The stakes are not enormously high in my day to day life. Wether I’m doing things around my house or for a client, it’s hardly life and death stuff. The good bit about that is that it leaves room for fun, expirementation, trial, and a bit of error, too. If I were in the military, or a cop, or a criminal defenes lawyer, things might be different. The decisions being made by those sorts of people have a different sort of weight, and that kind of weight changes how you swing. 

When I talk about politics I’ll always begin and end with the caveat that if I actually had any ability to change the situation at all, that would change my unerringly hot take on the situation. 

When Abby was heavily pregnant some of the considerations and concerns we had felt pretty serious. Not life or death exactly, but on the same class of road. Just a little ways down that path now, we find ourselves in the first month of parenthood, and the first time that Roby’s gotten sick. Abby has covid, for the first time, and while I don’t, we’re fairly sure Roby does. Luckily covid doesn’t do much to babys, and this varient in particular isn’t so mean. 

The great tragedy of capitalism, or one of them, the one that makes me most sad today, is the death of trust. The corporations are so profit-driven that trusting them is completely out of the question. And since corporations control every facet of our society, we can trust no part of it that we do not directly control or at least totally understand. Medical services are something I neither understand nor control.

Did you know that the medical concensus since time immemorial was that fevers, to a point, are good? They were not considered something to be reduced or fought at all costs. That was the perspective until McNeil laboratories invented Tylenol, a fever reducer. So now, when you google what to do if your baby has a fever, it says to give them tylenol, or to go to the hospital so that they can give your baby tylenol.

They don’t say whay will happen if you don’t. There’s no explanation as to why it might be bad to have a fever, but reading between the lines makes it look pretty fucking dire, doesn’t it? The reality is that unless it’s a really bad fever, it’ll just dehydrate them. Which is bad if it goes long enough, but if they have a fever and their feeding, who cares?

What I’m trying to say is you can’t trust the shirt on your back, modern society is a dirty diaper, and the only thing our society or technological systems give a shit about is selling us crap that not only do we not need, but actively harms us.

I’m going to start putting bombs in the mail.
That was a joke.
For now.