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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
See this Quillette article on how the symptoms of "long Covid" are so variegated that people who claim(ed) to have been suffering from it may have simply been using a topical buzzword to describe the ordinary ennui, malaise, tedium and frustration attendant to modern life. It has not escaped my notice that the demographics most likely to claim to suffer from long Covid are the same demographics most likely to
I'm being a bit cheeky here, because on both occasions I had Covid, I uncontroversially had long Covid symptoms: in the first instance a persistent sore throat, in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away. But the key differences are a) my initial dose of Covid (and I think also my second) was confirmed via antigen test; b) the symptoms I was reporting were extremely specific (as opposed to impossibly vague constructions like "fatigue") and c) the second instance of long Covid went away after a GP prescribed me an inhaler and a course of antibiotics.
I had a persistent (dry) cough for half a year after a non-COVID respiratory illness, and such a thing was never too uncommon among people I knew as they grew older. If after COVID this counts as "long COVID", then long COVID is not as unique or novel a threat as it is made out to be.
I don't think there's anything remotely unique, novel or threatening about long Covid. Sequelae for the flu were known to be a thing for decades before Covid. It's just a rhetorical tool pro-lockdowners only invoke while moving the goalposts when the more relevant metrics aren't producing the desired results.
It's one thing that really annoyed me when arguing with people who were in favour of prolonging lockdowns indefinitely. When Covid death rates started to decline, pro-lockdowners would inevitably resort to "but what about muh long Covid???"
Having gone through it twice now, my response to that is "yeah, it's a bit annoying. Is preventing it worth shutting down the entire country and throwing thousands of people out of work indefinitely? No, obviously not." (Even assuming that NPIs which throw thousands of people out of work indefinitely are even effective at preventing it.)
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My perception was that people thought that the fairly severe post viral disorders that we already know can occur after infections might have had a higher incidence rate for Covid, especially pre-omicron, but the definition got so ridiculously widened so that it included pretty much every person with any kind of lingering effect, if thats a cough, lessened smell or being so debilitated that they can't stand up.
This lead to sinulatanous claims of long covid occuring after something like 5-40% of COVID infections and that it's extremely severe, when in reality it's only that severe in some fraction of a percent of cases and likely isn't meaningfully more common than for other viral infections or the flu.
So did COVID cause a higher rate of post viral disorders or not? Was there anything novel about those disorders? Did some variants cause more severe issues than others? We have fucking idea because all the stats are so thoroughly contaminated that you can't discern anything at all with them being close to 100% noise.
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