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  • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:42 PM

    RE: mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/1

    OK, a bit on "during the pandemic" and physical vs social facts. Physical facts are things like the properties of gold. and social facts are like does your society use gold as money, do they let people make enough gold to live on and will you die of starvation if you don't have enough gold.

    People die from social facts much more often than they die from physical facts. Rarely does someone fall out of a window without there being a social history of window construction and/or pushing people.

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  • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:46 PM

    So, physical facts: covid is a virus, it is still circulating, people are still being affected by it (stats can be collected on this).

    Social fact 1: the definition of pandemic is a social fact, not a physical fact. WHO, probably the most powerful worldwide entity in this regard, declared covid to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and as far as I know has not retracted that.

    publichealth.com.ng/world-heal

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  • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:49 PM

    Social fact 2: in the US, and really in most or all of the world including eventually China, initial measures against the pandemic were lessened and often eventually given up in favor of "getting people back to work" and similar concerns. The end of these measures against the pandemic is what people talk about as "the pandemic lasted from 2020-2021".

    This is horrible, and it's also a social fact.

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  • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:51 PM

    There is a sense in which people are right to say that the pandemic is not over: this is true by physical facts and social fact 1.

    There is a sense in which people are right to say that the pandemic lasted from 2020-2021. This is the sense in which if society says that special measures are over and now it's time for people to die, then special measures are over and it's time for people to die. This is real and important.

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  • Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
    Oct 16, 2026, 9:54 PM

    I understand the rhetorical purposes being used in this. But social facts embedded in history get more and more difficult to change with rhetoric.

    /fin

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