If the political struggles of the coming months focus on whether to increase/decrease restrictions, and if the people who are for emancipation dig in around restrictions, they will lose massively, for reasons I shouldn't need to point out./1

Social distancing without social (communal, preferably) support is hugely miserable for people and unsustainable. /2

People are desperate -- for income, for freedom, for relation, for space and time, for the schools and gyms to reopen, basically for fucking anything. /3

If all you have for this desperation is moral injunction, don't be surprised if people don't listen. /4

The way social distancing has been done in the US has put the entirety of the burden for managing the epidemic on the people who have the least resources. /5

It has also abjured the kinds of responses that can't be individualized--testing, contact tracing, medical isolation, etc. /6

I'm not saying you shouldn't be outraged by the Florida beaches, I'm saying that it's a trap. /7

It would be better to focus on struggles by workers to stay home, to receive proper PPE, on the rent strike, on the need for a serious medical intervention involving massive testing and tracing, so many other things.

the regime of social distancing isn't an on-off switch. it tries to produce an overall reduction in contacts, by maybe three quarters./9

the problem is that this reduction is massively unevenly distributed. people are already forced to go out-- to work, to shop, to get medicine, to make deliveries. /10

instead of focusing on the legal restrictions on movement, we should think about the kinds of *positive* social structures that would allow us to reduce contact by a given fraction and still meet our needs.

focusing on the people at the beaches or in the parks, playing superego to the Trumpian id, is a really bad idea. please don't do it.