Tie Tens

@blackjinhwan replied to your post “note: spoilers”

i completely disagree with your “people coming back made no sense” take. idk if youve been dirt poor before but these people are desperate. some spent their lives in fear of loan sharks heckling them for money or getting beat up by gang members. when youre going through that everyday and your life is miserable, your life isnt much better than a deadly game. and idk how you think ali could afford to leave the country if he couldnt even get a bus ride home?

Thanks for your thoughts!

I agree the people depicted in the show are desperate; my argument is that the game is not the best way to handle that desperate situation, and I think the show actually makes this point.

When I said Ali could leave the country, I didn’t mean he could’ve done so easily, or simply, or that it wouldn’t have been a struggle. But I think leaving directly, or getting himself to the nearest authority, were both better options than being dead in the game.

I conceded above that I don’t have a thorough understanding of the criminal world. But in the show they depicted the character who embodied having gang issues (or loan shark issues, or issues with the law in general) as being savvy enough to get cash from his underworld friends and escape a beating when it was EIGHT VERSUS ONE and then they say this person chooses not to turn himself in to the police or go to another city/town/country but chooses to play the game. This choice. Is what I found odd. Particularly… not that he would choose the game the first time (he knew nothing about it then) but that he would go back the second time.

Because. The game is deceitful. It is not a fair game. It is designed to kill as many as possible randomly, unfairly, and the players KNOW this. So I didn’t understand why they’d come back.

In the first episode, when they all play red light green light, there is some time that passes between when the first person is killed and when the group gets over the shock and starts to really play the game again. During this time, a lot of players turned and ran for the door. Every. One. of the people whose bodies piled up at the exit door made a calculation in their head: Is my life out there better? (Even though I’m desperate? And poor? And in debt?) Or is my life in here better, playing this game?

And the fact that they were at the door when they died means they chose outside. The show is saying that when presented with the actual choice of life in misery vs. death, people choose life in misery. (And imo, it’s not even that they choose misery. It’s that they realized that there are better ways to get out of misery and get some cash than playing this rigged game).

Then there’s the conversation they have after the first game. 255 people dead. The guards come in, and the remaining players literally PLEAD FOR THEIR LIVES.

These are actual quotes from the second episode, after everyone finishes red light green light:

“We may be in debt. But that doesn’t mean we deserve to die.”

“Sir, please spare my life. I will find a way to pay off the debts.” (emphasis mine, in support of my earlier point: there are better ways to earn cash than this game).

“A chance? You kill us while playing a child’s game. You call that a chance?” (emphasis mine, more on this later)

“You killed all those people. Yet you call this a game?”

“I don’t need that stupid prize money. Please just let me out.” (emphasis mine, in support of the point: life in misery is better than life in the game.)

“Please spare my life.”

“Please let me go home.”

“I want to stop here.”

These people thought about it, and they came to the conclusion that they wanted out. And the show expects us to accept that they just… forgot???? All of the horrors of the first game? All the words they said after? How they pleaded for their lives? And instead they chose to come back?

Now…. I agree, they did take a vote. And some people did decide to go on with the game. But I argue that those people either fall into the two categories I mentioned earlier (really really sick or so emotional they’re not thinking straight) or they were not… appropriately assessing just. how. rigged and pointless the game is.

Firstly. Players are recruited through false advertising. The guy in the subway (essentially) says “I’ll slap you if you lose, I’ll give you money if you win.” A lot of people would play that game, it only (relatively speaking) has an upside! In the real game, you DIE if you lose, and get the CHANCE to DIE AGAIN in another game if you win. But subway guy doesn’t tell them this. It doesn’t make sense to me that a player then agrees to come back knowing the game runners are deceitful. (How do you even know they’ll give you the cash at the end if they lied about the rules?! It’s a lie by omission. But a lie nonetheless.)

Second. The game is not. Fair. The players, after red light green light, see the disparity between how the game gives you its rules (you’ll be eliminated) and how the game plays out in reality (you will be killed). So it makes no sense for me that they come back KNOWING the game is RIGGED against them. For example: the sugar game is not a fair game- disproportionately, if you choose the umbrella, you die. The tug of war game is not fair if you are physically smaller; even with the old man’s strategy, Gi-Hun and the team almost lost. The lights out game ISN’T EVEN A GAME, it’s just Murder Time In the Dark! The marble game is closer to fair but the old man blows that one by not dying when it’s his turn, and finally, the ‘walk across glass’ game is BANANAS unfair- obviously those in the back win more often, and the moment one of the players looks like he’s getting the hang of it, the Leader goes out of his way to get rid of the player’s advantage by turning down the lights (so he can’t tell the tempered glass apart).

This is the crux of it: it’s NOT A GAME! the players are in a death squad type execution field where instead of guns they have silly rules and fake teams that are designed to make players feel like they have a shot when THEY DON’T. It is not IF you die, it’s WHEN AND IN WHAT ORDER. Which brings me back to the earlier quote:

“A chance? You kill us while playing a child’s game. You call that a chance?”

It’s not a chance. Not a real one. It’s just death. And my argument is that people realize this after the first game (that quote comes from episode TWO) and yet they come back? I repeat the math from the other post: 1 in 2 is chance. 1 in 456 is zero. I don’t have any idea why they took those odds.

The first time, it’s fine because they didn’t know. The second time, it’s as if someone came up to them and said “okay. let’s play a game. I’m going to give you 20 million bucks if you can win this arm wrestling contest with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was 20 years old, right after he won Mr. Universe and was basically the strongest man on earth. Except you also have to do it while only standing on your left foot. Oh, and if you lose, you die.” And they took the bet.

Lastly, I think the show makes my point.

Gi-Hun, the winner, comes home to a dead mom (who he could’ve saved if he just accepted the cash the ex-wife’s-husband gave him). And he is so beside himself with grief and shame of what he did in the game and what it cost and who he lost that he can’t even spend the money.

The MONEY, the reason he played the game in the first place! is now useless. Because he can’t spend it.

So what was the point of coming back? What was the point in playing the game?

We know Gi-Hun has learned his lesson because he rips the card out of the hand of the new player being recruited in the subway. He doesn’t ask the new player, “Are you ill? Is a gang after you? Is your mom in North Korea? Are you in the country with all documentation handled? How big is the debt?” Nothing. He just takes the card. and goes, “No! Never!” when he’s asked to give it back because now he understands.

The old man created a situation where no one wins (except the VIPs), not even the winner.

TLDR; squid game is not a game. it is an execution system designed to leave one (1) person alive* and I didn’t understand why anyone would come back to the game and take a bet on being that one, especially after they know the game runners are dishonest, the game is rigged against them, and there are other ways to tackle poverty outside the game.

That. That is literally the point. The game is rigged, everyone knows they’re being played and used as a toy, everyone knows it’s not actually “fair”. But people are desperate enough to come back: that’s the whole point. These people haven’t been in poverty for a month, you think they didn’t try everything in their power to pay their debts? You think Ali didn’t try to leave the country after his surgery? People came back because they saw no way out and they were sick of being poor and living every second of their lives thinking about surviving for one more day to pay their debts. As Miyeon said-the inside and outside are no different, they’re both hell. People coming back and actively putting their lives on the line is The Point: the World has put them in such a position that they’ll do anything to pay their debts off. 

Thanks for your thoughts!

I… think we’re seeing two sides of the same coin here, two different conclusions from the same… coin. I think it is not believable to say that people in desperate situations choose almost certain death (knowing the game is 1/456) over possible death (life outside the game), regardless of the cash prize (in part because if they win, they are possibly too traumatized to spend it, and if they lose, they’re dead anyway, what does money matter?). I think your conclusion is that people in desperate situations would choose almost certain death (knowing the game is 1/456) over possible death (life outside the game) given enough financial incentive to try to overcome the odds.

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree :) If you haven’t already, see also this post where I elaborate, in the second main point, on why each of the (main characters at least) would have been better off not playing the game, despite their desperation.

To address your points above:

“You think they didn’t try everything in their power to repay their debts?” I point again to the quotes from episode two: “Sir, please spare my life. I will find a way to pay off the debts.” and “I don’t need that stupid prize money. Please just let me out.” The game is not the most logical way to pay off debts.

“You think Ali didn’t try to leave the country after his surgery?” Generally speaking, I would say that for Ali and his family, for a long time, staying in South Korea was the option they found more appealing than leaving South Korea. I say this because staying was what he/his family did despite all the perils of non-documented status (like being underpaid, being assaulted and not being able to go to the hospital for fear of being arrested, etc). But my point is. That when Ali’s choices were between staying (perilous), leaving (difficult), or playing this game (deadly), I don’t get why he chose the game.

“As Miyeon said-the inside and outside are no different, they’re both hell.” I understand that the dialogue suggests that life inside and outside the game are no different. They even dedicated an entire episode to trying to argue that life outside the game is truly awful and enough to make people play the game. My argument, for all the reasons stated, is that the two ARE DIFFERENT. The key difference is death. And that this difference makes no amount of money, despite truly awful life circumstances, worth the risk.

“People came back because they saw no way out and they were sick of being poor and living every second of their lives thinking about surviving for one more day to pay their debts.” There is a hypothetical scenario where the game doesn’t exist. Maybe the old man learned to be a normal rich person so the games were never invented, or the subway recruiter guy took a day off so no players were invited, idk. In this scenario, where nobody recruits them for the squid game, would Gi-Hun’s mom be dead? Would Sae-Byeok be dead? (Yes, her mom would be still be in North Korea, but isn’t she there anyway and Sae-Byeok dead by the end of squid game?) Would Ali be dead? (Yes he’d probably be in police custody. But dead?) Would Sang-woo be dead? (Yes he’d be in prison. But dead?) Would the gang guy be dead? (Yes, he’d be on the run. But dead?) Would the girl who gave up her life for Sae-Byeok be dead? (She’d conceivably be in bad shape. But dead?)

Tldr; If you agree that the players would not be dead inside of a week, or however long it takes to play all six games, then I think you can see where I’m coming from about why playing the game, why coming back, is meaningless. Playing the game is signing up for no money AND no life inside of a week. Not playing the game is signing up for (little to) no money and a difficult life, but a life nonetheless, and a chance to change the difficulty over time.

@themoonofblueside​ replied to your post “note: spoilers”

I think you're looking at Sangwoo's position a little too um.positive? Yes if he was a character attached to living your point would be true but it's already established that he's extremely suicidal. And he has a pride. It's not him being jailed, it's his mom practically losing her job and home. So since sangwoo is suicidal here's his thought process: I can die right now, in this bathtub. Or i'll get in the game again, either die while playing or win. There's also the whole point with people not actively believing they'll die(esp. in deoksu's case). Deoksu fully went in the game thinking he'll live. And about gihun: his ex-wife's didn't give him the money. He offered the money in exchange of gihun never seeing his daughter again. Gihun did not accept the money. While entering the games, he thought if he won, he could support his mom and daughter and if he lost, her mom would have enough money to get treatment(let's not forget the condolences money)

Thanks for your thoughts!

I agree that Sang-woo is. Well, he’s the Mysterious One TM in the show, whose motives are... interesting... And I agree, at the start of the show, he’s in a depressive state, very much coded to be at the end of his rope (the bathtub scene). However, I place Sang-woo in the category of people who seemed smart enough to not play the game because of his agency, which I alluded to a bit in the earlier post.

Essentially, to your earlier point regarding agency (does the circumstance of their world and poverty etc compel them to make this choice or do they still have free will), I said we’ll have to agree to disagree because I can’t... /prove/ or demonstrate necessarily that (a lack of) agency swings a person in a certain direction... but I still think Sang-woo had enough agency that he wouldn’t have played the Squid Game.

The first reason is the amount of money he stole. Please scroll to the bottom of this post for a more thorough breakdown, but the crux of it is he stole ~$550,000 US dollars. And according to google, people who stole much more, $180 BILLION USD, got 25 years in jail. Sang-woo is 46 in the show. He’d’ve gotten out at 71 if he got all 25 years (which is /way/ too much for what he stole). A closer comparison might be this guy Nick Leeson, a rogue trader who used futures and options (same as Sang-woo) to rack up a $1.4 BILLION USD loss and bankrupted an entire bank. He got 6 and a half years, served 4 years 4 months and then was out for good behavior. My question to Sang-woo is: why does a deadly game make more sense than four and a half, maybe 6 years in prison?

You mention his mother, which definitely is seen to be a motivation for him. But. I don’t agree that the desire to do right by his mom is enough to drive him to play this game. Firstly, it seems like he shouldn’t have been able to put up other people’s stuff as collateral without their consent in the first place. But if he had her consent, if his mom volunteered her stuff, it could be repossessed and sold to cover the debts, definitely, but only up to a certain point, usually bankruptcy (and even then, some of her property would be protected). Somebody who knows the law about it should prolly weigh in, but I’d think if the bank is really interested in recouping losses, wouldn’t they put a lien on the mom’s assets? This would let her keep (use of) her property, keep the stand open but make her turn over a percentage of profits until the debt is paid off (Like a mortgage). She wouldn’t lose everything.

But let’s pretend the mom did lose everything. No bankruptcy, no lien. Everything is just gone and she’s homeless. She still strikes me as the kind of person who would want her son alive anyway. Yes, the current situation is bad. But six years down the line, when her son is out of jail, she can open another stand. If he chooses to play the game, she can’t get another Sang-woo. I think if he wanted to do right by his mom, he would take the consequences of his actions and go to jail, not die in the game.

Also. um. In the middle of him being in the bathtub. The doorbell rings. And Sang-woo got up. This is agency to me. (That is, he could’ve decided to stay in the tub and die, but he didn’t. He chose to get up.) Is he seeking to /die/? Or is he seeking a way out of debt? It’s hard. But something about his actions, and the way he is calculating about letting Gi-Hun choose the umbrella option and the way he manipulates Ali... just put him in a different category, and I don’t think he had a reason to play the game. But I agree he was in a bad space.

It’s... possible... Deok-su may not have expected to die, but. It doesn’t make it a reasonable expectation. People died left and right in the game, and strong people at that. I think I would say he didn’t have a good reason to come back, and he wasn’t thinking through the repercussions... By episode 6, Gganbu, we see Deok-su shaking, trembling as he loses during the marble game. So he knows the fear of death. And he makes the same face of fear when Han Mi-Nyeo grabs him, even pleading, “Don’t do this. I’ll go first, okay? Please let go of me. Let go.” It’s the same plea of everyone who tried to leave red light green light - when it’s their turn, they all realize that there’s no point in playing the game.

I agree that the Ex Wife’s Husband gave Gi-Hun the money with strings attached. But firstly, imagine being Gi-Hun’s mom; would she be happy to get a surgery? And then go and beg for the permission to see the girl again? Or would she prefer to die for her son’s pride? Would the ex-wife allow her new husband to keep the weird arrangement even if he made it? Would she want her daughter to grow up without ever seeing her dad again? If Gi-Hun agreed to leave the daughter alone, took the money, saved his mom, and then went to the police to demand to see his daughter, what would the ex wife’s husband do about it? There was no contract, no signed agreement: that was free money. Gi-Hun should’ve taken the win and taken the cash, saved his mom’s life, and figured out the details on visitation with the daughter later. It’s like. Really wrong that he didn’t imo. That’s a /life/ he played with. We also know that at the end of the film he’s on his way to see his daughter. So. Whatever the ex-wife’s husband wanted by keeping Gi-Hun away, he didn’t get it.

As for saving his mom by dying in the game, i’m pretty sure they only send condolences money if everyone agrees to quit the game and no one takes the prize money. if a player wins, no condolences money is sent, the winner (Gi-Hun) gets everything.

Yesterday a friend and I talked about how the entire (AAA) game industrie looked at BG3 being as popular as it is and going: "Oh, we need to produce 100+ hour games, I guess! Those sell!" Which... obviously is not why it is popular. The game is not popular because it has 100+ hours of gameplay, but because it has engaging characters, that are well-acted and that work as good hooks for the players. Like, let's face it: The reason why I so far have sunken 160 hours into this game is, because I wanna spend time with these characters - and because I wanna give them their happy endings.

But the same has happened too, just a bit earlier this year, right? When Barbie broke the 1 billion and every Hollywood CEO went: "Oh, so the people want movies based on toy franchises! Got it!" To which the internet at large replied: "... How is that the lesson you learned from this?"

Well, let me explain to you, why this is the lesson they learn: It is because the CEOs and the boards of directors at large are not artists or even engaged with the medium they produce. They mostly are economists. And their dry little hearts do not understand stuff more complex than numbers and spread sheets.

That sounds evil, I know, but... It is sadly the truth. When they look at a successful movie/series/game/book/comic, they look at it as a product, not a piece of art or narrative. It is just a product that has very clear metrics.

To them Barbie is not a movie with interesting stylistic choices that stand out from the majority of high budget action blockbusters. It is a toy movie with mildly feminist themes.

Or Oppenheimer is not a movie to them with a strong visual language and good acting direction. No, it is a historical blockbuster.

And this is true for basically every form of media. I mean, books are actually a fairly good example. In my life I do remember the big book fads that happened. When Harry Potter was a success, there was at least a dozen other "magical school" book series being released. When Twilight was a big success there was suddenly an endless number of "teen girl falls in love with bad boy, who is [magical creature]" YA. When the Hunger Games was a success, there were hundreds of "YA dystopia" books. Meanwhile in adult reading, we had the big "next Game of Throne" fad.

Of course, the irony is, that within each of those fads there might have been one or two somewhat successful series - but never even one that came even close to whatever started the fad.

Or with movies, we have seen it, too. When Avengers broke the 1 billion (which up to this point only few movies did) the studios went: "Ooooooh, so we need shared universe film series" - and then all went to try and fail to create their own cinematic universe.

Because the people, who call the shots, are just immensely desinterested in the thing they are selling. They do not really care about the content. All they care about is having a supposedly easy avenue of selling it. Just as they do not care about the consumer. All they care about is that the consumer buys it. Why he buys it... Well, they do not care. They could not care less, in fact.

So, yeah, get ready for a 20 overproduced games with a bloated 100+ hours of empty gameplay, but without the engaging characters. And for like at least 15 more moves based on some toy franchise, that nobody actually cares about.

And then get ready for all the CEOs to do the surprised Pikachu face, when all of that ends up not financially successful.

Really, I read some interviews yesterday from some AAA-studio CEOs and their blatant shock and missing understanding on why BG3 works for so many people.

I think not appreciating successful works as art can contribute to 'learning strange lessons' from success if you will, but even if the studios appreciated the works as bespoke and unique art, i think they'd still fall into the trap of strange lessons because they don't want to take the financial risk that making an original work might fail.

You see this everywhere, even with really artistic or creative (traditionally anti-spreadsheet) people - instagram accounts are all the time told to "niche down". In other words, get a style and copy stick to it. Twitch streamers, even nice ones, react because filling HOURS of airtime with original thought would be almost impossible to do daily/every other day. Youtubers will milk the shit out of a successful series/type of video before trying anything new (I made 500 of... i spent 5000 hours in... i gave away 500,000 of...) because copying success and tweaking it slightly is a whoooole lot less work than developing another original hit.

otherwise reasonable people are following this guidance and it’s really upsetting to see. people close to me have gone to coffee with their friends or voluntarily back to work while actively covid-positive because they diligently looked up the cdc guidance and that’s what it said.

“People with COVID-19 should isolate for 5 days and if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving (without fever for 24 hours), follow that by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others to minimize the risk of infecting people they encounter. The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.”

The CDC is NOT saying people can go back to normal after 5 days. They are saying they can end quarantine if, and only if, they meet a specific set of criteria. They’re saying that IF people are asymptomatic or haven’t had a fever for 24 hours, very much IF, then they can return to work as long as they wear a mask for 5 more days.

This is based on the science that has shown that symptomatic infections will have patients shedding virus at dangerous levels when those symptoms are at their peak. Once symptoms have lessened significantly, wearing a mask should be effective protection from transmitting the virus, because the amount of virus shed is now low enough that a mask should be enough to prevent it being a danger to most others.

This is basically the CDC trying to limit transmission as best they can in a country where sick leave and sick pay are in such abysmal shape that people can’t afford to take a week and a half off to stay home. The CDC has no control over labor laws and their enforcement.

This is absolutely not the CDC not giving a shit about people, and frankly this post has done more damage in spreading the misinformation that the only requirement for covid patients is 5-day isolation, and completely leaving out the SUPER IMPORTANT part where people still have to wear a mask for 5 days if they resume going out in public. Not to mention that even that is contingent on symptoms diminishing and their no longer having a fever, so it’s not like there’s some blanket rule that after 5 days you can do what you want.

I completely get the anger and frustration, especially as someone who falls into the vulnerable category and has been struggling with long covid for two years in a country where we’ve had zero covid rules or support for many months now. But please please please I am begging y'all to look at sources and read through them because this info is literally in the first paragraph of the CDC page as linked in the reblog above.

By choosing to rage-post about the actual information that you skimmed at best, if you read it from the source at all, you’re contributing to spreading misinformation. And that makes going outside all the more dangerous for people like me, who are more protected by the actual CDC guidance than by your well-intended activism.

Just saw this, wanted to respond.

In case you haven't seen it, linking my in-depth analysis of the CDC decision here for context. This analysis was written before the reblog above (this is only noted to demonstrate that contrary to the above claim, research had been amply conducted prior to posting), and I have put together a response below.

But first, some context to the timing of the reply. In all honesty I considered not replying, because I just saw this and it's been a while since the reblog was posted, but I feel that the claim of misinformation made is quite important to address, if only for casual readers who might think it's true.

So in summary, a reply:

The CDC maintains that they came to a science-based decision of how best to approach the issue of quarantine. That's not what the post challenges, though some do debate it. The point of the post is that they chose to do so in the middle of an outbreak of a novel, though less severe, version of the covid virus (omicron) just after they were notified by a corporation that said the outbreak plus restrictions on working were responsible for a reduction in available staff.

This is TRUE - that happened.

There is no misinformation there, and the point of the post is that people might want to think strongly about why that occurred. Why the CDC, despite being a public health institution, was taking into account economic data at all, let alone staffing shortages. It says WAS taking, and not APPEARED to be taking, due to a direct quote from NBC (top) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (bottom):

NBC: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, told NBC Nightly News that the new guidance takes into account both public health data and worker shortages."

Dr. Fauci: "On balance, if you look at the safety of the public and the need to not have society be disrupted, this was a good choice."

That's the CDC. No misinformation, just their words.

To your point about 5 days of quarantine and 5 days of masking (which I addressed in great detail in my linked analysis post), I summarize my view as follows, first addressing directly the assertion regarding misinformation:

"This post has done more damage in spreading the misinformation that the only requirement for covid patients is 5-day isolation". The post never said this. What was said was that the CDC shortened the number of quarantine days [from 10] to 5.

This is TRUE.

The CDC has always been in support of masking when in indoor spaces where you could be in close contact to other people while Covid is around (with some asterisks about vaccinated families at Christmas dinner), sick or not, vaccinated or not. Masking is absolutely a requirement in the updated guidelines, but the major shift in the guidance was to shorten the quarantine - that is, the difference between the guidance before and after the update was that from days 6-10, now you can work.

To be clear: the guidance was not about testing negative for Covid (that is, being Covid-free). It was about the ability to work while having Covid, using "symptom-free" as a proxy for "not infectious" (even though they are not the same). It was about the ability to work while sick.

To quote Dr. Fauci again:

"[people should]... wear a mask for the rest of the time [sic, 5 days], so you can keep people safe from getting infected from you if you still are infected (emphasis mine), but at the same time, getting you back to what might be an essential function in society."

Call me crazy but I think people should be able to stay home the entire time they are sick with anything, and Covid in particular, not just the first half.

Further, and pardon the reliance on anecdotes here, if you've ever been sick, you know that just because you're not sniffling anymore or your fever has broken doesn't mean you feel well enough to work. Nevertheless, with the CDC guidance, employers now had the means to require workers to return to in-person operation before they felt safe to do so. In addition, no negative test was required to return - you could be covid positive, symptom free, AND (by their own admission) INFECTIOUS and back to work as long as you were masked, pushing the onus for public safety onto people's good will to mask up effectively (tight mask, nose and mouth covered, etc) - in a political climate where anti-mask sentiment was not only present but high.

You only have to go through the replies and tags on this post to see that the foreseeable, obvious result of the guidance - regardless of the intent, science, or wording - is what occurred: people were forced to go back to work sick. Period.

The posts are not about hypotheticals - they are discussing LIVED experiences of that time when the CDC gave corporations - intentionally or not - the ammunition to coerce their employees at a time when we needed the government to stand firm in doing the exact opposite.

The reason we need to think about this is not because anyone is trying to sow distrust in the CDC; rather it is to hold them accountable, to give scrutiny to their actions, or, in the absence of that, inform anyone who is interested about the CDC's (in this case economic) influences (biases?) so they can make fully informed decisions for themselves.

What would've happened if society took a second to learn lessons from Covid and how many people can be taken out by illness at once? What if we tried to facilitate remote work or improve distance learning or lighten the load on emergency systems in times of need? We don't know- because we've been shown that ostensibly, corporate interests can muddy the waters of decision making and force people to operate so that we never have to find out.

THAT's what the post was about. Hope it's clearer now.

The thing is, by the strict definition, most people ate disabled, if by that we mean "have a disability, as formally defined." Like, you can pretty much assume everyone over 60 and most people over 50 are disabled; everyone who needs glasses or contact lenses is disabled. I would expect it's a significant majority of the population, though I have very much not done the math.

But of course, most of these people don't consider themselves disabled, and wouldn't be considered "really" disabled by others, and crucially, in many cases they're better off being considered "not really disabled." It's not that they have a false consciousness so much as that "disability" is such an expansive category, so varied in both its severity and character, that it doesn't really lend itself to solidarity. Disabled people mostly have one specific problem or a set of closely related ones, and not only do they rarely benefit from help provided to others, but because it's impossible to give everyone adequate accommodations, and people can even have conflicting needs, accommodations to one disability group can be threatening to another. You can get deaf people, paraplegics, and autistic people into a coalition together, but it won't last very long, especially not if it wins enough to start thinking about how to divide the spoils. Sucks for people who are deaf, paraplegic, and autistic, because they sure do exist, and within disability culture they have the same kind of complex status that "intersectionality" was coined to describe.

Yes, almost everyone who gets old is eventually disabled. It would benefit these people, and the rest of us, if this were recognised, because people would be less able to pretend disabled people are a small minority who don’t matter and thus it’s fine if we don’t make provisions for them to access [name a thing].

Like, I think that insofar as we can define "disability", it has to be one or both of the followig:

A physical or medical issue or trait that makes it more difficult to participate in society on equal footing

A social stigma or deep disregard attending to people in this situation

And, like, people with glasses do in fact hit both those points? Like the only reasonable standard I can see for excluding them is that they don't have "enough", that it's a difference of degree rather than kind and they fall below some bar that's serious enough to matter, and my point is that this is the distinction people are generally making subonsciously, but it's rarely made overtly, because it can't be done in a principled way; there's no natural cutoff and many competing interests. But, like, on the social-model front, I will draw your attention to the fact that contact lenses are preferred to glasses despite being more dangerous and less convenient, mainly because they allow people to disguise their use of an assistive device.

I want to specifically talk about this point, because it's very much the kind of thing I mean to critique above:

people would be less able to pretend disabled people are a small minority who don’t matter and thus it’s fine if we don’t make provisions for them to access

All disabled people share the quality of having to navigate a world that is not designed with our bodies and/or minds and/or abilities in mind, to a degree that significantly affects our ability to participate in the world as we have it. 

I’ve seen some folks draw a distinction between disability - the systematic structuring of the built and social environment in ways that cater to a very narrow range of body types, neurotypes, and ability levels - and impairment, which I understand to be the specific thing that one does not do according to cultural expectations, that may or may not lead to being disabled.  It’s possible to have impairments that are not disabling.  It’s also possible to have impairments, such as chronic fatigue or chronic pain, that are disabling but cannot be accommodated by changes to the built and social environment to the degree that a person can participate fully.  And I might be going out on a limb here, but I think it’s possible to be disabled without any impairments, i.e. the barriers to your full participation are very there, but not based on a failure to accommodate your body form or neurotype.  I’ve found poverty more disabling than my circadian rhythm disorder. 

It’s true that what each person needs to be able to participate fully varies, and that sometimes people will need conflicting things.  It’s also true that no one disabled person will be able to speak for all disabled people.  But one of the benefits of sharing a disabled identity and forming a community is that we can work from our individual experiences to general principles.  Some of these, as I understand it, are as follows:

1) Disability is an axis of oppression like other axes of oppression.  Ableism is a systemic problem that isn’t going to be solved quickly or easily, or independently of other forms of oppression for that matter.  As far as wrapping your head about the variety under the disability umbrella, it’s helpful to think of it this way: the problem isn’t that people have so many different bodily and neural configurations, any more than the problem is that people have different sexualities, different genders, or different ethnicities.  The problem, in all cases, is the narrowness of the range that a person can inhabit without penalty.

2) “Nothing about us without us.”  The disability community should have input on decision-making bodies at all levels.  Ideally, this should be through direct participation by members of that community.  (I specify members of the disability community instead of disabled people, because I’ve worked on governing bodies where nearly everyone else around me is disabled to some degree but considers themselves to be the flawed exception to some sort of platonic ideal of a client.  Members of the disability community, on the other hand, I expect will at least be aware of the issues, and know what questions to ask.)  In organizations that are supposed to provide services to disabled people, representation on the board is absolutely necessary.  In other cases, failing direct representation, organizations should make a point of consulting with disabled people about policies and projects. 

3) People generally have a pretty good idea of what they need, and accommodating them is often a matter of asking them, and believing them.  If it’s impossible to give them exactly what they’re asking for, talk about it.  It’s usually possible to work out a solution together. 

4) As you said, there are all kinds of different access needs and comfort levels, including conflicting access needs; and there are disabled people who don’t conceive of themselves as part of the community; and in addition I think a lot of us have internalized ableism, different experiences and understandings, and sometimes trauma.  One person’s ableist dumpster fire can be another person’s touchstone and rallying cry.  So, like, a certain amount of grace is really helpful too, and flexibility, and willingness to hold conflicting ideas in tension, and openness to the possibilities of different understandings and interpretations.

The Disability Community coalesced into a political identity alongside the civil rights movements for racial and women's justice, during the 1960s and 70s. I was too young to take part at the start. But I'm old enough to have still felt the impact of the Way Things Were Done Before -- when each different kind of disability had its own, separate, advocacy organizations.

And I've just got to say: It was not better. We came together with all our differences, and different needs, for a reason. The ratification of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the signing into law of the Americans with Disabilities Act that followed, only happened when Disabled people came together in solidarity, rather than focusing separately on their individual access needs..

Here's the thing: As different (and yes, often conflicting) as our different needs may be, the social, bureaucratic, and economic systems that marginalize us are the same.

i still have to deal with the discomforts and inconveniences of wearing an imperfect prosthetic device to get by in the world? i still have to pay hundreds of dollars a pop to access it? if i lose it, i'm still helpless?

The social model is, like many models, a valuable simplification we can use to better understand the world! But it's also, you know, a simplification. It's actually one of those ideas that has a strong inflection from a subgroup within a broader coalition of disabled people: the social model has particularly strong support from, and I think may have originated within, the Deaf community specifically. Deaf people in particular have a very strong community culture ethos within their condition-specific community, and for historical and cultural reasons, the biggest marginalizations and struggles that Deaf people have often suffered from involve being isolated from society, denied means of communication, and treated as not worth the effort of educating. These really are very socially mediated!

What's more, the Deaf community--formed through networks of state boarding schools that created a tight knit group of people who formed found families, often after parental abandonment or at least parental disinterest in learning a language you can use--has often faced external groups saying that the community itself should be replaced with technological interventions. Instead of ASL, we should invest in better hearing aids, cochlear implants, or even signing gloves--interventions that are designed to make Deaf people less of an inconvenience to hearing people than an ASL interpreter, and often which carry big cognitive loads that hearing people don't notice or account for. Hearing aids are also even more expensive than glasses, even less likely to be covered by medical insurance, and don't work perfectly. So you get a certain frustrated defensiveness: I'm fine the way I am. The problem isn't me, it's you, and more specifically the problem is that you won't fucking listen to the solutions that actually work for me because you're too hung up on the ones that cause the least work for you. So: the social model appears.

And social models do have a lot of value when you consider what accommodations are, how to make spaces inclusive, and how to build organizations that are as accessible as possible. It takes the "blame" for access conflicts off disabled people and off their bodies and reframes the situation so that the "blame" for inaccessible situations is on the institution or society, which has more resources. It encourages us to shift our thinking. If you assume that we've fixed all the access issues for people with mild to moderate vision issues, then you might say that people who use glasses aren't disabled because society has lots of understanding and acceptance built in about glasses, people who need them, and what the strengths and weaknesses of glasses are.

But the social model doesn't work as perfectly for all disabilities. My memory is hazy, but I believe the biggest critiques of a purely social model of disability came out of the chronic pain community. Folks with chronic pain are understandably more likely to go "uh, yes I would like a cure, please and THANK YOU," and they are also much more likely to say "yeah, my body IS the problem, and I AM frustrated by the whole thing where it's constantly in pain." So you get this pushback against the social model where people with disabilities that are less socially mediated and more intrinsic say, "hang the fuck on: my body (or brain) is also throwing specific shit in my path that not everyone has to deal with, and I am absolutely fucking not going to pretend that this is entirely socially mediated."

So these days almost everyone is using a more complex biosocial model that incorporates both intrinsic and extrinsic struggles to disability. As someone with moderate myopia and fairly rough astigmatism, I have relatively few social impairments from my glasses (although the cost of the glasses and the need to take time for eye exams, plus the cost of those, certainly count), but there are other intrinsic impairments that are harder to fix, like fogging up in the cold or being reliant on a small nearly invisible set of frames to see with.

Having a variety of tools, and knowing their capabilities and limitations, lets you do more things.

Do y’all remember that time that someone discovered facial recognition cameras couldn't see through Juggalo makeup, then Facebook had a fun “see what you'd look like with Juggalo makeup” thing, and then facial recognition cameras could suddenly see through Juggalo makeup?

Do y’all remember how, on Twitter, Elon started a tirade against artists who ask for credit when their art is reposted, and he suddenly he created one of the first big art AI programs?

Do y’all remember how AI destroyed the field of translation, despite the inferiority of the machine translations, because people didn’t care about the quality of the translations? They just wanted it done for free?

Do y’all know how companies will see a lot of money going into a New Tech Thing (like, say, AI art apps) and will jump to try and implement that New Tech Thing into their tech? For example, how it felt like every big company and celebrity had an NFT to sell?

Externalities are the things outside the system that is supposedly dictating how things work but still influencing it. Economic theories, unlike theories of any scientific discipline, are not required to account for externalities.

One of the most common externalities is environmental impact and that was what set the scientist I heard off. The thing he and the economists were talking about was potential nuclear fallout from a space mission.

While not the likely outcome, there was a real potential for the mission to irradiate Earth’s atmosphere.

The scientist was arguing that the potential for the launch vehicle to explode in the higher atmosphere, which has happened - that’s not an abstract possibility, and would result in spreading the nuclear materials powering the mission through the atmosphere and over the entire planet should be accounted for in the process of risk evaluation for the mission.

The economist said that the radiation threat was just an externality. So the possibility should be ignored for risk assessment.

A risk is not a risk if it isn’t what the economist is interested in. Replace risk with factor and you have hit why calling economics the “dismal science” is only half correct. You cannot be scientific if you simply ignore the parts you don’t like.

The factors put in and left out of economic theory make it bs even where it’s correct, the same as a broken clock is not fixed in the moments that it is correct.

The biggest load of bs that economists, and non-economists trying to use economic theory to justify themselves, have been trying to foist off on humanity like it’s perfumed gold for decades in spite of ample proof to the contrary is the idea that selfish individual action results in mass beneficial action.

The most famous real life example of this is trickle down economics but understand that is simply an example. It is based on the underlying idea that if everyone does what is best for themselves it will result, miraculously, in everything evening out to be the best outcome for everybody. This is the idea championed by all of Ayn Rand’s heroes and skewered by the game Bioshock. The extremely well known effects of the Tragedy of the Commons, that any economist will be happy to explain to you like you’re an idiot, are externalities.

The idea that the best possible choice for an individual will inevitably lead to the best possible outcome for everyone is the root of the justification for deregulation as a political policy. Somehow, via the great chain, a business cutting corners to provide cheaper, less safe food so they can increase their profit margin and an underpaid consumer buying the cheapest possible product so that they CAN have a chance at making ends meet will result in everyone being better off.

Perhaps you are an American who is upset about environmental damage and the impact of eating fish. You decide not to eat fish. You remove your $5/month from the system.

Now, here’s where the path forks. If you’re personally changing your consumption habits because knowing what you know about fish has made eating fish unpleasant for you, then it is a complete sentence. That’s one of the best possible reasons to do anything, and may fortune follow your endeavour.

But let’s say you’re changing your consumption habits as part of your plan to SAVE THE WORLD. it is patently obvious that this action won’t save the world, but you feel that “if everyone did it” the world would be saved. In fact, you’re planning to go one step further than virtually anyone else, and as a result of some truly game-changing campaigning and devoting your tremendous talents to this one cause, you have successfully convinced so many people to join you in this behavioral change that you’ve removed $10,000 a month from the fish-buying system. Holy cow, that must be materially saving the world a little bit, right? How shall we quantify this impact? how many fishy lives have we saved with this? How healthy is the ocean getting?? This is pushing the needle in the right direction, right??

Well, in the case of the American fishing industry… no. The American fishing industry made $165 billion in commercial sales in 2019, which means about thirteen billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars a month, which means that it can absorb a change of -10,000 spent in grocery stores without noticing - no Congressman is going to pound his fist on the desk and say “by Jove, the People have changed their minds about fish!” when it’s about the same impact as a freezer in a supermarket breaking down - but honestly, we knew that, what about PUSHING THE NEEDLE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? HOW ELSE CAN WE COMBAT OVERFISHING APART FROM BUYING LESS FISH? It feels so goddamn obvious that it HAS to be the path forward! This is the way, guys, let’s try to make it $100,000 and THEN we’ll make a difference -

The most depressing externality here is subsidies. The American government directly subsidizes the American fishing industry to the tune of about $35 billion per year*. Of those, environmental groups estimate that over half of them are actively harmful. In addition to distorting The Economy, these “harmful” subsidies actively encourage increased fishing, support commercial enterprises to take risks, practice damaging behavior, or to simply stay in business when they’re no longer profitable.

* this takes into account a lot of factors, some seemingly innocuous, like state sales tax exemptions on fishing vessels, direct disaster aid payments to businesses, and marketing programs to support the industry and increase sales. Others are the result of quite specific lobbying, like the Fishermen’s Contingency Fund, where the American federal government pays out cash to commercial fishermen inconvenienced by oil and gas works - or the Surplus Fish Buyback programs… which purchase unwanted fish cheaply to put in school lunches. The combinations of direct/indirect payments, encouragements and programmes exist to keep American fishing exactly how it is.

This system means that whatever money you choose to withhold from this machine, the machine simply takes from you. You’re locking your $5 in your wallet to save a fishy life: the industry simply takes $5 from your taxes and kills 10 fish with it. You can’t “hurt a system in the profit” or “hit them in the wallet” or “vote with your dollar” when the machine is designed to extract your money regardless of blips, blips like “you not personally handing them your grocery money.” You’re going to change America’s minds about fish by Going Viral? Your tax dollars fund marketing programs to cancel out that impact. You’re hoping that rising fuel costs and climate-change-storms will make it less attractive to send boats out? Not in a subsidised economy, they don’t - it allows the industry to be disconnected from the market! What about if eVeRyOne did it - if we just scaled it bigger and managed to get 2% of fish-buyers to stop, or something? Well, the government already buys extra/unwanted fish for food programmes like school lunches or federal aid - you’d definitely instantly see more Mandatory Bargain Price Fish Meals being fed in schools, the military, state-owned care facilities, etc. But who knows how many heads the hydra might sprout to defend itself? If a $165billion/year industry backed by $35billion of government encouragement doesn’t want to stop, then it won’t. It is not part of the same market conditions that you are.

The point here is that it’s tempting to think of The Economy as something that notices you. It seems clear and obvious that “the solution to overfishing” would be “not eating fish.” And in a simplified market-led economic system it would probably be the case. You simply do not buy the fish, the supermarket sadly throws it away and tells the fisherman, and the fisherman counts up his dollars, checks the buzz on social media, and decides to run ecological whale-watches from his boat instead; the fishy lives are saved. But we don’t even live in a fantasy approximation of that system. Many parts of The Economy are completely artificial, and the machine is designed to resist market pressure. So the beguiling idea of “not feeding the machine” is easy to repeat! but ultimately it does not stop the behavior of the machine.

Solutions to stopping the machine do exist. It’s a human-made thing. You can break it, replace it, change its parameters, reduce its size, take away its nozzle for feeding itself by extracting cash from your back pocket, send it to China, stop it from emigrating to China, or bully it as much as you like. You can put it in a cage with a sustainable amount of food and tell it that it may make a sustainable amount of profit. You can paint it green and call it Eco. You can destroy its batteries, or install it with a solar panel, or adopt it out to a commune of low-income women. You can make the machine illegal. You can wait for another nation to kill it. You can kill it yourself. You can continue your stop-eating-fish campaign to fund ways to attack the machine. You can get many people together to put pressure on the machine. You can wait for it to run out of food.

This is not what actually happened. In reality, commons systems were sustained for centuries. Communities would regulate themselves, and moreover nonstop growth wouldn’t be feasible or desirable for your average herder—the logistics just don’t support it. The actual historical downfall of the commons came from wealthy landowners and nobles encroaching on the commons and privatizing the land so it could no longer be used communally.

And you know what the eugenicist author used this ahistorical hypothetical he created to argue for, in the main thrust of the paper? You guessed it, eugenics! The 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is about how overpopulation is just like the (fictional) commons problem, and how the only way to fix things is to let poor children starve to death. No, really, he says so explicitly. Go read it for yourself if you like.

https://www.hendrix.edu/uploadedFiles/Admission/GarrettHardinArticle.pdf

Physical media is harder to erase. Download your favorite animated shows today. Burn that shit to DVD and share it with your friends. If the corporations won't produce physical media, it's up to us to do it ourselves.

Streaming exclusives are the enemy of media preservation and archiving. Nothing should be lost just because corporations don't respect the art they own. When piracy is the only option, it becomes vital to pirate, lest things get lost forever.

There are instances of lost media being found again because someone home-taped it. The torrent you seed, the episodes you download, could one day be the only reason your favorite streaming show wasn't lost forever.

Art is being destroyed. Workers are being exploited and abused. And at the end of it all, what's there to show for it? Nothing, because HBO Max is setting the precedent that you can just delete whatever you want, whenever you want, and not even tell the artists.

otherwise reasonable people are following this guidance and it's really upsetting to see. people close to me have gone to coffee with their friends or voluntarily back to work while actively covid-positive because they diligently looked up the cdc guidance and that's what it said.

“A late-afternoon revision-mode thought. People ask me sometimes why I’m so *blatant* re racism and other bigotries, in my fiction. Wouldn’t a more subtle approach work?

Answer: No. A more subtle approach wouldn’t work.

SFF does subtle coverage of bigotry all the time, actually. Allegories all over the place, especially in secondary worlds. And probably because of that, readers who are fluent in SFF are used to separating real-world bigotry from its fantastic (or futuristic) counterpart.

Which is precisely how we ended up with a genre that, for most of my life, thought of itself as anti-racist. Look at all the allegories! Meanwhile no black characters. Few writers, editors, etc, of color. Open bigots everywhere.

Allegory does not reinforce reality. It obscures it.

That is, allegory allows readers who are uncomfortable with a topic to engage with that topic in a more comfortable space – away from reality. Scared of black people? Maybe you’ll empathize with these green people on Mars. Freaked out by the mentally ill? Make ‘em psychic.

And as a first step in desensitization, for people who’ve developed a pathological level of discomfort – which our racist, classist, sexist etc society encourages – that’s great! Except… most people stop there. Pat themselves on the back for coming so far. Go no farther.

Like, it’s awesome that you also think Dragon Age 2, a game about a penniless refugee who beomces a heroine, is the best game writing out there! Me, too! But you voted Trump or Brexit because fuck refugees/immigrants?

[A photo of a cat staring at the camera intensely]

But because it was the Done Thing for so long, allegorical engagement became standard in the genre… obscuring the reality that SFF had become nearly as old, white and male as a GOP convention, and just as defensive re its privilege. Overt engagement was, is, treated as gauche.

This isn’t just a genre thing. American society *loves* to pull this shit. Cf. Our media’s endless list of words to use instead of racism – racial tension, race-based bias, etc. Can’t say racism! That’s too far. How uncivil.

Reminder: calls for civility reinforce the status quo. They are a way of saying “Mm yeah you can mention X, but don’t you dare press for actual change!” Which *is* what anyone who mentions (say) the existence of racism, in a racist society, is doing. Naming it helps shame it.

Writing prominent characters who are members of marginalized groups, describing realistic examples of bigotry, and *calling* it bigotry when it appears, all can serve the same purpose, in fiction. But it’s going to feel uncivilized to some readers.

(This is apart from the matter of how to do it *well*. When just mentioning a topic, or a group, feels like a slap in the face to some readers – which it will, bc civility – then how do you slap gracefully? A little backhand, just a twist of the wrist? Practice your swing.)

Sometimes you gotta be uncivilized, when you live and write within a civilization built on bigotry. If it helps, remember that *you* weren’t the one who created this civilization… but you can help fix it.

So include green people…but also include black people. Make your character a refugee, and give them an indigenous Mexican name. Flex pronouns for your NB characters. When your characters are bigots, have somebody or the narrative *call* them bigots.

You cannot trust your audience to just figure that ish out. Some of them will, because they’ve lived it or learned better. Many will not, because they have been trained, by life and by fiction, to see only the “polite” obscuration, and to regard realism as separate and vulgar.

Nothing can fix that except us writers. Only way to move the Overton Window on what feels normal in fiction is to set your feet and shove. Rudely, if you must.

ALT

ALT

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The government coming out and openly saying that they plan for everyone to be infected with Covid, and refuse to do anything about it - even literally just fucking mask mandates - isn't somehow excused by a lack of effective vaccines. It wasn't acceptable at the start of the pandemic, and it isn't now.

'Herd immunity' was always a bullshit strategy - we've known, firstly, that there's no real lasting immunity to Covid, from since the first vaccines were developed; and, additionally, 'allow the virus to spread unchecked through a vaccinated population' is the exact course of action you'd take if you wanted to generate vaccine-resistant variants as fast as possible.

The only measure that has ever actually shown any effect has been lockdowns - actual lockdowns, not the 'you need to go to work, but please don't go out afterwards - also Starbucks is a critical industry' half-measures the west has had. The west refuses to have any actual lockdowns, because lockdowns sacrifice the economic performance of businesses in order to save lives. While other countries kept people at home and delivered free food, the richest country on Earth somehow couldn't even give people more than $1200 to live off for two years? There's nothing stopping them from doing something about the pandemic. The ruling class simply doesn't care about workers dying if it cuts into their profits.

i don’t want to draw wild conclusions or be alarmist. but when fauci said ‘as many as possible back to work’ in the midst of omicron in Dec’21 I said these people have given up...

And who is next to her when she says it?? Dr. Jha omgggggg of course it was him i said it i said it :((((((

i don’t want to be right... (be warned the readmore is long)