natalie - נוגה

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

But then she starts discussing parental leave and is like "In the US you might be lucky to get two weeks off for maternity leave and the other partner might get just a couple of days, whereas in Sweden they get a really long time, it's like a month or two months, a really long time."

In Sweden, each parent is entitled to 90 days of parental leave after a birth or adoption, and together they are entitled to 480 days of parental leave.

I cannot explain enough to any of you who might not be aware of this: Two Months Is Not A Long Time For Parental Leave That Is Like The Bare Fucking Minimum Globally The US Is Just Fucked And We Have No Guaranteed Leave Let Alone PAID Parental Leave.

Federal employees in the US have a guaranteed three months of paid parental leave, and three months is pretty standard for businesses that have good perks and benefits, and if you work in a business covered by FMLA you can use three months of unpaid leave for parental leave and you're not supposed to get fired over it, but if you work at a small (under 25 employees) company or if you're part time yeah you can basically lose your job if you take time off to have a baby.

I'll also point out that the "family values" party in this country opposes parental leave largely because they think that mothers of young children shouldn't work at all and they think that men shouldn't take parental leave because they should be providers. This does not, to me, indicate an actual appreciation of "family" as a concept so much as it signals that they have only one definition of family and would very much like it if other types of families ceased to exist.

But anyway, jesus fucking christ two weeks is not enough time to recover from birthing a human or to bond with that tiny human and two months is not a "long" time for parental leave.

health insurance

This is the issue with taking a totally individualist perspective on the pandemic that blames conspiratorial individuals for not taking the right health measures. It completely ignores the whole role of the state which has deliberately prevented any kind of strict measures that would’ve saved lives because it would disrupt business too much and would empower workers and poor through aid. By placing all the focus and blame on anti-vaxxers we miss that we wouldn’t be in this position if the United States government cared more about global public health than its ability to profit while people en mass die. The anti-vaxxers play a role but it would’ve been a far more minor one if we didn’t have exclusionary patent laws that are allowing the virus to mutate in the regions of the world with the least access to vaccines (despite wanting them!) and if the state was unafraid of angering business by putting into place robust stay at home policies where we pay and deliver food to people to keep them at home.