Post #3774685

2026-07-10 03:26 UTC

"This is a kind of thing that just happens" is pure unexamined cope. This being a sentiment that Rachel Carson penned a notorious polemic against. (See K. Walker's retrospective on same.) It's how such patterns are taken as normal in the same way that younger generations have no conception of what it was like to have swarms of flying insects literally everywhere, dead bugs smeared all over car windshields, because they've grown up in a time when that was no longer a thing. We're all aging into an era where more anecdotal sickness "just happens" to more people, more often and sooner than would have been expected in the eras that came before. We may not have a Laplace daemon's etiology for every known disease, but most certainly ought know, in now the seventh year of an ongoing pandemic, that nothing "just happens" in isolation from preceding conditions. That's not, as the kids say, how any of this works. "I think it is just bad luck." This is cope. 5/6 #LongCovid #Anthropocene #PublicHealth

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@beadsland@beige.party 2026-07-10 03:40

Per Maarten Steenhagen, in his 2022 essay against health supremacism, "Health is one of the most contingent facts about us human beings. Every one of us is always one infection or accident away from acquiring an illness or disability." Health supremacism, importantly, includes the tendency to dismiss certain managed or "mild" conditions as not being "any of the risk factors" for subsequent health conditions, so to maintain ideation of the (even if "flawed") healthy abled body: disability is other people. This a formulation that ought be front of mind when offering commentary on health conditions of other people we happen, however justifiably, to not like or respect. Careful, lest vulnerable people (to wit, all of us) catch strays. "It's, like, ironic..." Yes, indeed. Irony is the term we use for the mismatch between the actual and the apparent. It's not just coincidence. Not "just bad luck". 6/6 #HealthSupremacism #ableism

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