My best friend died of COVID. His loved ones weren’t able to be by his side in those last moments, for obvious reasons, and that left a wound that really disrupted my ability to grieve in the wake of his death. If I had been allowed to be there with him, I know that to actually do so would expose myself to a lot of risk, even though it was likely that we had been infected with the same strain of COVID (due to us being bubbled together and falling ill at the same time — me and his housemate had recovered by the time he died, but it would’ve still been risky for us to be there).

Despite this, I honestly don’t know whether I would have been able to stop myself from being there with him at the end. It’s easy to have disdain for people being foolish in this way, but I also have a lot of sympathy for people who make this choice — it’s not necessarily a case of people being unaware of the risk.

I feel like the ideal world would be if there could be collaboration between healthcare workers and members of a community to find a compromise solution that would allow burial practices to be preserved as much as possible, whilst also minimising risk of transmission. I imagine this might look like healthcare workers being involved in the process, rather than simply handing the body over to the family members as would happen if someone died from something other than an infectious disease. It seems like something that should be possible, in theory.

Of course, the problem is that healthcare workers and services are already stretched thin enough as it is, and I don’t imagine they’d have the capacity to even consider doing something like this. I was reading the other day that Trump’s cuts to things like USAID has really impacted the ability to respond to this epidemic

Nerds on this thread may be interested in linguistic research on emoji as gesture by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.

Here’s an open-access academic paper for the mega-nerds out there

With an overview of that article written for a more general audience, in The Conversation

For those who prefer their edutainment in audio format, McCulloch and Gawne’s podcast is a fun and eclectic listen. Here’s the episode on emoji as gesture.

Further Reading

For those wanting to learn more, McCulloch’s 2019 book “Because Internet” is a delightfully fun read that I can strongly recommend. It looks at the wider picture of how the internet has changed communication, with a chapter dedicated to emoji. There’s been a lot of productive discussion (both academic and informal) in this area since then, and McCulloch’s work has been a key factor in driving that.

Also, I’ve not yet read it, but Lauren Gawne has a more recent (2025) book titled "Gesture: a slim guide " that says it’s “suitable for readers of all backgrounds”.

If you’re interested in either of these books, then you should support the authors and purchase the book(s) if you have the means to. Certainly, that’s preferable to downloading it for free from a shadow library like Anna’s Archive(Wikipedia has reliable and up to date links to this site (so you know what sites to avoid, ofc) and pointing you there means I’m not directly linking you to the naughty site.

N.b. I am a biochemist, not a linguist, and so my word-nerdery is purely of the hobbyist variety. I don’t have particular domain knowledge in this area.

Also, this comment is in part because I linked these resources to a friend not too long ago, so I had it mostly to hand.

Glad you’re still here with us. For a variety of reasons, I’m similar. The average person is pretty pro-NHS, but when it comes to politicians, there seems to be a lack of political will to change anything.

I think something that makes it harder is that it’s not just a case of funding (though that is also needed), but a restructuring to reverse some of the insidious privatisation and outsourcing that’s so prevalent these days. Additionally, there needs to be more money put into skilled administrators — whenever there’s talks about cutting the fat from the NHS, pointing the fingers at “unnecessary” administrative staff is an easy tactic, but a lack of skilled administrators means that medical staff have to spend more time filling in forms and chasing up referrals.

A while back, I spent a couple of weeks in hospital despite there being nothing medically wrong with me

My carer had died a few months prior, and social care services were fucking around a lot so I spent a long while without any daily living support at all, except the occasional friend travelling across the country to spend a weekend helping me. A friend who hadn’t heard from me for a while called emergency services, because they were worried I might have tried to kill myself, because the last thing they had heard from me was pretty concerning in that respect (I was in a bad place mental health wise).

When paramedics got there, they found me on the floor, having had a fall. I hadn’t even in a week, and was severely dehydrated. They took me to hospital, got me hydrated and stuff, but then I was in limbo for a while. They couldn’t discharge me, because it wasn’t safe to send me back home without care. But the various services that were meant to be supporting people like me just weren’t working. It was basically like the NHS and social care services being the meme with two versions of spiderman pointing to each other.

And so I took up a valuable hospital bed for multiple weeks, in a place that wasn’t well situated to even support me. It made me so angry because of the inefficiency of it all. It’s all so preventable, but there’s so much inefficiency.

And that’s not even counting all the x-rays I’ve had following a fall that I had because wheelchair services were fucking me around, so I had preventable falls that cost the NHS more money.

Yeah, but my point is that there’s currently a lack of political will to do that

“single payer healthcare is forever”

The chronically underfunded NHS creaks as I weep.

I don’t disagree with her point though. In the UK, after decades of neoliberalism reigning supreme, I am often extremely depressed at how it’s changed things culturally. I was born in the 90s, so all of my life, I have seen the people who are struggling most scrutinised ever closer, and the state becomes more and more like a business.

If the NHS didn’t already exist, I can’t fathom there being political will to implement it right now. There would be far too much outcry over people “reaping rewards from the system despite not contributing to it”. There was that kind of opposition when the NHS was founded too, but far less of it. It was a different world. As I understand it, the Reagan and Thatcher era of politics were a big part of what caused things to change.

Learning the history helps ground me. A political philosopher I read a bunch of last year who influenced me greatly was Frederic Jameson, who advocated that we should “always historicise”, because connecting to our history is a great tool in resisting the cultural logic of late stage capitalism.

Or to put it a different way: the society we live in has a way of making itself seem eternal and immutable, but things have not always been this way, and they need not always remain this way. If AOC spearheaded a campaign that led to single payer healthcare, but the scheme was later repealed, that achievement would still last forever, in that it could serve as a template for those in future.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense. I’m just depressed and trying to clutch at hope. I’d say I don’t know if it’s working, but hey, I’m still alive — that’s something. I should probably get some sleep though

“leftist” means a heckton of different things depending on who you’re asking. Some people strongly feel that “leftist” means something distinct from “someone who is left wing”, whereas others don’t make that distinction. Of that latter category, some people use “leftist” to mean someone who is leftwing in an absolute sense, whereas other people use it in a relative sense, such that they would consider Bernie, who is on the leftmost fringes of a not very left wing (but more left wing than the GOP) party, a leftist.

I agree that when we’re talking about politics, it’s important to try to be precise in what words we use (especially when discussing politicians whose views may have shifted over time, as you highlight). However, the reality is that there is no single, agreed upon definition for terms like “leftist”, and no authority by which we can definitively say who is using it wrong or right.

Even if Bernie isn’t a leftist, he was certainly perceived that way by much of his party, who don’t care about making granular distinctions between “Socialist Democrat” and “leftist” when for the Democrats, both of those collapse down to “way more left wing than we want to go”.

Though I would also note that the person you’re replying to didn’t explicitly state that Bernie was a leftist. This isn’t just me being persnickety — I get that they did heavily imply Bernie was a leftist. The point I’m trying to make is that there are a lot of people who don’t think Bernie is/was a leftist, but, as one of the more left wing people in his party, could have been a passageway towards getting more candidates who are genuinely leftist (and indeed, some of the Dems pushing against Bernie likely shared this view)

Props to you for taking your outrage and funnelling it into something productive. I’m a nightmare for saying “I’ll do it later”, which, of course, means I never will (though I’m getting better at not doing this).

I think it’s more the principle of it than the money

Thanks for the link. There have been a few people in this thread making this point, and I was considering asking them to elaborate so that I can gauge what my risk is from using pip for python. I appreciate you providing a resource so I can go learn more about this

There are plenty of Israelis within Israel who are opposed to Israel’s war crimes and other crimes against humanity. If you doubt this, I recommend checking out the journalistic outlet +972, which has an editorial team of both Israelis and Palestinians, and have been speaking out against the Israeli state since 2010. They’ve written at length about how hard it is to operate within Israel when journalism such as theirs is heavily suppressed, but much of their work is also available in Hebrew, because they aren’t just writing for an international audience

Smart if so. Israel’s only been able to keep up its campaign of aggression because of US support (and I’m not just talking about this most recent war), and this seems like it could help drive a wedge between Israel and the US

It sounds like you’re in the affected area. Please accept my well wishes if that is indeed the case. What’s happening right now is disgusting beyond words, and I appreciate you giving your perspective

Thank you. I love you too

I’m really glad to hear this. FIFA might still be arses about it, but by New Zealand’s team being good sports about this, it will make it easier to hold FIFA accountable

Edit: also props to Mexico for making it clear they’re open to host also

Yeah, I hate the word “crisis” here.

Yeah, it’s a big “worst person you know actually makes a good point” moment

Removed by mod

Eid Mubarak, America.

I’m not glad for this war, but given that it is happening, I gotta admit that I am glad to see US hubris challenged so thoroughly