When it comes to the COVID-19 hysteria, it appears most people have moved on. But others can’t seem to let the pandemic go.
Washington Post media activist Taylor Lorenz is one of the latter.
Since it became clear that the coronavirus was no longer a threat, she has been insisting that the rest of the nation should still go through mask and vaccine mandates and take precautions to keep people like her safe.
The alleged reporter has even taken to portraying herself as “disabled” because she supposedly is still vulnerable to the virus. On Saturday, she replied to a user on Threads claiming that she is missing the fourth Christmas in a row because her friends and family refuse to mask up, meaning that she cannot enjoy the festivities.
Totally agree with you on the mitigation advice, but I very much judge anyone who participates in the social murder of disabled people just because it's 'the holidays.' Many of us who are high risk are missing our FOURTH Christmas because other selfish people can't be bothered to mask and take basic precautions that allow us to safely participate in public life. They don't feel enough shame and judgement imo, instead infection has been fully normalized.
Totally agree with you on the mitigation advice, but I very much judge anyone who participates in the social murder of disabled people just because it’s “the holidays”. Many of us who are high risk are missing our FOURTH Christmas because other selfish people can’t be bothered to mask and take...
www.threads.net
Earlier in July, Lorenz wrote a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, whining because people had moved on from the pandemic and were no longer ensconced in the COVID hysteria. She claimed people believe that disabled people “should shut up and die already” and called out leftist influencers for “spouting COVID takes that are farther right and more extreme than Trump.”
Lorenz has exhibited this type of entitled behavior for years. In this case, she seems to authentically believe that the rest of the nation should bend over backward to make people like her feel safe. The notion that she thinks everyone else should be living under the same conditions as we did when the pandemic first started is about as obnoxious as it gets, especially considering that the precautions and restrictions that were foisted on the populace were never necessary in the first place.
Fortunately for the rest of us, Lorenz has no power to impose any of these restrictions. If she wants to miss Christmas again, that is certainly her prerogative. But if she wants to live in COVID-land, she will likely have to wait until the next pandemic hits.
By Nate Holdren
Lire en français.
The present pandemic nightmare is the most recent and an especially acute manifestation of capitalist society’s tendency to kill many, regularly, a tendency that
Friedrich Engels called “social murder.” Capitalism kills because destructive behaviors are, to an important extent, compulsory in this kind of society. Enough businesses must make enough money or serious social consequences follow — for them, their employees, and for government. In order for that to happen, the rest of us must continue the economic activities that are obligatory to maintain such a society.
That these activities are obligatory means capitalist societies are market dependent: market participation is not optional, but mandatory. As
Beatrice Adler-Bolton has put it, in capitalism “you are entitled to the survival you can buy,” and so people generally do what they have to in order to get money. The predictable results are that some people don’t get enough money to survive; some people endure danger due to harmful working, living, and environmental conditions; some people endure lack of enough goods and services of a high enough quality to promote full human flourishing; and some people inflict the above conditions on others. The simple, brutal reality is that capitalism kills many, regularly. (The steadily building apocalypse of the climate crisis is another manifestation of the tendency to social murder, as is the very old and still ongoing
killing of workers in the ordinary operations of so many workplaces.)
The tendency to social murder creates potential problems that governments must manage, since states too are subject to pressures and tendencies arising from capitalism. They find themselves facing the results of social murder, results they are expected to respond to, with their options relatively constrained by the limits placed on them by capitalism. Within that context governments often resort to a specific tactic of governance: depoliticization.