I have a folder in my email and when people say kind things to me or I accomplish something I’m proud of, I save it there. And it’s fascinating how every time I go to read it I’m sure i know what’s there but I’ve actually forgotten most of it.
So for Christmas I want to remind you that you’ve had more of an impact on the world than you think and you are more loved than you remember.
One of the most interesting things I’ve read all year is this essay on sex scenes in films and what their lack shows us about what we’ve become and lost and are afraid to think about.
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The current state of cultural and material decline plays an important role in the shift toward Puritanism in media and art, in consumer appetite, and in the political posture of the State. That is to say, with the compounding crises we are bombarded with (everything from climate disaster to rampant racialized police violence to genocide) as a part of our daily lives under late capitalism, the need for escape, and indeed, the need for that escape to be completely unchallenging and non-confrontational, has become imperative. Moreover, as control over our own material realities becomes less and less feasible, the last lone place we believe we can exercise agency is within the landscape of that which we consume. This has resulted in the consuming public approaching all media and art with a moral imperative — that which we consume must be perfectly virtuous, sanitized of all problematic or complicated ideas and depictions, because it has become the stand-in for our very realities, our very political action as citizens; consuming has become our praxis.
One of the most interesting things I’ve read all year is this essay on sex scenes in films and what their lack shows us about what we’ve become and lost and are afraid to think about.
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The current state of cultural and material decline plays an important role in the shift toward Puritanism in media and art, in consumer appetite, and in the political posture of the State. That is to say, with the compounding crises we are bombarded with (everything from climate disaster to rampant racialized police...
Hey fellow Canadians trying to figure out #covid risk - there’s a great team led by a researcher at U of T that is still doing epidemiological modelling and publishing regular updates
It has all kinds of data in it but i find the province specific info that starts on page 7 of the report most useful. Right now about 1 in 24 people in BC has covid 😬
It’s updated every 2 weeks and has consistently done a fantastic job throughout the pandemic of forecasting deaths and risk.
Hey fellow Canadians trying to figure out #covid risk - there’s a great team led by a researcher at U of T that is still doing epidemiological modelling and publishing regular updates
It has all kinds of data in it but i find the province specific info that starts on page 7 of the report most useful. Right now about 1 in 24 people in BC has covid 😬
@susannah so we were going to the I Mother Earth and Tea Party concert next week, and we bought the tickets months ago, but we’re gonna bail based on this info. It’s not worth it.
A friend of mine recently went to an outdoor music festival and got Covid and has been pretty laid out for a month or so now.
I know some people would say she shouldn’t have gone because of Covid and I get that.
But there’s no reason catching Covid at a music festival should be common. We have so many tools to reduce transmission society-wide and at specific events.
At a specific event like this, a vaccine dose in the last year and a negative test to get in would have reduced the number of people with Covid at the event and the average viral spew of any false negatives. They could have reduced the size of the event or increased the size of the venue - it was so crowded you actually couldn’t move to get water or go to the bathroom, so that’s straight up dangerous without infectious disease in the mix. And they could have used fans to increase ventilation - and help with the apparently miserably hot temperatures. They could have required or recommended masks, though that may have made it harder to cope with the heat.
And if we had clean indoor air and any kind of support for sick people to stay home and recover or mask mandates that were responsive to community transmission levels or even fancier things like random testing and contact tracing, then we could maintain Covid at levels low enough that I’d be eating in restaurants and hosting dinner parties.
Folks are like don’t tell me what to do it’s my life and I want to go to music festivals and live my life and boy howdy so do I.
But imagine we decided, today, after making the world so very car dependent, to remove all the things like speed limits and car safety regulations and traffic lights and stop signs. You can still wear your seatbelt (get vaccinated) and try to buy a car with air bags and crumple zones (keep yourself fit and rested) and drive as carefully as you can (mask up) but driving is now much riskier than it was before - and you still have to do it for work and social connection and to care for your loved ones and go to the doctor.
I’m still taking precautions for Covid and it is limiting and expensive and less effective because I’m doing it as an individual. We should be doing it together.
A friend of mine recently went to an outdoor music festival and got Covid and has been pretty laid out for a month or so now.
I know some people would say she shouldn’t have gone because of Covid and I get that.
But there’s no reason catching Covid at a music festival should be common. We have so many tools to reduce transmission society-wide and at specific events.
Also omg cars are ridiculous and the infrastructure for them is worse and we should just melt them all down and have bike paths and walking paths and buses and trolleys and trains and housing instead
@susannah Wow, that is a great idea. I should get into that habit, too.