Fuck this fucking virus with a fucking farm implement.

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Comments

  • i basically wore my cranky baby till he was two (long story involving medical problems) which was the only way to keep him content and me still able to do things. But it might cost you, backwise.
  • Cameron wrote: »
    Can you go part-time for a while? Your outgoings are perforce reduced at this time (the lure of internet shopping notwithstanding), so it may be affordable.

    Not really affordable, unless it were a PT workload so slightly below FT as to make very little difference. Main outgoings are stuff like mortgage, utilities and TV/broadband which are all still going to need to be paid over the next weeks/months.

    I think this has been floating around as a meme for a while - but just in case it might raise a smile...
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Somewhere some of our favorite novelists are shut in and writing something great for us.
  • Cameron wrote: »
    Can you go part-time for a while? Your outgoings are perforce reduced at this time (the lure of internet shopping notwithstanding), so it may be affordable.

    Not really affordable, unless it were a PT workload so slightly below FT as to make very little difference. Main outgoings are stuff like mortgage, utilities and TV/broadband which are all still going to need to be paid over the next weeks/months.

    I think this has been floating around as a meme for a while - but just in case it might raise a smile...

    It certainly did!
    :lol:

  • anoesisanoesis Shipmate
    Problem with that is that I’m also supposed to be spending 7 or so hours each day working from home, and my boss has been very understanding about me having the wean with me and said that if I can’t manage it during normal hours he’s happy for me to make up the difference in the evening or overnight.

    This is a genuinely shitty situation you are in, without a doubt. I wish you had said so earlier, instead of throwing around that 'but the economy' stuff. And the fact that others have done it and are doing it doesn't actually make it any easier for you, in a practical sense, and not all the suggestions that could - and no doubt will be - offered by I or any of the others who have been in at least vaguely comparable situations will actually act to render the situation non-shitty.

    I suspect it's severely frowned upon to try and be helpful in Hell but I'll stick my neck out a tiny bit (it's not like I have a stockpile of techniques that work excellently - as I type this I've been interrupted twice with requests for a toasted sandwich by a child who was currently snacking on the contents of his nostrils)...anyway, a day's work after a day's parenting is always going to be a hard ask. Always. But if there's anything you can do to make that day's parenting less draining*, then the work bit will be slightly less impossible. (The small one has just reappeared, poking my back with my sharpening steel, telling me it makes an excellent ninja sword, and how long is it until Halloween?)...

    --here the writer took a break to just go and make the toasted sandwich so she could have her train of thought back afterward--

    *different things work for different people obviously, with kids being included in the category 'people' for the purposes of this discussion, but one thing that universally worked with both my (completely different) small people was music. And not the fucking wheels on the bus or old McDonald and his parade of increasingly improbably animals. Real music - the stuff that you like to listen to - find a playlist on YouTube, set it up to come out through the TV if you have that capability, loud as you like, kid won't mind provided he is relatively neurotypical, will likely be entranced by the video, can't be corrupted by profanity or twerking or dudes in makeup and drag or whatever the fuck at fourteen months - with any luck you can get a thing or two done while not having your legs tugged AND listening to some decent music AND educating your child as to what constitutes decent music, but if it turns out that your whole presence is required even during such an activity as this, which I acknowledge is possible with a fourteen-month old, at least the music will do a little replenishing of your soul. Hopefully.

    Believe it or not, I haven't reached my substantive point but RL intrudes and I will try again later at a hopefully more opportune time...

    **A brief tally of interruptions during second part of post:
    -why didn't you make me a toasted sandwich?
    -I can NOT make my own! [spoiler: Can, and has done many times]
    -Well, how do I know when it's ready?
    -Does the cheese need to be cut in triangles?
    -It won't close! It won't!
    -It won't open! There's cheese everywhere! It's all melted! [weeping]
    [Dad emerges from room where he is unavailingly trying to work amidst all this hysteria and commences yelling.]
  • mousethief wrote: »
    Our can opener died. Eating tinned food will be a little more difficult.

    Also I am dying for a cookie/biscuit. May have to dust off the ol' apron and fire up the oven.
    How did the can opener die?
    I admit to openning tincans at various times in my life with knives, screw drivers and hammer, a metal tent peg and a rock, a saw. In an ill-spent youth, we once built a fire and put unopenned tins in it. The spaghetti was best. Noodles hanging from trees. I don't recommend propane cylinders of any size to be placed in a fire unless you have good cover and are quite distant from others (boom!). Blowed up real good. Fire was also gone.
  • anoesisanoesis Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    So - to return to my substantive point, the universe having punished me for my enormous hubris in thinking that I know one single cottonpicking thing about parenting in the form of some spilled, smeared blackberries 'that I was eating out of a container a few days ago' ground into the bedroom carpet of the one who is definitely old enough to know better..
    My chief anxiety is that it won’t be temporary. There’s no exit strategy. It’s just going to be a constant series of three-week reviews that will all conclude we need to keep doing this. This is life now, and will be for long enough that you might as well call it forever. There are friends I will never see again, not because of Coronavirus but because they will die naturally before we’re allowed to meet up again.

    What I am mostly hearing from this is grief, rather than panic - and I think that's understandable. While I absolutely, 110% believe that there will, in fact, be a day when we are allowed out of our houses, and onto the streets, and into clubs and pubs and racetracks and stadiums and planes, and I guess cruise ships as well for those who like that sort of thing [shudder], it won't be the same as before, because we won't be the same as before. So yes, something is irrevocably gone and it's not inappropriate to mourn it. And when you are in grief, you can never see the end of it, nor can you see the point of anything outside of it, and the knowledge that nothing will ever be quite the same seems pretty much analogous to 'everything is ruined forever'. And I don't think there's anything much that helps at the time. You slog on, you are changed, you continue to mourn your loss, including the loss of your old self, erased by this cataclysmic event (whatever it is), and, if my experience is anything to go by, to pensively wish to turn the clock back. But nonetheless you do, at some stage, reach a point where you know that everything is not ruined forever.
  • Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't. Hubris to think we are experiencing unique tragedy. Different than others and less severe frankly then many. And for most of us it's not personal. It's general.
  • RooKRooK Admin Emeritus
    Well said.

    I've sometimes wondered if the core of conservatism is an expression of wishing one could go back to some earlier existence. Not perfect, perhaps, but comfortably familiar. So the push from progressives ranges from an experience of discomfort towards fear. The Left, and the Left Behind.
  • For the last week we've only been listening to the news once a day. If we have the radio on the rest of the time it's tuned to a music station. In the evening we watch films, the more mindless the better. Star Wars last night.

    Oi! My Cousin Wot Is A Nactor was in Star Wars...(can't quite recall which one, but about 10 years ago?).
    :wink:

    My good friend and drinking buddy was an extra in The Tudors miniseries. He appears briefly as a bare-chested wrestler entertaining the monarchs at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He also reckons he was a bishop in a crowd of prelates at some point, but we got bored before we could spot him.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    I am right now deliberately tunneling my vision--because I have a couple of anxiety disorders, and it's the only way I'm going to cope without huge amounts of alcohol or a hammer to the noggin or something. I think it's perfectly fine, even almost mandatory to do that, once you have the basic knowledge you need to survive--that is, "wash your hands" and "stay away from people" and stuff like that. All the horrific details are useful only insofar as they convince me to do the right thing. I'm convinced, and I'm doing it. So now I'm turning off the TV/internet/paper etc.

    The world does NOT need me to keep up with coronavirus statistics, or the fallout in the economy, or haunting pictures from Italy, or any of that. I am not personally called to be a public health commissioner. I have no political power beyond what I've already exercised. And so I'm deliberately turning inward to my own house, my own family, my own job, my own immediate neighbors and friends, because that's all I can handle, and the only place I can do any good, anyway. The grief outside is too great, and I don't have what it takes to cope with it right now, especially after all the deaths in my family last year.

    I know somebody has to bear witness. And years from now in the future I may feel drawn to go back over this time and do that. But right now I'm just trying to survive, and I think that's okay.

    (I'm pretty sure we've taken a massive hit in terms of my 403(b) account, and I am deliberately Not Looking At It because I don't need that stress right now. The disaster will still be there when life resumes. Or it won't, which would be even better.)
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    RooK wrote: »
    Well said.

    I've sometimes wondered if the core of conservatism is an expression of wishing one could go back to some earlier existence. Not perfect, perhaps, but comfortably familiar. So the push from progressives ranges from an experience of discomfort towards fear. The Left, and the Left Behind.

    Time to trot out my favourite Ursula Le Guin quote from The Dispossessed again:
    You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been
  • anoesisanoesis Shipmate
    Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't.
    If you think I was trying to argue that it was, you are misreading me on an epic scale.
    Hubris to think we are experiencing unique tragedy. Different than others
    So, we are NOT experiencing a unique tragedy, however it IS different than others? Has anyone got a cigarette paper handy for me to try and wedge in the definitional gap?
    and less severe frankly then many.
    Most probably. But that remains to be seen. It's not like the tape's played all the way to the end yet. It's not like things were all ship-shape on the world stage beforehand.
    And for most of us it's not personal. It's general.
    The two are not mutually exclusive. There is nothing whatever which precludes an individual having a personal reaction to a general event.
  • “Lots of people have broken their legs before, and they were fine afterwards. And some people don’t even have legs, for God’s sake. Stop complaining so much about it.” All said while the person who broke their leg five minutes ago is writhing in pain on the floor, not helped at all by the notion that others may have, or have had at some point in the past, it worse.

    I mean, yes twilight I know that when you were a kid things were like you say. But that was normal life for you - you weren’t suddenly thrust into it from a 21st century life without any experience of it or idea of what to do.
  • Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't.

    Life will never again be the same as it was before this fucking disease. Most people agree about that.

    If you happened to like how life was before, it no longer being the same is equivalent to it being ruined. And “never again” is another way of saying “forever”. Hence “ruined forever”.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't.

    Life will never again be the same as it was before this fucking disease. Most people agree about that.

    If you happened to like how life was before, it no longer being the same is equivalent to it being ruined. And “never again” is another way of saying “forever”. Hence “ruined forever”.

    That's what's called catastrophic thinking. Because it's not as good it's totally ruined. My Sunday dinner is ruined because they only had pork in the supermarket and I prefer chicken.

    Your equivalence there is simply false. Do you consider you fail an exam if you don't get 100%?

    Catastrophic thinking makes you terribly mentally and emotionally vulnerable to changes in circumstance.

    That's not to say it's easy to avoid, but the first step is to remind yourself that "not as good" is not the same as "ruined".

  • Well, there's a lot of pre-pandemic UK society that I will happily see the end of. Under-resourcing of the health and care sector, a welfare system that provides an inadequate safety net with barriers to access, a "gig economy" which leaves many hard working people without a secure income, a lack of social housing leaving vulnerable people to the mercy of private landlords often providing the least they can get away with for the most the market will allow.

    We might also gain a lot of benefit. Greater capacity for home working and virtual meeting cutting out the amount of commuting and business travel, a recognition of the need for better public transport with greater capacity (even without this pandemic we shouldn't be seeing overpacked trains), a re-balance of what we consider essential with a better balance of wages to support caring industries and other sectors where only a few weeks ago politicians were claiming these workers are unskilled.

    The challenge is for us to come out of this emergency with changes for the better not the worse. With the idiot in No 10 I'm not too hopeful.
  • anoesisanoesis Shipmate
    Life will never again be the same as it was before this fucking disease. Most people agree about that.

    If you happened to like how life was before, it no longer being the same is equivalent to it being ruined. And “never again” is another way of saying “forever”. Hence “ruined forever”.
    KarlLB wrote: »
    That's what's called catastrophic thinking. Because it's not as good it's totally ruined. My Sunday dinner is ruined because they only had pork in the supermarket and I prefer chicken.

    Your equivalence there is simply false. Do you consider you fail an exam if you don't get 100%?

    Catastrophic thinking makes you terribly mentally and emotionally vulnerable to changes in circumstance.

    That's not to say it's easy to avoid, but the first step is to remind yourself that "not as good" is not the same as "ruined".

    Of course 'not as good' is not the same as ruined - but that's not what it feels like when you're writhing in the first couple of stages of grief. Give the dude some time.
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    "Do not say, "Why were the old days better than these?" For it is not wise to ask such questions." Ecclesiastes 7:10
  • CameronCameron Shipmate
    A Covid mental health video aimed at everyone.



  • Twilight wrote: »
    Somewhere some of our favorite novelists are shut in and writing something great for us.

    Jane Austen is writing another novel? YES!
  • BoogieBoogie Shipmate
    KarlLB wrote: »
    Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't.

    Life will never again be the same as it was before this fucking disease. Most people agree about that.

    If you happened to like how life was before, it no longer being the same is equivalent to it being ruined. And “never again” is another way of saying “forever”. Hence “ruined forever”.

    That's what's called catastrophic thinking. Because it's not as good it's totally ruined. My Sunday dinner is ruined because they only had pork in the supermarket and I prefer chicken.

    Your equivalence there is simply false. Do you consider you fail an exam if you don't get 100%?

    Catastrophic thinking makes you terribly mentally and emotionally vulnerable to changes in circumstance.

    That's not to say it's easy to avoid, but the first step is to remind yourself that "not as good" is not the same as "ruined".

    I agree.

    Some people are eminently adaptable, others very stuck in their ways. It’s just a personality thing.

    I’m very adaptable indeed - I’ve had to be, change has been normal in my life since my Dad upped sticks and took the whole family to South Africa in the 60s when I was a toddler. Having ADHD also means I look for change all the time anyway - it’s my default, I get bored with sameness. ADDers are good in a crisis - we were the hunters and risk takers in early history.

    I try very hard not to be too optimistic/hopeful/cheerful/things-will-be-different-but-fine-and-interesting with people who are more conservative and struggle with change. They need time to adapt, and they will.

  • Twilight wrote: »
    Somewhere some of our favorite novelists are shut in and writing something great for us.

    About that...

    If my online community is anything to go by, most of us have run out of mental capacity to put pen to paper. And I speak as someone who is 70% through the WIP.
  • Twilight wrote: »
    Somewhere some of our favorite novelists are shut in and writing something great for us.

    Jane Austen is writing another novel? YES!
    A new version of "Pride, Prejudice and Zombies" which will be semi-autobiographical as her character seeks to break all social distancing rules by shambling down the street trying to grab hold of whoever she can. Aided by a small army of ignorant louts who are just wanting to picnic in the local park.
  • Re novelists:

    One of my favorite lines in the film "It's A Wonderful Life" is when Clarence the angel tells George "you should see the book Mark Twain is writing *now*".
    :)

    As to Austen, her last, unfinished novel (11 chapters) was made into the mini-series "Sanditon". It was recently on PBS.
  • Well, there's a lot of pre-pandemic UK society that I will happily see the end of. Under-resourcing of the health and care sector, a welfare system that provides an inadequate safety net with barriers to access, a "gig economy" which leaves many hard working people without a secure income, a lack of social housing leaving vulnerable people to the mercy of private landlords often providing the least they can get away with for the most the market will allow.

    We might also gain a lot of benefit. Greater capacity for home working and virtual meeting cutting out the amount of commuting and business travel, a recognition of the need for better public transport with greater capacity (even without this pandemic we shouldn't be seeing overpacked trains), a re-balance of what we consider essential with a better balance of wages to support caring industries and other sectors where only a few weeks ago politicians were claiming these workers are unskilled.

    The challenge is for us to come out of this emergency with changes for the better not the worse. With the idiot in No 10 I'm not too hopeful.

    This.

    Well said, Sir.

    Who knows? We might come out of it all with a Socialist government!
    :wink:
  • Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't.

    Life will never again be the same as it was before this fucking disease. Most people agree about that.

    If you happened to like how life was before, it no longer being the same is equivalent to it being ruined. And “never again” is another way of saying “forever”. Hence “ruined forever”.

    I think the person who said you were speaking out of grief is probably right. In which case you, along with a good many others here as well, are going through that infamous 'stages' of bereavement thing, that applies to any huge, cataclysmic change that occurs, and over which we have no control.

    We all have fears of the worst that might happen, knowing that some of it is outside our control. Some of us have shared what we fear. What I fear the most I can do nothing about. Day to day, I only have a dog to care for (outside of church stuff that can be done from home), and that's stressful enough, for all that he's the best company. I can't imagine what that responsibility must feel like for parents with young kids.

  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    I am currently re-reading A Cure For All Diseases by Reginald Hill. It is the second to last book in his Dalziel and Pascoe crime series which dedicated to a group of American Jane Austen fans. It has some relation to Sanditon - the setting is a fictional Yorkshire town called Sandytown - but not having read the original I can't comment on what the relationship is, but it's a good read in its own right. (In my opinion not his best though).
  • Thee is a superb version of Sanditon which was done in the 1970s. Picks up exactly where Jane Austen left off and completed by “another lady”. It is so good you have to read the introduction to know where the original text ends and the new work begins. It doesn’t try to make the story about anything other than social manners - as too many Jane Austen pastiches do. I highly recommend it.
  • And, bright side, all your friends are now unexpectedly isolated too - they'll probably be happy to chat with you and share ideas and let you blow off steam.

    Problem with that is that I’m also supposed to be spending 7 or so hours each day working from home, and my boss has been very understanding about me having the wean with me and said that if I can’t manage it during normal hours he’s happy for me to make up the difference in the evening or overnight.

    So you’re basically trying to do 2 FT jobs in the same day (wrangling a small thing + the usual work). No wonder things are difficult.
  • Well, there's a lot of pre-pandemic UK society that I will happily see the end of. Under-resourcing of the health and care sector, a welfare system that provides an inadequate safety net with barriers to access, a "gig economy" which leaves many hard working people without a secure income, a lack of social housing leaving vulnerable people to the mercy of private landlords often providing the least they can get away with for the most the market will allow.

    We might also gain a lot of benefit. Greater capacity for home working and virtual meeting cutting out the amount of commuting and business travel, a recognition of the need for better public transport with greater capacity (even without this pandemic we shouldn't be seeing overpacked trains), a re-balance of what we consider essential with a better balance of wages to support caring industries and other sectors where only a few weeks ago politicians were claiming these workers are unskilled.

    The challenge is for us to come out of this emergency with changes for the better not the worse. With the idiot in No 10 I'm not too hopeful.

    I note your last para and wish I shared your optimism in the first 2. I think society at large and govt in particular will go “Well, that was awful, wasn’t it? Oh well. Back to normal.”
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    'Appen. But then there are those who point to WW1 as a time when the Powers that Be realised women could do "men's jobs" perfectly well. It did, mind you, take decades for that to work through. The same might perhaps happen through our current crisis wrt perception of the value of particular jobs.
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    Indeed: a recent Economist (now arriving about five days late...) looked at the social changes that came in the wake of previous pandemics: the end of serfdom after the Black Death due to the workforce being in shorter supply and thus able to exercise more bargaining power, and the rise of industrialisation in the wake of the Great Plague.

    This is most definitely world-changing, too. I repeat my earlier prediction that it will mark the start of China as the world's dominant power.
  • mousethief wrote: »
    Maybe the pull-top cans are more prevalent over there than over here. Had a very nice bottle of Chianti Classico last night that required a corkscrew, and was glad I had one to hand.

    Maybe this will help ?

    I don't know how to thank you.
  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    Yes, world-changing indeed. Whether for better, or for worse, remains to be seen.

    China's pretty well up in the pecking order already, I guess, and the US (despite the demented rantings of The Great Orange God-Emperor) is in terminal decline, or so it looks from this side of the Pond.

    Not sure about what's left of Russia - I suspect Uncle Vlad is Biding His Time...

    My sister learnt Mandarin at school (can't recall why). It may come in handy. A few years before that, I had the opportunity (which I didn't take) to learn Russian...
  • And, bright side, all your friends are now unexpectedly isolated too - they'll probably be happy to chat with you and share ideas and let you blow off steam.

    Problem with that is that I’m also supposed to be spending 7 or so hours each day working from home, and my boss has been very understanding about me having the wean with me and said that if I can’t manage it during normal hours he’s happy for me to make up the difference in the evening or overnight.

    So you’re basically trying to do 2 FT jobs in the same day (wrangling a small thing + the usual work). No wonder things are difficult.

    Yep. He's napping now, which helps a bit as it's one less thing to have to worry about. Knowing my luck he'll wake up right in the middle of the Skype meeting I have coming up...
  • I disagree re world changing very much. This is going to be a blip, like 11 Sept, 2001 was, like the various "wars" in follow-up to that. Matters to those related to people who died, kind of a footnote to everyone else. It will not be like the Black Death because this will not revisit us after 12 to 18 months, and repeatedly cycle through after that. Depending on the timing of reliable vaccine of which some are already being double-blind studied. We'll hear first results in a month.

    The economies of the world will come back within 3-5 years. The world is awash in money, alot of it secured in cash the 1% and corporations, the money currently being spent to prop up the economy is less than 5% of the world's economy, in Canada we're told it may be 3%. They will want to prop up economies because the alternative is revolution and chaos. They lose if they don't spend.

    What will happen is the economies will boom tremendously for a bit, because of speculation with the currently idle money which has been hidden for years, and then there will be a lull. Governments will try to get hold of that cash but will be bought off as usual. Just like in 2008We might have another war and rumours of war, because it is a good way for weak leadership to assert itself. The reasons don't matter, they haven't really mattered for most this century so far. They unite people, give the economy something to chew on, and result in employment.

    Our personal worlds may change, some will never be employed in the same jobs, will have much lower income, will have lost loved ones, will not be able to fulfill plans they had, some sectors of the economy will die.

    Where the world will really change is Africa, parts of Asia, parts of South America. Because of limited health services, because of wars and conflict, because of the developed world going to want to exploit it more.

    Homeless, hungry people, those without resources, are the ones suffering locally. Some of them will also die. But we've never really cared about those people on a systems and national level.
  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    Re your last paragraph - maybe, when this passes, we WILL care more...though I'm too old and cynical to be holding my breath.
    :disappointed:

    If we do care more, on national levels, won't that be a positive change for the better?
  • Everything is not ruined forever. It just isn't. Hubris to think we are experiencing unique tragedy. Different than others and less severe frankly then many. And for most of us it's not personal. It's general.

    Our parents and grandparents endured a world war. This virus doesn't come even remotely close to that level of disruption.
    a re-balance of what we consider essential with a better balance of wages to support caring industries and other sectors where only a few weeks ago politicians were claiming these workers are unskilled.

    Unskilled or low-skilled isn't the same as inessential. People who stack shelves in supermarkets are essential, but it's also unskilled work - any normally functional person can be trained to do it in a morning.

    A lot of care work is also unskilled. It doesn't take special skill to be able to bathe an elderly man or trim his toenails. But it's an awful lot more important to that old man than the highly skilled blower of glass ornaments next door.
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    I disagree re world changing very much. This is going to be a blip, like 11 Sept, 2001 was

    I would contend that taking the long view, 911 was a world-changing event, not a blip, and that this is going to change the world a whole lot more than 911.
  • Hardly a blip, I think.
    :cold_sweat:
  • The only practical things 11 Sept 2001 changed was different rules at airports and borders, and vast spending on wars. Day-to-day there's nothing. I see no change from the "reaganomics" and neo-liberal policies and trajectory, and some countries spending absurd amounts on war matériel and deflecting blames for screwing over their citizens.

    But this was merely rhyming with the Cold War, where they did exactly the same things. New people, same bastardy.
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    But this was merely rhyming with the Cold War, where they did exactly the same things. New people, same bastardy.

    911 was nothing like the Cold War. It was asymmetric warfare writ large, with lots of budding terrorists busily taking notes. It massively changed civil liberties in the US and gave governments everywhere an excuse to curtail them. The wars it led to changed the balance of power in the Middle East, fuelled the rise of ISIS, and exposed the vulnerability of Cold War military planning and strategy that had been standard doctrine for 60 years.

  • edited March 2020
    Cold War for Europe and America perhaps, but how many dictatorships, revolutions, wars were part of the CW? I think if I understand it, the argument you're making is that the 11 Sept 2001 attacks changed the USA, or perhaps more precisely put, had Americans begin to share in what they'd previously wrought around the world with their Russian partners in the dance. Which of course is rather interesting: other countries are now influencing outcomes of American elections via manipulation. Tit for tat. Perhaps actual spy agency orchestrated coups to change governments in the USA will be only in movies.
  • EutychusEutychus Shipmate
    The changes went well beyond the USA. It's not all about that particular country getting its comeuppance, you know.
  • I don't think it is comeuppance. I think it's the connected world not allowing isolation. The entire human family on the world gets to share more and more and more. It's equality, and not avoiding effects of national conduct. Which is probably good. That an individual nation cannot operate as if they're special in the world. This virus is a quick example in terms of rapidity of effects, and of which climate change is another which perhaps needs to be as fast to get the attention needed.
  • The effect of 9-11 was as much on what didn't happen as what did happen. The Cold War was over, nations were beginning to think they didn't need as substantial a military infrastructure, the future was looking towards greater liberty and freedom, easing restrictions on borders etc. Then the terrorism that had previously largely been something that was a bit on the news happening somewhere else was in our midst. And, our nations all turned back in on themselves, instead of greater liberty we had to have our shoes inspected to get on a plane (I know, that was because of a different event ... but 9-11 was but one part of a greater movement of jihadist attacks on the West). Many developed a suspicion of others (especially, but not exclusively, Muslims) that would have made McCarthy think people were going a wee bit too far. The rise in xenophobia and insularity within many of our nations, rises in racism and islamophobia, and Brexit and Trump wanting a wall all spring in part from it. It gave a boost to what had been falling military investment, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were direct consequences, Syria and the rise of Da'esh indirect.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    “Lots of people have broken their legs before, and they were fine afterwards. And some people don’t even have legs, for God’s sake. Stop complaining so much about it.” All said while the person who broke their leg five minutes ago is writhing in pain on the floor, not helped at all by the notion that others may have, or have had at some point in the past, it worse.

    I mean, yes twilight I know that when you were a kid things were like you say. But that was normal life for you - you weren’t suddenly thrust into it from a 21st century life without any experience of it or idea of what to do.

    I was surprised to see my name in your post as I've said nothing at all about broken legs and my reminiscing with Antisocial Alto about how isolated we were when we were raising our children wasn't directed at you at all, although, come to think of it, I'm not sure why you think being home with a child and no car for three years was so much easier in the 1970's than it is now. Before I got married and had a child I had my own apartment and busy job in a large city and an extremely active social life. Perhaps not the amazing James Bond style life of international intrigue you must have been living until now, but I wasn't cloistered.

  • AravisAravis Shipmate
    It does take skill to bathe an elderly man, actually, for all sorts of reasons. You can learn to stock a supermarket shelf in a morning. It takes quite a bit longer to complete the essential training to be a home carer, and quite a bit of experience to be a good one. I’ve had ten years of working alongside home carers and they’re really, really undervalued.
  • Yes, skill and so much sensitivity and patience! Good home carers are worth their weight in gold.
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