Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 18

Some BS. Hope Rushdie is ok.

Outspoken critic of the man's views and what he's said, but his work is more or less unparalleled (even if some is pretty dense) and I recommend them. Midnight's children being brilliant and even the book that got him death threats is beyond solid. Yeah, Satanic Verses . But get them all, they're worth it, and that he was stabbed for them is something else entirely. Fuck that noise. Hope he recovers and comes back stronger. 
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Wow. Just Wow.

Was gonna talk about monkey pox and how we're living through a double pandemic time and... well, I got to hearing about our theocratic right and how they're busy trying to force underage girls who have been raped give birth to those kids. 


I'm not even joking. Just listen to the actual video. The odd thing is that, just a few years ago, I remember even the likes of Rush trying to crush some crazy from the heartland who thought abortion in the case of rape/incest was wrong. Now we're seeing that view come out of the woodwork. Like this is something that should sink the party but they know they can get away with it. Something really has broken in both people's sense of humanity and the idea of what's acceptable. 
And speaking of tragedies, this car crash is something else (nsfl). The screenshot is just a blur and flames. 
And then we have monkeypox. Social trust and fabric is at an all time low, so I'm sure that will go great (I don't think the virus can mutate that much, but we'll see... sigh). Be safe out there
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🦀

Apparently anti-vaxxers have driven an Austrian doctor to suicide. As usual, the cops (even there) backed the right wing crazies because they probably didn't want those night meetings to get too uncomfortable.

Wow didn't think this would be reported outside of my homecountry, but it is truly tragical. Dr. Kellermayr was a GP in rural Austria who voluntered to visit Covidpatients at home when no one else in our country had the guts to do so, because she didn't have a family and thought to herself who if not me should do this. After the first vaccines came out she was made sure everyone in her communitiy would get vaxxed.

Everything went to shit after a protest of anti-vaxxers in front of a hospital, which she condemned on twitter, saying the protesters blocked the entrance to the emergency room for the ambulances. Austrian police answered that this wasn't true because they arranged for a different entry point after talking to the protesters beforehand. The tweet and the reply of the police went viral in anti-vaxx telegram forums and it wasn't long until she received death threats via E-Mail. The Mails were very disturbingly written and by many different people, explaining in detail how they would visit her practice as a patient and would then proceed to torture her and her colleagues allowing them only a slow and painful death.

She reached out to the austrian police which told her that they couldn't locate the sender because the messages came from the mysterious darknet! One police-official even said in the morning news that he thinks she shouldn't have been so outspoken regarding the vaccinations and she only craves publicty for personal gains. 

Also the austrian medicine society didn't really help out they only said that if she wants help she needs to fill out a request and that they also think she should have kept a low profile.

She hired a private security firm which cost her a lot of money, so she had to close her practice a month ago. One official of the austrian medical society said that it's a nice practice next to a lake, and they won't have problems finding someone else to do her job.

Last friday she committed suicide and i don't want to speculate why. All I know is that every decent person in austria who helped to get over this pandemic is fucking furious towards the austrian police and the medical society, for not really helping out. It is a terrible sign to everyone who still believes in the society. Her death is also celebrated in many anti-vaxxer telegram forums.

As an austrian doctor what happened leds me to seriously doubt my countries officials and it makes destroying my health in the hospital everyday even harder.

Small comfort to realize that this doesn't just happen in the US, that the cops are right wing adjacent just about everywhere. Take, for example, this piece on cops who arrested medical students while leaving the anti-vaxxers alone:

Na, each country has its own lunatics. Both everywhere and regionalized clusters.

As a German it's too easy to shit on Saxony. But holy shit, they set the bar so low. There is a reason r/MannausSachsen is the German r/Floridaman.

Last winter, there was an aggressive protest of right-wing/neo-Nazi COVID lunatics in Dresden in front of the hospital. Local med students organized a counter-protest wearing white coats, keeping the entrances open.

Police appeared and fined and banned..the med students. Because of their white coats. Citing a law forbidding uniformed protests to surpress Weimar Republic style paramilitary organizations.

Can't make this shit up.

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Human Rights report on the war

Probably the only thing worth reading on the matter. 
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Nice Post

Nice post here on colonialism and past empires. 
Here:

This is a very difficult and complex question, any answer I give will necessarily be incomplete. I am also going to frame this as two different sides of a debate but this is artificial and does not actually represent an active scholarly controversy, it is just two different ways of looking at the issue. 

I also want to briefly outline a way of thinking about empire that is going to be useful here: the "world systems theory" best known from the political scientist Immanuel Wallerstein. Very simply put, the way he illustrated how the geopolitical configuration of the world operated is that there are "core" areas and "periphery" areas. The "core" would be something like Britain, the "periphery" would be something like Ghana. The main way this system reproduces itself is through economic production: the periphery is defined through primary economic production (cocoa beans) while the core is defined by secondary or tertiary economic production (chocolate bars). But it has all sorts of other effects in terms of, eg, social networks (the elites in Ghana will be educated in Britain) and culture (much education in Ghana occurs in English). This is an incredibly abbreviated introduction but it is a way of thinking about "empire" that is not just one political unit assuming direct control over another political unit.

So when you think about empire in terms of cores and peripheries there is a sense in which not much has changed, the domination of Ghana by Britain was fundamentally similar to the domination of Britain by Rome. We can talk about Italy as an "imperial core" and point towards all sorts of ways that wealth and resources flowed from the imperial peripheries into it. The great building projects of Trajan, for example, were in part funded by the spoils of conquest on the Danube, the Arch of Titus has a depiction of Roman soldiers carrying a menorah because the Temple in Jerusalem was sacked and looted during the Jewish Revolt. There are other ways too such as the imperial estates in Egypt and North Africa and the biographies of people like Herodes Atticus that we can see the way that resources flowed from imperial peripheries to the imperial core, and social networks formed with Rome at the center. And of course things flowed outward as well: Roman language and material culture and fashions and education flowed into the provinces just as surely as Spanish olive oil flowed into Rome. The big difference here between ancient and recent empires is therefore about the modern world, we still live in innumerable ways with the living legacy of recent colonial empires. This is not to say that Rome’s influence is invisible, but it would also be hard to argue that Italy maintains a position of socio-economic domination of France and Turkey and Algeria.

However, there is another perspective that modern colonial empires actually were qualitatively different, the economic dynamics of global capitalism, the ideologies of scientific racism, the efficiency and extensiveness of the modern bureaucratic state thus created a form of empire that actually was new. Put very broadly, European colonial empires were able to exert much more extensive control with less need for local accommodation and much more fine grained economic exploitation than ancient empires. This is not to say that the British behaved more tyrannically in India than the Romans behaved in North Africa (the reverse is almost certainly the case) but rather that modern political and economic systems effected much deeper changes. The widely studied phenomenon of “deindustrialization” in India is a perfect example of this: the British empire in India not only did not “develop” India but even made it “less developed” in that its industrial production declined in favor of primary economic production which then fed resources into the factories of Britain. You can also look at the development of “mono-economies” in Africa, how entire national economies become dependent on a single export oriented resource (cocoa in Ghana, copper in Zambia, ground nuts in Senegal, etc).1 This is not simply something seen by modern historians by the way: Bengali literati noted that while the officials of the East India Company were not more brutal or greedy than early elites, they were more distant, there was a visible way in which the British elite were taking wealth out of the region and bringing it to London that was not the case earlier.

1 This is complicated by the way that much of what we think of as “colonialism” in Africa occurred after formal decolonization–theinformal, de facto but not de jure relations of political domination in so-called “neocolonialism” is another way modern empires are“new”.

These ideas are not really in opposition and as I noted at the top, they do not represent a “debate” really within historiography. Rather they are different ways of emphasizing different things in history. There are ways in which modern, colonial empires are very different from ancient ones, but there are also ways in which ancient empires seem to be startlingly modern. In the long sordid history of human domination over other humans there are ways in which things do change the more, but also ways in which things stay the same.

No really easy way to give a bibliography here. For India I rely a great deal on William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, for Africa Stephen Ellis' Seasons of Rain, for Rome David Mattingly's Imperialism, Power and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire.

For Rome an important note is that there are live debates about how much the sort of economic transformation I describe ("peripheralization" to use a truly unwieldy word) actually occurred. There is evidence for example of transitions from polyculture to more monoculture in agriculture in certain areas, particularly North Africa. But it is difficult to see Africa proconsularis, one of the wealthiest, most urbanized, culturally sophisticated regions of the empire with some of the most impressive public monuments and private estates, as being a stand in for modern colonies.

 

Also , it sounds nuts but we lost 1.5 milliseconds last month. 

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Laxness

Really good article in the New Yorker about an Icelandic writer. I liked his Independent People a lot. Check it out if you have the time. But, despite the New Yorker article being solid, it kinda glosses over why he was black listed in the US. Apparently he was socialist and stood against the Icelandic joining of NATO. No surprise there. Good stuff to read nevertheless. 
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Huh

I mentioned reading Republic of False truths. In it the army et al accuse all the activists of being Zionist stooges and that they got CIA money to do what they did. Seems that there is a modicum of truth to the accusation (something I was not aware of), though the fact that the reactionaries (the army etc) get way more money from the US isn't lost on me. 
Also it leads me to believe that they are always looking for purity from those who would attack the status quo while they themselves can hide their own attachments to "the CIA". But they can use general public dissatisfaction to lie their way through and point people's biases against the revolutionists. 
Will have more on that, but for now that should be enough. Your thoughts?
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Huh More layoffs in the Webcomics/webnovel worlds.

Sounds familiar to me, unfortunately. So instead of editorial staff, people are going with user generated content. 

"It does seem to follow in the path of Korean rival Webtoon, which similarly ramped up in the US with original Western material only to cut editorial staff and go to a more streamlined UGC and Korean content model."

It's a large market, but unfortunately going for the path of least resistance is the way to go as far as content generation. Huh.
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Speaking of my last post:

Many people are actually feeling that "something in the air" and it's not just that we had the largest civil rights movement in our history that was essentially met with a collective shrug by those in power (or complete weakness of those we vote to have power vs those we don't... proving once again that we don't live in a democracy or republic or what have you). 
Well those int he medical field are feeling it too. More than just the shortages or over charging by insurance companies (or same companies denying benefits etc etc) or labor shortages. No, they're sensing something. Now, it could be a mix of the changes we've seen from this pandemic (or solidifying of the hierarchies, the jubilee for the superrich but not for us, etc etc), but perhaps it's more:

It's a subtle anxiety where you are? We are out of RNs and IV contrast and everything except patient satisfacton surveys. This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. 

That said, I am grateful so many if my family and med school friends are alive. I remember sitting in the dark watching footage from Italian hospitals in early 2020 and wondering which of us would be here in a year. And it's nothing compared to what the doctors in Ukraine deal with every day. Everything is relative.

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[–]KetamineBolusMD[S] 98 points 21 hours ago 

Even outside of the rn shortage, full hospitals, med/contrast shortage. Something big is coming

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[–]ineed_thatMD-PGY2 185 points 20 hours ago 

I think we’re inching closer to the peak of a total healthcare collapse. The last of Travel nursing is being rolled back by hospitals. More people are quitting and travel isn’t seen as a viable option to replace them. Remaining staff are quitting. More groups are unionizing (residents, nurses) everywhere. There’s even less trust in the medical establishment than usual after the latest Alzheimer’s study fraud and SSRI thing came out last week. Feels like shit keeps building and building. Expecting it to start unraveling even more during winter when the energy crisis gets mixed in with full recession stuff and hospitals get even more flooded with social cases

And this is at all parts of the system:

That's interesting bc there has consistently been an overabundance of pharmacists over the past 10 or so years due to the large number of schools. Perhaps it has to do with how little they pay? I'm a pharmacist, but I work in ambulatory care and I'm pretty sure a chain pharmacy would pay me $20 less per hour.

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[–]MochaUnicorn369 31 points 1 day ago 

From what I’ve read working for a chain is a nightmare - over worked to the point of dangerousness etc. And low pay.

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[–]CatsNFleasNBootsNBee 4 points 16 hours ago 

My mom is a pharmacist and had to work 100 hours a week during the height of the pandemic. Now that it’s “calmed down” they decided to cut her salary by 20,000$ a year. They framed it as fixing her work life balance by closing the pharmacy 2 hours earlier, while expecting the same quota. Wish they did that while she would come home crying every day from work form the stress. She’s been a pharmacist for almost 30 years. 

IHer pharmacy students are shitting themselves because they see how overworked, overwhelmed and underpaid they are. Pharmacy students are starting at 50-55$ an hour when it used to be at least 66$-70$. Insanity.

Apparently you can go to r/collapse and get a feel for the coming apocalypse. So it goes, but that does make a handful of my short stories that I'm working on ever "past it"
be safe out there

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Still A Million Damoclean Swords Now

Not inflation, but the rich still looking to rob this country via the likes of Trump but also the moderate Dems, and now they're full on trying to blame the raises the plebs got for the inflation we do have (the mountain ranges of money they got? Well you don't hear much about that). 
If that fails, they know they can get the plebs riled up about China or something else. Meanwhile the wind to effectively deal with climate change continues to narrow. 
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