#at least european countries HAVE social safety nets | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

writingonesdreams · 2 years ago

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I take you consider capitalism to be good because your country must have had some terrible experiences with communism. However, your capitalism (where you have "support for ill, weak, disabled, unemployed, healthcare") is not America's capitalism. You live a "softer" capitalism. Capitalism IS the root of most bad things (inequality, market failure, damage to the environment, short-termism, excess materialism and boom and bust economic cycles). Do yu realise there are other socioeconomic systems?

Yes, a friend has recently brought this miscommunication to my attention. What we call capitalism in EU is something different in USA. That does seem more ruthless without a social system safety net, money for the unemployed, and no free universities - I love that about EU.

Though I would mention that the social system we are supposed to have works only in western EU countries, while the former east block countries' system isn't working. The support you get won't even buy you breakfast. But at least the theory looks good.

It's still much much better than communism or anything else out there.

I disagree with seeing capitalism as the root of "most bad things". Capitalism enables free market. (Though checks against monopolism should be in place, cause that leads to unfairness on the market). Inequality? People should have the same rights, but we are not all equal. Why should people that work have the same money as those who are lazy to? Capitalism is fair in this.

It does have its flaws, that's why the social system (the whole taking care of sick, disabled, old, young + environment care, worker rights etc) should be in place to help with them. But softer capitalism with a working social system is the best we have so far. Other systems exits, but nothing is better.

Maybe if there was such a thing as universal income, so no one would be forced to work a job they don't like, with lots of technological advancement for menial work - I think that could be better, but the implementation is long in coming. For what it's worth, I don't like the emphasis on productivity and performance and on money instead of following one's own interests and doing things out of inner motivation and joy. But I still think it's possible in capitalism to build yourself a life you want.

I just really hate seeing out of context american exclamations that capitalism is the worst evil on earth, when it saved us from the idiocy of communism that preached equality, so there was no reason to work, to strife, to be better, to want anything, cause everyone had the same bare minimum to survive.

I also don't like the whole "I'm a victim and hate the system for what it doesn't give me", cause it takes from the agency of human beings. World isn't fair and you shouldn't be expecting anyone to be taking care of you. If you don't like how you live, you have to change it. The responsibility falls on you and not on the system. Anything is possible if you truly want it and make active steps to reach it. My parents worked their skin off to have the company and wealth they have now. I had to learn two different languages and change schools when I couldn't say more than hi, to have a chance at better life. I spend more time on the road than with my friends. I changed faculties 2x times to find the subject I love with all my heart. It isn't an easy road and it's by no means fair.

Was it fair european countries handed Slovakia over to Hitler, when he asked? Was it fair Russia occupied us for 40 years in terrible dictatorship halting out progress with socialism, while the rest of the world bloomed with capitalism? Was it fair they would shoot you for wanting to visit another country outside of the block or not being at work on time? Is it fair that western Germany still sees eastern Germany as lesser, for the suffering they were subjected to? Is it fair that you have to learn English to be a person on the world market and on the web, cause English dominates everything?

Is it fair that Russia is shooting at Ukrianians and people in EU are angry Ukrainians don't let them, cause then there could be "peace"? It it fair USA and NATO promised to help and could stop the war in a day, but they would rather let millions of people die, cause economically weaker EU is to their benefit? I don't understand why USA isn't helping, they are happy to fly to any other world conflict there is (and they have a contract of protection with Ukriane, although the latter isn't in NATO or EU).

There is so much unfairness, inequality and "evil" in the world that has little to do with capitalism. At least it allows for freedom and agency, cause the responsibility is on you. Do whatever you want with it.

Those are my opinions, based on information I have. I'm open to discussion.

#politics #ask #capitalism #war #mind the tags

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piduai · 3 years ago

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Just out of interest, queen, re: choosing a profitable profession, how do you feel about majoring in psychology? Since you ended up in a differently field in the end.

psychology is definitely a risky field, mostly because it requires commitment and a phd if you want to be taken seriously. not like it's impossible to make bank through it, quite the contrary - therapy isn't cheap, but again you do need to bust your ass and consider your circumstances if you want to come close to that. and it severely depends on the location too, are you in new york where every second flea on a garbage rat's body is in ✨therapy✨ and "professionals" are dime a dozen? are you somewhere in a small ass underdeveloped eastern european town where going to th*rapy is more shameful than being HIV+? do you have enough empathy, skin thick enough to engage with people's darkest sides without letting it break you but also without being a condescending ass? it's not like you'll have a constant stream of clients if you suck at listening to people, you know. it's an emotionally demanding job. and again while you can make good money with it if you bust your ass or get lucky, or find ways to apply your degree in different fields, you also risk facing unemployment. and psychology as a field is rather new so it really, really depends on the place, not every therapist wants to be stuck with absolute nut cases - which is what you'll get in places where it's not normalized lol.

as for me, i'm a special case. it's not like i dreamed about being able to help sadlets since i was a wee child, i went with this major because it was offered to me - i got to study overseas, didn't pay a penny for my education, got a good monetary scholarship and free housing. i chose psych because it seemed more interesting than the other options (all related to welfare), but i never seriously planned on making it a career. if my plan to fuck off overseas flopped i would have gone to med school, but after high school i managed to get into 2 different foreign unis so i rolled with it, my priority was immigration rather than a good start up for a stable career (getting into a seedier field is much easier than a ✨prestigious✨ one as a foreigner, especially if you're like me and simply do not have means to pay for that and have to rely on scholarships and on being smart). but i'm also aware that the regular person plans to stay in the country where they were born, so in that case i think it's best to go with something fool-proof - as long as the fresh and unexperienced youth is unsure about what they want to do, i mean. of course, if you were raised with a Dream at your mother's teat about being a social worker or whatever power to you, chase it, but it's rare for a young person nowadays to know what they want to do with their life at 17 because the career choice is overwhelmingly wide while half of them aren't particularly lucrative to begin with.

it just really depends on the person. if you have a safety net in the face of a well-off family or at least a family that loves you enough to support you if you can't find employment after you realized that you were wrong in choosing a career then you have more room for error. if you have no safety net and no place to go back to and have to be self-reliant from a young age in order to survive, then each mistake will have a bigger toll on you. i just like to consider the worst case scenario as the default because the solution will be a blanket statement automatically. of course it's not the end of the world if you set for a major that you end up hating, it's possible to end up working in fields that have nothing to do with it and live comfortably. but it's still better and more safe to have options and for your education to be relevant to your job.

#anon

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unmanlygrief · 9 months ago

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i think i've realized that i will never fit in in europe because at my core i am pure red-blooded american trailer trash. my skater boy father and goth mother eloped at a roadside hitchin' post in idaho. i was conceived that night in a trashy motel with a coin-operated vibrating bed and when i was born my parents brought me home to a trailer in "crackima" washington. there's a photo of me as a child in the backyard of a house that my parents would later lose after filing for bankruptcy, playing with an empty beer can in a plastic kiddie pool. i think that europeans (at least in western european social democratic countries) feel the distinctions of class less strongly than americans these days. because they have a stronger social safety net, essentially everyone is middle class (except for the immigrants, but i can't really speak to their experience). there's no "excuse" to be low class, so they expect everyone to conduct themselves with a certain degree of sophistication. well i reject sophistication! long live tackiness!

god i wish i could take these little austrian kids to las vegas, i need them to experience the tragic beauty of american culture. but they could never understand

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phroyd · 5 years ago

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I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world.

The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them.

And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots?

Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union.

So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die.

(The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.)

Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set.

That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close.

And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people.

That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it.

How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings.

People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else?

The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else?

A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either.

What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us.

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest?

A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period.

That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this.

People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have.

People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones.

The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to?

Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish.

(Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food.

As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?)

That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to.

A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that.

You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own.

They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist.

And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse.

Umair December 2019

Phroyd

#decline #superpowers

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some-jw-things · 4 years ago

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So I’m not all that familiar with this religion, but after seeing it explained isn’t there some legal course you could take to try and get it dismantled? Or at the very least make it easier to escape for those who want to?

I don’t think having the Society legally dismantled would help anything. Jehovah’s Witnesses are already outright or functionally banned in like a half dozen countries. In countries with mandatory military service, they go straight to jail. In countries imposing a temporary draft, they go straight to jail. This really only makes things worse

The most famous ongoing case is the situation with Russia. Jehovah’s Witnesses are classified as extremist and under ban there. Imo from reading about it, it wasn’t actually about them being a doomsday cult. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t vote and it sounds like Putin realized he had a population of thousands of people in his country where not a single one of them had voted for him. And the result of the ban has been the European Court of Human Rights going to bat in favor of JWs, all members of the Org going underground and into hiding, and some really shitty treatment of members.

That narrative has been used to further JWs’ persecution complex. If they’re being mistreated by “the world,” then that means they truly are God’s people and all the prophesies are right. It means everyone in the world is cruel and hateful. It means that only Jehovah’s Witnesses have love among themselves and you can only find happiness within the Org. A religious ban validates every single thing the Org tells its members and also actually fulfills several specific details of their doomsday prophecies. Also— being in hiding, only able to trust other cult members, unable to speak about the religion casually and hearing about pillars of your community be held by the state and tortured— is a really great way to make sure you don’t criticize the group you’re part of. Jehovah’s Witnesses already forbid members from listening to ex-members’ criticisms, and saying something negative about the Org is called apostasy— arguably the biggest sin they have. All serious sins are punished with disfellowshipping, aka shunning. I have to imagine that in that situation, most JWs are on way higher alert than normal to look out for apostates or potential false Witnesses

Religious bans hurt a lot of people, help no one, and make active members leaving a whole lot harder. Also in places like China where preaching/missionary work is banned.... they just find a way around it. They’re extremely careful and get visas to “teach English” and keep the fact that they are JWs secret

Legally, the only thing I want done about Jehovah’s Witnesses is governments actually fucking investigating their sex abuse database and also judges to stop letting kids be killed for their parents’ religion. A minor cannot freely consent to give up their life when every adult in their life (who they are dependent on) is pressuring them to, especially given that they wouldn’t have much of a life left if they refused. That’s not a free choice. Free acceptance of a blood transfusion isn’t safe and would be life-ruining, but refusal leads to immediate death. I know if I had been in that situation at 17, I would have chosen to die for my family’s sake, even though I no longer believed in the religion and desperately wanted out. Plus a ban on child marriage, which isn’t directly a JW issue, but it’s not disconnected either

Though on making it easier to leave: there was a bit of discussion like a few years ago about the idea of ex-cult safe houses. It wasn’t really a serious discussion, due to everyone participating being broke traumatized teenagers, but in an ideal world, I’d like to see that happen. It would be infinitely easier to leave a cult if you had somewhere to leave to.

Cults isolate their members. JWs forbid members from socializing with anyone not in the cult, with the only exception being for preaching. Most JWs are only close with other cult members and have no social safety net beyond that. There is no one who’s house you could crash at, even temporarily. Some have managed to get put in foster care, but with me, I didn’t even realize that was an option until I was over eighteen. That leaves homelessness or shelters as the only remaining options. When I first cut ties, I figured a homeless shelter would be a worse situation than the one I was already in, and I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking a spot at a battered women’s shelter. My situation isn’t exactly the sort of thing those places are meant for

But if there were even just a few ex-cult safe houses in like major hubs, then there would be somewhere to go to. I think there would be a real benefit in that for a lot of people.

There’s also been a few documentaries made about JWs in recent years, some of them focusing mainly on the sex abuse cover up. That’s great for awareness, but in an ideal world, more awareness would go with outreach. This is mainly a mental health reform thing, especially in schools, but there need to be other spaces that offer that too, esp children’s spaces. More JW kids are homeschooled than not. There should be ways to reach out for help, confidentially and for free

#csa tw #ask #ex jw #ex cult #apostate #ex jehovah’s witness #christianity #religion #exjw

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glorianas · 4 years ago

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i mean given that most european states, monarchy or not, have a pretty robust social safety net, at least in comparison to the u.s, i think it’s hard to say whether the revolution really cemented france’s social democracy

and also france is a racist nightmare country so like

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 5, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Last night, in a speech to honor Independence Day, President Joe Biden used his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to defend democracy.

Biden urged people to remember where we were just a year ago, and to “think about how far we’ve come.” “From… silent streets to crowded parade routes lined with people waving American flags; from empty stadiums and arenas to fans back to their seats cheering together again; from families pressing hands against a window to grandparents hugging their grandchildren once again. We’re back traveling again. We’re back seeing one another again. Businesses are opening and hiring again. We’re seeing record job creation and record economic growth—the best in four decades and, I might add, the best in the world.”

The president was referring, in part, to the jobs report that came out on Friday, showing that the nation added a robust 850,000 non-farm jobs in June.

But he was also talking about how the United States of America took on the problem of the pandemic. Coming after two generations of lawmakers who refused to use federal power to help ordinary Americans, Biden used the pandemic to prove to Americans that the federal government could, indeed, work for everyone.

The former president downplayed the pandemic and flip-flopped on basic public health measures like masking and distancing. Unlike most European and Asian countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the Trump Administration sidelined the country's public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, considered to be the top national public health agency in the world. Trump downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus out of fear of hurting the stock market, and turned over to states the process of dealing with this unprecedented crisis. The U.S. led the world in COVID-19 deaths. More than 603,000 Americans have died so far.

When he took office, Biden had already begun to use the government response to coronavirus as a way to show that democracy could rise to the occasion of protecting its people. The day before his inauguration, President Biden held a memorial for the 400,000 who had, to that date, died of COVID-19. He put Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a renowned infectious disease expert, at the head of the CDC and reinstated the CDC at the head of the public health response to the pandemic. And he made vaccines accessible to all Americans. Fifty-eight percent of American adults have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus; 67% have had at least one shot. The U.S. has one of the highest vaccine rates in the world and is helping to vaccinate those in other countries, as well.

Biden recalled that the United States of America was based not on religion or hereditary monarchy, but on an idea: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights—among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We have never lived up to that ideal, of course, but we have never abandoned it, either. Those principles, he said, “continue to animate us, and they remind us what, at our best, we as Americans believe: We, Americans—we believe in honesty and decency, in treating everyone with dignity and respect, giving everyone a fair shot, demonizing no one, giving hate no safe harbor, and leaving no one behind.”

But, he said, democracy isn’t top down. “Each day, we’re reminded there’s nothing guaranteed about our democracy, nothing guaranteed about our way of life,” he said. “We have to fight for it, defend it, earn it…. It’s up to all of us to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right.... to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come… the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given [talent] can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”

Biden’s speech recalled that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June 5, 1944, upon the fall of Rome during World War II. It was Italian leader Benito Mussolini who articulated the ideals of fascism after World War I, envisioning a hierarchical world in which economic and political leaders worked together to lead the masses forward by welding them into a nationalistic, militaristic force.

In his 1944 speech, FDR was careful to explain to Americans how they were different from the Italian fascists. He talked about “Nazi overlords” and “fascist puppets.” Then, in contrast to the fascists’ racial hierarchies, FDR made a point of calling Americans’ attention to the fact that the men who defeated the Italian fascists were Americans from every walk of life.

And then he turned to how fascism treated its people. “In Italy, the people have lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of it—their economic conditions have grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education, a lower public health, all byproducts of the fascist misrule.”

To rebuild Italy, FDR said, the troops had to start from the bottom. “[W]e have had to give them bread to replace that which was stolen out of their mouths,” he said. “We have had to make it possible for the Italians to raise and use their local crops. We have had to help them cleanse their schools of fascist trappings….”

He outlined how Americans had anticipated the need to relieve the people starved by the fascists, and had made plans to ship food grown by the “magnificent ability and energy of the American people,” in ships they had constructed, over thousands of miles of water. Some of us may let our thoughts run to the financial cost of it,” he said, but “we hope that this relief will be an investment for the future, an investment that will pay dividends by eliminating fascism, by ending any Italian desires to start another war of aggression in the future….”

FDR was emphasizing the power of the people, of democracy, to combat fascism not only abroad but also at home, where it had attracted Americans frustrated by the seeming inability of democracy to counter the Depression. They longed for a single strong leader to fix everything. Other Americans, horrified by FDR’s use of the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, wanted to take the nation back to the 1920s and in so doing had begun to flirt with fascism as well.

As he celebrated the triumph over democracy in Italy, he was also urging Americans to value and protect it at home.

Biden, too, is focusing on how efficient his administration has been in combating the coronavirus to combat authoritarianism both abroad and at home. With its support for the Big Lie; congress members like Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who openly associates with white nationalists; and its attack on voting rights, the modern-day Republican Party is moving rapidly toward authoritarianism. But the former president botched the most fundamental task of government: protecting its people from death. In contrast, more than 60% of Americans approve of how Biden has managed the coronavirus pandemic, with 95% of Democrats approving but only 33% of Republicans in favor.

Biden’s approach appears to be helping to solidify support for democracy. A recent PBS Newshour/NPR/Marist poll showed that two thirds of Americans believe democracy is under threat, but 47%— the highest number in 12 years—believe the country is moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, that number, too, reflects a difference by party. While 87 percent of Democrats say the country is improving, 87 percent of Republicans say the opposite.

Biden conjured up our success over the coronavirus to celebrate democracy: “[H]istory tells us that when we stand together, when we unite in common cause, when we see ourselves not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, then there’s simply no limit to what we can achieve.”

—-

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/05/remarks-by-president-biden-celebrating-independence-day-and-independence-from-covid-19/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/02/june-jobs-unemployment-shortage/

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/561513-67-percent-of-adults-have-received-at-least-one-shot-of-covid-19-vaccine

https://docs.google.com/document/d/162VvK8TyM_3xNJbZtd0vLcNiLuK1bzpV0zqcD8o0TuM/edit

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2-out-of-3-americans-believe-u-s-democracy-is-under-threat

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From an American #Heather Cox Richardson #history #fascism #democracy #WWII #1920 #COVID-19 #global pandemic #vaccination

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Pope Francis says the world is ‘seriously ill’ from the consequences of the pandemic (Washington Post) Pope Francis on Monday offered a grim assessment of humanity’s response to the pandemic in a lengthy speech that highlighted aspects big and small from a year of isolation and “despair.” He talked about domestic violence in homes under pandemic lockdown. He emphasized the job losses predominantly among off-the-books workers, with no safety net on which to rely. He described a generation of children, alone and in front of their computers, enduring the “educational catastrophe” of school shutdowns or distance learning. The world, Francis said, “is seriously ill.” “Not only as a result of the virus,” the pope continued, “but also in its natural environment, its economic and political processes, and even more in its human relationships.” “The pandemic shed light on the risks and consequences inherent in a way of life dominated by selfishness and a culture of waste, and it set before us a choice: either to continue on the road we have followed until now, or to set out on a new path,” Francis said.

Nothing to sneeze at: Global warming triggers earlier pollen (AP) When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentine’s Day. Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. While other studies have shown North America’s allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations.

Divided Senate votes to proceed with impeachment trial of Trump (Washington Post) A divided Senate voted 56 to 44 on Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, rejecting his lawyers’ argument that it is unconstitutional. Most Republicans stood with Trump and his legal team, which contended the Senate cannot convict a person no longer in office. The House impeachment managers, in pressing for the trial to proceed, said Trump had a role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and should be held accountable. Opening arguments in the trial are set to begin Wednesday.

Sheriff: Hacker tried to taint Florida city’s water with lye (AP) A hacker gained unauthorized entry to the system controlling the water treatment plant of a Florida city of 15,000 and tried to taint the water supply with a caustic chemical, exposing a danger cybersecurity experts say has grown as systems become both more computerized and accessible via the internet. The hacker who breached the system at the city of Oldsmar’s water treatment plant on Friday using a remote access program shared by plant workers briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide by a factor of one hundred (from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million), Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday. Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is used to treat water acidity but the compound is also found in cleaning supplies such as soaps and drain cleaners. It can cause irritation, burns and other complications in larger quantities. Fortunately, a supervisor saw the chemical being tampered with—as a mouse controlled by the intruder moved across the screen changing settings—and was able to intervene and immediately reverse it, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar officials have since disabled the remote-access system, and say other safeguards were in place to prevent the increased chemical from getting into the water.

Mexican Census: Evangelicals at New High, Catholics at New Low (Christianity Today) The Catholic majority in Mexico is slipping, as Protestants surpassed 10 percent of the population in the country for the first time ever. According to recently released data from Mexico’s 2020 census, the Protestant/evangelical movement increased from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year. The Catholic Church has historically dominated the religious landscape across Latin America, but especially in Mexico, which ranks among the most heavily Catholic countries in the region. Today, though an overwhelming majority of Mexicans still identify as Catholic, declines are accelerating. It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent.

Venezuela’s exodus (Foreign Policy) Colombia is to grant temporary legal status to the more than 1.7 million Venezuelans who have taken refuge in the country. Under the terms announced by Colombian President Iván Duque on Monday, Venezuelans who entered Colombia without permission before Jan. 31 will be eligible for legal protections, making it easier for them to live and work in the country. Roughly 5.4 million people have left Venezuela in recent years, according to U.N. estimates.

EU countries expel Russian diplomats in Navalny dispute (AP) Germany, Poland and Sweden on Monday each declared a Russian diplomat in their country “persona non grata,” retaliating in kind to last week’s decision by Moscow to expel diplomats from the three European Union countries over the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Russia had accused diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany of attending a demonstration in support of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile political foe. In a statement, EU lawmakers also appealed to “all EU Member States to show maximum solidarity with Germany, Poland and Sweden and take all appropriate steps to show the cohesiveness and strength of our Union.”

Rescuers look for survivors of Indian glacier flood disaster (AP) Hundreds of rescue workers were scouring muck-filled ravines and valleys in northern India on Tuesday looking for survivors after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, unleashing a devastating flood that has left at least 31 people dead and 165 missing. One of the rescue efforts is focused on a tunnel at a hydroelectric power plant where more than three dozen workers have been out of contact since the flood occurred Sunday. Rescuers used machine excavators and shovels to clear sludge from the tunnel overnight in an attempt to reach the workers as hopes for their survival faded. The disaster was set off when part of a glacier on Nanda Devi mountain snapped off Sunday morning. The floodwater, mud and boulders roared down the mountain along the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers, breaking dams, sweeping away bridges and forcing the evacuation of many villages while turning the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.

Cooped up in the pandemic, Chinese couples were not in the mood for love (Washington Post) When Chinese families were ordered to stay at home last year amid the coronavirus outbreak, authorities hoped for a much-needed baby boom. It turns out that few couples were in the mood. New data this week showed that birthrates in the country continued to plummet, with 10.04 million births registered in 2020, a 15 percent drop from the year before, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Although not the official birthrate, the latest figure was a third lower than the number of births recorded in 2019—already the country’s lowest since the early 1960s, when China was in the middle of a famine. China has been working to reverse falling birthrates caused in part by decades of population controls. After the country relaxed its infamous one-child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, initiatives have ranged from the supportive to the punitive. Policymakers face a demographic crisis that could cause the country’s population to start to shrink as early as 2027, according to a worst-case estimate from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Official 2020 population data is expected to be released later this month, but in January some local governments published birth data showing declines as steep as 30 percent.

Myanmar police fire into air to disperse protest, four hurt by rubber bullets (Reuters) Police fired gunshots into the air and used water cannon and rubber bullets on Tuesday as protesters across Myanmar defied bans on big gatherings to oppose a military coup that halted a tentative transition to democracy. Four people were hurt by rubber bullets in the capital Naypyitaw, and one of them, a woman, was in critical condition with a head wound, a doctor said. The Feb. 1 coup and detention of elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has brought the largest demonstrations in more than a decade and a growing civil disobedience movement affecting hospitals, schools and government offices.

Fish Farm (Hakai Magazine) A new fish farm in Singapore will produce up to 3,000 tonnes of grouper, trout and shrimp annually. This fish farm is notable primarily because of its location, which is an eight-story indoor aquaculture facility being constructed in the city-state. Singapore imports 90 percent of its food, and would prefer to scale that back a bit, with the national goal of producing 30 percent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. If all goes according to plan, the new facility’s efficiency will be six times higher than that of other fish farms in Singapore.

Anger grows at Israel’s ultra-Orthodox virus scofflaws, threatening rupture with secular Jews (Washington Post) The Shinfelds, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in this most religious of cities, are used to being a bit at odds with the rest of Israel. Their community’s tradition of large families—the couple has 10 children and 30 grandchildren—strict observance and exemption from military service have long created friction with the more secular majority. But they say they have never felt hostility like they do now, as a pandemic-exhausted nation has turned its rage at ultra-Orthodox scofflaws. As Israel endures its third national lockdown, social media has been inflamed by images of black-clad men brazenly crowding schools, weddings and other events, including 20,000 at a recent Jerusalem funeral of a leading rabbi. Secular critics have cast the ultra-Orthodox, fairly or not, as superspreaders supreme. “Now it’s not only tense—it feels like hatred,” said Vivian Shinfeld, 60, of the anger she feels even from some less-religious members of her own family. The backlash could have cultural and political impacts well after the pandemic ends. “There has been a schism growing for a while, and the pandemic is making it wider,” said Tamar El-Or, an anthropology professor at Hebrew University and longtime scholar of ultra-Orthodox culture. “When this virus is gone, nothing is going to be same.”

Ethnic clashes in Darfur could reignite Sudan’s old conflict (AP) Sayid Ismael Baraka, a Sudanese-American visiting from Atlanta, was playing with his three children, and his wife was making tea, when the gunmen stormed into his family village in Sudan’s Darfur region. The gunmen went through the village of Jabal, shooting people. The 36-year-old Baraka was shot to death as he rushed to help a wounded neighbor, his wife and brother said. The attack on Jan. 16 left more than two dozen dead in and around the village. They were among 470 people killed in a days-long explosion of violence between Arab and non-Arab tribes last month in Darfur. The bloodletting stoked fears that Darfur, scene of a vicious war in the 2000s, could slide back into conflict and raised questions over the government’s efforts to implement a peace deal and protect civilians.

Try a ‘Shultz hour’ (NYT) When George Shultz—who died Saturday at 100—was secretary of state under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, he developed a weekly ritual. He closed the door to his office and sat down with a pen and a pad of paper. For the next hour, Shultz tried to clear his mind and think about big ideas, rather than the minutiae of government work. Only two people could interrupt him, he told his secretary: “My wife or the president.” That’s even more useful advice today than it was four decades ago. These days, we are constantly interrupted by minutiae, via alerts and text messages. They can make it impossible to carve out time to think through difficult problems in new ways or come up with creative ideas. Letting your mind wander, Sandi Mann, a British psychologist, has said, “makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas.” The Dutch have a word for this concept: niksen, or the art of doing nothing. As Amos Tversky, a path-breaking psychologist, said, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

#headlines #news

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rjzimmerman · 4 years ago

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This is a really good Op-Ed, written by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. It’s one of the longest Op-Ed pieces I’ve read in a long time, because it has a lot to say and share. My only criticism is that the writer doesn’t mention the climate crisis as one of the several crises we are facing, as Americans. But, that aside, I liked it. I hope you can read the entire piece. Here’s an excerpt:

Just one in six Americans in a poll last month was “proud” of the state of the country, and about two out of three were actually “fearful” about it. So let me introduce a new thought: “hope.”

Yes, our nation is a mess, but overlapping catastrophes have also created conditions that may finally let us extricate ourselves from the mire. The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.

The last time our economy was this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election with a mandate to revitalize the nation. The result was the New Deal, Social Security, rural electrification, government jobs programs and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that built the modern middle class and arguably made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. And when I reached out through the gloom to consult experts, I was struck by how much hope I heard.

The United States faces at least three simultaneous crises: more coronavirus deaths than any other country, the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and overflowing outrage over racial inequity. Yet these crises are all interlinked, all facets of the same core failure of our country, one that has its roots in President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of 1968 and in the racialization of social safety net programs thereafter.

Why is the United States just about the only advanced country to lack universal health care? Without universal paid sick leave?

Many scholars, in particular the late Alberto Alesina, a Harvard economist, have argued that one reason for America’s outlier status is race. Investing in safety nets and human capital became stigmatized because of a perception that African-Americans would benefit. So instead of investing in children, we invested in a personal responsibility narrative holding that Americans just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps to get ahead.

This experiment proved catastrophic for all Americans, especially the working class. Marginalized groups, including African-Americans and Native Americans, suffered the worst, but the underinvestment in health and the lack of safety nets meant that American children today are 57 percent more likely to die by age 19 than European children are.

This boomerang effect of obdurate white racism — what Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl calls “dying of whiteness” — means that Americans now are less likely to graduate from high school than children in many peer countries. Meanwhile, people die in the United States from drug overdoses at a rate of one every seven minutes.

#trump #Joe Biden #2020 presidential campaign

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notanecromancer · 5 years ago

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This is How a Society Dies America and Britain are Textbook Examples of a New, Gruesome Phenomeon: Rich Nations Self-Destructing Into Poor Failed States Umair Haque

When I ask my European friends to describe us — Americans, Brits, who I’ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay — they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we’re a little thoughtless. They say we’re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we’re cruel and brutal. I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world. The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them. And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots? Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union. So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die. (The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.) Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set. That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close. And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people. That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it. How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings. People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else? The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else? A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either. What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us. We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest? A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period. That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this. People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have. People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones. The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to? Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish. (Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food. As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?) That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to. A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that. You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own. They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist. And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse. Umair December 2019 Eudaimonia and Co.

#vote 2020 #resist #persist

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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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I was hoping you would be able to help me form a response when my family says they're sick of hearing of systemic racism and white privilege because THEY have had to work for everything and believe nothing got handed to them (true in the way they're thinking, but you know what I mean).

Welp. First, I applaud you for taking the initiative to engage in difficult conversations with your family, since the only way embedded racist ideas are going to get confronted in white society is if racist white people hear it from their friends and family. They are going to cheerily ignore protestors, academics, newsreaders, popular culture, and certainly politicians who say anything to the contrary, but it’s harder to ignore and brush aside when it’s coming from people who are directly within your own family group. They can still then ignore it, but at least you’re trying to do something that is not at all fun but which is deeply necessary, and good for you.

First, there are a few things for you to consider. Is this a case where they actually don’t know the difference, but are willing to learn, or is this essentially sealioning (where they act like they don’t know the difference, but they absolutely do, and put the emotional labor on you to extensively define and explain and educate while never intending to change their stances on anything). If it’s the former, then there is some point in engaging in dialogue with them. If it’s the latter, it’s a giant emotional trap that you are within your rights not to engage with until they signal that they’re willing to engage productively. You don’t have to educate someone who is categorically unwilling to be educated (especially when it’s often deliberate ignorance). As people like to say, Google is free, and it’s their responsibility to take the first steps to change. You can continue to talk with them, but yes, that is contingent on them actually standing a chance of listening to you and not just you wearing yourself out on something that they don’t want to actually hear (because it threatens them and makes them feel Personally Wrong, and white people don’t like that).

There have been various books written on why it’s so hard to talk to white people about racism, which you may be interested in checking out, not least the book "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” by Renni Eddo-Lodge. Ibram X. Kendi has also written “How to Be An Antiracist,” one of the bestselling books of this summer, either of which would be useful either in shaping your own arguments or (if they’re receptive) giving to your family. Once again, this is contingent on them signalling that they’re actually willing to listen, and not just to make you do pointless emotional labor. These books are probably available from your public library (though there’s probably a waitlist) or in other easily available formats.

Next, it’s a basic tenet of an anti-racist education that white people have never had to do this kind of reckoning, and thus get whiny, defensive, guilt-tripping, and “it’s not about ME I’m a GOOD PERSON” when it comes up. This also rests on the damaging and deeply intertwined effects of racism and classism, which has to be understood if you’re going to talk about it. One of the greatest tricks that racist capitalism ever pulled is convincing poor white people that they had more in common with their filthy rich white masters (people whose way of life will never in a thousand years be anything like each other’s) simply because they shared the inherent racial “purity” of being white. There have been political studies written on how poor/undereducated/working class white people have become such a reliably Republican constituency, because they have been successfully manipulated to believe that the white overlords are their “people” and they will constantly vote against their own economic, social, and cultural interests in favor of enriching amoral white demagogues who beat the populist xenophobic drum. Then they blame black and brown people for society’s ills and for the reason that they stay poor, rather than the rampaging oligarchs awarding themselves massive tax breaks and billion-dollar bailouts and refusing to extend unemployment benefits in case people “make too much money” from not working, just to name the most recent example. They are so poisoned on populist politics and white supremacy, which assures them that they’re better than anyone else by virtue of being white, that they actively attack politicians and policy platforms and other social welfare initiatives that would materially improve their own lives as “un-American.” This is maddening and sometimes baffling, but it’s how it works. Whiteness trumps all, currently literally thanks to the Orange Fuhrer. Problems in life are the fault of the Other.

This isn’t to say that poor white people are “dumb” and just unable to realize it, because they’re caught in a system that has done this literally from the start of America. In the early 17th century, indentured laborers and slaves in the American colonies were in fact more likely to be white. (The word “slave” comes from “Slav,” since that was the predominant ethnicity of slaves in medieval Europe; i.e. white eastern Europeans.) But even despite the fact that they were unpaid laborers, they were still white and thus recognized as human by their white masters, and thus when slave ships began arriving, it was easier for everybody to simply outright demonize and dehumanize the black African slaves. The poor white indentured servants got to feel better than the black slaves simply for the fact of their whiteness. Their lives obviously sucked, but their whiteness was in fact a mitigating factor in the suckiness that it involved once it was easier to use “animalistic” black people. And we wonder why America can’t ever confront its racist history properly. As Kendi calls it in his other book, it is stamped from the beginning.

As it has been put before, white people can and often do have difficult lives, because late-stage capitalism devours its workers no matter what color they are, but their whiteness isn’t a factor in why their lives are difficult. They will never encounter racial prejudice, race-based hate crime, discrimination for housing, education, employment, bank loans, daily microaggressions and identity erasure, constantly racist tropes in the media, politicians fingering them as everything wrong with America/the world, casual prejudices or assumptions even from close friends, assumed criminality based just on their race -- etc etc. The list goes on and on. Just because you have a hardscrabble economic background does not mean that your life has been made harder by your race -- because if you’re white, it hasn’t. (And as noted, poor white people have consistently voted for megalomaniac white men who don’t give a shit about them but promise them that everything is fine or should be better for them because of their whiteness, and then blame minorities for being the source of their problems.)

I honestly wonder if racism would still be such a problem in America if we had a remotely more equitable economic system, because when you’re well off and have your basic needs consistently met and don’t need to worry that you’re one paycheck away from disaster, it’s harder to constantly be paranoid that your differently colored neighbors are stealing everything from you and the cause of all society’s ills. The historian Patrick Hyder Patterson wrote a very interesting book on material culture in Yugoslavia in the 20th century, where he basically argued that despite the spectacular collapse of the federation into the Yugoslavian wars of the 90s, things didn’t really go to hell until after the economy crashed following Josip Broz Tito’s death in 1980. While there were obviously ethnic fault lines and conflicts between Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Albanians, etc, when there wasn’t any money and any jobs and everyone thought everyone else was to blame, THAT is when the whole thing blew up into a genocidal civil war clusterfuck. Food for thought.

This is why people talk about economic justice and racial justice as going hand in hand. When there is a scarcity of resources and no social safety net, people are obviously more inclined to look for scapegoats and to blame someone for taking their entitlement (while still somehow refusing to blame the billionaires and corporate oligarch who are ACTUALLY stealing from them). They indeed actively resist any attempts to make their own lives better as being “socialist” or “un-American” and take pride in the fact that there’s absolutely jacksquat nothing (until of course, something like the coronavirus pandemic hits and it’s revealed just how many of us were always one missed paycheck away from disaster). Then when they need government assistance (while disdaining the government as tyrannical the rest of the time, unless it’s Trump’s actively tyrannical lot, but hey, we don’t have time to unpack all that) it’s still shameful and something they shouldn’t be using, instead of their basic entitlement to a decent life.

This country is poisoned on a lot of toxic beliefs, but this is one of the deepest-running one, and which will always get in the way of poor white people dealing with racism: their lives suck, but they have ALWAYS been told that despite that, they’re still better just for being white, which is their consolation prize for supporting white populists who actively rob them, and they haven’t even always consciously registered that. They just feel that if they’re “fine,” even if they’re not fine, then black people are just malcontents and criminals who can’t hack it. In 2016, there was a lot of ink spilled over how poor white people felt a sense of economic grievance and being left behind, which was why they voted for Trump, but... Trump was never going to do a damn thing about that??? He doesn’t actually do anything for his supporters except feed them his jingoistic Orange Nazi stump speeches. They voted for Trump to feel vindicated, not to actually improve their lives, and it’s damn clear by now that not only has he NOT improved their lives, he has no desire to do so. He just wants them to cheer for him and feed his ego, not fix any problems.

Basically, racism and capitalism and the American political system intersect in multiple deeply toxic ways to do precisely what you’re talking about; producing poor white people who feel that they shouldn’t be included in the reckoning with racism because if THEY worked hard and they don’t live in a mansion, somehow racism is fake and black people should just shut up and get a job etc etc. This is because poor white people have been systematically conditioned to support white supremacy at the direct expense of their own economic and social interests; it’s terrible, but that’s how it functions. They will never in a million years have anything in common with the (white) ruling class, but they still instinctively identify with them rather than people in their own deprived economic class who are different races or colors or religions. That is how white supremacy has supported the hyper-inequality of the industrial age, and vice verse, and it is one of capitalism’s best functions for survival, so it’s in the interests of the overlords to maintain it. Stop the workers from recognizing pan-racial solidarity based on economic grievance, and compete with each other and blame each other rather than the overarching system, easy!

Anyway. Once again, this is long. But in short, the attitudes your family are exemplifying are a direct result of both racism and classism as they have been deliberately cultivated in the American social and political system, and the interlocking causes and symptoms of both have to be recognized (and acknowledged) before they can get to dealing with that. I don’t know how that will go, and I don’t have an easy shortcut. But I’m glad you’re trying. Good luck.

#politics for ts #history of racism #long post #anonymous #ask

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Europe Confronts Coronavirus as Italy Battles an Eruption of Cases https://nyti.ms/2SPybgt

Europe Confronts Coronavirus as Italy Battles an Eruption of Cases

The country announced more than 150 cases, many in the densely populated region around Milan, as officials closed schools and canceled Venice’s carnival celebrations.

By Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo | Published Feb. 23, 2020 Updated 7:57 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 23, 2020 |

CASALPUSTERLENGO, Italy — Europe confronted its first major outbreak of the coronavirus as an eruption of more than 150 cases in Italy prompted officials on Sunday to lock down at least 10 towns, close schools in major cities and cancel sporting events and cultural touchstones, including the Venice carnival.

The worrisome spike — from fewer than five known cases in Italy before Thursday — shattered the sense of safety and distance that much of the continent had felt in recent months even as the virus has infected more than 78,000 worldwide and killed more than 2,400, nearly all in China.

The perception of a rising threat was amplified on television channels, newspaper headlines and social media feeds across Europe, where leaders could face their greatest challenge since the 2015 migration crisis.

That surge of people into Europe radically altered the politics of the European Union and exposed its institutional weaknesses. This time, it is an invisible virus from abroad that has slipped past Europe’s borders and presents its bickering coalitions with a new potential emergency.

If the virus spreads, the fundamental principle of open borders within much of Europe — so central to the identity of the bloc — will undergo a stress test, as will the vaunted but strained European public health systems, especially in countries that have undergone austerity measures.

Already, a new nervousness has pervaded Europe.

Austrian officials stopped a train en route from Italy to Austria and Germany to test passengers for the virus. The Austrian interior minister, Karl Nehammer, said the tests came back negative so the train got the “all clear.”

In France, the new health minister, Olivier Veran, stressed the country’s preparedness, saying it would significantly ramp up its testing.

“There is a problematic situation at the door, in Italy, that we are watching with great attention,” he said on Sunday, adding that a Europe-wide discussion between health ministers was in the works.

On Sunday night, an aid ship bringing hundreds of migrants, who had been rescued off the coast of Libya, to a Sicilian port received instructions from the Italian government to remain in quarantine for 14 days as a precaution, according to the ship’s Twitter account.

Fears of foreigners spreading the virus across oceans has already prompted some governments around the world to impose new border or travel controls.

The Trump administration has barred entry to the United States by most foreign nationals who have recently visited China, where the virus first appeared and spread. Much of the world has adopted similar controls, but the virus has continued to spread, most notably to South Korea, where more cases have been recorded than anywhere else outside China, and this past week to Iran, where eight deaths have been reported.

Israel on Monday will block entry to all nonresidents who have visited Japan and South Korea in the 14 days before their arrival. On Sunday, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, which has 602 confirmed infections and six deaths, put the country on the highest possible alert, empowering the government to ban visitors from China and take other sweeping measures to contain the outbreak.

“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” Mr. Moon said at an emergency meeting of government officials.

Even China — with an authoritarian government that has locked down areas with tens of millions of people in an attempt to stamp out the epidemic — has struggled to contain the virus, which has no known cure.

But the scores of new cases in Italy, mostly in the Lombardy region that includes densely populated Milan, present a new challenge for a country with a wobbly government often paralyzed by infighting.

That government has now become the reluctant laboratory to test whether the virus can be successfully contained in an open European society with a liberal approach to restrictions.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said on Italian television on Sunday that the country had taken precautions, including barring flights from China in January. These measures seemed to have paid off “even if now it looks like it didn’t,” he said.

He suggested that the surge of Italian cases only reflected Italy’s casting a wider net in terms of testing.

“We cannot exclude that after tests that are equally rigorous, the numbers can go up in other countries,” Mr. Conte said.

Beatrice Lorenzin, a former Italian health minister, said the sharp rise in cases in Italy resulted from systematic checks that discovered a “second generation of contagion.”

She said this was probably caused by infected people who traveled to Italy from China using indirect flights without declaring their original departure point or putting themselves in voluntary quarantine during the virus’ incubation period.

“I hope similar things did not happen in other countries,” she said.

In the Lombardy region, which has reported the majority of cases in Italy, 10 towns were locked down after a cluster of cases emerged in the town of Codogno, about 60 kilometers southeast of Milan.

At least 50,000 people are affected by the lockdown. Residents were supposed to leave or enter the towns only with special permission.

The outbreak in Codogno was detected after a 38-year-old man was admitted to the city’s hospital and diagnosed with the virus on Thursday. But the man had developed symptoms perhaps five days before that, potentially allowing the virus to spread.

Health officials are trying to figure out how he contracted the virus; he had not been to China. Many cases in Lombardy, officials say, may be traceable to that one case.

At least five members of the hospital medical staff and several patients have been infected. Other persons who tested positive include the man’s pregnant wife, some friends, and others who spent time with them. The towns surrounding the ones where the man works and lives have been included in the shutdown.

On Sunday night on a road outside Casalpusterlengo, one of the locked-down towns, police officers in surgical masks waved down cars, asking what business they had in the town. The officers suggested that motorists take an alternate route and urged them against going any further.

Most of the drivers didn’t need much convincing.

Bahije Mounia, a 42-year-old caretaker from a nearby town who wore a surgical mask, turned right back around. She said the government should have let people in the area know how dangerous things were much earlier. With the spike of cases in the region, she said, “It’s almost like we’re in China.”

The exaggeration could be forgiven considering the dramatic turn of events in Italy in recent days.

What had seemed like a contained few cases spread throughout the country’s wealthy north. So did the precautions.

People wore surgical masks in Aosta, which is on the Swiss border. Officials in the Piedmont region closed schools in Turin, and Venice cut its Carnival short. The patriarch of Venice, the Reverend Francesco Moraglia, suspended all religious ceremonies, including Ash Wednesday celebrations that mark the beginning of Lent.

Two elderly people who tested positive for the coronavirus were in intensive care at Venice’s municipal hospital.

In the regional capital of Milan, officials closed museums, schools, its cathedral, and halted religious and cultural events. Many other venues, aside from those providing essential services, have been closed, including most bars and nightclubs.

Fears that the city could be quarantined triggered a run on supermarkets. By 5 p.m. on Sunday, at least one supermarket had run out of fruit, vegetables, meat and nearly all canned food.

Some of the customers wore masks, and they all seemed in a hurry to fill up their carts with whatever was left on the shelves.

Vanessa Maiocchi, 45, said she worried about getting her children enough food. She was also concerned that her brother, who has a weak immune system, might be more vulnerable, especially if his company kept making him go to work.

“At least in these cases,” she said, “the state should intervene.”

So far, the virus has killed three people in Italy, including a 78-year-old man from Veneto who died Friday; an elderly woman who died in Crema on Sunday; and a 77-year-old woman who died in her home in Casalpusterlengo and posthumously tested positive for the virus.

The Italian state, which leads the third largest economy in the eurozone, has not inspired much confidence of late, as it has been consumed by internal machinations. But health experts said they were more worried because the Italian health ministry appeared to have moved aggressively to prevent an outbreak, to no avail.

Francesco Passerini, the mayor of Codogno, said in an interview on Sunday evening that he still had not received concrete logistical instructions from Rome.

“Who is going to bring essential goods here?” he said. “Who is going to take care of provisions and medical transportation?”

Two military structures in Lombardy are being prepared to become isolation camps. A military base in Rome has been housing evacuees from Wuhan, China, where the virus began, and the Italian passengers of the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that has been under quarantine in Yokohama, Japan.

Lockdown procedures like the ones in Lombardy will be applied to other towns if new clusters emerge, officials said. Quarantine measures will also be applied to anyone who has close contact with someone who has the virus.

Elia Delmiglio, the mayor of Casalpusterlengo, said people continued going in and out of his town for most of the day on Sunday.

“We got the decree, but not a precise schedule for when it will be implemented,” he said.

But by late Sunday night, police began arriving to seal the town off.

“People are worried,” said Paolo Camia, a 55-year-old manager of a software company from Casalpusterlengo, who drove out of town in his blue surgical mask to take some pictures of the police checkpoints. “Basically, we can’t leave.”

_____

Jason Horowitz reported from Casalpusterlengo, Italy, and Milan, and Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Rome. Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Berlin, Constant Meheut from Paris, and Emma Bubola from Milan.

*********

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alexsmitposts · 5 years ago

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When the Criminal Liars Shout, “Conspiracy Theory!” You Should Stick to the Facts Do you know who coined the curse, “conspiracy theory” or accusation, “you are conspiracy theorist!” – It was nobody less than the CIA in the 1950s, to silence those who saw through the lie of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This was a complete lie by US war strategists, to install fear in the population in general and in Europeans in particular and to boost the American Military Industrial complex – and presenting a constant threat to the communist Soviet Union. A complementary phrase developed in the last years is “fake news” — people who are saying well-founded truths, are being accused of spreading “false news” – and that by the very media that spread the real false news and lies in the first place. A dystopian world indeed, and most of the public doesn’t capture it. The fear factor is always a crucial element in dividing people, and in corralling them into chambers of fear – which allows anything outside to happen – building up armament, faking an arms race – when there was none. The Soviet Union came out of WWII – where they lost between 25 and 30 million people to safe Europe and the world from fascism. But western history books have it, that it was the United States and her European allies, who foremost defeated Hitler. This false news is continuingly being propagated, last by the recent WWII Victory Celebration on 9 May 2020 – without any consideration of the key role of the Soviet Union – today’s Russia – in defeating the Hitler Nazis. After this enormous sacrifice, the Soviet Union had no intention nor the resources to build up an army to defeat the west – as was being propagated by the US and then being aped by Europe, hence justifying 40 years of a Cold War, based on FEAR. The Cold War destroyed the natural relationship (trade, diplomatic, cultural) between Europe and today’s Russia. Today, however, anybody who dares to remind the western media, politicians and friends of the real conqueror of Hitler, namely the Soviet Union – is a “conspiracy theorist” – or someone who spreads “false news”. The Corona Crisis The latest example of conspiracy galore, is the corona crisis. What is playing out in front of our eyes, a worldwide lockdown of everything, followed almost by every government of this globe with similar severity, quarantine, confinement at home for almost everyone under the “pretext” of protecting you – the people – from an invisible enemy – a corona virus. And every government KNOWS it is a disaster for the national and world economy – it is social suicide. Yet they go along – with the orders of whom? As most of us who look for our own sources of information, outside the mainstream dominated, government dictated or supported lies, data collection and statistics on COVID-19 infections, as well as death rates, are vastly inflated and willingly falsified, to increase the fear factor and prolong the all destructive lockdown. This horrendous cheat is not just actively practiced in the US, but also in Europe. A point in case is Italy Unless solid proof is presented, like by the Italian Member of Parliament and a number of medical doctors, virologists and microbiologists from Italy and other European countries, as well as the US, anybody who refers to the fakeness and unreliability of the statistic is called a conspiracy theorist — a liar. And in some countries people who tell the truth are even liable to fines and legal pursuit. These threats and conspiracy accusations should shut us up. But they don’t and won’t. We want the truth to come out and be known to the entire world. The World Economic Crisis We already now realize the damage of unheard proportions. In the first four months of this so-called, WHO-denominated pandemic, we see a global disaster of proportions far exceeding those of 1929-33 and 2008-09. Never in recorded human history has so much misery been created. Bankruptcies abound, the stock market plunged so far by more than 30% (with some ups and down – called “quick profit taking” by the rich and powerful on the back of the small investors), a meltdown of productive assets, easy prey to be bought by large corporations – unemployment soaring to heights never experienced before by modern humanity, currently at least 37 million Americans out of a job.This does not account for those having given up looking for a job or claiming unemployment. According to Fox Business News, up to 40% may never get back to work. The FED predicts unemployment may reach 50% by the end of the year (in the worst 1929 recession period unemployment attained 25%). These are only US statistics. The situation in more chaotic Europe may be even worse. The International Labor Office (ILO) announced that within months worldwide unemployment may hit 1.6 billion people, half the globes work force. Many of these people, especially in the Global South have already been at the verge of poverty or under the poverty line, living from day to day, with no savings. Now they are condemned to begging – and many, maybe hundreds of millions, to die from famine, according to the World Food Program (WFP). Many if not most of them have no access to health services, no shelter, or any other form of social safety nets, because the COVID-caused economic collapse has wiped out even flimsy social safety structures poor countries may have set up. Misery no end. And this is only the tiny tip of the iceberg. The worst is still to come – when in a few weeks or months a clearer picture of what industries will live or die will emerge – and more people will be relegated to economic paupers. The Real Conspiracy Taking a few steps back – it is clear, it is no coincidence that the entire world is stricken by the same virus. That does not happen naturally – but can happen, as it did, when the virus is artificially implanted in every country – and that at the same time. So, there is a diabolical plan behind this so-called corona-crisis which does not even have to be a crisis, if we look at real disease and death rates – not the inflated, fear-inspiring ones. So, who is behind this all? – Well, without naming names and leaving that guessing up to you, there are several reports and events that have “predicted” such a pandemic. One of the most prominent ones, is the 2010 Rockefeller report – that described in surprising detail what is happening now, and calls it the “Lock Step” scenario. According to the report it should get worse and the current pandemic might be followed by a stronger wave later this year or in 2021. Strangely, the IMF’s economic projections for a “post-Covid economy, foresees 3 scenarios, two of which consider another outbreak in the second half of 2020, or in 2021. Event 201 on 18 October 2019 in NYC, simulating among other atrocities a corona pandemic that would leave 65 million dead within 18 months. This was the final stroke before the planned outbreak. Let’s just say that the evil masterminds behind this monstrous crisis are a few very rich, power-thirsty psychopaths and their families and cronies. They are planning a One World Government, also called the New World Order, or the One World Order – that has been under preparation since the latter part of the last century. It requires total control over the population and- a sizable population reduction. That’s where the eugenics come in. Many of the Rockefeller club, the “Bilderberg Society” members have been advocating population reduction for decades, including Bill Gates. He even bragged about it when in a 2010 TED talk in Southern California, “Innovating to Zero”, he said, “when we do a real god job vaccinating, we may reduce world population by 10% to 15%.” . He wants to eliminate poverty, literally. However, talking about it, and connecting the dots of what we are living today – is Conspiracy Theory. Why are Bill Gates’ new corona vaccines possibly killer vaccines? – Here is how it works. The Gates Foundation first created the pharmaceutical company “Moderna” in Seattle, Washington State, not far from his Microsoft empire, basically to produce tailor-made vaccines for the Gates Foundation. Then the foundation gave US$ 20 million to Moderna for the development of a COVID vaccine. A few days ago, Moncef Slaoas resigned from Moderna’s Board to become White House Director of Operation Warp Speed, a plan to fast-track a COVID vaccine. Nobody seems to bother about the flagrant conflict of interest – let alone the health risk that poses. But it gets even better. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), a little-known agency that is hardly in the news, had, according to Whitney Webb (Last American Vagabond) knowledge of the pandemic outbreak at least since last November, possibly earlier. This means that President Trump knew about it, but didn’t do anything about it, rather let it happen. His blaming China today for mishandling the corona crisis is a sheer lie and a propaganda bluff to denigrate China’s reputation and her rising economy and solid currency, the yuan – which may soon take over from the dollar as a key world reserve currency. DARPA is also financially supported by the Bill Gates Foundation. They have been working on new vaccine technologies for several years. The COVID-19 outbreak brought this research work to prominence. DARPA is closely collaborating with Bill Gates in applying this new technology to the vaccine, Bill Gates wants to develop and impose on the world population. According to Whitney Webb, DARPA and its partners agencies are planning to “produce DNA and RNA vaccines, classes of vaccine that has never been approved for human use in the US and involve injecting foreign genetic material into the human body. Notably, it is this very class of vaccine, now being produced by DARPA-partnered companies, that billionaire and global health “philanthropist” Bill Gates recently asserted has him “most excited”, relative to other Covid-19 vaccine candidates.”. This is not conspiracy theory; this is real conspiracy. This sounds like the kind of medical trials Hitler’s medical team has carried out. The perpetrators were condemned at Nuremberg. In our dystopian world, nobody will be punished, even if thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands will die from the Gates WHO-supported rush with an untested vaccine. Though, it would match the eugenics agenda. *** The so called (by WHO) COVID-19 “is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the human race.” It is a multi-generational lie that has become a ‘false normal’, says Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, founder of the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center. And as a piece of reference enhancing her reputation, she has 20 years of vaccine research experience and her articles are translated in 12 languages and she appears frequently on radio and TV to educate parents. “By putting vaccines into our bodies, we are inserting foreign matter, toxins, into our cells, like mercury and aluminum.” In legal terms vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”. Through pharma lobbying, in 1986 Congress has passed the National Childhood Vaccine Children Act, a law whereby pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for any damage their vaccines cause, including death. Vaccines have enormous side effects, especially in small children, causing various lasting diseases, like peanut allergies, asthma, eczema and – yes – autism. Particularly harmful vaccines are western-made MMR (measles), polio and DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough). Russian made vaccines have different compositions and have helped prevent millions from polio and other debilitating, crippling or killing diseases. Since 2002, when revenues from vaccines for US pharma companies amounted to about US$ 8 billion, revenues and profits have skyrocketed to more than 60 billion per year by 2020. Every new vaccine is worth about a billion dollars. Anybody who speaks out against vaccination, irrespective of the evidence given, is labeled a conspiracy theorist by the media, and often by the pharma-coopted medical society. People start understanding that Bill Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) call the shots on public health around the world, especially on vaccination – vaccination against the corona virus. The sinister new vaccine that Bill Gates in tandem with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), one of 27 agencies of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and supported by CDC and WHO – and in cooperation with DARPA – are described above. All Gates promoted vaccines are made by wester pharma-corporations. You should know, that the Bill Gates Foundation also generously funds NIAID, NIH and CDC. Both CDC and NIH own several hundred if not thousands of vaccine patents. So, they have a vested interest in promoting vaccination, no matter how much harm they cause to the population. But this cannot be questioned, let alone criticized – else you will be denigrated as a conspiracy theorist. In fact, western Governments hire psychologists, sociologist and medical doctors to give interviews and talk to the media, on conspiracy theories – in a last-ditch effort to dissuade people from thinking. And many still fall for the lie, but evermore stick to their own investigated information – and demonstrate and protest, often with civil disobedience, against harsh government measure of police -and often military crackdowns. They call out against Bill Gates and WHO, a corrupted organization that receives half to three quarters of its annual budget from private donors, mostly the pharma industry, Bill Gates, but also telecom-industries (that’s why WHO has been silent on the potentially nefarious effects of 5G). Bill Gates is the biggest single donor of WHO. Conflict of interest is never discussed in the media. Those who know the truth and don’t hesitate calling it out, are silenced by being called conspirators, liars by the media and – of course, by much of the medical community. In fact, Bill Gates literally calls the shots on matters of public health that affects the entire world. People – be aware! Also speaking out against vaccines and the lab produced viruses from which eventually vaccines are derived, is Dr. Judy Mikovits, a long-time NIAID micro-biologist, who has been severely punished by Dr. Fauci for defending her research results which Fauci wanted to hide. Her book, “Plague of Corruption” is currently Amazon’s number one Bestseller. That in itself tells a story of a public awakening. Referring to her and her numerous interviews, peer-reviewed scientific articles and her book, is called a conspiracy, because even her own outspokenness is called conspiracy – all in an effort to shut up critics of the current system, of the current new-normal that will soon require universal vaccination (Bill Gates with a sly smile wants to vaccinate 7 billion people in the next ten years). Will it be compulsory? Against most countries Constitutional and Democratic Rights? We don’t know. Seveb billion is a slight exaggeration, because Russia and China will certainly not vaccinate their people with vaccines produced under Bill Gates funding and supervision. But even if it is not compulsory, there may be so many “legal” hindrances put in place by western governments that most people eventually will roll over and accept the possibly killer vaccine that Bill Gates and his association of pharmaceuticals (GAVI) supported by WHO, will impose on humanity. For example, you may not be able to receive or renew your driver’s license, going to concerts, to the movies, to sports events, to fly – and so on. That’s all been talked about and is part of the 2010 Rockefeller Report’s ”Lock Step” scenario , in which we are currently hopelessly navigating – under lockdown and with social distancing’ – so nobody can get together and possibly organize a plot against these draconian inhuman measures. *** Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s, nephew, founder of “Children’s Health Defense” an NGO advocacy organization has this to say: “Bill Gates is the world’s largest vaccine producer and the single largest donor to WHO and the CDC Foundation. Those agencies are now marketing-arms for his vaccine empire. In January 2019, Gates had WHO declare “vaccine hesitancy” the top “global health threat” (with Ebola, cancer, war, and drug-resistant pathogens), signaling a worldwide Pharma Gold Rush to mandate vaccines to all people. Gates maxed-out in donations to Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff’s Political Action Committee (PAC). In February 2019, Schiff wrote to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Pinterest, demanding they censor “vaccine misinformation, “a term meaning all skepticism toward government and industry pronouncements about vaccine safety or efficacy––whether true or not. – “Vaccines are both effective and safe,” Schiff wrote. “There is no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling disease.” This was misinformation. A year earlier, Schiff pushed a bill to hike the Vaccine Court admin budget to $11,200,000 to reduce vaccine injury backlogs. The court had already paid out $4 billion for vaccine deaths and disabilities. Facebook and Pinterest said that they will rely on Gates’s WHO and CDC to say which on-line statements are “misinformation or hoaxes.” Facebook and Google hired “FactChecker” (Politifact) to censor vaccine misinformation. The Gates Foundation is “FactChecker’s” largest funder. In his article, “Fact Checker, a Propaganda Device,” investigative journalist Jeremy Hammond concludes, “Facebook is guilty of misinforming its users about vaccine safety… They have no problem with lies about vaccine safety and effectiveness, as long as it’s intended to persuade parents to vaccinate their children.” On May 4, 2017, FactChecker declared as false, Del Bigtree’s statement, “Vaccines include aluminum and mercury, which are neurotoxins, and vaccines cause encephalopathy.” FactChecker explained, “Current data show vaccines are safe and do not cause toxicity or encephalopathy.” [However], manufacturer’s inserts reveal that many vaccines contain aluminum and mercury, and cause encephalopathy. – Finally, massive gifts to NPR & PBS buy Gates biased vaccine coverage. This statement is from public media Highwire. “I’m (Robert Kennedy) not anti-vaccine. I’m against dangerous, shoddily tested, zero liability vaccines with toxic ingredients. If someone came up with a thoroughly tested vaccine that was completely safe and efficient, one that performed as promised, one that made people healthier rather than sicker, I’d be for it. – Indeed, only an idiot would oppose it. But under no condition, would I support mandatory vaccination. Government has no right to force citizens to take unwanted medicines or to submit to involuntary medical interventions.” And he adds: “Google is a vaccine company. It has a $760 million partnership with Glaxo-the world’s largest vaccine maker and similar deals with Sanofi and Merck to mine your medical information. Googles mother company, Alphabet, has 4 vaccines developers working on flu, and other, vaccines.” Google and Youtube are removing videos from highly experienced doctors, epidemiologists, biologists and virologists – censuring is also the new normal – but they are promoting a billionaire software developer and a 16 year old climate change “expert” about viruses and vaccines — what does that say for the media, for the governments that support and finance the media. The Strategy behind shouting Conspiracy – Conspiracy Theorist There is a lot of psychology behind the strategy – leading people to a state of cognitive dissonance, of believing a narrative they know is a fiction, meaning, you know there is something not quite right, but you don’t’ dare questioning it. Why? Because of being called a conspiracy theorist. And why does that matter? Because it is a demeaning term, robbing the accused of his credibility (well thought-out by the CIA in the 1950s). Somebody stamped as a conspiracy theorist, believing in conspiracy theories – in fake news, makes you a lesser person in your friends’ eyes. So, they may avoid you – and if you stick to your opinion, you may gradually move into isolation. Being isolated, no friends, is fear-provoking. So, better believe the official narrative. The silver lining around this dark cloud is ever more visible and ever brighter. Be self-assured. Don’t cave in. Stick to your own research, to your opinion, regardless of being insulted as a conspiracy theorist. Stand up for what you believe – and do it with passion. Other people also have doubts, and when they see people defending their believes with passion, they may join you. And so, a critical mass grows. And the conspiracy theory strategy loses rapidly power – and fades away. Fading is already visible throughout European and US cities, where tens of thousands take to the streets, defending their civil and human and Constitutional Rights. These are encouraging signs. Hope never fades – until “we shall overcome.”

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thessalian · 5 years ago

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Thess vs Gun Violence

So let’s talk about gun violence. Because there is some stupid, stupid shit flying around out there and I really desperately need to vent about it because ... honestly, really, people who are frankly misinterpreting the second amendment are coming out with some crap to justify why guns need to be readily available at the nearest department store.

Someone on Facebook came out with the one that basically went, “If we criminalise guns, then only criminals will have guns”. Actually, it was worse, because it was more, “There’s no point in having laws about guns because people will break those laws”.

.........

Okay, first of all, you’re advocating anarchy. You have rationalised away all need for law enforcement. “There’s no point in making murder illegal, because people do it anyway!” “Theft? People steal shit all the time! Why bother having laws about it?” Now, apparently the justification for having laws is “So that people can be punished for breaking it. So ... that’s a point. Break the laws on selling guns outside of the strict regulations? Get punished. Buy a gun through circumvention of the laws? Get punished. Use an unlicensed firearm? That’ll add to your sentence when you’re convicted - not only because you’re tacking “Illegal possession of a firearm” to the charges list, but also because you’re removing the potential for someone to get a plea bargain through, “Oh, it was a crime of passion, that poor young man was disturbed”. Yeah, so ‘disturbed’ that they went through convoluted underground channels to buy an illegal weapon. That proves premeditation, whereas at the moment people can just say that they snapped and didn’t know what they were doing. The whole point of a firearms ban or at least stricter controls would be that if you’re getting that kind of killing power? You have to know what you’re doing.

Which brings me to the second point: if guns are harder to get, fewer of them are going to be on the streets. I mean, look at the UK. 1996, Dunblane. Man walks into a primary school, shoots up the place. Immediate handgun ban. Guns don’t happen here, beyond well-regulated shotguns on farms for vermin control and a very few law enforcement officers. (Seriously, most beat cops don’t have guns unless they’re dealing with the beat around Downing Street, Whitehall, and the Houses of Parliament - our seats of government, in short.) And you know how many shootings we’ve had in this country since? One. And the casualties were lower than any individual shooting the US has seen. Want to compare one shooting in 23 years to ... how many in the US this year alone? Don’t you tell me that handgun bans don’t work. And honestly, in the current political climate in this country, I’m glad we have the handgun ban. There are enough angry, dispossessed, desperate people in this country because of the bullshit that’s happening now that I’m grateful that this long ban has managed to short-circuit any chance that we’d develop a gun-toting culture in this country.

This leads naturally to another bit I keep hearing: “People will find ways to hurt each other even without guns, so what’s the point?” The point is numbers. Knife crime in the UK is on the rise - big surprise, given the political chaos that’s threatening to tank our economy, destroy what few social safety nets we have, kill our universal healthcare system and basically turn us from a major voice in the European Union to a tiny little island shedding chunks of no-longer-United Kingdom like bits of broken cookie. This is obviously a problem that needs to be solved, and I would definitely not mind some stronger legislation about knives in this country (we are trying, by the way). Thing is ... to stab someone, you need to get right up close, which means your attacker has a chance to defend themselves. It’s slower, so they have a chance to get the hell out of the way. It takes time to stab someone, and there are very specific points you have to hit on a human body to guarantee a fatality, which is harder still when the victim is trying desperately to keep you from stabbing them at all, and can get their hands on you - hence the term “defensive cuts”. And all the time it takes to kill even just one or two people gives law enforcement time to get there and make it stop, not to mention that stabbing someone takes a lot of focus and it’s harder for the assailant to turn their weapon on law enforcement officers and do any real damage. What I’m saying is that while any fatality is sad, looking at the simple numbers ... fewer people die in ‘stabbing frenzies’ or whatever the media’s calling it than in mass shootings, and the assailant is caught more easily. Banning handguns and assault rifles outside of very specific circumstances would save lives. The people who say it isn’t worth doing because people will still die ... I don’t get that. Surely it’s better to prevent as many deaths as possible, even knowing you can’t save everyone, than not to prevent any deaths at all and let a lot of people die? Just because you can’t save everyone, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to save anyone.

Then there’s blaming video games. This is going to be interesting to watch from the AAA gaming industry perspective, because we could go either way here. See, if people believe, properly, that video games cause violent behaviour, they will have to admit that what we see and do in video games can have long-term behavioural consequences. Now, what’s the other issue with video games at the moment? Oooooooooh, right, gambling mechanics. Now, some governments are saying that yes, video games with loot boxes (or, as EA are calling them, ‘surprise mechanics’) are actually gambling, and I think they’re right within the evolving definition of the term. However, a lot of the lobbyists around the US are insisting that no, of course it’s not gambling Because Reasons and ‘disagreeing’ with the evidence that suggests that engaging in the loot box thing encourages addictive behaviour for shopping and gambling addicts (because we all know that all you have to do to refute evidence is say that you don’t agree with it). Meanwhile, studies have shown no link between violent video games and gun violence. Hell, let’s look at cultural evidence. The global monoculture means that a significant percentage of the world’s population has access to violent video games of the FPS variety ... but only the US is having this mass shooting epidemic. Anyway, point is that the people lobbying for this kind of shit are going to have to make choices here - either they’re going to stick with this “video games cause violence” narrative and admit that gambling mechanics cause or at least abet gambling addiction (because they can’t have it both ways), or fight for their right to loot boxes and all the lobbyist money that comes with them in order to find something else to blame for gun violence than ... I dunno, guns. I mean, I wouldn’t mind seeing the gun violence in video games get a little less ... realistic, I guess. I mean, games like Borderlands or Overwatch or Mass Effect, where all the gun makes and models are fictional? Fine. But all these realistic war shooters read like gun catalogues, glorifying existing weapons. So maybe there does need to be some thought put into the design of FPS games in terms of gun violence; stop glorifying and fetishising existing weapons of war, and maybe people won’t feel so desperate to own real ones. No one ever killed anyone with a cosplay replica of the Kassa Locust.

Long story short - this is about guns. Fetishising guns. The overly casual availability of guns. Not to mention a sociopolitical climate where loud, obnoxious bullying and posturing to ‘keep undesirables in their place’ is seen as the key to victory. There’s a sense of entitlement I’m seeing in a lot of these shootings in the US - the whole thing feels like some asshole going, “I hate these people and they won’t go away no matter how much I shout at them so I’ll just remove them because this is MY country and only people like ME are allowed in it!” Trump’s not helping, obviously, particularly since he’s going to talk to an anti-LGBT group coming soon. But that’s only encouraging a wellspring of entitlement that’s always existed and is now erupting because people are coming to understand that being straight or white or male or all of the above entitles us to no more and no less than anyone else gets. But if these people didn’t have easy access to guns, they would have to work a lot harder to kill people when their frustration explodes. Hell, maybe they’d have to find a less visceral outlet for their rage-adrenaline. I would recommend Overwatch. I don’t play it anymore but at least the violence is cartoony.

#Thess has opinions

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