By heritage and personal experience of human folly, I expected this pandemic to be terrible, it's been terrible and it is getting worse and I now think it will be worse than I can now imagine. Especially as it will have new strains of viral disease helping it kill in the coming flu season. And they're talking about finding another meat-industry enhanced virus that has pandemic potential.* In such times the worst of human character plays a controlling part, it really shows up the strong link between what people mistake as "freedom," "liberty" if they want to get all Founding Fathers, and selfishness. Virtually every awful thing conservatives, Republicans, the secular play-left advocate or claim as a "right" is done through a claim of "freedom" especially when they say "liberty".
The language of rights and liberty is wide open to be a cover for selfishness, those words are as capable of enabling the most stupid selfishness as well as being used to describe the right for people to do and advocate for the most unselfish, generous and rational behavior. Unselfishness being, so often, ungratifying to the self, as well as harder than what is more gratifying it has the general character of being a tougher sell to a large number of people. That is the secret to the success of American-style conservatism, really of European style libertarianism and conservatism, that 18th century style of "liberalism" that frees the rich to enjoy and enhance their wealth, that is in opposition to the more traditional American liberalism that had the name before then which is based on generous, "liberal" provision to the least among us.
It also plays out in FOX, Sinclair, the right wing media, the Republican-fascist politics which they sponsor appealing to the stupidest, most selfish inclinations of people in order to gull and swindle them. In the case of this pandemic disease, the anti-mask, anti-shut-down, anti-responsibility being peddled to their Republican-fascist viewers, many of them in the age cohort most vulnerable to the disease - that gulling and swindling them is getting them killed or putting them in danger of being seriously, disastrously ill. And if not them their nearest and dearest as well as anyone else they come in contact with.
The "liberty" the "freedom of the press" that is enshrined in the irresponsibly inspecific First Amendment should rationally and rightly be indicted for its major role in permitting the disastrous course the American Covid-19 pandemic. From the racism promoted through it about the pandemic to Trump peddling his adult Chicken Pox party style rallies, to literally everything else about what has made, especially the "red states" most influenced by that kind of criminal irresponsibility shows that the traditional, post-war interpretation of the First Amendment, by "liberal" as well as Republican-fascist courts is extremely dangerous. If you think regulating the press so it doesn't spread homicidal lies is an infringment on personal freedom, getting intubated as last ditch resort to trying to keep you alive IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE ONE AVAILABLE DUE TO THE REPUBLICANS AND MEDIA SPREADING THE PANDEMIC is somewhat more of an inhibition of your personal style.
I wish I'd copied the doctor's tweet about wearing a mask and taking other precautions or get intubated by a novice doctor in an unrelated field who did their last semester online. It was a good one.
* I've always told people as they promoted promiscuity and things like anal sex as being kew-el and transgressive and fashionable that even though they may have the stupid belief that AIDS ended (it didn't, in anything except the ability of rich people to, as of now, control its severity) that there was absolutely no guarantee that another deadly pandemic couldn't arise through the same means that AIDS developed into one through risky sex, needle exchange and blood donations by infected people in the period before the virus is even noticed. It wasn't a welcomed message among gay men in the 1980s, even as they saw the new disease killing men, even as it was clear that there was a link between promiscuous sex in places like bath houses and sex bars and the disease. So much of what we're seeing about the assertions of "freedom and liberty" so much of the denial of reality among the Republican-fascists and their criminally irresponsible media was seen by those of us observing the early years of the AIDS pandemic. Only differnece is that there is no homophobic content in the irresponsible misinformation about this present pandemic to complicate things. Though that might have had anti-"liberal" anti-North-Eastern, anti-Democratic bigotry as a media and Republican-fascist promoted and exploited stand in.
The potential of the factory farming or even small farming of animals for the meat and egg industry giving rise to novel viruses, involving ever so many more animals kept in ways to insure that they take in each others virus carrying body fluids and breath, is even more obvious a means of that happening. The workers and those they come in contact with take in those viruses too. Unless the entire human population takes up a vegan diet, this is hardly going to be the last one. The next one could come from any meat or egg producing operation anywhere in the world. I would expect there are many that arise that way which don't kill people dramatically so they are never intensively studied or named. I don't anticipate that veganism will rise greatly - the online cooking shows certainly aren't doing a lot to promote a diet that doesn't contribute to the generation of pandemic viruses. Which I have to say, I find enormously frustrating. But there it is. The worst of human follies can be carried in what we assume is the simplest of pleasures.
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