I actually remembered a dream on waking this morning!
I visited some guy’s basement recording studio. He was a hoarder. He had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear there, amid trash bags and piles of instruments. He said his dad bought it for him. I picked up a bass mandolin (not an octave mandolin, which I have, but some kind of weird hollow-body electric “bass guitar” mandolin thing) and started playing a funky bass line. He recorded it.
Omicron is surging. Kids under 12 are still unvaccinated in Korea. (Why? I have no idea why, it’s just “not approved yet”.) We just hit 13,000+ cases in a single day. Testing has scaled back. And a massive national holiday involving family gatherings is almost here. In other words, February’s gonna… 🥺
And since it deserves restatement: kids under 12 STILL ARE NOT EVEN vaccinated. Maybe it’s a supply issue, but it’s maddening to not know anything more “not yet, hopefully soon.”
Thread *and* link both worth giving a look. twitter.com/allyjung/statu…
I really wonder why so many Korean websites bother to include an English version of the site that provides none of the services as the Korean version. Like, no, your org chart and list of inaccessible, unlinked services is not really useful to anyone, folks. Why bother? (And don’t get me started how, even when you are on the Korean version, 95% of the time it’s built not to work for non-Koreans. Korea invented another “digital divide”: the equivalent of a brick wall with NO FOREIGNER ALLOWED GO TO GU OFFICE spraypainted on it in invisible ink.)
@ToddWilde1 You probably haven’t heard someone on the front lines talk about their experience. Here, read this firsthand account by @CassieY4:
https://t.co/SJtEWzJxss @ToddWilde1 @CassieY4 I’m sorry if I sound harsh, but you’re talking about “freedoms” like you’re being oppressed when what you’re complaining about is temporarily changed closing hours and the cancelation of some public events. Does it suck? Sure. Is it the “curtailing of freedoms”? Meh.
@ToddWilde1 And people whose immunity is wearing thin, incidentally. Did you know that medical workers are now quietly waiting for their *second* booster shot, because their antibodies are once again dwindling? @ToddWilde1 Do you know how burnt out they are—medical workers? Do you know what your “personal freedom” will cost them, though speeding up the overload of hospitals, and cost us all when they burn out and cannot handle it any more, as many already are experiencing?
@ToddWilde1 I’m sorry, but it is. It’s 100% “Muh freedoms.”
By your (fairly weak) dictionary definition, traffic laws are authoritarian. We consent to them for the common good. @ToddWilde1 And you know this. You’re just sort of erasing it from the formula by which you do your calculus. Just as you know children exist but say, “Everyone has had the chance to get vaccinated (three times)” while surrounded by children who haven’t.. and immunocompromised people.
@ToddWilde1 “Strict obedience” Hahaha. Yes, they’re shooting people in the streets and torturing bar owners who fail to close on time. Why, six pub owners were ratted out and found dead in the Han just last… oh, wait. @ToddWilde1 You live in Korea, surrounded by people who lived under actual authoritarianism decades on end. When they got a whiff of it from a President, they impeached her and removed her from office.
This is not authoritarianism, and calling it that is ignorant and infantile.
@jeremiahtolbert Dear sir,
Having taken note of your current malaise, I set out to find on the telegraphic network a GIF or moving imahine that could adequatey express the sentiment, oft-expressed, of “Chin up, old boy.” @jeremiahtolbert I am immensely disheartened to report that all I managed to discover was assorted members of the public exercising, a fight scene from cinematic production titled Oldboy, & this:
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker It’s very easy to forget large swaths of people when it’s convenient to us. I forget that some people seem to need daily social interaction with strangers (ugh, god, why?) as you forgot that, vast numbers of young people are also part of “everyone” but have had no vaccine access. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker (I mention this because, in many ways, I worry more for my son than I do for myself. I worry COVID could kill me, but I also worry that if forced onto campus, I could get infected, bring it home, and infect him and… well, you know. Pandemic management is for their safety, too.)
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Oh, but one more thing because it’s been in the back of my mind since I read this:
Children under 12 exist too. NO children under 12 in Korea (and many other places) have been had the chance. Again, this is why I think it’s brutally unfair to put them all at risk. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker And we should all know by now that kids can get very sick and die from it, and even with mild or asymptomatic cases there are all kinds of post-COVID effects and many, many unknowns. Up to half of them develop long COVID from some studies I’ve seen.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker If policies were flexible and accommodating, then I wouldn’t be quite as concerned personally—though I would be shaking my head about the larger failures that we’d be seeing. But when we go back to normal, most employers will instantly stop accommodating anyone at high risk.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Sigh. We enforce personal restrictions on people ALL THE TIME, *because* we are social.
Our efforts to accommodate sociality should also accommodate, as much as possible, the right for people to minimize risk of exposure. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker And I think I’m not saying this clearly, so: most changes involving “going back to normal” fail to accommodate that. They force a lot of people who are not safe, who are at higher risk, back to risk of exposure and higher risk of severe illness or death.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Thanks. Perhaps with better antivirals, and if the experimental anti-coagulant/anti-platelet treatments work out and become widely available. But my son growing up with a father—and seeing him grow up—matters much more to me than the far lesser pleasure of visiting some hof, tbh. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Which I should say, before I really go. I’m not saying we should FOREVER LOCKDOWN. I’m saying that if we can contain and slow spread, we could shift med science to where, even if we can’t beat this thing into the ground, survival rates improve drastically. That would be worth it.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker (But I think COVID has been a dress rehearsal for how we handle how the bigger shocks of climate change roll in over us, and it’s been scary… but also instructive, in terms of what cultural work we need to start doing now so we don’t flub it as horrifically as we did this.)
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker I know you’re joking (sort of), but on this side of the divide it just feels sad to see again this insistence that we “go back now.”
I’ve had a very active social life, but it’s been online. Do I miss in-person events? Yes, but… one adjusts. It’s not THAT hard. *shrug* @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker (And I don’t mean Twitter.)
Yes, yes, maybe for me. But also, yes, yes, because I view this as “adjusting is the right thing to do.”
The impulse to insist we “return to the way it was” is going to serve us very, very poorly going forward, and not just in terms of COVID.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Again, you don’t understand what 5% means in this context. Completely overwhelmed and collapsing health care means tons of non-COVID patients also can’t get into hospitals and die of other things. Also, that’s 5% per infection. So the next case, the next variant. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker You’re not rolling 5% once and done with it. You roll 5% with each new infection, and with variants, aging, other complications in the mix. It’s a fucking horror show if people are accepting, “Eh, 95% of us are safe,” because, no, that’s not how it works.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker It’s not just me. It’s countless people. Including many people I’m sure you don’t expect to fall to this thing.
And… I worry for all of us. Variants are going to keep coming. And then we will have to figure out how to care for the people who survive but are shattered by it. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker And we will have to fight off the people who think they should just be dumped in the trash, or euthanized, or forgotten. And we will have to find a way to have a public space that isn’t riven between people on opposite sides of the divide across which we’ve been shouting now.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker You were here in November, yes? When they floated “Living With COVID” for a few weeks and then shit started to rapidly hit the fan? Maybe you weren’t here. The worked well until November. Then restrictions eased; things started to fall apart rapidly, and they sensibly reversed. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Anyway, another way to stay healthy is to be off Twitter. I hope we all get through this unscathed. I hope people stop arguing against an abundance of caution which has worked well. I hope we can return to be acrimonious and rude about nonsense that isn’t life or death for many.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker I think you have a weirdly small sense of what a “truly fulfilling life” means, and it’s funny to be called selfish by a guy who’s arguing, “Eh, if 5% of the entire population risks death and 25% of the entire population risks debilitation, that’s fine, if I get what I want. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Maybe I’m being unfair to what you are actually arguing, but you’re arguing it poorly. Maybe I’m being aggressive, but you’re talking about personal freedoms and I’m arguing, “People should not have to die avoidable deaths when the policies we’ve had have worked so well.”
@taebonga @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 What @taebonga said.
Also, I’m at high risk for complications AFAIK, so please don’t fucking wish daily peril and risk to my life on me. Your personal joy at “chimaek” and the footie will not comfort my wife and son if COVID kills or debilitates me and makes me unable to work. @taebonga @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 (And yes, that might be why I’m taking this personally.)
Incidentally my students have loved my classes online. Loved them. Positive responses like I’ve never seen.
People can live fulfilled lives without rushing back to The Way It Was Before before it’s wise or sane.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker And the pathetic thing is that this only leads straight back to lockdowns. The people who are all, “I want my freedom” are missing the point that moderating their use of freedom allows slowed spread, which avoids the more extreme lockdowns. It’s just common bloody sense. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker And the hard lockdowns are far more brutal on most businesses than more gentle, long-term restrictions, *shrug*
It’s pure short term thinking, blind to the inevitable.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Yes, well, I didn’t go dig into your past posts to insult you, now did I? @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Also, spread 5% out across as many people as possible and you know what that means, right? Far more than 5% of people dying, because way more can’t be hospitalized (hospitals are overloaded) and people also die from other things b/c hospitals are overloaded. We’ve seen this!
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker You also clearly do not understand what a statistic like 5% means in the context you’re talking about. Trust me, I have a good feel for what 5% probability looks like. It’s fucking horrible odds given enough cases of infection. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker To say nothing of people at higher risk, who I assure you find no comfort in the fact you “feel bad for” them.
Especially since what you advocate means recurrent infections, and as we’ve seen new variants, and eventual vaccine escape, and then we’re back to square 1.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker As with COVID, you know less than you think about me. I haven’t worked at a religious school in a decade, and it wasn’t 9 years, and wow, you really took a long time to slide into lazy, ill-informed ad hominems, didn’t you? @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker BTW what I urged you to own wasn’t the risk to yourself, it was the risk you’re asking everyone to shoulder—you know, the risk to others you don’t care about—so you can have beer and chicken parties and watch sportsball in person.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Spare me the “It’s a cold” bullshit. The death rates (even in highly vaccinated populations), and the long COVID, and hospitalization rates, are not something we see in colds.
Be an adult and admit that you’re fine being selfish and imposing deadly risk on countless others. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Sigh. I can understand your family in other places adapting as they have little choice.
But you should know better. Equating businesses being told to close at 9pm in order to stave off mass death and impairment with “authoritarianism” is incredibly ignorant.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Maybe it’ll be some eugenics shit about how people with preexisting conditions were doomed anyhow, or some tearful demand that the government fund your loved one’s care because their COVID isn’t your fault. Or maybe you’ll just reconcile yourself to euthanizing them. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker I mean, you’re already arguing that the freedom to pub as late as you want to is worth the risk of more variants, the risk mass unavoidable deaths, the risk of your own debilitation… because, yeah, it actually can happen to you, too.
Like, take the risk, sure. But own it.
@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker “We’re doing great, everyone I know is pretending life is back to normal and has caught it!”
🙄
The thing about guys like you is, history shows you always change your tune. @ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Maybe it’ll be, “We couldn’t know so many would be sickened long-term or permanently.”
Then we get to watch a mass trip down the rhetorical waterslide from “We’ll all catch it, it’s inevitable, it’s just a cold,” to “euthanasia for Long COVID is a mercy” to “longhaulers are useless eaters.” Oh, and… life is also carrying on here in Korea too. Most have the sense to prefer caution and inconvenience to just shrugging and letting countless folks die/suffer as yet poorly understood sequelae.
So, like: life carries on here too… with far less death & sickness.
Yeah, it’s *almost* like much of the west bumblingly botched its handling of COVID early on and is scrambling to normalize mass death and further mishandling by pretending we’re almost done with COVID… till the numbers surge again, hospitals fail, & back to lockdown.
(Hmmm.) https://t.co/Q65XablHi7 Meanwhile, COVID apparently inflicts “sustained cognitive dysfunction” on 25% of everyone infected.
But hey, a few months’ make-believe that we’re *almost* out of the woods is worth a potentially society-wide mass-debilitation event, right?
🙄
