Of all the things you could critique DSA on, this is the hill you’re going to die on? 
DSA deciding to do a mask mandate at this event is unequivocally good and based. Shut the fuck up, you fucking dipshits.
Imagine being this much of a fucking goddamn crybaby about masking. Eat shit, you ableist fucks.
One of the biggest lessons this pandemic has taught me is the astounding number of people for whom leftism is really just performative, and that when push comes to shove, these people will make the biggest fucking stink about having to do something even mildly inconvenient for even a single fucking event or context and show themselves for who they really are.
I don’t consider someone a leftist by default if they can’t even be bothered to care enough about other people to wear a fucking mask, even if it’s mildly inconvenient to them.
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The vaccines reduce the chance of becoming infected moderately, but they don’t prevent infection. They considerably reduce the chance of severe symptoms requiring hospitalization, and the risk of death. However they only reduce the chance of Long Covid, and it’s unclear by how much they reduce it.
Up to date vaccines help a great deal, but they’re not a silver bullet. You still run the risk of long covid.
Whereas if two people are wearing properly fitted N95 masks and one of them has Covid the risk of the other contracting Covid is very, very small.
covid shouldnt be the only reason to be wearing a mask out in public. pollution, pollin, and other diseases basically mean people should be wearing one practically all the time. plus wearing one makes me feel more like a cute femboy uwu
I tell myself i look cyberpunk af wandering around masked up. I don’t but I tell myself I do.
Not getting kicked in the balls by my allergies because I was masking basically anytime i left the house that first summer of covid was kinda revelatory
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please correct your post and put leftists in scare quotes
well you’re talking about people who attends DSA convention, only a few true leftists will be there, most are Berniecrats.
The new elected majority to the NPC (highest body in the org) are of the left/marxist side of the DSA. Now of those you have a lot of neokautskyists and the like but they deserve a little more credit than berniecrats.
does that mean a hard break from the democratic party is more likely to happen?
More likely than before, but like long term; definitely not within the next 2 years. I think this convention was a swing in the direction of people who want a clean/hard break but I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.
neokautskyists? Thats even worse. Ignorance by choice is worse than ignorance due to inexperience.
I honestly don’t know a whole lot about neokauts (I think they are also pro-lenin? Whatever the politics of cosmonaut magazine are) but from what I have seen the organizational strategies they’ll push for are much better than that of “berniecrats”.
If this was about Marxist Unity, calling them Neo-kauts is kinda unfair to them. It’s more like “Kautsky’s writings have things we could learn from, but he was a renegade and Lenin was right about him.” They’ve explicitly said this.
Fwiw I only refer them as neokauts because I see a lot of them identify as such on twitter. But yeah I looked up their onboarding school and they make their members read more lenin than they do kautsky. That might be too revisionist for some people here’s taste but I think them, red star, and even b&r making up a left-majority steering committee is a good thing.
I hate wearing masks but its not fucking hard to do if youre just glad handing a bunch of people in an air conditioned space. As you long as you arnt doing hard work in the sun/humidity theres very little reason to get mad at masking.
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You see that doctor that ran a marathon with a mask on just to prove a point?
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I am always kinda suspect when someone doesn’t want to use protection of any sort. Rubber gloves, safety goggles, seat belts, masks, whatever. Even if you take it off the moment you leave or whatever, it’s just kinda weird when someone asks you to do “the safety thing, even it just a for a little bit” and people bug out
I still can’t fathom why people get so pissed off about wearing masks. I’ve heard tons of explanations but they just slip off my mind. Like just… don’t catch a shitload of respiratory viruses and con crud! The horror!
I still can’t fathom why people get so pissed off about wearing masks.
For the same reason they threw a fit about seat belts and motorcycle helmets. Its a generic “You can’t tell me what to do!” impulse that runs rampant among American libertarians.
impulse that runs rampant among American libertarians.
It didn’t stop with the libertarians.
My partner was fucking healthy before her first and only COVID infection. Also if one includes those “at risk” (old, chronically ill, cancer surviving, diabetic, too young to vaccinate, etc), it’s like 50% of the human population.
I’m pretty sure “at risk” included pretty much all mental health disorders too. I remember reading articles listing those at risk around the time the vaccines came out (and thus around the time of “take your masks off its over” round 1).
Yeah depression and stress both impair your immune system, and given that everyone is depressed and stressed now… 🤮
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Cortisol in the blood, among other things. Descartes was full of shit; the brain and body are connected in an interwoven way.
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/effects-on-body
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Stress factors affect pretty much everything negatively, from weight gain, to schizophrenia, to immune response. So on and so on.
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I mean I don’t want it to be the norm forever, at least not outside of big events where it makes sense, but with covid still going around in waves…
Plus, the way to not have to wear masks in the future is to actually wear them when there is a pandemic and actually tamp down on that shit
At this point I believe it’s just cognitive dissonance, everyone said it was time to stop masking, and repeated a bunch of thought terminating simple explanations as to why, and the mandates all dropped, so it was normalized. Accepting that they should still mask at conventions now has implications for what they should do day to day, at the store, and what they should have done over the past year or two, so they reject the new thing instead of doing some self refelection
Haha my brother just got covid from going to dirty myrtle. It’s not gone people
Nice, fuck American individualist culture
Masks should be required at conventions even if we magically made all covid disappear today. I don’t want your cold, your flu, or your strep either!
Ironically the pandemic has taught me that disease spread is actually much more possible to manage and prevent and we simply choose not to. With a couple years of dedicated effort that isn’t even that difficult as a society we could pretty much eliminate contagious disease. Imagine never getting the flu, or even a cold again. This is the world that capitalism keeps us from.
Yeah, I’ll never travel again without a mask on the airport/plane/train. It fucking sucked to get the crud while I was on vacation, and it was like 50/50 whether I’d get something.
Airports and conventions are like these big petri dishes where everyone tracks in their bugs from all corners of the world and then take them back home. It’s wild that any of them don’t require masks. Convention crud was a meme before covid, and it sucks.
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Oh god I know. I got sick so often when I flew. The only time I’ve left North America in my whole life I spent half of the week I was in London in bed sick. It was awful. Never again.
And I got con crud a bunch of times, too. In fact the only time I didn’t get Con Crud was when I was staffing a kissing booth and we were all swigging vodka between kisses for sanitation reasons.
🫦 kissing booths are not sanitary eww I was young and dumb. If you’re going to do a kissing booth have, like, plastic wrap or something to use as a sanitary barrier. 🫦
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Look we were young and dumb and it was for charity and I looked very pretty in my corset and heels.
Hospitals are even worse and yet somehow I’ve seen like half the people there not wearing masks which is just absolutely wild
fucking love to bring a baby to the hospital for severe respiratory distress as a result of viral infection, and then multiple followups and CT scans after the respiratory distress and every time, the medical staff see our masks and are like damn, do you want us to wear a mask? Hold on I’ll go get one
Masks should be required. We should all wear masks all the time. Source: The Dread Pirate Roberts
Cary Elwes
I know, right?i spent.a good chunk of my 20s trying to channel that.
Buttercup and Wesley are the two genders.
Yeah, influenza B was eradicated locally even with our very performative COVID measures, zero wastewater detection and no confirmed local cases for months on end. Stayed that way until mask mandates were dropped.
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there’s a lot of radical people within DSA, wouldn’t be surprised if this is was because of pressure from them. There’s a movement trying to do a hard break from the democratic party from my understanding, don’t know how big or likely it is to happen though
I think it’s a fair and valid criticism of the DSA. They hold some generally leftist positions, but overall they’re in line with the “progressive” wing of the democratic party.
one could argue it’s a bit of a stretch to even call their community and audience “leftist” to begin with
Sure, but you could say that about any electoralist outfit. They’re still a powerful organizing body and they’ve proven successful at influencing policy by sheer weight of numbers. If you’re going the electoralist route, I’ve seen much worse.
for the slate of candidates that have been out there…
Half the motivating force behind the DSA is the fact that mainstream candidates do suck. Cultivating younger and more radical leadership, then promoting those leaders to high office is a major motivating factor in the movement.
If the only thing that comes out of DSA is a new generation of experienced organizers and leaders, I’d call the community a success.
they kind of burn through key organizers though. it’s hard to be in the org for more than a few years if you actually do work.
That’s what happens when you don’t have a ton of money and leisure time to throw at a project. Not really a DSA issue so much as a general organizing challenge.
DSA is very inclusive
This has great emoji potential.
You know what emojis I want? The bum fights guy and Dr Phil having a stare down
Like this? I just quickly made these.
Incredible. 10/10.
If enough people use a title then that’s what that title means now, even if we hate it and don’t think it should be
This is the coolest thing the DSA has done, that I know of at least. Masks are fucking awesome. I haven’t gotten sick since I started wearing them. Also they hide my face so people cant see me laughing at them and muttering to myself.
Dear leftists that don’t want to mask to protect others (including the vulnerable), please post your sad faces on Twitter so I can at least get a little satisfaction from this pandemic and all the suffering I get from your selfishness.
Even in 2020-2021, during the fucking mask mandates, I had to stop doing heaps of shit I enjoy because you dipshits can’t follow simple requests to save lives. Go watch a film? Nope. Coffee shops? Gone forever. Gyms? None for me. Mass transit and food shopping? Yes because I have to, but fuck I’m terrified. Work? Sadly yes but you fucking need to put the fear of death in me.
Real impressed by all the
armchairs ITT who are the real DSA understanders, not those of us who spent 3 months planning for the convention and pulled 16-18 hour days all weekend trying to improve the org (which we got a good start on) and network with other leftists to bring resources and support back to the workers organizing in our cities. You all are the real leftists, I dont know what we would do without your keyboards.If you weren’t at the commie caucus party at UE hall raising money for striking workers in Erie, if you werent on the picket line supporting striking queer nightclub workers, if you spent this weekend watching anime and still have the energy to post a priori bullshit that you think makes you a radical, save yourself the energy and just
I went through this rigamarole 4 years ago. hope your experience is different but I walked away 1. burnt out and 2. with the sincere impression that the org is beyond salvaging. hope you manage to succeed where we failed but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Sorry to hear about your experiences, comrade. It sounds really frustrating. Ive been put off by orgs before and it feels like a real defeat.
Maybe I’ll learn the same lessons, but this is where my journey has led me so far. And we have helped people form unions and take actions against their bosses, and tonight the mobilized left in my state scored an honest to god (intermediate) victory for reproductive care access. Theres the fight for lgbtq+ especially attacks on trans people. Maybe I can’t change the org but I can organize locally and work with a crew. And I’m in a caucus so I do participate in national DSA politics. Dont hold your breath but the org is changing. I guess what is yet to be seen is what kind of reaction will there be, and from where?
Leftists?
