Pandemic diary: Year 3

It's now been three years since my first pandemic diary entry on this blog. My previous one was a year ago, when I noted that our government had pretty much abandoned trying to contain the pandemic at all. The official death toll on 1.1.2022 was 1 564. As I write this, the WHO Covid dashboard has our total deaths at about 8 900. In my previous post, I said we'd need to triple our death toll from what was then about 3 000 to reach per capita numbers like Sweden. Well, we've done it.

So what happened? I'll show you. I no longer have screenshotted graphics from our government broadcaster, because they've quit publishing covid statistics. These are from Our World in Data.

The graph below shows the story of our pandemic. For the first year or so, we were very successful at suppressing the pandemic. Deaths were well below the world average, let alone the EU average. We were on par with Asia. Until something changed, and away we went.

In the fall of 2021, our government pretty much decided that we're going to stop suppressing the pandemic. The next graph is from about a week ago, and it shows the consequences of that decision.

Over the past year, covid deaths in Finland have been way higher, per capita, than in the UK or the US. We're also way above the EU average, let alone the world. We simply decided that actually, we're just going to let people die.

The one thing I associate this with, more than anything, is a cheerful media appearance by our very cinematic prime minister. On September 24, she was on the cover of one of our major afternoon papers, with the huge headline: It is time to live!

Obviously it wasn't just one interview: rather, it coincided with a general lifting of restrictions. Masks and distancing are no longer recommended, and in general, people are being encouraged to behave as if there was no pandemic at all. Below you can see the results.

It's actually really interesting to look at all the Nordic countries. First of all, this is the only real frame of reference for assessing Sweden's performance. People in English-speaking countries occasionally make very misleading arguments about Sweden, because they compare Swedish policy outcomes to their own. Surely the comparison point has to be very similar societies, with very different pandemic policies. Below is what it looks like. Frankly, if you think pandemic mortality in Sweden wasn't high, your baseline is wrong.

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So here we are. On New Year's Day 2022, 1 500 people in Finland had died of Covid. Now the number is 9 000. We were doing a world-class job of suppressing the pandemic - until we decided to quit. Almost ten thousand people died, and we're still pretending it isn't happening. Get on the subway today, and there's barely a mask in sight. We're doling out record amounts of sick pay, but even that can't sway the government into doing anything. It is time to live. Except, of course, for the 7 500 people who died after we lifted restrictions.

What's horrible about all this is that this pretence that there's no pandemic is empowering all the worst people. We now have folks who were grumbling about the restrictions claiming that they were never necessary in the first place. It's honestly kind of terrifying that hundreds of thousands of people get sick, thousands die, and there are actual people out here saying that the greatest atrocity was that they weren't allowed to go to the gym or the karaoke bar. It's certainly now easier to understand why the 1918 pandemic seems to have vanished from the historical record.

First it was hoarding pasta and toilet paper, then it was "time to live", i.e. "I don't give a shit who dies, it won't be me". The necropolitics of Covid suggest that we're in for an unbelievably grim time with the climate crisis.

Pandemic diary: March 2022

This is the two-year anniversary of my first ever pandemic diary, and here we are in the third year of Covid. Last fall, Finland more or less decided to abandon our very successful covid strategy, and our government decided that it's time to "live again". There's a good summary of events here. Last time I wrote about this was December, when cases and hospitalizations were rising so fast that there was serious talk of a new lockdown, which mostly came to nothing.

It did affect us in adult education, though, as we were abruptly ordered to change everything in January to online teaching. Our heresy lectures, which would have included my Tolkien lecture, went with that weird pseudo-lockdown; we're now trying them again in October. Who knows what anything will be like then.

Since, though, we've returned to pretending there isn't a pandemic. You can see the results in the graphs below, which are from our government broadcaster. Hospitalization figures are, shall we say, alarming.

And deaths even more so.

I direct your attention to the fact that on New Year, some 1 500 people had died of Covid in Finland. On Friday 25.3. the official count was 2 985, and at this rate we may already have hit 3 000 by the time this post publishes. Sure, that's nowhere near Sweden and their 18 000 deaths; Finland has roughly half the population of Sweden, so we would still have to triple our death toll to get anywhere near out neighbors. But it's pretty sobering to think that half of Finland's Covid deaths have come in just three months in 2022. All because this fall, we decided that containing the pandemic is just too boring and unprofitable for our restaurant industry.

Judging from what I'm seeing on my Instagram, case numbers are only going to go up. It's just bizarre that we're back in a situation where nobody in authority seems to know what to do or want to do anything, and we're all out here trying to work out what kind of risks to take on our own.

Pandemic diary: August

Last time I did one of these was in April, when we were coming down off the totally unnecessary March peak. We've since been suffering through an absolutely tortuous summer, with new heat records and everything, and also the second summer in a row where we pretend the pandemic is over.

At least we're learning something about stuff that went on earlier in the pandemic. There was a really good Twitter thread on masks that I thought really nailed some of the initial confusion on them. We also had so-called experts in this country suggesting that mask mandates could even be dangerous, and the thread I linked goes into this failure of thinking very well.

The Finnish Safety Investigation Authority found that the mixed messaging on masks confused people and delayed the adoption of facemasks, which you can argue led to people dying. It's really worth remembering how much of a shitshow our pandemic response was at times; the mask confusion was preceded by some of our chief health officials telling us the pandemic wouldn't affect us at all, which then led to people flipping out and buying all the toilet paper when they realized the truth.

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Speaking of shitshows, here's the pandemic situation from last Friday.

On July 20th, our health authority guys figured that this is effectively a fourth wave, so, y'know, yay. As you can see, we were well on our way to actually suppressing the damn disease - until some of our countrymen decided that they absolutely have to travel to Russia to see the Finnish men's football team play. You know, Russia, where the delta variant was running totally out of control at the time because they were taking basically no safety measures.

Once these idiots had seen their football game, the Kymenlaakso health authority decided it would be too much of a hassle to actually test all of them when they returned to the country, so they just let them all in. No testing, no quarantines, nothing at all. For some reason we have refused to implement any kind of quarantine measures for people traveling abroad, and now we're facing the consequences.

As a result of these, shall we say, decisions, we are now experiencing a fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic. As cases exploded, the authorities banned most cultural and hobby activities, but, of course, the bars stayed open. Right now, it looks like the wave may have peaked, but schools have barely started, and hospitalizations (blue line below) are ticking upward.

What this amounts to is a colossal human experiment: if we let thousands of young people catch the virus, how long will the epidemic continue, and what will the long-term effect be? It's salutary to remember that we still don't know a whole lot about long Covid in young people. Well, we're going to. Also, I guess if you can't get the vaccine, or are at high risk even if vaccinated, then the current policy is apparently that it sucks to be you.

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As far as I know, adult education will be resuming with masks and distancing, like we did last fall until the situation got way too bad, so we'll be trying to finally deliver our heavy metal lectures this September. We'll see what happens. Personally, I'm quite concerned; it's not just that we have a lot of people acting like the pandemic is over, but also the authorities are asleep at the wheel, or have decided that we're just going to let this go and hope that the vaccines are enough to keep everyone safe.

I'm very much afraid this won't be my last pandemic diary.

Pandemic diary: April

So here we are, over a year from my first covid diary. Just a couple of days after my previous post on the subject, the government announced we would be going into a sort-of-lockdown for most of March, and a week later, the municipal elections were postponed until June. The government then wanted to introduce draconian restrictions on movement, including a curfew for some of the worst-affected areas, but their proposed measures were struck down as unconstitutional and pulled. Luckily, toward the end of March cases started receding, and suddenly, barely over a week since the curfew failed to pass, we started talking about opening everything up again. It's enough to give you whiplash.

As you can see from the graph of confirmed infections, we've brought cases down to approximately where they were before we started opening up again in January. Restaurants and suchlike are now opening again. I think you see where this may well be going.

What's getting lost is that there was no reason for either the December or March-April spikes to happen at all. The only reason they did was, frankly, short-sightedness and stupidity, and of course greed. People died for it.

**

I've mentioned this before, but what I find quite personally hurtful is that I know people who are ostensibly liberal, maintain they support free speech and deliberative democracy - and also believe I shouldn't be writing any of this, because they're on social media sharing messages that say "unless you're a fully accredited academic expert, shut up". I absolutely agree that the vapid opportunism of the right-wing opposition is shameful and stupid, but at the point where even supposedly progressive people are lumping everyone critical of the government with far-right covid deniers, well, I guess authoritarian technocracy doesn't look so bad to you after all, does it?

We transitioned from this directly to the discourse on the postponed elections, which immediately became more of the same. The extreme right tried to spin moving the elections into some kind of communist plot against democracy, which was ridiculous. Quite a lot of people across the political spectrum, however, were very unhappy with how the move was handled, and the apparently total lack of preparation by the responsible state agencies. This then got the government loyalists to declare that these two criticisms are exactly the same: if you think the state hasn't done everything perfectly, you're a far-right extremist. It's really been something.

So yeah, we're certainly learning a lot about our fellow citizens during this pandemic, and so much of it is so much worse than I would have ever expected. I ended up taking a bit of a break from Twitter because of this bullshit, and I feel much better for it. I understand that people are tired and stressed out, because I am too, but some of this behavior has still been absolutely appalling.

**

Anyway I don't have much to say; as I predicted, I'm pretty sure I'll be teaching remotely for the rest of the semester, and I really dislike it. Not being able to see or properly interact with people makes teaching incredibly difficult, and at worst reduces it to a filmed monologue. That's not what I do or want to do. However, the way the employment situation for teachers is, it looks like teaching, whether remotely or in-person, isn't going to be my problem for much longer. There are next to no job openings, and when there are, they're inundated with dozens of applicants. I keep applying for everything I can, and have yet to land a single interview. In several cases, there have been 20-50 people applying for a temporary position of one year, only for the school to give the job to the same person who had it the previous year. So it's hard to see the point of applying at all. The logic seems to be the old classic: you can't get a job because you have no experience, therefore you can't get any experience. I have nothing except a couple of lecture courses to look forward to next fall.

The unavoidable logic seems to be that I need to find another profession. Again. What makes this particularly frustrating is that I keep getting excellent feedback on my teaching. Unfortunately, as in academia, so in teaching it doesn't matter one bit whether or not you're good at your job. I would dearly like to find something where it does matter, but I have no real idea what that could be. Quite frankly, this is all incredibly depressing.

Pandemic diary: February

It's almost been a year now since the pandemic started; my first diary post was last March. The previous one was my end-of-year post, where I talked briefly about the moaning from our event industry. Sadly, a far bigger problem is the restaurant and tourism businesses, who have actually succeeded in lobbying government so hard that despite infections constantly going up and the UK variant of the coronavirus now spreading in Finland, bars and restaurants are open, and there are no effective border controls in terms of testing or quarantine. The result is that cases have barely receded from the Yuletide peak, and are going up again.

It's been demonstrated over and over again that the choice between suppressing the pandemic and protecting the economy was a false one; the countries with the most deaths also took the biggest economic hit, and quite frankly, you do need to have a very strange notion of what the economy is to be very surprised by that. All our economies run on private consumption, after all, and we're not very likely to consume much if it comes with a significant chance of catching a pandemic disease. Right now, I'm afraid we're going to be presenting Act 2 of this fallacy: to spare our hospitality industry some short-term loss, we've abandoned suppressing the pandemic - which means the long-term losses are going to be much greater than they would otherwise have been. In money and in lives.

So far, Finnish pandemic policy has been a weird ride. First we were very slow to take any of this at all seriously; we even had officials telling us that Finland won't be affected at all. We were very late to recommend facemasks or anything like that. Then our government did take action, and as a result of that, the total deaths and economic damage are still of a different order of magnitude than, say, Sweden. But now it looks like our social democrat-led government has decided that the hospitality business is more important than national health, and we'll all be paying for it.

We're also making a fairly big bet on the vaccination program being a success. If it isn't, we may still be dealing with this pandemic next year.

In personal terms, I've already had one lecture course cancelled, and have started teaching business school prep online. The way things look right now, I feel like the only reasonable course of action is to assume that we're not going to be able to teach live all spring. Which absolutely sucks, but here we are. The worst-case scenario in terms of my work is that we're going to stay remote all spring, spend another summer pretending the pandemic went away, and lock down again in the fall. Quite apart from my working life, I would also really, really like to have a social life again, thank you very much, but at this rate that'll be something to look forward to in 2022 - or later.

To finish on an upbeat note, though, at least we've had a proper winter for once! We've had actual snow for well over a month now, with surprising amounts of sunshine. It's been a real joy, especially after the previous winter, which literally felt like five consecutive Novembers.

Stay safe, everyone.

End-of-year: 2020

It feels so weird to think that last December, when I wrote my previous year-end blog post, nobody had any notion of a pandemic, and I just complained about Warhammer. In March, the coronavirus really started to hit, and my teaching for the rest of the spring was cancelled. We eventually got the virus sort of under control, and I was able to do some teaching (with appropriate precautions), until we got into the second wave and I was back distance-teaching over Zoom again.

I did a couple of pandemic diary entries on this blag, but I couldn't be bothered to write one for September, and then decided I might as well do the November one here. There really hasn't been that much to tell, to be honest. We've mostly been keeping to ourselves; our entire social and board-gaming life is on hold, we wear our masks, and are incredulous at the constant bullshit some people keep coming up with to complain about the restrictions. We're very lucky and privileged to be able to live this normally, but I can't wait for this shit to be over.

One of the most striking things that's happened throughout has been far too many people showing their true colors, so to speak. People on the social media have just come up with the most ridiculous nonsense, from sharing whiny posts by superrich promoters angry they can't make even more money to, sadly, totally irresponsible corona trutherism. The end of the year is sort of crystallized for me in a moment from November, when cases were going up dramatically and new restrictions were coming into force. I was having two simultaneous but separate conversations on a messaging app. One was with a person who was very irate that bars were being closed and gigs were being cancelled. The other was with a friend who hadn't been able to spend time with their dying father because of the pandemic. He sadly passed away while the visiting restrictions at the hospital were necessarily draconian, so his family could only be there for brief moments.

I really cannot bring myself to shed any tears for the nightclub owners. You read some of the stuff our event industry puts out, you'd think that the pandemic was something the government invented to make their lives miserable. The selfishness is astounding.

But even more than that, it has at times been unfortunately enlightening to see who can deal like an adult with having to tenporarily restrict your behavior to protect other people. Like I've said before, we are a nation with a permanent hardon for "exceptional circumstances": our nationalism is thoroughly militaristic and dominated by fantasies of past and future wars. And then when people brought up in this culture suffused with imagining collective hardship actually encounter a real-life situation that calls for the virtues that we, as a people, supposedly cultivate, they panic-buy all the toilet paper and peanut butter, and throw a tantrum when someone asks them to wear a simple facemask.

Turns out a pandemic is a hell of a mirror.

**

On to more frivolous things. I already complained about Warhammer last year, but it's only gotten worse since. I talked about Chaos Marines then, but I think it's the loyalists who really underline how absurd 40k is right now.

The first Space Marine codex for 8th edition came out in July 2017. Fairly shortly, they came out with codexes for the Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves and so on as well, which referred back to the vanilla Marine codex. The campaign book Vigilus Defiant came out at the end of 2018, and it had specialist detachment and other rules for Marines. At least some of these rules were then incorporated in the second eighth edition Marine codex, which came out in August 2019. It was shortly followed by the Psychic Awakening book Faith and Fury, which revamped rules for Marine Chaplains and came with a bunch of other stuff as well, and the previous single Chapter codexes were replaced with a line of Codex supplements. Until, of course, 9th edition came along, and the very first codex to be announced was Codex: Space Marines, coming out in 2020.

So from 2017 to 2020, i.e. four years, there have been three Space Marine codexes, two sets of supplementary codexes, and two campaign books with Space Marine rules. This is completely ridiculous. I'm a collector more than a player anyway; the only reason I'm really interested in the rules is because I like the units I build to make at least a little bit of sense. But frankly, at this point the investment required to keep up with the constantly changing rules is way too big. So I'm sticking with eighth edition for the time being.

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Obviously the pandemic put a stop to all our boardgaming activities; when the best way to catch the virus is in confined spaces with lots of talking, gaming is definitely out. So instead we've been playing Here I Stand by email; we started in March, and the game is currently in its third turn (!). Frankly, at this point we can hope that the pandemic will end before the game does, and we can finish it live! However, with next to no social contacts in real life, the email game has been a blessing, and I think I like play-by-email enough to want to do more of it. I'm very grateful to everyone who's participated.

I also managed to play a game of Blood Bowl, and with our Turboleague rules, that's enough for a season! So for the first time since 2012, we have a Turboleague champion. I'm hoping I can keep playing at least one game of Blood Bowl every year - and maybe even win the league one of these days!

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Finally in hobby matters, I want to return to the sort-of New Year's resolution I made last year, to finish modelling projects before starting new ones. I feel like it's been working for me. Hell, I even managed to finish the project that got this whole Warhammer-and-whatnot spree started in the first place. I also made some Renegades and Heretics infantry and tanks, a whole detachment of Adeptus Custodes, and decided to not collect a Sisters of Battle army. It's felt really good. I've still got quite a few unfinished projects lying around, and in pursuit of this notion of finishing things, I've decided to make an additional resolution: in 2021, I'm not buying any new models unless they're part of a project that I already started. So I'm going to stay on the lookout for new figures for my Blood Bowl stands, for instance, but I'm really going to focus on getting stuff done.

Since my several jobs are all academic and mostly social, I've been very grateful to have a hobby where I can work with my hands. It' very therapeutical to concentrate on building or painting something physical and tactile. Next year, I hope to get started on building a proper-sized game board and terrain, just in case we ever actually get to play something again.

I'm also very pleased to say that we managed all of a single session of Cyberpunk 2020 this year! Our Rogue Trader campaign is still ongoing, but because it was 2020 we thought we'd roll up a couple of characters just for the fun of it. We played one ex tempore session before the pandemic. I really can't wait for things to get back to something lile normal again.

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So that was the hobby and pandemic year of 2020. In personal terms, it's now been two years since I quit my PhD. I'm still angry and bitter about the conditions that led to my decision, but I couldn't be happier that I made it. Sure, any kind of financial security or even quasi-semi-permanent employment is nowhere to be found, but at least I now have several years of actual teaching experience that I've gotten paid for, and quite frankly, based on the feedback I've gotten, I'm good at it. This coming spring, I'll be teaching high school history to people applying to study business, and lecturing on the history of heavy metal and the environment - in separate courses! Conditions permitting, I'll probably be giving my first lecture on Tolkien and theology next fall, but it isn't official yet.

To give you an idea of what it's like to be a teacher in Finland, this past year I've worked for seven different employers, and I'm not really making anything like enough money to actually support myself. All that talk about how teachers are supposedly valued and well-paid in this country is, frankly, complete bullshit.

However, this is the trade I have, and I'm going to see if I can make something of it. It's not like switching careers to IT seems to be possible. It's worth reminding myself that when I started this blag in 2007, an unimaginable thirteen years ago, I had no job, no degrees and no notion of any kind of future for myself. Now, several shall we say interesting years and a prison sentence later, I have a university degree, several peer-reviewed papers to my name, a professional certification, and I'm good at my job. Back in 2007, any one of these things would have seemed unimaginable. Life in 2020 is so strange and precarious that it's easy to feel like nothing matters, so I think it's worthwhile to remind oneself that we've come a ways.

On that note, I'd like to wish the three people who read my blog a very happy holiday season, and an excellent new year. I hope we all stay healthy and take a few steps forward next year as well.

Pandemic diary: July

Everyone is acting like the pandemic is over, and I'm not one bit okay with it.

I mean yes, case counts in Finland are way down, so almost all of the official restrictions have been lifted. Restaurants and bars and so on are operating at lower capacity, but to be honest, I'm seeing people flocking to night clubs and karaoke bars and whatnot on the social mediums, and it looks like a recipe for complete disaster. One person in that karaoke bar has the virus, and in about a week or so you've got a lot of contact tracing to do. I just think we're being reckless with this. We've had such a strange trajectory with this: first the official powers told us we'll be fine and the virus won't affect us; then we shut down everything, including an entire province; and now it's like we're pretending the whole thing never happened.

This affects me personally in that I'm due to resume teaching, well, next week! At this time we're cleared to hold public functions with up to 50 people. Given what we now know about how the virus spreads, I'm going to do what I can to make sure we have good air circulation, and I intend to continue wearing a mask on public transport, even though no-one else is. In September, I'll be restarting some of my lectures that usually get an older audience. I'm not qualified to judge if it's safe for them. I hope it is.

Anyway, this is the thing, isn't it; I'm not so much worried about myself, as I feel like I can take precautions and maintain social distancing and so forth. It's other people I'm worried about: not just myself having the virus asymptomatically or something like that, but someone in my audience having it and giving it to others. Obviously there's nothing I can really do to stop this from happening, but it doesn't mean I'm not worried about it.

We're scheduled to start returning to more or less business as usual in August in general. I just hope it isn't too soon, or we'll have a second wave in the fall.

Pandemic diary: May

I didn't write one of these things for April because frankly, I was quite depressed; nothing much was going on; and toward the end of the month I started my university prep course, and it took up all my free time. So I guess this is a bimonthly diary? I hope there won't be too many entries.

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This past month marked my first adventure into online education. This is my fifth spring teaching university prep courses, but with the pandemic, the decision was made to switch to distance education, specifically Zoom. Teaching online is in some ways easier, obviously: you can do it from the comfort of your own home. But in several ways it's much harder than being there in person. I feel that the main issue is the lack of human contact: I spent the vast majority of my time talking to a screen showing my own slides and a picture of myself. Even as a lecturer, you get so much feedback and energy from the audience that it's really draining to teach without any of that. Another issue I find is that students seem to be less engaged with the class at a distance: this year a lot less people did their homework assignments, which showed in the mock exam. Some people didn't even do that! Distance learning may be the future, but it's not here yet. Even in adult education, it takes away so many of our tools as teachers that I am not very enthusiastic about doing more of it. To say nothing of the way in which it magnifies all pre-existing inequalities.

The entrance exam book they chose for the degree program on social change or whatever the faculty of social sciences officially calls yhteiskunnallinen muutos in English was Dr. Paige West's book From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: the Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. It's a really good book and was a delight to teach.

Tuomas Tammisto of the University of Helsinki reviewed the book (PDF), and identified a key unresolved tension in it, so to speak:

West gives a very powerful critique of neoliberalism and especially of certification schemes, which seek to solve problems created by neoliberal practices by adhering to the very same practices that brought the problems in the first place. However Harvey’s theories of accumulation by dispossession could have been problematized more in the light of West’s own rich material, as the Gimi are – as she herself notes (p. 246) – owners of their own land and means of production and incorporate commodities into their own moral economy that does not follow a capitalist logic.

I think the same is true for several other sections of the book as well: there's a very well-argued theoretical case and really good ethnographic material, but the two don't always meet like you'd expect them to. I was slightly puzzled by the seventh chapter, where the author interviews several Western coffee marketers, who sell Papuan coffee with fantasy images of primitive Papuans. Several of them explain this away by saying that they have to do this, that this is just how things are now.

Dr. West takes this as confirmation that the advent of neoliberalism changed the way coffee is marketed, and I think she's right; but I can't help but think that there's a real missed opportunity here. Personally, as a social scientist, whenever someone says they "have to" do something a certain way, that there's no choice, I know I've found something interesting that needs looking into. In the earlier chapters, and indeed later in the same chapter, the book talks extensively about virtualism: how coffee marketers produce consumers. This angle is entirely absent in the interviews with the marketers; suddenly instead of consumers being produced, the marketers are simply responding to the dictates of the marketplace. I at least was left with an uncomfortable uncertainty as to whether we were meant to be reading this ironically, or whether the author was momentarily abandoning virtualism to hammer home a point about neoliberalism. Either way, there was a an opportunity there for an interesting analysis, which was not taken.

In her account of the pacification of the Papua-New Guinea highlands, Dr. West drops a reference to James Scott. Now, I'm a big Scott fan; discovering his work made a huge difference to my master's thesis back in the day. I had several thoughts about possible intersections of Papua-New Guinea and his work, but the biggest one is that I think the role of the state in coffee in Papua ends up being somewhat neglected in the book. We hear quite a bit about the Australian state's activities during the colonial period when they were in charge of Papua-New Guinea, but after independence, the focus of the book shifts to neoliberalism and global capitalism, which is certainly necessary, but the state drops out of the picture.

In one of the chapters, we had a look at the economic programs envisioned for an independent Papua-New Guinea, that stressed development on national terms. What happened to all that, and how did the state then end up running an economy driven so strongly by mining in Bougainville that the rebellion there apparently crashed it altogether? We then get the all-too-familiar story of the various international financial instìtutions stepping in with their structural adjustment programs, miring the country in permanent recession. But where was the Papuan state in all this? In general, the "development state", the idea that the state's job is to ensure economic development, is a thread that runs through the history of coffee in PNG. I think the overall argument of the book would have been made even stronger by highlighting that the British-Australian colonial state, the independent Papuan state and the structural development programs are a continuity of Scottian "schemes to improve the human condition" forced on the people of Papua-New Guinea. In a sense, isn't that what coffee certification is as well?

This is part of my fundamental disagreement with the various Marxist-derived world system analyses: they generally tend to neglect the state. Obviously for Marx himself, the state was simply a tool of class interests, and this carried over into the work of his followers. As a military historian, it's quite difficult to accept a worldview in which the state is elided from politics and the economy. I think we can see the influence of this in the way that we treat climate change as a global, corporate and individual problem, but seem to really struggle with treating it as something fundamentally driven by the development state.

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In addition to the prep course, I will say I've got a bunch of painting done! I finally finished painting Star Wars: Rebellion, a project I started in the summer of 2018 and that got me back into all this nonsense in the first place. I also finished a Renegades and Heretics detachment and some Custodians, all of which were a lot of fun. I've referred back to my new year's resolution to actually finish projects several times, but I feel like it's made a difference, and it's made me feel better about my hobbying.

We also got the news that there's going to be a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 again, amd to be honest, I really don't care. We've played eighth edition a couple of times, it's been fun; I'm sticking with it. So far, I've played 2nd, 3rd and 8th edition; maybe that means I'll eventually cave, play 9th ed and then get back to this in what, 15th edition?

We also started playing Here I Stand by email, which has been very interesting. As I write this, we're in the middle of the second turn; a report on the first turn is here. We're currently almost managing a turn a month, so unless the game ends surprisingly early, we may be at it for quite a while...

**

Anyway that's it from us for April and May. I have a whole bunch of lecture courses arranged for next fall; it'll be interesting to see if we can actually make them happen, or if I'll be doing more Zooming. Again, I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy.

Pandemic diary: March

Now that there's a pandemic, several people have said we should write diaries. I already have this blog, so why not.

In my mind, our pandemic experience starts on March 9, when we took the boat to Sweden. We'd booked the trip on Silja Serenade ages ago, and there was no official word at the time on any travel restrictions. I was also quite keen to visit our friendly overseas gaming store and pick up a copy of Star Wars: Armada for 75% of what it costs in Helsinki. Given that it was a Monday departure, the ship was surprisingly crowded. We mostly kept to ourselves and tried to practice good hygiene, and had a nice, quiet trip to rainy Stockholm and back. I had an excellent lasagna at Michelangelo's in the Old Town, where they have a printout from Puma Swede's Instagram on the wall.

The trip turned out to be kind of a blessing in disguise. I had a regular cold shortly before it, but with all the talk about covid-19 and so on, I was a little bit nervous about continuing my teaching. Next Monday we were due to start the second run of our history of heavy metal lecture course in Kallio, and that Wednesday I was supposed to give my next lecture on the history of Britain in Hamina. The course in Hamina is specifically for pensioners, and the average age is well into the risk group for covid-19, but I was already anxious enough about giving them my cold. I loved giving those lectures, they were a great crowd, so I didn't want to skip out on them either. The issue was resolved when our government advised that everyone who's been abroad should quarantine themselves for two weeks. Shortly after my lectures were cancelled, both the Helsinki and Hamina adult education institutes were shut down.

Speaking of our government, the current cabinet has really risen to the occasion. At first both our politicians and civil servants took a very bizarre and frankly irresponsible line of trying to assure everyone that we would be fine and nothing was going to happen. One of our chief health officials even said we would only have "some individual cases". Of course, in a country where no-one is ever responsible for anything, you can say anything. There's a far more learned critique than mine here (in Finnish). After this initial nonsense, though, they've done very well and been decisive. I can't sufficiently express how delighted and relieved I am that we kicked the previous clowns out. Had the elections gone differently, we might still be ruled by the most incompetent peacetime prime minister in history: a religious fanatic and idiot. Not to mention his buddies the fascists. They'd be setting up concentration camps.

It's difficult to not feel a real sense of horror at what's going on in the UK and US. If anyone had written a satire say five years ago, where the president of the United States is a completely debile reality-tv con man who seriously suggests forcing Americans to go to work in a pandemic to save the stock market, and his sycophants solemnly declare that maybe the elderly need to die for the great leader's hotels and portfolio, I would have thought it vulgar and unrealistic. Shows what I know. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to live in these idiocracies, and genuinely terrified of what might happen.

A lot of people are struggling with social media and news in the middle of all this, and I get it. It's a fine line for media to walk between keeping people informed and stoking panic. For example, I read the Guardian online regularly, and I have to say I don't like the entire front page being nothing but coronavirus news. I mean yes, it's a pandemic. But there are also other things happening in the world, and I don't think it does much good for anyone's mental health to be bombarded with black backgrounds and huge headlines on the latest covid mortality.

The social media have been interesting. I'm happy to say I wasn't following anyone on anywhere who spreads disinformation, but what I didn't expect were the people who took this occasion to unleash their inner authoritarian. It's quite something to see people who previously self-identified as whatever particular shade of left-anarchist or something like that take to the social mediums to scream "shut up and obey" at anyone with the slightest criticism of the official response. Even a pandemic is not a time when we suspend democracy and discussion, no matter how badly someone's inner commissar wants to. The serial trolling and disruption the far right get up to even in these times is another thing entirely, but if you can't tell the two apart, well. Like the Finnish joke goes, if you can't tell the difference between a cow's ass and a mailbox, I'm not sending you to post a letter.

On a more personal level, we've effectively been self-quarantineing since we got back from Sweden. I made one last trip to the university library the day before it closed, and since then it's been groceries and the occasional walk, all while maintaining social distancing. We've obviously cancelled all our board- and tabletop gaming and are trying Here I Stand by email; it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I'm experimenting with shopping at the 24-hour supermarket nearby. It's a bit of a walk, but it's very quiet there after midnight. The infuriating thing is that there are constant shortages. Not because of any disruptions in supply, but because my idiot countrymen are hoarding everything. On one particular day, the bastards had cleared out all the peanut butter. Peanut butter! The only thing more ridiculous was the great toilet paper panic, which as near as I can tell was based solely on news and social media posts of people hoarding toilet paper abroad. We as a nation have a permanent hard-on for "exceptional circumstances", and then when they actually come about we go berserk over toilet paper. We are a very silly people.

I'll admit that I've been feeling some anxiety, and apart from midnight walks to the grocery store and the occasional spot of cooking, have struggled to be particularly useful or productive. I'm obviously worried about my parents and some of my friends, especially my colleague in lockdown in Italy, but I also have some very bad childhood experiences related to calling in sick, and having to cancel lectures brought them back very strongly. Even now with my employers shut down and my courses cancelled, I feel like I should be working and everyone is angry at me for skipping out. I know it's stupid, but there you are. I've already rescheduled some lectures for August, but we'll see. I think we're in this for the long haul, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some movement and socializing restrictions in place well past summer.

But at least for now we've been reasonably healthy, and I'm getting some painting done. Some parts of my previous life, which has always mostly felt wasted, turn out to have been surprisingly good preparation for a pandemic. Keeping very late hours and walking around deserted suburbs at night? Now useful experience for midnight grocery runs. Mentally habituating myself to extreme feelings of loneliness? Incomparably useful, and also now there are no social events to feel left out of. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to past me for buying boxes and boxes of miniatures without the least inkling of when I'd ever have the time to build them, let alone paint them. Well, that time is now.

Anyway I expect I'll be doing several more of these. I hope anyone who reads this is well and stays that way. Happy quarantine, everyone!