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A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.
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The actions of US nurses in recent years have updated my priors against them, for they have gassed themselves up as “essential workers” while posting tikthot dances on social media.
Which is darkly hilarious: Imagine being a bed-ridden patient with a request pending to your nurse while she’s out in the hallway attention-whoring for social media, where you can hear the shitty music being replayed over and over again and thumping through your room again and again (like you’re getting tortured like a prisoner of war), the recurring cacophony of giggles, squeals, shrieks, bumps, and crashes while she repeats takes with her coworkers until they get a sufficiently cUuUuUte take for social media… before she deigns to return to you when she has a spare moment. She’ll roll her eyes, "Ugh, stupid patient, so needy and thirsty. Can't he see I’m a BUSY essential worker."
US white women should know by now that race generally trumps sex when it comes to idpol considerations. If they didn’t know from undergraduate admissions affirmative action statistics, they should at least know from anecdotes such as Central Park Karen.
This has always been a weak argument. People who do stressful work want and need to unwind sometimes. It's why soldiers get rotated out of the front lines rather than being there continuously. The TikTok dances say little to nothing about how busy and essential the nurses were.
On the other hand if you’re really overwhelmed with deathly ill patients, it would seem like you wouldn’t have time to elaborately choreograph and perform dances. And the dances I saw were not the kinds of things you might film in two minutes of spare time between patients. They were highly produced, filmed well, and the costumes were coordinated. No one was out of rhythm or forgot the dance. It had all the hallmarks of something people had put significant time and energy into, had clearly practiced, and had coordinated outfits.
That’s not something that you could reasonably do in between dying patients.
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