This and that for your Thursday reading. – Stephanie Carvin, Kurt Phillips and Amarnath Amarasingam discuss how anti-vaxx themes in Canada are being pushed and used by the fascist right. Alex Boutilier and Rachel Gilmore highlight how the convoy supported by Scott Moe, Jason Kenney, and so many other right-wing
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Claire Horwell highlights how masking and other continued public health measures to rein in spread to the extent possible are the only way to avoid catastrophic results from the Omicron wave. Mickey Djuric reports on leaked modelling reaching the same conclusion based on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Kuodi et al. find some hopeful evidence that vaccinations may help to prevent long COVID symptoms as well as more acute ones. Nili Kaplan-Myrth rightly questions why safety is being treated as a privilege to be withheld from vulnerable people. And
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Katherine Wu warns that the worst of the Omicron COVID wave may happen even after case counts have peaked as continued spread (facilitated by people relaxing their prevention efforts) batters already-struggling health care systems. And Ingrid Torjeson discusses a new study from
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jim Stanford discusses how Canada’s COVID response has been slanted toward handouts to corporations and demands of workers – and increasingly so as the pandemic has continued. Alison Pennington calls out the cruelty by design in Australia’s similar move toward eliminating pandemic leave
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Sarath Peiris discusses the Saskatchewan Party government’s utterly feckless pandemic response – which they’ve apparently decided to keep in place for the rest of the Omicron wave. And Abdullah Shihipar points out the folly of expecting individual choices to resolve a collective action
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On unearned compensation
One of the most striking recent developments in Saskatchewan’s COVID response has been the disconnect between Scott Moe’s government telling people not to get PCR tests due to their utter failure to provide them, and the Workers’ Compensation Board declaring that nobody will be able to make a claim for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – John Michael McGrath writes that the Omicron wave of COVID may manage to be the most disruptive year, while Alex Press discusses how its effects at an individual level may differ drastically based on one’s income. – Ed Yong warns that the U.S.’
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On voluntary efforts
The past few days have seen the emergence of an effort to build up self-reporting capacity to fill in where provincial governments are choosing to be wilfully blind to COVID caseloads – as well as a response questioning whether people should be willing to provide information to that project. Now,
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Conservative Premier Scott Moe sides with Big Oil campaign, ignores the climate crisis
Regina city councillors proposed legislation to ban advertisements from oil and gas industry. The industry responded with an astroturfing campaign. Here we have yet another example of right-wing politicians supporting powerful oil and gas corporations. These corporations are so powerful that they can shape narratives and create false populist movements.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ben Cohen points out some of the ways the Omicron variant deviates from what we’ve come to assume about COVID-19. And Colin Horgan writes that we should draw lessons from the pandemic in exposing some of the ways our social system is built
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On lockdowns
Richard Raycraft reports on the absurdity that the Libs’ latest excuse for a pandemic support (the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit) is available to precisely zero Canadians even as the Omicron wave crests. But let’s note that the problem with it involves a common set of assumptions between the federal government
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Bush discusses how the latest wave of COVID-19 would have been entirely avoidable if we hadn’t allowed corporate interests to suppress vaccine availability and turn workplaces into super-spreaders, while Andreas Laupacis confirms that we had (and have) more than enough knowledge to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Better late than never
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the running joke in Saskatchewan politics was that whatever NDP leader Ryan Meili pushed for, Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government could be counted on to implement three days later. This of course came after Moe’s party had laughed at the concept of both
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Kai Kupferschmidt reports on the recognition among scientists around the globe that the Omicron COVID variant is almost certain to precipitate another major wave of infections and hospitalizations. CBC News reports on the Ontario COVID19 science table’s recommendation of a circuit breaker to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Bruce Arthur writes about the need for governments’ responses to COVID to adapt to the increased risk posed by the Omicron variant. And Charles Blow writes that he’s understandably lost patience with anti-vaxxers who are endangering us all in the service of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Miquel Oliu-Barton et al. study the effects of different government approaches to COVID-19 – and find that elimination strategies have produced far superior outcomes to attempts to live with uncontrolled community spread. And Andre Picard begs us to stop repeating our mistakes in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Supriya Dwivedi writes about the Groundhog Day-style loop we’re trapped in due to a pandemic which is being allowed to continue and evolve. And while Daniel Wood and Geoff Brumfiel point out how the politicization of the pandemic is resulting in systematically higher
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Crawford Kilian writes that even if the Omicron variant of COVID-19 doesn’t prove as dangerous as it appears, it should serve as a reminder as to why we should be careful to protect everybody’s health and safety. And Andrew Nikiforuk examines the evidence
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On toxic preferences
From the standpoint of any reasonable observer, there’s reason for outrage that Saskatchewan is one of the provinces pushing to undermine federal standards for water pollution from coal mines – especially when the argument being made is that regulations should allow for a certain amount of selenium to be released
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