Social justice

This is just brilliant:

As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.

He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.

The fact that we could talk about Covid without ever mentioning it by name struck me. Others in the waiting room surely heard us, too, and knew what we were talking about. After all, nobody has really forgotten Covid. But what most people have done, collectively, is decide that it is over by fiat; that is, they have ejected Covid from their reality and therefore their vocabulary. “Covid” has become a forbidden word. What has resulted is an unnecessary mystification of the present: gruesome signs of Covid are all around us, as my mechanic saw so clearly, but we are without adequate language to describe it.

[…]

When Trump said that the pandemic would end if we just stopped testing for it, the public was rightly outraged. We were new to the pandemic, not yet fatigued by the inconvenience of caring for others. And so we could easily see through this proposed sleight of hand; we knew that viruses exist even when we don’t go looking for them. But this is exactly the policy that has been universally adopted under a Democratic presidency: almost every method we developed for measuring the true extent of the pandemic in 2020 has been eliminated, not because the threat disappeared but rather to disappear the threat. Just one reliable metric remains, wastewater data, and it reveals the truth: we are still in a biological pandemic, killing and disabling millions. 

[…]

What this sleight of hand conceals is the fact that the social end of the pandemic was manufactured to restart the engine of capital as quickly as possible to quell a newly-radicalized society. At least in the United States, the early pandemic ushered in the most robust social safety net that many of us had seen in our lifetimes: we all received a universal basic income; unemployment benefits doubled; child poverty was cut in half; the changes to manufacturing and travel for which climate activists have been agitating for decades were implemented in the blink of an eye. The lie that bureaucracy is slow and the government’s hands are tied was laid bare. We saw, for the first time, what the state could really do for us when it prioritized people over profits.

Won't somebody think about the children? Well, in the face of certain poverty, at least all these kids won't be exposed to the vanishingly small risk of eventually regretting trans health care. F***ing hypocrites.

The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National party’s amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.

[…]

It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.

Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.

In short, although policies to improve broadband access are important, policies that help ensure the availability of low-cost devices are also essential.

But advocates of digital equity are not the only constituent groups concerned with the supply and accessibility of computing devices. Environmental and labor rights activists advocate for policies that extend the lifecycle of existing devices, which can help to minimize e-waste and protect the viability of the repair and refurbishing labor markets, respectively. Making computer repair cheaper and bolstering secondhand and refurbishing markets better ensures that low-income consumers can afford to maintain the devices they already own and that they can purchase devices as needed (Fosdick, 2012; Islam et al., 2021). Extending the life of a device through repair is often a more affordable choice than purchasing a brand-new device (Svensson-Hoglund et al., 2021). Furthermore, optimizing the lifecycle of existing devices helps exert market pressures on manufacturer's pricing of new devices, helping to keep down the cost of brand new devices (Islam et al., 2021; Leclerc & Badami, 2020). Thus, policies championed to reduce e-waste and protect the right-to-repair (R2R) can also enhance digital equity.

Policies that have mutually beneficial outcomes for different sectors have been described as multisolving innovations (Dearing & Lapinski, 2020). Multisolving innovations can broaden the coalition of activists in support of a given policy issue and can be strategically framed to appeal to constituent bases that might otherwise be disinterested or even antagonistic (e.g., framing environmental policies around health outcomes to appeal to conservatives) to an issue.

From the ABC's summary:

The Albanese government's Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee released its second report recently. […]

The committee made 22 recommendations to the federal government on ways to best improve economic inclusion and create a more equal and prosperous nation.

It said its recommendations had been made with regard to their fiscal impact, their effect on workforce participation, and the long-term sustainability of the social security system.

But the committee said its five priority recommendations were to:

• "Substantially increase JobSeeker" and related working-age payments, and immediately improve the indexation arrangements of the payments.
• Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance to better reflect the high rents actually charged in the private rental market.
• Commit to a "full-scale redesign" of Australia's employment services system to underpin the government's goal of full employment, and to replace the current system, which "worsens economic exclusion" with one that "promotes economic inclusion".
• Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the activity test for the child care subsidy to guarantee access to a minimum three days of high-quality care.
• Renew the culture and practice of Australia's social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

The committee's experts said that last point was really important.

In the first minutes of the new film Judas and the Black Messiah, released Feb. 12, it shows archival footage of the free ambulance service started by the Black Panther Party’s Winston-Salem, N.C., chapter in 1972. And the party’s Illinois chairman Fred Hampton, played by Daniel Kaluuya, sums up the risks of going to a hospital for a Black American, “We think it’s normal for us to go to the hospital with a runny nose and come home in a body bag.”

These scenes are a glimpse at a lesser-known aspect of the Black Panther Party’s community health work of the 1960s and 1970s that has become more widely recognized in recent years. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a new appreciation for the Black Panthers and attempts have been made to recast their image in history and highlight the work they did in their communities, such as serving free breakfast to children and setting up more than a dozen medical clinics nationwide. It’s public health work that also demonstrates the long history of problems activists are still trying to solve today.