I think they expected to swap the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, since they've done it before.
unwellsnail
joined 2 years ago
Not the commenter you asked, but my understanding of this situation is that in response to a Hamas attack on the 7th Israel has, for the past week and a half, been bombing a captive population that is currently without electricity, water, food and medical supplies, and our government is supporting that.
What Biden could do, now, is say "Hey, we understand your fear and pain, but Palestinian deaths won't brings back those Israeli lives. Mass killing of civilians in the hopes of killing some of the people responsible won't bring peace, trust me we've tried too." From there he can engage in discussions about next steps, but this is the minimum fucking first step he refuses to take.
Yes, the rampant spread of covid will make it difficult to make the case it was caught at work, unless the work is somewhere covid is known to be like healthcare or where an outbreak is known. Unless and until we have sufficient infection control measures in most places it will continue to be difficult to know where one was exposed.
Unfortunately it's already the norm in many workplaces to not inform employees of outbreaks. There's little to no requirements for reporting cases so businesses have no responsibility to keep covid out of the workplace and people are getting sick at work. This ruling is a result of that reality, not a precipitator.
Same in the US, that's what I assumed when I saw the pic. I've done it myself a handful of times.
No, I'm continuing the original statements I made. That covid is causing long term health issues, and while vaccines can lower the odds of long term impacts they do not prevent them. The only way to prevent long covid is to not get Covid.
I agree masks are cost prohibitive, I support free distribution of n95s or elastomeric and fit testing in communities, but how are they limiting where folks go? When we had widescale masking I was able to go the places I wanted, safely. I disagree that asking people to stay home while sick is a drastic reduction in freedom, I actually believe people's desire to go in public and spread disease that can cause serious problems for them is a much great reduction in overall freedom. Another drastic reduction in freedom is what people who don't want to get covid have been experiencing, which is being cut off from all public life. One-way masking is not enough, it's like wearing a helmet in a monster truck rally, helpful but insufficient. Even hospitals are not places one can go without getting ill.
I can't convince you to care about yours and others wellbeing. I believe that freedom is something we share and create for each other, not simply being able to move about and do whatever I want as an individual. I truly hope you educate yourself on the risks of covid and take proper care to avoid it. Peace.
These misunderstandings about covid are what I mentioned in my original post. Covid is currently killing fewer people than it did the first few years, it already burned through the most vulnerable and you can only die once. But illness is not rare at all. Aside from the rampant acute illness, Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” and about 10% of infections results in long covid. We don't even know what the long term effects are, we do know it's already having impacts on people's health and on healthcare services, and that there is no lasting immunity. People used to suffer and die from preventable diseases, a lot. We didn't say oh well, sucks to suck. We learned and adapted, that's what we need to do that again.
You mentioned costs and freedom, what does freedom mean to you in this context?
Actually I'm proposing life is valuable and we should protect it.
The vaccines don't solve the problem and the solutions do not require massive change, but they do require people reflect on what's important and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think that living a good life is important so I believe we should do things to better those odds, like reducing the amount of damage covid does to the body. Choosing continuous illness and your worse years coming much sooner sounds closer to suicide to me. Masking, improved ventilation and filtration, paid sick leave, and other simple steps are not absurd and shouldn't be temporary. We know easy ways to reduce massive suffering, it's ridiculous to me that people oppose it.
No, we don't have to just accept continuous illness and death. Why do you think that it's necessary for people to suffer when there are simple solutions? There are steps between nothing and total shutdown, read above for some of them.
Covid isn't like people going in the street risking getting hit. Covid is a communicable illness spread by others, not a personal choice someone makes. People can't just choose to never be exposed even if they wanted, we have to interact with others. Further, people can and do avoid being run over in the street by walking on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in vehicles with protections, with lots of traffic safety rules in place to minimize accidents. Right now our covid elimination strategies are similar to that of traffic safety in the early days of automobiles when there were no safety regulations. Right now we have a bunch of people driving wildly with at best ineffective vaccines, we need a lot more than that if we want to stop repeatedly trying to dodge covid crashes and have any sense of stability in actually living with covid.
This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren't aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it's gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn't really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.
And that this isn't inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn't mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we've done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.
Would you like help researching those things? I'm a stranger on the internet but I'm happy to help or point you in some directions.
Books Fiction, Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut. I first read it in high school and even then it hit very hard. I had friends going off to war at the time and it was a very different perspective than the pro-war media I had been immersed in to that point. I've read it every couple of years since and find more I love about it every time.
Non fiction, The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It's a beautiful piece that felt less like a book and more like a conversation with a friend. It helped me imagine what a world centered on care could be like.
Movies Gaza Fights for Freedom. It's a few years old now but extremely relevant, a documentary about the 2018/19 peaceful protest in Gaza and Israeli response. It was horrifying to watch and realize many things, and the horrors in it pale compared to the last few weeks. I think about it a lot right now.