Bits & Pieces

The whole thing is the Netherlands and all the closed-off red-lined areas are Belgium. Except, if you look carefully, you have some SMALLER closed-off red-lined areas INSIDE the bits of Belgium. Those bits are the Netherlands. For reasons.

This has to be some sort of elaborate joke, right. You can’t be actually like this.

Oh, but they do.  Infectious disease is not make-believe, honey.

“Treat others the way you would like to be treated.”

If I was an active and persistent demonstrable danger to the health and wellbeing of the people around me because I refuse to take simple actions and accept aid out of willful ignorance, I damn well hope that the people around me would treat me as a danger!  

Two, if you believe they work so much unvaccinated people are not a threat anyway.

From the Atlantic article linked above:

Because vaccines are such a polarizing topic, Dubé says, “being harsh or not listening” is just plain “not helpful.” “People with really, really strong convictions against vaccinations are really few,” she says. “It’s not common. Most of the people who have doubts and concerns are feeling unsure,” perhaps because they’ve heard some troubling stories about injuries and illnesses believed to be linked to vaccines, or because they might believe that vaccines are being pushed on patients by the pharmaceutical industry.

From the Columbia University article:

“We have to come from a place of empathy,” says Alter. “The vast majority of [anti-vaxxers] are really just trying to do what’s best for their families and their kids, and they don’t have the science literacy to weed through all the information.”

From the eVisit article:

Understanding parents’ fears is the first step to overcoming them. Don’t jump to conclusions or assume parents’ reasons for choosing not to vaccinate. Some parents may know a child who suffered adverse reactions from a vaccine, some may have drawn conclusions from their own research. Find out why a parent is hesitant before jumping to persuasion. Also, remember anti-vaxxers come from a wide range of economic and ideological backgrounds.

“Just listen to your doctor” is not an adequate rebuttal to a person who’s scared of vaccines – in fact, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of who that person is. Anti-vaxxers are 88% more likely than others not to have even seen a doctor in the past year. They are not typically people who believe the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry have their best interests in mind. And frankly, if you look at the medical establishment’s history with the rural poor, it’s hard to blame them for that belief. 

I know there’s a lot going on in the world, but you probably haven’t heard about what’s happening in Australia.

we’re on fire.

approximately ¼ of australia’s population is in catastrophic fire danger. A catastrophic fire level means your only chance of surviving is leaving before it’s too late.

it’s Spring in Australia, and rainforests aren’t meant to be dry enough to burn, yet at the time of writing this (11/11/19) there are 71 active fires in NSW (43 out of control), and 51 active fires in Queensland - not including those that have already burned before now, and there are more in other states. Sydney is already rated “catastrophic”, the first time this rating has ever been used there since its creation in 2009. That’s right, we had to add yet another level of destructiveness, because “high”, “very high”, “severe”, and “extreme” were no longer adequate. To quote the Fire Danger Ratings, “for your survival, leaving early is the only option”. conditions tomorrow will be the worst they have been, and people are evacuating as we speak. the fire fighters are preparing as best they can.

This isn’t just about people losing their homes; people have died and will die, countless animals have already lost their lives and many more will still perish. our land, our lives, and our hope is up in flames and will soon be nothing but ash. the annual fire season has not even begun yet. this is only the beginning. my native land is burning, and there is nothing i can do to stop it.

the government refuses to acknowledge that we are in a climate crisis. the fires have never been this bad. we have been in severe drought for more than a year which has only contributed to the force of these fires. the Prime Minister Scott Morrison has done nothing but send his “thoughts and prayers”. He will not accept aid from other countries because he is too egotistical to admit that we need it. All the while the people of this land are suffering. Climate change needs radical human change to be combated. we are already seeing the results of years of indifference, and this is barely the beginning of something that will only get worse the longer government’s and big companies refuse to act to counteract climate change.

Our government has also cut funding to Fire and Rescue NSW by 35.4%, the Rural Fire Service by 75.2%, and QLD Rural Fire Service by 26.42%, resulting in closures of services; they don’t have the resources to cope. We are fighting a losing battle against the results of climate change.  and this is only the beginning.

12/11/19 UPDATE

At least 6 million people today are prepared for evacuating. There are strong winds, low humidity, and high temperatures which will only exacerbate and encourage the fires. Authorities have warned that there aren’t enough fire trucks to help everyone, so unless you are prepared to the maximum, you need to leave. 600 schools and TAFE’s across NSW have been closed due to the fires, with others in Queensland closing due to air quality being virtually unbreathable due to smoke. Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers said the state was as prepared as it could be, with military aircraft on standby to rescue people from fires if needed. Smoke from these fires have reached as far as New Zealand and New Caledonia.

As Queensland and New South Wales deal with these unprecedented bushfires, there is a lot of talk about how to stop, or at least reduce them. David Bowman is a professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania and he says the short answer is that climate change is making a bad situation worse.

But it’s also much more complex than that. Much of Australia’s natural biodiversity has evolved to withstand and even stop bushfires due to a multitude of species being in one area. Eucalyptus trees encourage fires as they help spread seeds, but other species are naturally flame retardant and help to curb the fires. The issue is that so much of the native bush has been cut down for farming and agriculture that the natural fire defence has virtually been destroyed. Australia is the leading country in mammal extinction, as well as one of the worst 7 for biodiversity loss.

There have already been significant harmful impacts to wildlife, with entire ecosystems up in smoke and individual species affected, including around 350 Koalas presumed dead – all before the fires have reached their peak.

my heart goes out to the victims of the current fires, which we know have been exacerbated by the decline of native biodiversity. Australian conservation efforts need a radical overhaul. Mitigating the intensity of these fires, mostly set by humans and their activities, can be achieved by restoring our native ecosystem engineers, such as bandicoots, bettongs and potoroos.

These species help to maintain healthy forests by continually turning over and breaking down forest leaf litter, thereby drastically reducing fuel load. In their absence, fires are more intense, often reaching the treetops, which can affect populations of species already on the brink, like the Koala.

Slow growing and ancient Australian East coast temperate forests are of global significance, as these forests have some of the highest carbon storage on the planet. Fires of this intensity threaten their very existence but managing wildlife to reduce fire intensity and protect forests is under-appreciated for its importance in reducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

If you wish to donate to the NSW Rural Fire Service, follow this link. I’m not sure if it works for countries outside Australia, but if you can spare some money, please try

http://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/volunteer/support-your-local-brigade

Or you can donate to the Red Cross who have set up many shelters and are providing first aid, and are trying to fund small kits to provide families with basic necessities

Like, her beliefs are not actually an unusual amount of wrong given her surroundings. She’s almost certainly a sincere person who really wants to do the right thing.

But now her face is everywhere and associated in large part with false or otherwise unreasonable assertions. This, despite the fact that she seems to be trying really hard to not say stuff she’s not very confident in.

It’s not clear whether she has a good path to backing down from public life if she wants to. It’s really not clear whether she has a good path to realizing she’s wrong. It would probably be hard for her to communicate “Hey, I was wrong about what actions should be taken to address climate change and how bad you should feel about it, but I still think we shouldn’t burn coal and stuff” without a lot of people responding very badly.

Stuff like

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

and

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 ½ years.

and

risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Gaggle is one of a handful of creepy companies that sell surveillance software to school districts, which monitor every keystroke and click on school networks – they’re the latest evolution in spy-on-kids tech, which started off by promising that they’d stop kids from seeing porn, then promised they could end bullying, and now advertise themselves as a solution for school shootings, under the banner of being a “Safety Management Platform.”

Gaggle has plenty of competition from the likes of Securely and Goguardian. The whole sector has undergone a massive buzzword-compliance overhaul and added “AI” to their products, using algorithms to decide which student keystrokes are worthy of being flagged as suspicious.

But Gaggle appears to be unique in promising to help school board detect unrest among teachers so that the wave of teachers’ strikes can be headed off by management. In a deleted blog post, Gaggle wrote, “Think about the recent teacher work stoppage in West Virginia. Could the story have been different if school leaders there requested search results for ‘health insurance’ or ‘strike’ months earlier? Occasional searches for ‘salary’ or ‘layoffs’ could stave off staff concerns that lead to adverse press for your school district.”

It’s a great example of the shitty technology adoption curve: first we use creepy technology against people who don’t get to complain, like schoolkids, then, once it’s normalized, we work our way up the privilege gradient, inflicting it on teachers, then everyone.

If you’re anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people don’t think you’re one of “those” random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you “work in content,” and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you can’t even hate them for the ways in which they’re different to you, because there aren’t any. But fear not! There’s one thing you’ve got that nobody else does: you know that you’re definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.

But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like “Dove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.” But also don’t imagine, because that’s exactly what’s happening.

This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Let’s look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)

Mr A isn’t actually in your group DM, and you’ve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally can’t stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and he’s already a Nazi. He doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his mother’s basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesn’t get laid, but in a different way to the way you don’t get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A won’t shut up about the superiority of a “free silver” bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the “gold shills” in a way that doesn’t really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesn’t really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, he’s talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and he’s at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone you’ve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.

Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like “so how is everyone’s day today” with a smiley emoji, and when you’re talking to him you get this airless feeling like you’re about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party you’re afraid that he’s going to blurt out that he loves you, but you can’t keep your distance too much because he’s so clearly autistic, and you don’t want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didn’t understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly he’s a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and it’s ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, he’d definitely do it.

Ms C is one of those women who doesn’t like other women, and you know this about her because you can’t fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff that’s really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. You’ve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesn’t need to consider the harm this does to others, just because she’s “funny” and “an artist.” She’s the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and she’d throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. She’d definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and you’re thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once you’re certain she’s a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.

Ms D’s boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you can’t stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says she’s a socialist but doesn’t devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means she’s just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), she’d be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You can’t imagine yourself actually hitting her but it’d definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?

Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RT’s and now he’s moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writers’ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasn’t even been greenlit yet, but you’re already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once he’s back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you won’t say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way he’ll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.

Mr F probably thinks he’s better than you. He’s a union organizer. So are you (you added “#Unionize” to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who aren’t in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with “the real workers,” who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because you’re not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it you’re certain he doesn’t acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. He’s trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and that’s what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.