A few dozen is smaller than millions. It's not minimising, its maths.

I've never heard anyone attempt to debate whether trans people exist, so the meme seems a bit weird.

The 'debate' seems to fall into two camps. Those who question the relationship to biological sex (sports, restrooms, prisons, etc), and those who label all such people as 'deviant' in some way (usually on pseudo-religious grounds or some other spurious right-wing nonsense).

It's pointless conflating the two, they're completely different debates for completely different reason with completely different (often vehemently opposed) groups. And it's pointless pretending either are denying trans people's existence.

If you've got a set of negative beliefs you need to fight against in society you need to actually address those beliefs, not some belief that sounds bad but nobody actually has.

It's not a distraction from the class warfare though. It is the class warfare. The wars, plagues, and destitution are the class warfare.

The sexual exploits of that class are a minor (if appalling) sideline. It affected dozens of young women. And, again, my deepest sympathies to them, but dozens is not millions. The wholesale massacre of an entire nation is not a 'distraction' from a sex scandal. The sex scandal is a distraction from the wholesale massacre of a nation.

The mass exploitation of the poor is the most noteworthy feature of the ruling class. Calling them the Epstein class just makes them sound like their main crime is the exploitation of a few dozen teenagers. Their main crime is the complicity in the massacre and starvation of thousands of children, the impoverishment of millions more.

It's insane that people seriously think this.

Millions of people have been killed, and millions of dollars have been extracted from the poor. There's a genocide actively taking place. Anthropogenic climate change is literally an existential risk. 150 million children are at risk of starvation.

These thing pre-date Epstein, have nothing to do with Epstein, and (with the greatest sympathy to his victims), are way more important than Epstein.

I honestly would rather they burnt the files so the issue could stop taking up news feeds that should be focusing on the far, far more extensive human suffering caused by the aforementioned wars, plagues, and destitution, which, far from being g a manufactured distraction are absolutely fundamental features of Neo-liberal economies.

I agree. I was pointing out that (even if perhaps inadvertently), your post just ends up guilting people who don't do enough activism instead. It turns, not on the problem (reducing carbon emissions), but on your comrades (those who share your concern, but disagree about how best to achieve it).

The responses blaming individuals don't seem to be exculpating corporations. They're just adding a dimension they felt was missing.

Solidarity is about accepting into the fold anyone who agrees with a broad aim and working toward that end.

So anyone concerned about our impact on the planet can work together to minimise it. Some by campaigning to reduce consumption, some by campaigning against corporate overreach, some by campaigning for political parties who have better agendas. And each campaign supports and nurtures the other.

What we get instead are endless (and often furious) arguments between each campaign about how they've got it wrong and their approach will never work.

I suppose in the vein of "the one thing I don't tolerate is intolerance", I'd say the one thing I will always say isn't going to work is telling every other well-meaning activist that their campaign isn't going to work.

(The obvious caveat here is determining 'well-meaning', but hey, no system is perfect)

Yep. Solidarity, collectivism.

Which presumably is why the left wing spends 100% of it's time and energy on purity tests, cancelling, essentailist identity politics, and knee-jerk tribalism...

... classic solidarity-building. We should have this problem sorted in no time.

I don’t understand this argument. On the one had you have sympathy for the average car user who hasn’t the time or resources to struggle with poor transport infrastructure and don’t necessarily have the resources to make preventative purchasing decisions, but then, on the other had you say

Needing to put in the political struggle to take on the corporate interests… takes effort that deviates from your normal life

You don’t seem to have avoided the responsibility being laid at the individual at all. You’ve kept it firmly in the same place. All you’ve done is allowed those individuals to keep their materialistic lifestyle because “It’s OK, I’m an ‘activist’”.

Activism, for most people, is not sacrifice. Its a jolly good day out with a cool social group, sometimes there's even free music, circus acts, the works. You get to waive a flag, and everyone congratulates you on what an amazing person you are.

What's properly amazing is taking a slightly less well-paying job because it's on a bus route, or not going out twice a week so you can afford organic cotton instead of polyester, or avoiding that deal trip to Tibet to meditate with monks to save fuel. Zero social credit, zero visibility.

And if these big companies have the economic system so stitched up that individual choices barely matter, then what on earth makes you think they won't have the political system similarly stitched up so that individual activism doesn't make a difference either?

What losses in revenue? As I said earlier, deaths an hospitalisations were overwhelmingly in older age brackets and poorer neighbourhoods. Companies were compensated for closures, and able to profit enormously from the 'supply chain problems' by price gouging. They made a fortune on the vaccine itself, not to mention the increase in future products off the back of the RNA research. What losses in revenue were on the horizon?

Health insurance costs in America have risen by over 130%, so there’s no evidence of insurance companies offering flu shots to save money, they just demand more premium to cover it.

Far more likely, in my view, is that taking regular vaccines has become a marketable product (for various reasons) which insurance companies have jumped on. Offer the shot, up the premium to cover it (plus a healthy profit). It simple market expansion.

If there’s a market (or one can be fabricated), then there’s a product to sell. If you can add a flu shot, up the premium to cover it, and not lose customers, then it makes sense to do so. Doesn’t have any bearing on whether it works. Same metric would apply to a medicine which did absolutely nothing whatsoever. As long as advertising it justified a rise in premiums larger than the cost of it, and customers don’t jump ship.

This is want I mean by comfortable narratives around medicine. If literally any other industry had added a service to their product, you'd assume it was simply something they thought they could market, and probably be suspicious that it was any use at all. But when a medical company adds a service (and charges more for it) people have to do this mental gymnastics to make the company's actions all for the best in the end.

I don't disagree with your description of events, but you're imposing a reasoning behind them for which there is little evidence. The idea I'm pushing back against is that vaccines (here Covid) and I suppose now Covid policy in general, resulted from some clever metric of keeping people alive because of their income generating value. There's no evidence government works like that, and masses of evidence that government decisions are in fact a mix of submission to industry lobbying, blatant electioneering, and simple incompetence.

Whatever the policies were, they would almost certainly have been whatever the loudest industry lobby, focus group committee, or egotistical politician wanted at the time. Not some sociopathic genius doing life-value calculus.

Why would it matter to them whether they pay out for hospitalisation, or pay out for flu shots? The payouts don't matter. We saw that with the banking crisis. They're covered by bigger insurers who are covered by government bailouts because they're too big to fail. All that matters is that premiums keep coming in.

Insurance companies can write off excess payments anyway. Those making the decisions undoubtedly have hedged portfolios, so if the company they're working for goes under it doesn't matter as long as other companies in their portfolio benefit. Many will even take out short positions on their own failing company and profit from its demise.

Gone are the days when CEOs actually cared if their particular company's on-book expenditures matched its income.

Yeah... Only

1. Covid significantly affected the elderly and those from poorer neighbourhoods. Net draws on government funds, not net producers of income. If the government were being callous capitalists they'd have let covid rip and saved themselves a packet in pension payouts and welfare.
2. The government were widely criticised at the time for not doing enough (too late with lockdown, too lax with mandates). The government cannot simultaneously find it prudent to not care about covid and care terribly that it is kept in check. Their callous calculation should have come out with either 'save everyone' or 'let everyone die'. It can't be both.
3. Pharmaceutical companies made a fortune, as did anyone with shares in them. No one 'paid out' there was no trade off of expense against predicted income. The taxpayer paid for the research, paid for the shots, and paid for the shutdowns. The corporations didn't pay for anything at any time.