also strange because otherwise this was a completely normal architectural office.

So I was trying to leave her office and it was on one of the top floors of a skyscraper, and their elevators had turned into some kind of weird puzzle game. See, they had several elevators in different parts of the building, but they couldn't access all floors. So like, one elevator could only get to floors 15, 7, and 2, while the elevator on the other side might only manage to get to 11, 5, and 1.

I was walking through the floors with two guys (one of who randomly bled on me) as we tried to manage to get to the ground floor to leave. I figured out a route, but it took us through the cafeteria floor, which was like floor 11. We just needed to cross it to get the elevator that took us to the ground floor.

As we crossed it, I noticed that a lot of people at the buffet were naked (it wasn't sexual, it was more like nudist-style nudity). I asked one of the guys why, and they said it was the government's new harsh anti-covid measures: you had a choice: vaccination, or CANNIBALISM!

Yeah see it turned out the naked people at the buffet were gonna be eaten later, because they had turned down the covid vaccination. This is the draconian rules of Foone's Weird Dream Tower. I guess they needed to be fattened up before they were eaten or something? I'm not really sure why they were in the cafeteria and not getting eaten, if cannibalism was the goal.

The worst part was that it turns out the elevator was closed for maintenance, so we had to go through the cannibalism!cafeteria for nothing.

I was pissed off and decided there was only one solution: we were going back to the other elevator, going down to the second floor, then doing the unthinkable: taking the stairs!

#my dreams are weird

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waitmyturtles · 6 months

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THE MORNING AFTER: ONLY FRIENDS, EPISODE 12 -- WHEN ONLY FRIENDS GOT 2GETHER-ED

TRIGGER WARNING: EVERYONE'S UP FOR CRITICISM HERE, JOJO AND TEAM, FORCEBOOK, FIRSTKHAO, ALL OF THEM. Read at your peril.

Well. Big deep breaths. I spent a lot of time on a show that had been marketed as not-a-BL, that ended as a BL. As a mom with not that much time to spend on watching and writing on dramas that were marketed incorrectly, I am feeling some kinda way (fucking pissed off).

So many people had amazing takes yesterday, on both sides of the aisle, regarding how the show ended (pro-ending here, anti-ending here, here, here, here, here, and here, and my dear friends @neuroticbookworm and @lurkingshan did heavy lifting on reblogs yesterday, so stroll on over to their blogs for more).

I want to set up a constellation of points to touch upon before I get into the meat of this post.

1) I referred quite a bit to my review of Theory of Love throughout my watch of Only Friends. In that review, I meditate on how the majority of the general global public judges sex, and casual sex, and people who have sex and/or casual sex. Generally speaking -- even in countries that makes as progressive art on sex and sexuality as Thailand and the United States -- that's a rule of thumb that I can rely on. Sex is judged by the majority of the global public.

2) I hate to say it. I cannot believe this happened. But I was right about monogamy being an ultimate theme in Only Friends. Not just a theme, fam. A theme by which people judged others for having open, casual, and consensual sex. Queer sex. Queer sex that is so very often had outside of the constraints of a monogamous relationship.

There was a reason why that holiday party was populated by couples, except for Boston, and Boston had to grovel to them in apology for their friendship. In Only Friends: monogamy wins, and casual queer sex loses.

3) Unfortunately, in part though an analysis of Cheum inside of last week that I accidentally started (ha), I see that points 1 and 2 come together to have created a fabric and framework of judgement that Only Friends ended on.

The last paragraph in this excellent post by @benkaaoi notes that the assumption by a large portion of the OF fandom that the creative choices that were made to end this series were designed to save the sanctity -- economic and otherwise -- of the shipped pairs of ForceBook and FirstKhao. This rings true to me.

Most of the BL shows that I've watched this year are older shows, through my Old GMMTV Challenge, in which I've been studying the changes over time that GMMTV and other Thai networks, have made towards their editorial choices, attitudes, and risks in producing BLs. I included Only Friends on this syllabus to note the show's impact as a kind of zeitgeist measure of how much heat and literary controversy GMMTV could take in airing increasingly progressive queer media -- even though Only Friends wasn't originally intended to be a BL.

To the theory that Only Friends needed to save the ships... and to another theory that the ships needed to be saved in the most moralistically judgmental way that I could have ever imagined (I was actually blown away by how heavy-handed this messaging was) -- I look to the ending of 2gether.

The majority general reaction to the ending of 2gether from within the existing BL fandom in 2020, was one of guffawed incredulousness. BrightWin/SarawatTine did not kiss in the first season of 2gether. It took Aof Noppharnach to come in to make Still 2gether to indicate that these two young men may have been at least vaguely sexual with each other throughout the course of their fictional relationship.

Yet, 2gether was a massive success. Many theorize it was because 2gether was the first big BL to air during the start of the COVID pandemic, and new BL fans had time to be at home and watch shows. But I posit in my 2gether/Still 2gether review that 2gether was also successful PRECISELY BECAUSE IT LACKED SEX (and by sex here, I mean plain old kissin').

As I stated earlier: sex is judged by the majority of the global public. With BrightWin NOT kissing, new fans who may have been implicitly and/or explicitly turned off by physical depictions of queer love could glom comfortably onto 2gether, and watch a BL without the "threat" of physical depictions of two men expressing their love to each other.

Subsequently, BrightWin gained massive social media followings, 2gether made GMMTV buckets of money, and GMMTV went -- well, hot diggity.

Many of us had impressions of Only Friends as...something else than it ended up being. Early on, Jojo Tichakorn, for instance, cited an early non-GMMTV, non-BL show, Gay OK Bangkok, that he and Aof Noppharnach worked on in 2016 and 2017, as being referential to Only Friends. Gay OK Bangkok centered on a group of queer friends, mostly cisgender men with Jennie Panhan in the mix, as they lived their lives and dated away in Bangkok.

I'll tell ya, GOKB didn't end the way Only Friends did, and I'll get into that more in a bit. I believe @benkaaoi, @lurkingshan, and others are absolutely right that the ultimate moralization on casual sex that this show depicted -- and how Only Friends punished Boston for his casual sex -- was an economic decision designed to reflect on the sanctity of monogamy that shipped couples like ForceBook and FirstKhao can sell back to their fans, fans that may have actually flocked to GMMTV shows from 2gether, and that demand a fantasy of devoted monogamy from both fictional characters and professional actors who are actually only just doing fan service to earn their livings. GMMTV has known for a long time how to make money, and money the network doth has made from Only Friends, and from shipping their ships around the world to service the growing fandom.

Casual sex in fiction, casual sex that breaks up the ships.... fucks that economic shit all up.

GMMTV has taught us our lesson, a lesson that we had already learned from the no-kissing rule of 2gether. Loose lips shall not sink ships at this network. And I think we lost a chance for a big and progressively artistic zeitgeist that GMMTV could have taken risks on, if it had the courage to risk depicting something truly novel.

I want to note quickly another framework that I dug into while I was watching this show. I sent a flare to @lurkingshan before I started watching the episode that I was going to, in part, watch this last episode from my personal Asian lens. I wanted to ask myself, as I was watching this disaster -- is there anything happening here that strikes my heart with fear and doom as an Asian?

Indeed, yes. I didn't expect it, but there was a dialogue on individualism vs. collectivism.

Boston. My dear, sweet Boston. Boston, named after a city so very distant from Bangkok.

Boston was punished by his group of friends because he didn't adhere to the rules of the group. His individualistic actions and preferences -- his preferences to "roll alone," as Nick stated, would not work in the frameworks of either monogamy with Nick and/or the group dynamics of the hostel crew.

The link I linked above is an amazing answer to an inquiry I posed to dear @absolutebl last year about how Asian social collectivist paradigms are depicted in BLs. In that question-and-answer dialogue, I asked ABL Sensei about the motif of queer revelations in BLs, and how seemingly straight characters respond in kind to being approached with a proposition to a queer dalliance and/or relationship. Generally speaking, the Asian collectivist mindset is to at least attempt to respond in kind to those kinds of propositions, as one's behavioral habits are designed to be responsive to others instinctually, as opposed to only servicing oneself. To only service oneself is not only seen as selfish, but also as disturbing to the general flow of public existence among one's societies. To respond in kind means that you will not cause potentially disturbing angst to another individual or group. (Collectivism explains why Asian countries performed much better with mask mandates during the pandemic than we in the States did.)

So -- Boston filming Ray, Boston sleeping with Top, created waves in the friend group. He was so severely punished for it.

And the show iterates, and repeats, Nick's preference that Boston move forward alone in Boston's life, because of Boston's tendencies to make decisions that suit himself. As an Asian-American, I mutter to myself: god forbid.

Nick will not commit to Boston -- and yet, will also condemn Boston for making his own decisions outside of the specter of a monogamy that does not exist between Nick and Boston, and that Boston will still get judged for, as referenced in the Sand/Nick conversation depicted above.

In other words: if Boston makes a decision for himself? That's punishable. Because it might hurt someone else's feelings -- a someone else that actually hasn't committed to Boston, and/or allowed Boston to commit himself to.

This group caught Boston in a moralistic and collectivist catch-22, the likes of which I just would have never expected from Jojo and team, even if the creative team faced the economic pressures of the GMMTV bigwigs. I'm sorry to state that I am beyond disappointed in this condemnation of individualism, sending Boston alone, judged, and friendless, off to New York City to live in, what, the immoral boundaries of Chelsea? Homey, get a fucking SWEET-ASS PAD, and FUCK THESE LOSERS, leave 'em BEHIND in your cloud of airplane gas emissions. See you at the La Quinta rooftop bar on 32nd Street, friendo.

Only Friends could have ended so much better. And I understand that in the Only Friends novel, published AFTER the script was finished, that it did end somewhat better for Boston (cc @jinitak, reporting from Thailand, thank you for this heads-up about the novel!).

So. Any-fucking-way. Do y'all know how Gay OK Bangkok ended?

Of many lovely endings for the various GOKB characters, an older main character, Aof, was dating a much younger character, Big. (CC to @neuroticbookworm for our quick convo on this last night.)

Aof was sex-averse. Big wanted lots of sex. Big slept with a lot of people. He loved Aof. Aof couldn't handle Big having sex with other people, and they broke up. It was a lovingly handled break-up, written just gorgeously by Aof Noppharnach.

After their break-up, I thought Big would disappear from the show. Instead. Instead! Nong Big, the little brother to the core group of queer friends that centered GOKB, was welcomed back with open arms. Arm, Pom, Sathang (played by an effervescent Jennie Panhan), and others toasted to Big, telling him he would always be family, no matter if him and his ex, Aof, had broken up. In the queer circles of friends that I'm a part of, exes are not as commonly excommunicated as they are in straight circles.

Only Friends could have been this. Something, a little something, like this.

Instead, Only Friends punished a friend for acting outside of the rules of their group.

Boston was punished because.... because Only Friends had to end up being a BL. For the sake of the moolah, for the sake of collectivism, for the sake of the shippers who'll buy tickets around the world to see ForceBook and FirstKhao perform fan service on stage.

I just didn't think that the show would be so brutal, on so many levels, in the end, to people who want to have casual sex. I don't think any of us expected this. But, it's over, it's done, and the piece has been said -- GMMTV said, no casual sex today, and here's how we actually feel about it.

I'll see you over on Gagaoolala for Playboyy. Deuces, OF.

(It was an absolute pleasure writing meta with the Ephemerality Squad -- onto the next one! @lurkingshan @neuroticbookworm @ranchthoughts @twig-tea @slayerkitty @thatgirl4815 @distant-screaming @clara-maybe-ontheroad)

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permanently-sprained-ankle · 7 months

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If you can wear a mask and choose not to, that is ableist.

If you can’t wear a mask and do not take compensatory anti-COVID measures, that is ableist.

You are not a true disability advocate if you do not take sufficient anti-COVID action.

You are not an advocate for autistic people if you do not take sufficient anti-COVID action.

#disability #disabled #chronic illness #chronic pain #chronically ill #cripple punk #cpunk #cripplepunk

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racefortheironthrone · 7 months

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Is there any way for governments to respond to a pandemic such as Covid 19 or something worse without provoking considerable public resentment? Take no measures to prevent the spread and you’ll be blamed for the resulting public health disaster. Try to prevent the spread, and you’ll be blamed for the inevitable inequities and negative effects taken to do so, and the (mitigated, but not entirely avoided) public health disaster.

I don't mean this to come off as pessimistic or overly negative, but I would say as a matter of historic record, public health campaigns (especially anti-pandemic campaigns) tend to be quite unpopular - and my suspicion is that the mid-20th century moment where public health experts like Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin became folk heroes with enormous amounts of popular support from the middle-class parents of the Baby Boom is probably the exception that proves the rule.

You can go all the way back to the very earliest days of public health measures - the Venetian invention of the quarantine during the Black Death - to find one of the first anti public-health backlashes. Conservative Venetians felt that the free food packages that were an essential part of the quarantine process (because you don't want potentially sick people wandering the city looking for food) would make people lazy and economically dependent on the government.

Likewise, when advances in medicine and state capacity in the early 19th century led to one of the first modern pandemic campaigns during the cholera outbreaks of the early 1830s, the public's response was not one of orderly compliance and gratefulness. Instead, you had what were called the "cholera riots" in both the U.K and Russia. Buoyed by conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals of doctors working hand in hand with an autocratic government to kill the destitute, mobs attacked symbols of public health (public hospitals, government doctors, public research clinics, anatomical colleges, health boards) and government authority (governors, police stations, quarantine cordons, court houses, etc.).

By contrast, all the anti-vaxx insanity of the past couple years seems a bit tame - at least in COVID-19, most violence has been rhetorical and abstract rather than involving the targeted murder of doctors and government officials.

Ultimately, we may just have to come to grips with the fact that public health/anti-pandemic policy is always going to be unpopular and that the correct approach is to use hard power rather than try to chivvy people into doing what's in their best interests. I certainly remember how California started to make strides against the anti-vaxx movement prior to COVID-19: it ultimately required legislation like SB 277 and SB 742 that made vaccinations more mandatory and made anti-vaxx harassment punishable with six months in jail.

#history #social history #history of medicine #public health

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drdemonprince · 2 months

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It’s “urks me” anon. I agree with your reply very much. I know I sent the ask but you did not have to reply as in depth as you did and it genuinely made me feel a lot more comfortable with the space you are creating. I kinda wish you had explained yourself that well in the beginning but hey I of all people know online communication is difficult and this is an evolving convo. Also I’m going to be real your followers have been being a lot more annoying than you ever could be and it was affecting my mood when talking to you. It’s less that healthy people talking about risk management inherently annoys me and more that they are constantly slipping in microaggressions and minor misinfo when they talk about it. Even if the choices they are making are (sometimes…) reasonable it is so obvious that they were not listening to the important technical details vulnerable people were speaking and only heard “blah blah blah scary stuff and restrictions blah blah blah” like…!? I think overshaming is one piece of the puzzle. But I think a lot of people, including many so called allies and covid-aware people, simply don’t listen to us very carefully regardless of how diplomatic we’re being. Maybe they think they already know the technical details even though they clearly don’t? Idk it’s very irritating.

Thanks for your message. This is another place where I get very enraged at our public institutions for failing us so catastrophically! We have all been so systematically misled about COVID, and the actual infection numbers and other ever-evolving data on how it's currently spreading is actively covered up, and not made accessible by journalistic institutions, so on that level I do not hold individiduals reponsible for not understanding things.

Chronically ill, disabled, and otherwise COVID-conscious people have been forced to become the public health information apparatus and have done incredible amounts of thankless work geneating the data, reporting on it, monitoring wastewater levels, delving deeply into the latest research, creating infographics, and trying to spread the word to the public about it, but they have no assistance in it, and no platform beyond what they can build online. and those online communities tend to become siloed because of how social media algorithms work, and so people who have been spreading the facts relentlessly every single day routinely bump up against people who do not see those same posts hardly ever because they are in different pockets of the internet. Which comes down both to their choices and priorities, and due to algortihmic echo-chambers, and economic and political incentive structures silencing the work that COVID-conscious folks do.

And yes, also, people very much do shut down and turn away when confronted with scary information... that's a very well-established fact within public health and persuasion science that has remained a real barrier to public awareness campaigns for a long time. People do not process information about death and threat well at all. So much so that many public health intitatives of the past had to limit talk of death and scary outcomes if they want people to things like get a cancer screening or contemplate quitting smoking. the cigarette companies themselves funded "anti smoking" campaigns that were awash in images of death and bodily decay because they knew those kinds of messages shut people down and actually make them less likely to quit. (i write a lot about this stuff in my new book).

This is where conversations about tactics do become relevant again -- mentioning death or the direness of long COVID isn't "shaming", it's not moral sanctimoniousness, it's not "wrong" to do, it is accurate! but it doesn't usually work persuasively. and I do think there is more we could do to frame masking and taking covid mitigation measures as a thing for a person to take pride in, feel empowered by, and feel connected to others by doing, which generally is what we find to be more effective in public health research.

to return to the cancer comparison, we tend to find that "think of how much peace of mind you'll feel after your cancer screening! take a positive step for your health!" is a more effective framing that actually inspires behavioral change than "if you don't find out that you have pancreatic cancer in time you will most likely die. here are the stats on how many people die of it." That kind of messaging tends to make people less likely to take proactive steps. even though it's all rooted in actual facts.

I have seen some propaganda (postive connotation) evoking a kind of positive, empowering idea regarding masking at protests, but I'd love to see more of it. Sounding the alarm repeatedly does not work for a variety of psychological reasons. people get both numb to it if they've heard something is a "pressing serious life and death emergency" for long enough, and paradoxically, they also overwhelmed by the bleakness. we see a similar thing happening with climate change. these situations ARE dire and people SHOULD care, but in order to make caring feel concrete and possible, behaviorally, we have to frame information in an empowering way.

of course, there are COVID conscious people who do do that and devote lots of energy to crafting such persuasive messages! and still have to cope with being silenced, downgraded by the algorithm, ignored, attacked by anti-maskers, etc. and lots of people understandably feel that they have tried everything and that people still don't care. from where they are sitting as one person that's the emotional reality and that's often the lived intepersonal experience. but that appearance of other people not caring was engineered...and lord i hope we can find a way to socially engineer a collective way out of it, because what we are doing isn't working well enough. unfortunately the thing we need the most desperately is just more people spreading the message and giving a shit.

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mariacallous · 2 months

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Far-right extremists have spent the past week harassing and threatening migrants on the United States border with Mexico while making money by livestreaming it on YouTube and Rumble.

“Anybody in there,” said Dennis Yarbery, one of the YouTubers, as he approached a migrant camp at night in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, near the border last week. Yarbery was livestreaming to thousands of people. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

Yarbery is one of three men who split off from the Take Our Border Back convoy in Texas and, according to their livestreams, spent days driving along the border in Arizona and California to harass migrants and volunteers with nonprofit groups.

“We’re illegal hunters,” Yarbery told a store clerk while livestreaming at a Subway sandwich counter in Jacumba Hot Springs. “I’ve hunted a lot in my life, but I’ve never actually hunted people, and that’s what we’re doing now.”

Yarbery, who is known online as both MasterGrifter and Big D and says he joined the People’s Convoy, a group that protested Covid lockdown measures and disrupted traffic, in 2022, was joined by Josh Fulfer, known as OreoExpress, and Joe Felix, known as Taco Joe, who runs 1st Responders Media, an outlet focused on livestreaming far-right events.

Throughout the hours-long broadcasts from the border in Arizona and California, these livestreamers regularly asked for donations from their supporters, which they claimed was being used to continue their work “covering” the crisis.

Even while in the middle of harassing the migrants, the livestreamers could still be heard thanking those who were sending them money via YouTube’s Super Chat function or through other platforms like Venmo and the Christian-aligned crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. In one situation, while Fulfer was shouting at migrants in Arizona telling them to go home, he stopped briefly to call out a supporter who had sent him $50 on Venmo.

These livestreamers come after weeks of inflamed rhetoric from both the far-right community and Republican lawmakers about immigration at the Texas border with Mexico. This year, the situation has erupted: After Texas governor Greg Abbott refused to heed the Biden administration’s calls to remove razor wire along the border, a dozen GOP governors publicly declared support for Abbott, and the Take Our Border Back convoy traveled from Virginia to Texas. Though the convoy petered out, the violent anti-immigrant rhetoric, which experts have warned would have long-term impacts, has only heightened.

“The post-convoy terror campaign against immigrants at the border follows an all-too-familiar pattern we’ve tracked for the past couple of decades,” Devin Burghart, the executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, tells WIRED. “Public bragging about ‘hunting people’ is a descent into a dangerous new low for armed vigilantes. Left unchecked, armed far-right vigilantes will spill more blood.”

After the livestreamers left Texas, they went to Sasabe in Arizona and a migrant camp run by No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization that provides support for migrants crossing the border.

During an hours-long livestream at night, Yarbery, Fulfer, and Felix all shouted at the migrants and accused them of human trafficking. Yarbery even tried to sell cigarettes to the migrants for $20 each. At one point, Fulfer threatened violence against a migrant who was shining a torch at their cameras.

The trio also verbally attacked a volunteer who worked with the organization, following her around as she phoned for help from US Border Patrol, according to livestreams of the incident viewed by WIRED before they were taken offline.

Yarbery, Felix, and Fulfer didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about their actions at the border.

Laurie Cantillo, a board member from Humane Borders, says the organization, which maintains water stations along migrant routes near the border, is aware of the allegations of harassment. “We have noticed an increase in vandalism of our permitted water stations along the border,” Cantillo tells WIRED. “Our 55-gallon barrels have been shot, stabbed, drained, and stolen. It’s a sad state of affairs when someone sabotages water that can save a human life.”

US Border Patrol and No More Deaths did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the incident. One former volunteer with No More Deaths, who did not want to be identified due to safety concerns, told WIRED that they were not surprised no one replied, as the organization “may not want to draw extra attention to this event.”

After departing Arizona, the trio of livestreamers headed to California, where they continued to try and track down migrant camps. On several days their searches were fruitless, though they continued to broadcast and solicit donations through YouTube.

After Fulfer and Felix departed, Yarbery continued to “hunt,” as he called it, and during one broadcast over the weekend, he livestreamed with his partner and their baby while driving toward the border in Jacumba Hot Springs.

While there, Yarbery met with locals to discuss the migrant situation, and in one conversation a man could be heard on the livestream saying, “I say we shoot ’em all,” before Yarbery told him to be quiet as he was broadcasting live on YouTube.

YouTube told WIRED that it terminated Fulfer and Felix’s accounts after WIRED asked about the livestreamers, but it did not take action on Yarbery’s account. All of Yarbery’s videos, YouTube said, were set to private by the account holder. Yarbery has also created a backup channel, and told his followers in a YouTube chat where they could continue to follow him on the platform.

For years, extremism experts have been tracking how violent rhetoric around the border and migrants has led directly to violence, dating back to the 2000s when fear-mongering attacks on immigrants led to the mobilization of far-right paramilitary groups, one of which brutally murdered Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia.

“Sadly, this cycle of violence has become so common that it tends to go unnoticed outside of the communities targeted by far-right vigilantes,” Burghart said. “This time around, the Black Mirror-like difference is that tech advances now allow [people like Yarbery, Fulfer, and Felix] to stream and monetize their cruelty to a far-right fanbase that craves more.”

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sramfact · 2 years

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The report "Anti-counterfeit Packaging Market (Mass Encoding, RFID, Tamper Evidence, Hologram, Forensic Markers), End-use Industry ( Food & Beverage, Pharmaceuticals, Electrical & Electronics, Automotive, Luxury goods), and Region - Global Forecast to 2026", size is projected to grow from USD 117.2 billion in 2021 to USD 211.3 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 12.5% from 2021 to 2026. The market is driven by factors such as strong growth in the demand from the food & beverage and pharmaceutical & healthcare sectors. The growing pharmaceutical & healthcare industry and rise in counterfeit products in the market are the major drivers of the anti-counterfeit packaging market.

The Asia Pacific, with emerging economies such as China and India, is expected to drive the anti-counterfeit packaging market. China is projected to account for the largest market share and dominate the Asia-Pacific anti-counterfeit packaging market in 2021. The growing pharmaceutical & healthcare and food & beverage industries are likely to drive the demand for anti-counterfeit packaging solutions in China. In addition to this, the country’s large consumer base, overall positive economic environment, and increase in manufacturing activities will drive demand in the packaging industry.

The major players include Avery Dennison (US), CCL Industries Inc. (Canada), 3M Company (US), DuPont (US), Zebra Technologies Corporation (US), SICPA Holding SA (Switzerland), AlpVision S.A (Switzerland), Applied DNA Sciences Inc. (US), Savi Technology, Inc. (US), and Authentix, Inc. (US). Companies have adopted strategies such as new product launches, expansions & investments, and acquisitions to cope with the increasing demand in the emerging markets.

#anti-counterfeit packaging market #COVID-19 Impact on anti-counterfeit packaging market #anti-counterfeit packaging market trends #global anti-counterfeit packaging market #anti-counterfeit packaging market size #anti-counterfeit packaging market share #anti-counterfeiting companies #Anti-Counterfeit Packaging Industry #Anti-Counterfeit Packaging #anti-counterfeit technology #anti-counterfeiting solutions #anti-counterfeiting strategies #anti-counterfeit measures

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kim-they-them · 2 months

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I want to talk about how interconnected the genocide of the Palestinian people and the ongoing covid pandemic are.

Just as the 1918 flu pandemic desensitized the world to mass death and disability leading into WWII, the ongoing covid pandemic has also desensitized the world today leading into the genocide of Palestinian people.

The genocide of the Palestinian people is a mass disabling event, and it is compounded by imposed starvation and the mass spread of diseases, including covid. Israel is actively depriving Palestinians of food, clean water, and covid vaccines through occupation and blockade.

Just as Israel imposes apartheid on Palestinians, the US imposes medical apartheid on all marginalized groups of people. Indigenous and Black communities are especially disproportionately affected by covid.

Also taking place in majority Black communities are the establishment of cop cities. Atlanta, GA and Baltimore, MD are just two examples of the nation-wide cop city role out. These cop cities will be used for further militarization of US police officers and an intensification of the Deadly Exchange. The Deadly Exchange is a training and exchange program between the IOF and US police officers. This will only amplify discriminatory and apartheid practices already existing in US policing.

Atlanta, GA just narrowly escaped a face covering and mask ban, as the state of Georgia is criminalizing protests against the Atlanta Cop City. Georgia is prosecuting cop city protestors with RICO charges right now.

In Washington DC, another majority Black community, fascist “anti-crime” bills are being rammed through by Mayor Bowser. The Secure DC Omnibus Amendment Act was just advanced by the DC City Council. While the bill contains a large list of horrifying measures, I want to point out the ban of face coverings, which does extend to masks and respirators.

With the unwinding of all federal and state covid policies and prevention measures, we have very few tools left to protect ourselves as individuals from repeated covid infections. Criminalization of masks and respirators will make Black, disabled, and marginalized DC residents even more at risk of disability or death from covid.

It is so important that we understand how the ongoing covid pandemic and genocide of the Palestinian people are connected. As a community we must take both of these mass disability and death events seriously. Please wear a high quality mask (a KN-95 or N-95), and check out your local mask bloc for access to masks and covid tests to incorporate into your praxis and activism for Palestine, the DRC, Sudan, Tigray, and so on.

#long covid #covid19 #covid 19 #covid #palestine #free gaza #disability #dr congo #keep eyes on sudan #free tigray #covid isn't over

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transmutationisms · 10 months

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something i think is deceptively easy to overlook in theorising biopolitics is that the state has interests both in maintaining a fit and healthy population (simply put, it needs workers, a military force, and so on) and in designating certain populations as threats to be eliminated (eg, through processes of racialisation used to justify war, slavery, and colonialism, or through eugenic policy that seeks to eliminate the ‘unfit’). these two goals—enforcing life, and creating death—are thus not at odds with one another, but occur in tandem and both play critical roles in the state’s overarching endeavour to harness biology and population management in order to ensure political dominance and profit. an explanation of state policy that exclusively invokes one or the other will never be able to capture the full dynamics of imperialism or even internal policy; always there are efforts to produce and reproduce certain bodies alongside the embrace, and subsequent political use of, the deaths of others. the state cannot be said to have interests solely in mass death or solely in health and life. it needs and uses both; the effort to biologically create and strengthen its population is a matter of managing both death and life. this is why it is possible to identify examples of coercive healthist measures (eg, anti-‘obesity’ policy and rhetoric) and examples of exterminatory and eugenic measures (eg, denial of the ongoing nature of the covid pandemic) coming from the same states at the same time. they do not contradict; they are both useful for the state, are both aimed at the same biological end, and both rely on the same set of bio-medico-political discourses determining which bodies and lives are useful and valuable.

#biopolitics

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phoenixyfriend · 3 months

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Suggested topics to call your reps about today, 1/30/24!

I’ve been doing two subjects per call recently; one is almost always about the events in the middle east, and then one is domestic policy. I’m including a bit of verbiage you can use as basis for what you say (if you agree with me), for a few of these.

BOTH SENATE AND HOUSE:

Foreign Policy: Reinstate funding for UNRWA. While the claims made by Israel that employees of the relief agency were involved in Oct. 7th are troubling, this arm of the UN is currently providing food, water, shelter, and medical care to the 2.3 million displaced peoples of Gaza. It is especially disturbing and concerning that the many children of Gaza, who are already suffering due to this conflict, are now having this support revoked.

Warn Congress to reaaaaally think about whether a strong response to the incident in Jordan, currently attributed to an Iraqi group backed by Iran, if we're truly looking to avoid a wider regional war as claimed. There is already growing unrest in Yemen and the threat of another civil war, fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now the situation with the Islamic Resistance. Caution them against an overreaction of the kind that the US has a tendency towards.

FOR THE SENATE: Urge your senator to put their support behind Bernie Sanders and his motion to restrict funding to Israel until a humanitarian review of the IDF’s actions in Gaza has been completed.

FOR THE HOUSE: Urge your representative to put their support behind Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s petition for the US government to recognize the IDF’s actions in Gaza as ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, and put a stop to it.

Domestic Policy

House of Representatives:

Expansion of the child tax credit. The House of Representatives is currently voting on whether or not to expand the child tax credit that was instated during COVID-19. This credit offers a return on taxes for individuals with children, but currently does not apply to families that are too poor to qualify. During COVID, this tax credit was expanded to include those families, and child poverty fell to record lows, but as it was a temporary measure, those children are getting left behind again. Given the effectiveness the expansion of this tax regulation showed in the past, it would be a net positive for the country as a whole to codify it more permanently.

Other things coming up in the next week if you think your rep might be receptive:

H.R. 6976: Protect Our Communities from DUIs Act: Vote no. This act is discriminatory and enforces harsher penalties on immigrants than in legal citizens. While DUIs are a significant issue, enacting stronger guidelines on a small portion of the population that is already at risk from discriminatory police action is not a solution.

H.R. 6679: No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act - Vote no or dismiss if possible. Terrorism is already considered a reason to reject immigrants. This bill is pointless peacocking. You have better things to do with your time.

H.R. 6678: Consequences for Social Security Fraud Act - Vote no. This proposed act is discriminatory and enacts unduly harsh sentences against minorities. The system already has punishments for fraud; this specific act is unnecessary.

H.R. 5585: Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act - Are you sensing a pattern? It's discriminatory! Evading law enforcement on a motor vehicle is already illegal, you do not need to ADD IMMIGRATION PENALTIES.

Senate:

Abortion rights. Domestically, for the senate, push for abortion rights.

Specific things coming up in the next week if you think your Senator might be receptive:

H.R. 6914: Pregnant Students’ Rights Act - Call to ask that the resolution EXPLICITLY include abortion access, or otherwise vote against. This passed the house on strict party lines; other than a handful of abstentions, the vote was all republican for and all dems against. The text of the proposal is explicitly anti-abortion.

H.R. 6918: Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Women and Families Act - same as above, it was very partisan in the house vote, though less explicitly anti-abortion in the text. Nonetheless, it focuses explicitly on protecting funding to "pregnancy centers," which are often anti-choice and dedicated to pushing patients towards keeping a baby they don't want.

DOMESTIC POLICY, BOTH BRANCHES OF CONGRESS: Border policy is currently being hotly debated and negotiated. A very strong policy in favor of the Republican party is the status at the moment. Even some democrats are in favor of it due to small border communities being ill-equipped to handle large numbers of migrants, and states usually removed from the situation getting migrants bussed in from Texas despite telling Texas to knock it off. Despite some Republicans saying that they have gotten everything they could want out of the current deal, the party at large is refusing to pass it as the politics of the debate are more useful to the coming election than actually passing policy. This is also causing delays in passing the federal budget.

I... don't actually want to tell anyone WHAT to think of the border policy since I do not have any real knowledge on the budget impacts and resources dictating the actual problems (nor the racism or xenophobia, that part is obviously bullshit). I can recognize that too some degree, there is a genuine issue of manpower and budget restriction impacting the ability to house and process immigrants.

However, DREAMers are not being considered in the current deal, the delays in the deal are impacting the federal government and threatening a partial shutdown, and people are STILL getting hurt and even dying at the border.

I would focus on protection for DREAMers, chastising the Republicans for deliberately delaying the budget in order to use the border as a reelection premise instead of actually working on the policy they claim to want (emphasize that they are going to lose votes for focusing on reelection at the expense of their people), and protection for children, parents with those children, and nonviolent migrants in general.

#politics #current events #united states #call your reps #Phoenix Politics

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