Quick hits - Boxing & UFC exploitation, & Biden covid-19 callousness
Systems of power are the problem, not individuals
(Boxing great Evander Holyfield, 58, is being pushed into the ring to fight a much younger man on short notice, 17 years after he was banned from competition due to diminished performance)
Whether it’s outside at a rally or online in twitter posts it isn’t uncommon these days to run across signs reading some variation of the following: “If you've ever wondered whether you would have complied during 1930's Germany, now you know.”
If only such protestors weren’t so late to the party of systemic analysis and self-reflection. Alas, these days such messages are likely in reference to masking up or vaccine mandates during this covid-19 pandemic.
I do not have any philosophical or practical opposition to either masking or vaccine mandates, in and of themselves. After all, surgical masking and vaccine mandates have proven public health utility.
I just wish that our U.S. government were doing more than issuing unfunded mandates to actually try and end the pandemic. We’ll have more on that, here, next week.
Back to protesters who’ve suddenly discovered the specter of civil and human rights violations…
If the sleeping citizen Nazi Germany comparison above were referring to our New Jim Crow carceral system, prison slave labor, our domestic spy state, that we commit multiple ongoing genocides abroad, or in reference to our current ethnic concentration camps inside our borders, or how American police kill far more than any other nation on earth’s does, or to our police torture sites, or to voter suppression, attacks on women’s healthcare rights, or the prosecution and torture of journalists and their sources, then it would be onto something. Anyone suddenly worried about authoritarianism because they’re not allowed to cough on a waiter or are told they should consider getting a vaccine is deeply unserious.
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One of the greatest boxers of all-time, Evander Holyfield, was barred from competition New York’s athletic commission in 2004 due to diminished performance. Now, 17 yrs later, at 58, he's fighting a man a decade & a half his junior on short notice in Florida as former President Donald Trump commentates. Everyone involved with this event should be ashamed of themselves.
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(Darren Till after recently losing to Derek Brunson)
UFC contender Darren Till’s team says that he knowingly went into a main event bout the other week with a completely torn ACL in one of his knees, effectively meaning he fought one-legged. He subsequently lost the bout, quickly. If the UFC & MMA on the whole were properly regulated, it would have been public knowledge as soon as Till's ACL was diagnosed as torn, and he wouldn't have been allowed to fight.
If the sport & the UFC weren't particularly exploitative, he wouldn't have had to rely on making that single date in order to keep a roof over his head and food on his family’s table. UFC fighters don’t have salaries, healthcare, pensions, or any employment status rights.
Unlike even elite pro boxers, top MMA pros like those in the UFC are not protected by the Ali Act, and routinely follow through with fights injured instead of having the cards rescheduled for when they’re healthy. If what Till’s team says is true, it’s important to realize that at no point did he face enough medical scrutiny from the promotion or the bodies that could and should regulate the UFC to discern that he was effectively disabled.
Were Till and his colleagues working in an industry that was actually properly regulated and he were still somehow able to fool doctors to avoid diagnosis, pre-fight, both the promotion (the UFC) and his own coaches would be investigated and sanctioned for letting him fight that badly hurt. Sadly, Till does not compete in a industry that is properly regulated with sufficient medical oversight, nor does he work for a company that provides even the most basic of employee safety and financial security measures.
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It was announced earlier this week that today, Friday, the U.S. Senate’s Parliamentarian - an unelected official - would graciously sit and hear arguments as to whether or not Congress people could include a so-called “pathway to citizenship” for young immigrants in the reconciliation package both parties are negotiating. We need no additional reminders of this but if we did such a sick joke of a process would put in stark relief how the United States is not now, nor has it ever been, anything resembling a functioning democracy.
That elected officials in an already patently undemocratic body such as the U.S. Senate would have to defer to an appointed, un-elected bureaucrat on a matter as important as the fate, rights, and very lives of hundreds of thousands of minors and young people says a lot about just how autocratic and undemocratic we are.
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President Joe Biden has been particularly cruel and dystopian lately in his remarks around covid-19. Biden recently continued to blame the pandemic’s persistence in this country on unvaccinated individuals.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin and the refusal has cost all of us,” he said.
That’s rich coming from a man who has refused to open up vaccine patents, grant everyone healthcare, give paid work leave, or sufficient covid cash relief. Blaming individuals who are mostly low-income, working poor who say their biggest reason for vaccine hesitancy is not being able to afford taking even a day off should they experience mild symptoms from the shot, is typical from a power establishment that refuses to do their jobs and give us the support we need with our own funds.
Those who blame the pandemic's persistence in the US on individual behavior probably also believe that riding their bike and separating plastic bottles will end climate crisis. In both cases they are foolishly simply not looking at what the science and data tell us is needed to address our health needs.
I’m vaccinated and tell everyone I can to get vaccinated if they can safely do so. Still, vaccines alone will not end this pandemic.
Unhoused people, poor people, uninsured people are all suffering from higher rates of illness and death from covid than the general population. Lack of income and healthcare directly contribute to people reaching those circumstances.
Getting vaccinated won’t help people who Biden and Congress have allowed run out of unemployment benefits. Getting vaccinated won’t help people who are a part of the crest of mass evictions we’re about to see because Biden and Congress won’t forgive or subsidize rental debt or provide guaranteed free housing even as millions of safe homes go unoccupied.
Vaccinations won’t help families with children who are too young to get vaccinated but who are still able to get sick and are being forced back into under-funded, cramped schools with no air-purifying upgrades, and no surgical masks provided by Democrats and Republicans alike. In short, our government isn’t doing what it needs to to keep us safe, and it’s blaming us for it.