A view on top of the Mont Vully, trees, a lake, misty clouds

This! March 202328 min read

[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, toots … you name it]

a communal grill made of concrete with a circle A sprayed on its side
a cardboard circle a
a spectacular sky with clouds and some sun


[Videos]

An Update On Dianna’s Health – “We just wanted to give you an update on Dianna’s health, since she’s been sick for a while and may not be returning for longer than we previously thought. Her science videos are postponed until she can make a full recovery. We really appreciate everyone’s support here on her channel. We know Dianna wishes she could be here making videos and happily physicsing, but right now she needs to stay in bed and away from work until she makes a full recovery.”

AI and Image Generation (Everything is a Remix Part 4)

Interview with Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm | The Problem with Jon Stewart


[Music]

On Stage Off Stage

The Chemical Brothers – No Reason (Neon Marching Band Video)

Eartheater – Airborne Ashes (Eartheater & Aleksandir Remix) [Official Full Stream]

Elisapie – Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass) (Official Music Video)

Black Thought – A Love Letter To Hip Hop


[Podcasts]

The Coddling Of The American Mind [if books could kill] – “TRIGGER WARNING: if you’re a SNOWFLAKE college professor afraid of how your students are expressing themselves, you might need a SAFE SPACE, because Michael and Peter are discussing “The Coddling of The American Mind,” a book about campus culture that’s light on facts and heavy on cherry-picked anecdotes.” They don’t seem to have a standalone website, or at least i didn’t find one.

BS Jobs w/ David Graeber (2018) [srsly wrong] – “The Wrong boys speak with David Graeber about his new book ‘Bullshit Jobs’, exploring the ever multiplicating ways our society makes up stuff for people to do. They also discuss the puritan work ethic, and even discover how to solve global poverty in just three steps.” This is from 2018. It does hurt to hear Davids voice, but it’s always great to hear him. Now with transcript.

Ep. 38: Der koordinierte Angriff auf trans Rights [kreuz und flagge podcast] – “Heute reden Lukas Hermsmeier und ich über den koordinierten Angriff von Seiten der Rechten auf trans Rights, und den Versuch, trans Menschen aus dem öffentlichen Leben zu verdrängen. Wir beginnen mit einem kurzen Recap von CPAC, auf der Transfeindlichkeit ein zentrales Thema war und erklären dann, wie der Angriff auf trans Rights auf Bundesstaatsebene mit großer Geschwindigkeit voranschreitet, und von Republikanern immer weiter eskaliert wird. Abschließend besprechen wir die Rolle von “Mainstream” Medien beim Mainstreaming von Transfeindlichkeit, und gehen ein auf den offenen Brief von 1000 Autor*innen der New York Times, die die tranfeindliche Berichterstattung der Zeitung kritisiert haben.” This is a much better podcast than to listen to than the horrendous JKR one.

Disposable Bodies (Reading Health Communism) [vulnerable by design] – “Is capitalism bad for your health? Let’s talk about this and other questions in discussing the book Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.” A good spin off to the book.

Why We Must Resist AI w/ Dan McQuillan [tech won’t save us] – “Paris Marx is joined by Dan McQuillan to discuss how AI systems encourage ranking populations and austerity policies, and why understanding their politics is essential to opposing them.” Paris seems a bit puzzled by the clear marxist rethoric at times.


[Toot Threads]


[Pandemic Roundup]

Pandemic Roundup: March 30, 2023
Pandemic Roundup: March 23, 2023
Pandemic Roundup: March 16, 2023
Pandemic Roundup: March 9, 2023
Pandemic Roundup: March 2, 2023


[The Must Read[s] This Month]

I’m Immunocompromised. I Know Ableism Is Oppression. We Need Disability Justice. [truthout] – “I’m not lonely, I’m enraged. Having a non-compromised immune system doesn’t make you lucky, it makes you privileged in an ableist society. We need to reframe risk. In the context of oppression, immunocompromised people and other vulnerable populations aren’t at risk for reasons related to their individual bodies. They are put at risk by systems of oppression that value some bodies over others, an ideology that forms the basis of eugenics. Ableism is compromising our immunity. Oppression is compromising our immunity.
This is a big part of the reason why individualizing safety is so absurd. Immunocompromised people need to be protected. Most of all, we need to protect each other.” This is the kind of article that we need from leftists now

How’s your covid grief? [outside the circle] – “Without masks and other visible gestures of everyday forms of looking out for the well-being of all …
Without regard for how some people are being cut off from living fully and in community because they are at risk while so much of social and work life is “back to normal” …
Without those in our own anarchist(ic) circles steadfastly, reciprocally, and without question always including and lovingly abiding by covid and other harm reduction as practices in all our spaces …
How can one not be stuck?” Thank you Cindy. Your text made me cry in despair and in anger. But i am so grateful for your words.

Rethinking ‘Back to Normal’ in the Pandemicine [counterpunch] – “I mean, come on, leftish folk, do you and your organization care about racial justice and disability justice and worker justice? Do you care about at least looking as though you care about racial and disability and worker justice? Do you care about making events welcoming to all your allies and potential allies, including people who are old, or pregnant, or who have disabilities, or comorbidities, or compromised immune systems, or loved ones who are old or pregnant or immune-compromised or immune-suppressed, or who just can’t afford to take (any more) sick days? Do you believe that all our struggles are connected, that we are all connected, that we need to try to be the change we want to see in the world?” This article also contains many links to great articles and podcasts, a veritable resource.

Broken Sociality [peste] – “Social loneliness blurs into another facet of broken sociality, what I think of as political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible. Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I find hard to overstate.” Nathan Holdren going meta.


[Articles English]

The Public Health Pledge – “We are committing to safer and more inclusive events. You can too.” Bottom-up public health.

Last Resorts [baffler] – “For the disabled, assisted dying can be eugenics by another name.” While i agree with the basic premise of this article, yes, if we maintain such an absurd construct as a state, it really SHOULD take care of the disabled. Yet the reality on the ground remains, that the state often does not do this (many would argue, BECAUSE it is a state). And since we have not managed to build robust mutual aid projects of communal care – which would be the actual alternative we should strive for here, because a state will always do state things – assisted suicide must be defended and even fought for, as an easily available and accessible option, freed from stigma. Life for many of us is unbearable under neoliberal, late stage capitalism. And so what is our alternative? Should the people who decide the pain is too much resort to butchering themselves using unsafe methods? If we as leftists start to fight against assisted suicide we align ourselves with right wing, reactionary christians arguing in the same vain, and this cannot stand.

Deputies Who Raided Afroman’s House Sue Him For Daring To Turn Footage Of The Raid Into A Viral Video [techdirt] – “LOL. Fuck these guys. There’s no case here. The lawsuit [PDF] makes plenty of claims that might have sounded credible if these officers (1) were not public servants, (2) not performing their public duties, (3) not captured by someone else’s recording equipment, and (4) not doing a bunch of stuff that made them look ridiculous. Fortunately, by filing this lawsuit we now have the names of some of the deputies who participated in the raid, which should only add to their emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation, and humiliation.” This is pretty hilarious, especially that they doxed themselves by suing.

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova Placed on Russian “Wanted” List [hyperallergic] – “Any truly political artist risks their personal safety for the sake of their art,” Tolokonnikova said. “It is not a new concept for me. They threaten us but we cannot show fear.” Solidarity with Nadya, except with her crypto shite.

Imagine If My Pain Was Taken Seriously [peste] – “It’s hard to say because endometriosis care is horrible worldwide. It is a global failure and I don’t think it’s one person who built this misogynistic world we live in, it was a real team effort. And unfortunately, it almost doesn’t matter who did it, right? It’s who does it now, and who’s going to do it in the future.” Gender gap, racial gap, colonical gap, in short medicine needs a major rehaul. Read the book Inflamed! It’s awesome.

Hollywood Pretends There Is No Pandemic [peste] – “Actors, film and TV makers, and content creators have been perpetuating a fantasy for nearly three years that there is no pandemic. No “present day” shows or films acknowledge the real present day. By pretending in real life there is no pandemic in films and TV, no public health crisis affecting every corner of everyone’s lives, no massive global event disabling our friends, putting our grandparents in coffins, and making our babies sick, we are being denied our ongoing collective experience. We’re being gaslit and mocked by the very people we’re looking to for some relief in all of this. We’re being robbed of our collective grief. But hey, Tilda Swinton seems fine.” Violet Blue omits some material, like This England! or season two of The Morning Show, but it’s a great article.

We Need to Talk about Doctors’ Politics [peste] – “Implementing a multilevel approach to addressing the impact of physicians’ politics on patient care may take a while as we generate the best evidence and best practices. But it should be of high interest to our profession, the general public, and the federal government, given how much it invests in medical education. It’s worth asking: should we spend taxpayers’ money on training doctors who, in turn, can pick and choose who they want to care for to maximize their earnings? Or who may use their power to restrict some patients’ autonomy against bioethics principles? To borrow a phrase from my cost-conscious colleagues, Is it a good use of healthcare dollars?”

Major Publishers Mull Legal Action Against Pirate Ebook Platform [torrentfreak] – “With Sci-Hub and Z-Library making headlines over the past few months and the Internet Archive’s legal battle still ongoing, publishers seem prepared to defend every last inch of their rights. That includes Cengage, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as they investigate what appears to be a blatant pirate ebook platform. A closer look reveals even more dubious activity.” Free the books.

J. K. Rowling Tweets Support for Activist Embroiled in Nazi Controversy [assigned] – “Kellie-Jay Keen has been the center of controversy over the Nazi presence at her Australian rallies for several days. Today, author J. K. Rowling showed her support for the embattled Keen.” And all this while that propagandist podcast is airing. Makes me sick.

Everyone, Everywhere | Nate Bear [substack] – “One way to sum up where we are with covid in 2023 is that businesses, governments, their experts and the media desperately wanted and needed vaccines to turn a Sars virus into the common cold, and no one is prepared to deal with the possibility they didn’t. And nothing suggests they did. With a de facto blackout on covid due to the elimination of testing and reporting, it will be much harder to assess the ongoing effects of the virus, but sickness from work will be a key one. As will excess deaths and life expectancy, which have both trended significantly up and down, respectively, in the last two years. The future is sicker. That’s unavoidable now. Mass infection with a Sars virus will do that. It just will. This isn’t doomism, it’s biology.” But i even like doomerism.

Preventing Long Covid | Eric Topol [ground truths] – “The first and only definitive way is to avoid Covid infections. As I previously reviewed, there are still approximately 10-15% of Americans who are likely Novids, never having been infected (potentially confirmed with negative anti-nucleocapsid antibodies), and that per cent will continue to decrease over time as the virus relentlessly finds new (and repeat) hosts. A good quote from Mike Ryan of WHO from an excellent new piece on the ongoing threat: “You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”” Oh cool, a meta study that shows what the people suffering from have been saying all along.

Asking for a “correction” JK Rowling podcast’s PR firm mistakenly confirms her transphobia [boing boing] – “Yesterday Boing Boing received an email from a PR firm claiming to “work with” the folks producing JK Rowling’s podcast. The PR flack asked us to change a headline they felt was inaccurate: Now JK Rowling grossly equates trans people to her “Death Eaters.” They hired a PR firm. Just that, think about it.

QAnon Will Not Be Leaving Us Anytime Soon [jacobin] – “Will Sommer, author of the new book Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, explains where QAnon came from, why it isn’t going away anytime soon, and how material deprivation helps drive conspiracy theories.” Grrr.

Beethoven’s genome, sequenced for first time, yields clues on cause of death [ars technica] – “Composer had genetic predisposition to liver disease and hepatitis B infection.” “Genetic predisposition for hepatitis”, and here i thought it was an infectious virus.

AI Images Visualizing Trump’s Arrest Send Internet Into a Frenzy [hyperallergic] – “The pictures, created using Midjourney, depict the former president’s greatest fantasy: being dragged away by police in front of the cameras.” I fukcing hate AI for being so good at this.

AI platform allegedly bans journalist over fake Trump arrest images [ars technica] – “Trump family names are also seemingly blocked on AI-imager Midjourney.” LOL

Antisemitism on Twitter has more than doubled since Elon Musk took over [ars technica] – “Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and October 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic”—that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”” Fuck Msuk! And fucking leave Twitter already.

Rhythms of Labor, Labors of Love, Labors of Grief | Peter Gelderloos [substack] – “Since we’re talking for realsies, though, let me name our wretched old travelling companion, patriarchal conditioning. The lack of resources is real. Being theoretically aware that a major problem exists—being aware that you, in fact, have that problem—and yet not doing the hard work to avail yourself of the resources to move from theoretical awareness to a transformation in embodied practice because whatever man… yeah, that’s also real.” I hear you, Peter.

Why I Decided to Update the Language in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Children’s Books [literary hub] – “After deep breaths, and with Ursula’s own revisionism in mind, I contacted a disability rights attorney, a youth literature consultant, a racial educator, and some kids. My advisory group leaned toward change but was not in consensus. I genuinely didn’t know what my mother would have decided. But she left me a clue: a note over her desk asking, “Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?”” How language edits should be done.

Is the “Free the Nipple” Movement Too White? [hyperallergic] – “Online representations of the activists lean White and thin, creating an image problem for the movement” That’s a problem.

The Imposition of Black Grief [yes! magazine] – “Grief requires tenderness. Demands it, even. As Black people, being rough or careless with our grief is more of the same indoctrination from Western culture and society. Trying to survive in this capitalistic society teaches us that we should not value stillness or rest. And racism always gives us a reason to be aggrieved and to fight for our humanity to be acknowledged and validated. Honoring our losses—and the grief that follows—means bowing to stillness.” We must grieve the many that died.

How U.S. Evangelicals Helped Homophobia Flourish in Africa [foreign policy] – “Anti-gay sentiment had previously existed on the continent, but white American religious groups have given it a boost.” Fuck evangelicals.

Monsters Vs. Nazis: Margaret Killjoy Of Feminazgûl On Anti-Fascist Black Metal [thequietus] – “Take the idea of loyalty. I don’t believe in loyalty, not as such. I believe in solidarity, instead. These are comparable social values, but the difference matters. Loyalty, as I understand it, is about allegiance. Allegiance is about the subordination of one to another. Loyalty happens, by and large, in a hierarchical fashion. Solidarity is performed between equals.” I love this distinction.

@loscharlos #LongCovidAwarenessDay – “If you’re not wearing a mask in public spaces, please reconsider.
I get social conformity is the driving factor for most human behavior — but the amount of suffering & agony you can save by wearing a mask at pharmacy, grocery, transit, etc is immeasurable. Be a fkn rebel.” Just as a reminder of #LongCOVIDAwarenessDay.

London’s Arts Scene Has Been Captured By Corporate Culture [novara media] – “12 years of austerity has seen the UK arts world lose more than a third of its funding, while a new ‘levelling up’ agenda is also seeing grants funnelled away from London theatres – a short-sighted plan to rob Peter to pay Paul. A third of London’s music venues and studios shut between 2007 and 2016, and more than half of London’s nightclubs closed their doors between 2008 and 2016, with a further quarter following during the pandemic.” Bummer.

Conservatives hate wokeness. Don’t trigger them by asking what it means [the guardian] – “The reason that Mandel and Soave seem to have such a hard time defining “woke” is because the right’s use of the word is amorphous by design. It’s not meant to have a precise meaning, it’s meant to be a loaded catch-all for things they don’t like and a stand-in for slurs they can’t say in public.” How would we say: “I woke up this morning empty and scared”.

Holocaust survivor: “Trans rights are the same as human rights” [dailykos] – “Gidon Lev went viral for a TikTok video where he offered his solidarity with the transgender community in the wake of a Republican genocide campaign against transgender and non-binary existence. In response to an TikTok video comparing Republican attacks against transgender rights to the Holocaust, Lev spoke firmly into the camera: “Do you know what I think about this as a Holocaust survivor? Trans rights are [the] same as human rights. And I stand with the trans community.” Lev is not the only Holocaust expert who thinks these Holocaust comparisons are valid.” Good man.

Right-wing media blame wokeness for Silicon Valley Bank failure [media matters for america] – “Right-wing media are blaming diversity policies and wokeness after the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed following a run on the bank by depositors. The cause of the crisis is complicated, but reports have homed in on a few factors — the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to combat inflation, and a panic among venture capital firms to withdraw funds in response to liquidity concerns, leaving the bank with a negative cash balance of nearly a billion dollars. Signature Bank in New York has now also collapsed following a run.” Woke banks lol.

February 2023 Global Climate Report [ncei] – “February 2023 was the fourth-warmest February for the globe in NOAA’s 174-year record. The February global surface temperature was 1.75°F (0.97°C) above the 20th-century average of 53.9°F (12.1°C). February 2023 marked the 44th consecutive February and the 528th consecutive month with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.” Oh really?!

Bees learn to dance and to solve puzzles from their peers [ars technica] – “Social insects like bees demonstrate a remarkable range of behaviors, from working together to build structurally complex nests (complete with built-in climate control) to the pragmatic division of labor within their communities. Biologists have traditionally viewed these behaviors as pre-programmed responses that evolved over generations in response to external factors. But two papers last week reported results indicating that social learning might also play a role.” <3 bees.

radical pop culture break. | Raechel Anne Jolie [substack] – “I share this conversation between me and anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos who, I was pleasantly surprised to learn, is also a bit of a movie person. We had a great time talking about movies this year, and we hope you enjoy this conversation to add to the Oscars discourse.” Movies viewed from an anarchist angle.

Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Terán’s Independent Autopsy Report Released at Press Conference [unicorn riot] – “The autopsy conducted of Tortuguita at the request of their family by Dr. Kris Sperry has found that when Tortuguita was shot and killed, their hands were raised in the air. According to the family’s lawyers, “The autopsy further reveals that Manuel was most probably in a seated position, cross-legged when killed.”” Outrage.

Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call [waxy.org] – “I didn’t think there was anything the MPAA could do to stop screeners, and ultimately, there wasn’t. The world changed around them, and made screeners largely worthless. The Oscar screener appears to be dead and buried for good, but the piracy scene lives on. And with that, it seems like a good place to wrap this project up. The spreadsheet has all the source data, 21 years of it, with multiple sheets for statistics, charts, and methodology. Let me know if you make any interesting visualizations with it.” Yeah, i think we got your point waxy.

How Capitalism Is Killing Our Attention Spans [current affairs] – “We need to stop blaming ourselves, and we need to stop only asking for small tweaks, valuable though they are. We are not medieval peasants begging at the courts of King Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds. And together, we can take them back if we’re determined to.” Capitalism kills more than out attention spans, but fine.

J.K. Rowling’s transphobia: A history [vox] – “An exhausting — if not exhaustive — timeline of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia.” It’s just so clear, so why that podcast?

I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading | George Monbiot [the guardian] – “Worse still, conspiracism is fascism’s fuel. Almost all successful conspiracy theories originate with or land with the far right. I’m not suggesting for one minute that Brand is sympathetic to fascism, but his videos are likely to assist its spread. As for his own politics, while he claims to have transcended left and right, I see a clear rightward shift.” Russell had an interview in Jacobin recently. Still don’t understand.

Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT [nyt] – “ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.” I cry.

Alfredo Cospito – Last Letter [anarchist federation] – “As a good anarchist, I believe that everyone is responsible for his own actions, and moreover, since I belong to its anti-organizational current, I have not “associated” myself with anyone and therefore I cannot “dissociate” myself from anyone. Affinity is something else.” This is a powerful position.

So Wearing a Mask Makes You a Criminal Now? | Jessica Wildfire [substack] – “If you wear a mask (N95 respirator or above), you’re not a criminal. You’re not a moral deviant. You’re not hysterical or paranoid. You’re not a coward. You’re not weak. You’re not a sheep. You’re not imposing any kind of burden on anyone, even though non-maskers increasingly act like the very sight of us triggers some kind of trauma. You’re displaying a form of moral integrity that’s increasingly rare. You’re actually paying attention to reality.
You don’t hear it often enough:
Thank you.” Same, thanks to everyone who still cares.

Shift Happens: Typewriter simulator – “Welcome to the typewriter simulator, part of my upcoming book Shift Happens!”

De La Soul Is Streaming [npr] – “What kept De La’s tunes out of rotation was a frustrating morass of outdated contracts and record label parsimony. It got so bad that in 2014, the group put their entire catalog on their website to download for free for a day. As they told Rolling Stone at the time, “We’ve been blessed to be in the Library of Congress, but we can’t even have our music on iTunes.””

Fear of clowns: An investigation into the aetiology of coulrophobia [frontiersin.org] – “A clown is a compound stimulus consisting of many different individual elements. It may not be any of these individual elements that is in itself frightening, but rather the juxtaposition of these features.”

Why Centrism Is Morally Indefensible [current affairs] – “Urban went off for six years to research and think and write, and to come up with a comprehensive theory of what society’s deepest problems are and how we ought to solve them. And the answer he came up with is that angry people in politics are the problem, with “social justice fundamentalism” being the problem he devotes more time to than any other.
To which I can only say: have you looked around you lately? Urban writes a 700-page book on politics, filled with citations to current events, without considering the problems of nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, the decimation of Earth’s biodiversity, animal farming, global wealth inequality, plutocracy, exploitation in the workplace, medical bankruptcy, opioid deaths, police brutality, homelessness, mass incarceration, COVID, unaffordable housing, student debt, or voter suppression. How out of touch with the basic facts of the world do you have to be to think that ethnic studies programs merit more attention than all of these colossal problems facing humanity?” Radicalized centrism makes fascism possible. That is what we see now.

Italy has kept its fascist monuments and buildings. The reasons are complex [npr] – “Historian Ceci, one of the website’s coordinators, says the project started seven years ago. It is backed by the Ferruccio Parri National Institute in Milan, named after an anti-fascist partisan who went on to become the first prime minister of postwar, newly democratic Italy in 1945.” Do not want.

These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends | Jessica Wildfire [substack] – “The pandemic has dealt its own final truth bombs. It seems pretty clear now that we’re not capable of cooperating as a species. If we were, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. We wouldn’t have let it get this bad. We’re capable of cooperating in smaller units, like villages. That’s what we were built for, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to exceed the parameters of our programming.” Jessica has not written much of late, i understand. But i miss her writing.


[Articles German/French]

«Tod im Waaghof», Teil 1: Ihr Name war Kowsika [republik] – “Am 12. Juni 2018 nimmt sich eine junge Frau in einem Basler Untersuchungs­gefängnis das Leben. Sie erstickt, weil sich vom Aufsichts­personal 15 Minuten niemand um sie kümmert. «Tod im Waaghof»” Racist bias of the swiss carceral system illustrated.

Psychiater Thomas Maier im Interview zu den Verschwörungstheorien Mind Control und ritueller Gewalt [beobachter]
“Die Störung ist zwar in gewisser Weise «man-made», aber auf keinen Fall so, wie sich das die Protagonisten dieser Ideologie vorstellen. Die Störung ist viel zu komplex und auch individuell, als dass sie gezielt induziert werden könnte, erst recht nicht bei Kleinkindern oder gar Säuglingen.” I mean…

Long Covid und ME/CFS – Teil 1 – “Ein Überblick über die komplexen Vorgänge, die zu Long Covid führen” Hier die Teile 2, 3 und 4 Good job, doc.

Aufschrei [hauptstadtbrief] – “Mittlerweile dokumentiert die Bürger*innenrechtsorganisation ACLU mehr als 400 queerfeindliche Gesetzesvorlagen in fast allen Staaten der USA. Nahezu täglich kommen neue hinzu und werden zunehmend beschlossen. Unter anderem wird darin trans Kindern und Erwachsenen ihre Gesundheitsversorgung verboten, Eltern sowie medizinisches Personal, die trans Kinder unterstützen, werden kriminalisiert oder Kindern wird allgemein der Zugang zu queerer Community und Inhalten beschnitten.”

Deichkind: Kostümparty ist vorbei [woz] – “Kids in ihrem Alter feiern lieber in Outdoorkleidung: Die Rapper von Deichkind melden mit ihrem achten Album «Neues vom Dauerzustand». Zeit für eine Modekritik.” I have questions.

Polizeieinsätze mit Gummigeschossen: Weltweit Tote und Verletzte [amnesty.ch] – “Polizeikräfte weltweit verwenden routinemässig Gummigeschosse und andere Einsatzwaffen in missbräuchlicher Form, um friedliche Proteste gewaltsam niederzuschlagen. Dabei verursachen sie massive Verletzungen und Todesfälle. Dies zeigt ein neuer Bericht von Amnesty International.” I think everyone knows someone who has lost or injured an eye.


[Older articles, still great]

J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints It was mentioned in that horrible podcast. Natalie with a great meta analysis on JKR.

Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID? [midnight sun] – “Ableism is counterrevolutionary. Left failures to incorporate an analysis of disability and ableism are detrimental to our vision and organizing capacity. Capitalism itself is fundamentally ableist, awarding the food and shelter necessary for survival on the basis of an individual’s ability to work for pay. Capitalism ensures its own survival by turning disabled people unable to work, along with other unemployed people, into a surplus population whose existence disciplines employed workers into accepting poor working conditions and little pay, lest they fall into the abject poverty and exclusion experienced by many disabled and unemployed people. Work under capitalism is a disabling process, as workers become debilitated through unsafe jobsites, injuries from accidents or repetitive stress, and the mental and psychological tolls of a work culture that is almost universally unsustainable.” WHY!!!!????

Are you an Anarchist? by David Graeber [audible anarchism] – “Chances are you have already heard something about anarchists and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Anarchists believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without being forced to. It is really a simple notion. But it’s one that the powerful have always found dangerous.” I am still so sad he died of presumably LongCOVID.

Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist [pulitzer] – “the notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man. But it was not until organic community relations … dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world.” What a strange and interesting character.

Johann Hari: This could be why you’re depressed or anxious – “If you’re depressed or anxious, you’re not weak and you’re not crazy — you’re a human being with unmet needs” I am.

Joanna Macy on How to Prepare Internally for WHATEVER Comes Next – “We could allow this whole experience of the planet, which is intrinsically rewarding, to manifest through our heart-minds—so that the planet may see itself, so that life may see itself. And we can bless it in some way. So there is some source of blessing on us, even as we die. I think of a Korean monk who said “Sunsets are beautiful too, not just sunrises.” We can do it beautifully. If we are going to go out, then we can do it with some nobility, generosity and beauty, so we do not fall into shock and fear.”


R.I.P.

Judy Heumann
And still too many of COVID


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Header Photo: a beautiful morning on the Mont Vully

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