Yeah. No idea how well that argument holds up. It's an issue that affects all resources. You need lithium and various metals for renewables, and they need to be periodically replaced.

It's worth saying that there are in fact uranium deposits in France. 76,000 tons have been extracted from 1945 to 2001. Some resources we only pillage the third world for because you don't shit where you eat, but we could actually responsibly do at home (to an extent) if safety, compensation, and environmental clean-ups were guaranteed. Other resources are actually absent in certain countries, which does raise a significant problem to any country that wants to have a communist revolution, decolonize and leave the globalized world economy while preserving modern life standards in important sectors (medicine, energy).

Yeah I do mean energy. Indeed, nuclear energy is big in France and popular among the overall population.

Their stated goal is to eventually go full renewables (0% nuclear in 15-20 years). They want to stop building new plants and eventually close existing ones. Some of the stated reasons are waste, water, an inability to solve climate change, unreliability (such as in 2022 with heat and the war in Ukraine, adding that climate change compounds the heat issue), dangerous accidents, import issues (no uranium in France, therefore does not allow for energy independence), and cost. He's not bad on climate change generally though.

Those were the official reasons I was able to find, I couldn't tell you if there was some kind of ideological stance behind all of it or some kind of sociological explanation that explains their opinions.

He's not the only one, the green party is also against it (0% nuclear in 25 years). The communist party (not communist) likes nuclear energy, the socialist party (not socialist) is kind of split/unclear. The right-wing parties all like nuclear energy. One of the trotskyist parties, the NPA is also anti-nuclear (0% in 10 years), citing Fukushima, Chernobyl, military interventionism in Africa and Asia for uranium, waste, and also call it anti-democratic.

I don't know where to start or how to succintly describe him in a way that properly captures the vibes especially if you don't have a coherent view of the state of French society.

Trotskyist background, leader of the biggest party on the left (which is also the party that's furthest to the left if you only include electoralist parties). Founded said party because the socialist party was too reformist and cozying up with the center/center-right. Likes quoting Lenin and insulting capitalists. Even though he clearly believes electoralism is useful it's clear he has a class-conscious/anticapitalist view of the world. Is pretty well-read and good at giving speeches. His party does not have a democratic structure. People on the center/right try to villify him and say he's uniquely bad, sometimes using quotes that are actually pretty iffy. Anti-NATO, critical of the EU (which he gets plenty of criticism over by people who aren't as left-wing), anti-nuclear. Doesn't want to give weapons to Ukraine. Usually fairly well-liked among young people on the left, is usually considered to have managed to create an "actual" leftist movement à la Bernie Sanders. People on his left, those who think electoralism isn't enough etc. might say that the way the media class and the capitalists are scared of him (and form a united front in attacking and villifying him) is evidence he might actually be a threat to their interests. Part of his electoralist strategy was to try to reach out to the classe populaire in banlieues, get them to vote and all that. Any issue I didn't mention you can probably imagine what his position is.

But why does that line of reasoning not apply to rich YouTubers and Twitch streamers?

If influencers stopped working, their revenue would go down drastically, which can't be said of Rowling. So in a sense they have to work for a living, but they're also so rich that they could stop working if they wanted to. It just seems like they're similar situations.

If you can call an athlete or a movie star labour aristocrats, it seems like that label would also apply to successful authors and influencers. They're all propped up by the industries built around them.

Good point. A rough estimate would be she gets 10% of each of the 600,000,000 $15 Harry Potter books that have been sold worldwide. That comes out to $900,000,000.

A lot of that value came from the many workers involved in the publishing, marketing, translating, printing, shipping, etc. of the books. Did she get the surplus value of their labour? Does intellectual property count as means of production? How is that different from Youtubers and Twitch streamers benefitting from the labour put into their respective platforms?

If intellectual property is valid in at least some sense and she deserves monetary compensation for the sale of Italian translations, why does that not transfer to the licensing for movies and theme parks?

Btw I'm neither defending Rowling nor am I being antagonistic / trying to pull a gotcha or anything. I just think it's interesting.

I live in France.

Looks like 81% of the US population got at least 1 dose, and 17% got an updated (bivalent) booster dose.

81% of the French population got at least 1 dose, and 56% got a booster.

Wack. But I was talking about the attitude of the doctors and pharmacists I've met.

Sorry that happened to you but I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment. We should study the negative side effects of vaccines and take them seriously but two anecdotes outside of a clinical trial is not much more meaningful than a single anecdote. If everybody is vaccinated, you'd expect a bunch of vaccinated people to die or get weird symptoms even if it's completely unrelated to the vaccine. We see patterns everywhere.

In that case, did JKR become a billionaire by being a worker?

The fact that vaccines help prevent the spread of disease is offhandedly mentioned at the very end. This is so wild. Isn't herd immunity a concept most people understand? That vaccines aren't just about you personally?

I'm not high-risk at all and I got my latest booster a few weeks back - upon learning this very shocking fact my GP asked me why in a pretty judgmental way. Same deal when I had to jump through hoops to get my previous booster even though the official government policy in my country was that anyone could get it. Different pharmacies had different interpretations of this very clear policy though and nobody agreed.

I don't live in constant fear of what COVID will do to me personally, but the vibe I get from practicing health workers I interact with is that I'm weird for caring about getting vaccinated and it's getting to me. Like, am I wrong? I don't think I am.

No idea which comments you're talking about, but maybe they just disagree with you? Just repeating the same stuff isn't necessarily going to convince someone - is reciting Leninist theory supposed to be a magic spell to force people to agree with you? If you think it's impossible for somebody to be a communist and oppose Russia in the war, you live in an online bubble.

Keep your cat inside and it won't destroy the ecosystem.