Romancelandia, LGBTQAI+, et al v Bouzy

You don’t remember it (it was passing away in my youth) but there was a time when gynecological information was kept from women. It is for that reason that Our Bodies, Ourselves was published, and was a radical act in its time. Such material was banned as obscene in the past, and will be again, if the misogynists have their way. These bans, regardless of how well-intended, are invariably enforced over-broadly, and Spoutible will be pressured to do so. There is a huge, mean-spirited, well-funded, and largely successful movement that is working to that goal.

Covid, the media, the medical literature, and SCIENCE!

I recently had an extended Twitter discussion with an antivax lawyer, and he pointed out that he knew a lot of people who had had covid who didn’t have long covid symptoms. This isn’t likely. He probably assumed this was so because those people didn’t talk about it, and didn’t have big, obvious disabilities.

One gets a different picture of covid from reading the medical literature than from casual conversation with people who have had the disease or most of the major media sources. The people he knew may not have talked about long covid symptoms, or recognized them. Many doctors, even, don’t.

Tweets and Elephant Calls

Here in the United States we have had a massive outbreak of invertebrate spinelessness.

Controlling Airborne Diseases: Tuberculosis and Covid

Another airborne disease, tuberculosis, was suppressed during the 20^th century. Could we do the same with covid?

We beat tuberculosis. We can beat covid.

A distant family member died of covid today. Utterly unnecessary. And I realized: we beat tuberculosis, another airborne disease, which used to kill 1 in 7. We can beat covid. Why aren't we trying?

President Biden's Imagination

I don’t think President Biden has much imagination. This comes through in his remarks about covid, where he just doesn’t imagine what it’s doing to the country and the world. It’s the same thing, I think, with his handling of the insurrection. He doesn’t see that it’s a political hazard and that it may yet take over the country, especially if capitalist leaders throw huge numbers of people out of work. That’s what brought the Nazis to power in Germany and it might bring the extreme Republicans to power here in the United States.

This doesn’t mean that Biden is an evil man. A lot of the commentators I follow seem to think he is, but I think they mistake his limitations for evil. He seems to be a decent and devout man and he’s gotten a lot done. But he seems unable to imagine many parts of the future and take precautions against foreseeable disasters. It is as if our country is a pinball and flippers and traps and all the rest of the panoply of a pinball machine are operating. We have no idea where we’re going to end up, because our leaders can barely look past the next trap.

On the Recent Tech Layoffs

Apparently the Federal Reserve and various influential financiers are very bothered by the favorable labor market. So the Fed plans to raise interest rates and, despite very good profits, several major technology companies are undertaking extensive layoffs.

In what is used to be called a layoff, in the auto industry, say, people are let go because of seasonal downturns or because sales are bad. Employees recognize that there’s a reason, even if it’s one they don’t like very much, and they have an expectation that they will eventually be called back. That’s not at all what these firings are - they are entirely arbitrary and the employees know it. These firms have broken the trust of their employees, and the best will think twice before hiring on again with these firms - it will become a matter of employees looking at more reliable employers for work, or establishing their own businesses - very much an option available to most tech workers. So these companies have managed to reduce the quality and output of their workforce. If this, plus the Fed’s interest rate increases induce a recession, people will get angry and they’ll turn out and vote. It may just hand the country to the Republicans, the way the great depression handed Germany to the Nazis.

Why is the capitalist elite so stupid?