Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 6

Interactive Fiction

Just had a list of IF games that I have been quite impressed by. Something that is helping me think through the different ways to tell a story. Howling dogs is one I've just played (and quite possibly, one that I need to play again). Highly recommend you playing it. I will keep looking and keep learning... 


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Covid 19

Good stuff from NEJM on the virus (be safe):

We’ve come a long way. From the early, terrifying days of a rapidly spreading deadly infection to the current circumstances in which — despite a recent steep rise in transmission rates — Covid-19 has, for many people, become no more than an occasional inconvenience, involving a few days of symptoms and a short isolation period. It’s clear that for many, if not most, people, SARS-CoV-2 infection no longer carries the same risks of adverse outcomes as it did in the early months of the pandemic. These shifts have led to a widespread assumption, fueled by political and economic priorities, that the pandemic is behind us — that it’s time to let go of caution and resume prepandemic life.

The reality, however, would starkly contradict such a belief. Covid-19 currently results in about 300 to 500 deaths per day in the United States — equivalent to an annual mortality burden higher than that associated with a bad influenza season. In addition, many people continue to face severe short- or long-term Covid-19 illness, including people who lack access to vaccines or treatment and those with underlying conditions that impair their immune response to vaccines or render them especially vulnerable to Covid-associated complications. The ever-looming threat of the evolution of a new variant, one that can evade our vaccines and antivirals, remains very real. These facts support the assumption that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to play a major role in our lives for the foreseeable future. This new reality compels us to navigate a more complex social, economic, political, and clinical terrain and to take to heart the lessons learned from the Covid-19 response thus far — both the successes and the missteps.

To date, monitoring of the effects of Covid-19 has rested on several epidemiologic and clinical measures, which have shaped the recommended or mandated protective actions. Most commonly, these measures have included estimated rates of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; monitoring has also been conducted of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants and their susceptibility to available vaccines and treatments.

Yet in the current situation, some of these traditional measures have limited value. For example, the availability of rapid antigen tests that can be conducted at home — the results of which often aren’t captured by public health surveillance systems — challenges the validity of reported case numbers and transmission rates in some jurisdictions. There is therefore a need for unbiased monitoring of transmission and infection rates by means of regular testing of sentinel populations or randomly selected representative samples of the general population.1,2 Hospitalization and death rates are certainly more reliable measures than case rates, but these measures are limited by the fact that some hospitalized patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection have been admitted for other reasons and only incidentally tested positive. Furthermore, hospitalization and death are distal outcomes, so their rates have limited value for triggering early action to control the spread of infection and averting the consequences of a surge in cases. Other measures have gained prominence and now play a critical role in defining risk for infection or severe disease. Vaccine and booster coverage and availability and utilization of treatment for Covid-19 are critical variables that affect both the risk of severe illness or death from SARS-CoV-2 and health system capacity and access.

We have gained a deeper appreciation of the breadth of the pandemic’s effects, beyond its obvious health effects. These effects have included loss of employment or housing, disruption of educational systems, and increased rates of food insecurity. Many of these negative social and economic effects were unintended results of mitigation measures, including stay-at-home orders, the shutting down of public venues, and transitions to remote learning. Although these measures were appropriate at the time, their effects weren’t evenly distributed, with some communities facing disproportionate hardship, particularly historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups and communities with limited social and economic reserves. It is thus necessary to take into account the ways in which public health recommendations and policies may differentially affect various subgroups of the population. Government and nongovernmental entities need to create clear pathways for vulnerable populations to obtain access to the resources they need, including masks, vaccines, no-cost treatment, direct economic assistance, supplemental food, rent abatement, and Internet access to support virtual learning and remote access to health services.3 Such an approach requires that the federal government continue to invest in the Covid-19 response, since private-sector investment will be insufficient to meet all needs.4

One of the key challenges that the public health community faces as the pandemic evolves is the need to move away from universal recommendations, or population-wide prevention policy, toward a more differentiated or tailored approach — one that takes into account the characteristics of various communities and the pathogen. Relevant characteristics may include those that influence virus transmission or clinical outcomes, such as vaccine and booster coverage and risk factors for severe outcomes, including chronic medical conditions, racism and discrimination based on ethnicity, and lack of adequate health insurance. The implementation of tailored guidance for specific populations, however, is complicated by the legacy of glaring health disparities, the threat of stigmatization, and prevailing mistrust of authorities in some communities. Health-equity and antiracist principles and insights from the fields of health communication and behavioral science must therefore be taken into account from the start in the development and dissemination of recommendations and the implementation of programs and policies.3,5

There is much to lament in the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic, the spread of disinformation and misinformation, the deep divisions within the U.S. population and, globally, in people’s perceptions of the pandemic and willingness to trust guidance and embrace protective measures. These divisions should inspire a reexamination of the reasons that some public health recommendations fell flat, in addition to an acknowledgment that political expedience played a role in sowing mistrust. As the pandemic evolves, as the measures of its effects become more complex, and as guidance requires greater tailoring to specific populations, effective communication becomes even more important. Providing clear guidance, including explaining the rationale for various recommendations, acknowledging the social and economic trade-offs involved in complying with them, and offering people the resources they will need to effectively manage these trade-offs, would go a long way toward enabling the adoption of those recommendations.

Most important, attention to the engagement of trusted community leaders and spokespeople is required, as is listening authentically to communities from the start. Rather than focusing solely on what is being recommended, it’s equally important for public health leaders to focus on how recommendations are communicated and disseminated. Early engagement of community representatives is critical so that various aspects of anticipated guidance can be discussed in detail, including rationales, trade-offs, and the most appropriate communication channels and formats. Engagement must not only come in the form of an emergency response, but must involve a consistent presence, which can then be leveraged and activated further during times of urgent need.

The current moment in the Covid-19 pandemic is a pivotal one. There is an urgent need to confront a future in which SARS-CoV-2 will remain with us, threatening the health and well-being of millions of people throughout the world. At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that objectively we are in a better place with regard to the virus than we’ve ever been and that in fact many people believe the pandemic is behind us. This reality compels us to avoid using alarmist language and to offer valid and feasible solutions to bring people along to a new, nonemergency phase of the pandemic. How we craft our policies, programs, and associated messaging in this context and who delivers the messages is as important as ever.

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Russia Ukraine.

Still hard to get anything like the truth out of the fog of war that is Ukraine, never mind the mind melting narrative being pushed in the US. I mean read this headline, then the comments. Since there's a war on, I'm sure there's some validity to this. But given Europe's concentration camps for refugees (direct or indirectly paying others to do them), this is simply another line for the long list of evils going on in the world. Instead we get that comment thread, which reads like State Dept porn. 

Then I start watching this, and unlike what you hear from both sides, it seems more measured, more worth listening to. I'd check it out, tbf. 


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More Visual Text Mixtures.

Thanks to Vault of Culture for posting these two pieces. Also my statement and breakdown of what I've said is pretty on point, though I wonder how it will change. I do wonder what will come of this. Stay tuned!
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Reagan's Lies.

What we have here, is a failure to communicate. But also that history is a battlefield where telling a lie, like Reagan brought the Cold War to an end, is the lie for your cause to cut taxes. Thing is that you may or may not care, but it does matter. And this is from me, a person who thinks that Reagan did damn good for his legacy when he decided to pull back from the brink with regard to nuclear weapons and had a détente with the USSR. Might be that Bush is evil one in this story. We'll see or may never know. 
Some gems:

It depends. First I'll tackle the myth, which is pretty persistent, namely that Reagan's military spending (or sometimes strictly that related to the Strategic Defense Initiative aka "Star Wars") bankrupted the USSR and ended the Cold War. A repost of an old answer of mine:

Part I

The short answer is that while the Soviet Union did collapse in no small part because of budget deficits and economic stability, and while SDI did play a complicated role in arms control negotiations towards the end of the Cold War, responses to SDI were not a major factor in either the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor in the end of the Cold War.

First, about the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI, simply, was a defense program that was supposed to render nuclear weapons obsolete by creating a system of anti-ballistic missiles (or lasers) that would be able to intercept any Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads fired at the United States or its allies. The first call for such a program was in President Reagan’s “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security”, given on March 23, 1983:

”What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.”

Now, while this was a momentous announcement, it is largely a concluding section to a larger speech, one that effectively is given to justify increased US military spending since Reagan came to office in 1981. The general thrust of the speech was: “the Soviets have increased their military spending and research since the 1970s, the US has fallen behind, and needs to spend more to catch up.” Small note: while it has been argued, with some documentary evidence from Reagan’s diary, that the film “The Day After” had a profound influence on his desire to eliminate the nuclear threat, that made-for-TV film was broadcast in November 1983, some eight months after this national address.

Congress appropriated $1.39 billion for the initiative in 1984, but this was largely for research. The project was considered to have a final cost of $70 billion, soon rising to $170 billion, with no operational defense before 2000. Ultimately SDI was renamed in 1993, and then reorganized again in 2002 as the Missile Defense Agency. While it continues to conduct anti-ballistic missile research, the results have been mixed, and to date there is no ballistic missile shield rendering nuclear weapons obsolete.

So, so much for SDI. Now let’s look at the Soviet response to the program. The impact that the announcement of SDI had on Soviet strategic thinking has been debated. First, it’s worth noting that the Soviet defense industry and the Politburo did plan responses to SDI:

A decision of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of 15 July 1985 approved a number of "long-term research and development programs aimed at exploring the ways to create a multi-layered defense system with ground-based and space-based elements." It should be noted that no commitment to deployment of any of these systems was made at the time. The goal of the research and development effort was "to create by 1995 a technical and technological base in case the deployment of a multi-layered missile defense system would be necessary."

These “symmetric” defense responses largely revolved around developing a ground-based missile defense, and a space-based defense. However, it’s also important to note that the Soviet ministries proposing these measures were largely repackaging projects that they already had on the books, rather than creating entirely new systems from scratch, and that in any case no development to the point of deployment was considered for at least a decade. Furthermore, Soviet ministries involved in defense projects were confident in developing “asymmetric” responses to SDI (ie, mechanisms for allowing ICBMs to bypass SDI defenses). 

Ultimately, as stated by Pavel Podvig, an independent analyst on Soviet and Russian nuclear forces:

”The new evidence on the Soviet response to SDI largely corroborates the prevailing view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program does not present a danger to its security, for it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures. The evidence also helps answer some important questions about the concerns that the Soviet Union had about the U.S. program, the reasoning behind the choices that the Soviet leadership made, and the process that led to those choices.

So SDI does not seem to have greatly altered Soviet military spending. 

Which is not to say that the Soviet government did not care about SDI! The key difference is that it is not that SDI caused a new round of massive military spending, but that there was the fear that it and similar programs might at a time when Gorbachev was already committed to lowering defense expenditures. It clearly was a major item in arms control negotiations between the US and Soviet Union, most notably in the Reykjavik Summit in October of 1986: Gorbachev offered massive reductions in nuclear weapons if Reagan would agree to scrap deployment of (the then-nonexistent) SDI. Reagan refused, but offered to share the technology with the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev was suspicious about (“You don’t even want to share petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools, or equipment for dairies, while sharing SDI would be a second American revolution.”). The end result was that both parties walked away without any agreement. As Reagan noted: “Gorbachev is adamant we must cave in our SDI – well, this will be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.”

SDI played a major role in US-Soviet arms control negotiations in the 1980s, but it was more of a complicating factor, rather than a decisive factor – if anything it made coming to a comprehensive arms control agreement more difficult. 

Now, I’d like to turn to the Soviet economy and its role in the Soviet collapse.

Part II

Now, the Soviet economy was facing difficulties by the time that Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985. The Soviet budget had been running small deficits since the 1970s, defense expenditures made up some 18 percent of national income (although other estimates concluded that something like 20-40 percent of the economy was involved in military production), and investment in consumer goods industries and social programs was lagging. 

Khrushchev had considered shifting resources from defense to the consumer sector, but Brezhnev boosted military spending. When Gorbachev came to power, he was willing to cut back on military expenditures in order to free up capital for the civilian economy, although he and those around him would differ on relative priorities and on the need for introducing market mechanisms. However, ultimately, considering the extremely low pay of the largely conscript Soviet military forces, any major savings would have to be made in cutting military industrial production. While all of these debates occurred with SDI on the table, they also occurred with increased Western technological sophistication, stagnating civilian living standards, and a costly and bloody Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. 

By 1988, Gorbachev pushed the economic shift forward with a declaration of unilateral defense spending cuts, personnel cuts of half a million, a planned withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Warsaw Pact states, and a “de-ideologization of interstate relations” in a speech to the UN on December 7. 

Ironically, it was Gorbachev’s attempt to shift the Soviet economy that led to the increasing fiscal instability of the regime. In order to refocus and modernize industrial production, the Soviet Union needed to import new machine tools from abroad. An increase of importation of machine tools, coupled with a fall in international oil revenues (from 30.9 billion rubles in 1984 to 20.7 billion rubles in 1988) caused a massive increase in the deficit: from some 17-18 billion rubles in 1985 to 48-50 billion rubles in 1986, and rising. This was also coupled by a fall in domestic governmental revenue, as Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign cut sales receipts (a Soviet version of a sales tax) from 103 billion rubles in 1983-1984 to 91.5 billion rubles in 1986. The deficit continued to climb, reaching an estimated 120 billion rubles in 1989 (or 10-12 percent of Soviet GNP). By 1990, no one really knew how large the deficit was in reality, and with increasing political reforms giving greater sovereignty to the Soviet Republics, some three fourths of tax collections were withheld from the center by the Republican governments, leading to an effective bankruptcy of the Soviet government. The Soviet government responded to these deficits by printing money, which in turn caused a sharp rise in inflation, an increased scarcity in goods, and a related decline in living standards. Glastnost (greater media openness) meant that increasingly the government was forced to admit the scale of the economic crisis, and the public was very well aware of the problem.

As economist Marshall Goldman notes: 

”Gorbachev’s well-intended but misguided economic strategy was in itself enough to cripple any chance to bring about the economic revitalization he wanted to badly. But the macroeconomic implications of his budget deficit eventually came to have their own impact. Whatever their commitment to socialist economic planning, Soviet officials by 1989 and certainly by 1990 belatedly came to understand that macroeconomics and budget deficits, particularly large ones, do matter. As Gorbachev himself admitted in an October 19, 1990, speech to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, “We lost control over the financial situation in the country. This was our most serious mistake in the years of perestroika…Achieving a balanced budget today is the number one task and the most important one.” “

In 1990, the Shatalin Plan was proposed, to further cut foreign aid, military expenditures, and the KGB budget in an effort to reign in the deficit and inflation. Other proposed plans called for the cutting of food subsidies. Ultimately, Gorbachev was unable to make a firm decision on any of these proposals, and so the economic situation continued to deteriorate. Confidence in Gorbachev, both from reformers and from conservative hard-liners, fell, until the events of 1991 caused Gorbachev to lose complete control of political events, and ultimately caused the end of the government he stood at the top of.

In summary: SDI, both in terms of its US program and the Soviet response, were more based on research and proposals than on hard spending on a new arms race. The role that SDI played in Soviet concerns over military expenditures was not negligible, but is debatable and probably not decisive. SDI became a major sticking point in US-Soviet arms negotiations by 1986, but if anything hindered agreements concluding the Cold War. By the time Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, the USSR was in economic and social stagnation, and was spending ever more of its national income on defense that was not keeping up with technological advances in the West. Nevertheless, the cuts to military spending that did occur were largely unilateral moves on Gorbachev’s part as a key in his plans for economic, political and social restructuring of the USSR. Overall, it was these reforms, their economic mismanagement, Gorbachev’s often hands-off and indecisive leadership style, and increased social, ethnic and political tensions that resulted which caused the fall of the USSR.

Sources:

Reagan, Ronald. “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security”. March 23, 1983. Reagan Presidential Library. Link here

Gorbachev, Mikhail. “Speech to the U.N.” 43rd General Assembly Session, December 7, 1988. Link here

Broder, John M. “'Star Wars' First Phase Cost Put at $170 Billion : System Would Intercept Only 16% of Soviet Missiles, Report of 3 Senate Democrats Says” LA Times, June 12, 1988. Link here

“Cost of Missile Defense Put at $70 Billion by 1993”. NY Times. February 12, 1985. Archive link here

Podvig, Pavel. “Did Star Wars Help End the Cold War? Soviet Response to the SDI Program. Russian Nuclear Forces Project, Working Paper. March 17, 2013. Link here

Goldman, Marshall. What Went Wrong with Perestroika. W.W. Norton & Co., 1992

Hoffman, David. The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Sept. 22, 2009

Odom, William E. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. Yale University Press, 2000

Now for some updated thoughts. 

There's a more charitable reading of Reagan and the end of the Cold War, namely that relations were noticeably, massively thawed when he left office in January 1989 than when he arrived in 1981. As US president he deserves some credit for this, because he could have kept a hard line all the way throughout if he had wanted (and he did get public criticism from parts the political right for warming US-Soviet relations). He developed a good relationship with Gorbachev, and was in continous conversation with the Soviet leader, even when individual summits like the one at Reykjavik ended up not going anywhere. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which was the first arms control treaty to cover an entire class of nuclear weapon ( as of 2019 it's no longer in force). 

But even here, there are some caveats. Most of the events ending the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR happened after Reagan left office in 1989. George H.W. Bush, although he had been Reagan's Vice President, rather famously put US-Soviet relations on pause for a strategic rethink: he actually had to come around to developing his own trust of Gorbachev, it's not something that was an automatic given. 

And at the end of the day, Gorbachev was always in the driver's seat for Soviet actions. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, cutback in support for friendly regimes in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, and the withdrawal of troops from East Europe were his initiatives, not something forced on him. The drawdown in Eastern Europe was actually a surprise (he announced it at the UN in 1988), and Americans didn't even have advance notice of it. 

And lastly, "the end of the Cold War" didn't originally mean "the fall of the Soviet Union". Bush and Gorbachev jointly declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit in December 1989, a good two years before the USSR's dissolution. The events that led to that dissolution in 1989-1991 were internal Soviet political events, and at least up to August 1991 Bush himself advocated for a continued Soviet Union with Gorbachev leading it. It's only once the USSR fell that its dissolution began to be associated to the "real" end of the Cold War, and the US winning it (and Bush himself is responsible for making this association in his 1992 State of the Union speech).

So even in this charitable interpretation of "Reagan ended the Cold War", it tends to assume that the 1991 dissolution and not the 1989 Malta Summit is the end point, but also that all the major events happened because of Reagan, and that even on the American side Bush was just continuing or caretaking those policies, when he had to come around to warm US-Soviet relations on his own, and make a number of very critical decisions.

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Gods Fail

More proof that with even slight power, not complete, people are straight evil. Cops here and our border guards have shown how bad they can be with murder and sexual assault. Same in the UK, apparently. And all matches our slow march towards Neo feudalism. Also have to add the note that I too am starting to think the reason our elites are so invested in Ukraine, a country they don't care for, isn't just profits, but a sense that it's their last stand at the top of the world (someone defying them is what they hate more, they really don't care about innocents dying). 
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Fog of War

Fog of war. New Russian Offensive. That much seems clear. Now, depending on who you listen to, it's not clear how things will turn out. One side, like Scott Ritter et al, think that Russia is going to steam roll the Ukrainians. That they have too many people and tanks to be stopped. 
Others are saying their weapons, their conscripts are weak and will lose:

According to the usual suspects the Glorious Russian Winter Offensive has begun in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. It is super effective, the Russians are gaining ground rapidly, Ukraine is on the verge of total military collapse. Surrender now ye Hohols. 

Back in reality initial information on the Russian attacks in Zaporizhzhia Oblast looks very bad for the Russians. There were attacks across a large section of the front, most of the attacks appear to have been conducted by mobilized personnel with BMP-1 and T-62 tanks. (Both built in the 60s, both outclassed by the 80s) Russian air support remains limited though claimed shootdowns by Ukraine spiked in the past 3 days. 

It appears that to save on vehicle losses Russian infantry are dismounting well short of their objectives and walking towards Ukrainian lines while the Russian armor sits back and provides distant fire support.

This gives Ukrainian artillery time to set up and dial in with devastating results.

It is possible that this is not the "real" offensive. It is possible that the Russians are engaging the Ukrainian lines with disposable conscript troops. It is possible they will attempt to breakthrough with professional soldiers armed with relatively modern equipment in Zaporizhzhia or elsewhere.

But at this point it looks like they fed thousands of conscripts and a bunch of 1960's equipment into the meatgrinder for no real gains.

Is there any way to actually know the truth (fog of war aside)? Seems little too hard to me. I have no clue. Not on the ground and know few on the ground there. 



My main thoughts are that: I don't even know the casualty ratios for the war right now. Wikipedia seems to have large ranges (but ones that favor Russia). Ukraine: 100k casualties whereas Ritter claims 250k (dead, I believe). The Russia: 100k-180k casualties. The dead breakdown could be anywhere around there. Note it is in each side's interest to lie about these numbers. So I'm not even sure how one comes even close to figuring out what the final is. On the face of it, it would seem to make sense that the offensive force has more. Or else, how would they take any land against a well trained force?
On the other hand, who knows? Each side points to comments or singular instances (meat grinder that Ukrainian forces are currently going through, that either side has conscript forces that are useless etc etc) that don't clarify. Are there 100k+ missing on the Ukrainian side and they're so corrupt that they aren't reporting this? I don't know. Seems like there would be a revolt among the wives and mothers of those missing people if this were the case. 
The same goes for the offensive. On one hand when I hear of a few tanks being sent to Ukraine (when they asked for 100s), that doesn't seem like it would make a difference. But how much does incompetence play a role? Again, the other example is America defeating the Iraqi army with less soldiers. Things like that really do matter. So hand waving it away isn't right IMO. But claiming Russia is equal to Iraq in either war also seems like a tall stretch of the truth (which no one knows... yet). 
Some claim that the lack of Russian success comes down to how they had bad intel (thought Ukraine was very corrupt and thus would roll over) while not wanting to fight all out (Ritter again), but that too doesn't seem entirely legit. For most of these things, we can only use past information (I've noted how both US and Russian military lied over and over in previous conflicts, so hard to know what to trust) from these groups and wonder if they're telling the truth at this moment?
For the dissident voices in the US, it would seem that their track record is better than anyone in the mainstream, let alone those in our gov. On the internets, if you try to raise any questions about the western narrative (Russia on the verge of collapse) you just get called a Putin Troll. I'm sure it's similar in Russia, but the other way, but still it makes me believe that it's a narrative that's more likely to be true [1]. To that end, I tend to believe the Russia offensive will be damaging to Ukraine and I don't think the worst is behind us in this conflict (note: if Russia does lose, that's when they will go nuts.. And this doesn't mean Putin isn't replaced... just that he might be replaced by someone more hardline). Your thoughts?
[1] even if I know that the narrative being pushed has no bearing on the truth, it doesn't mean it's automatically untrue. 


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Assange

Is part of this discipline the narrative war we've been seeing here in the States (west too, from what I've heard) whereby any dissenting voices are crushed. Especially those that are strong like Assange's. Funny thing is, though I know people on the left seem to know how vital Assange's case is to stopping the coming Neo-feudal age, most people seem fine with it. Even right wingers who get close to thinking about the overall narrative (and censorship) being pushed out there. Ah well. Divided we fall indeed. 



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Interesting post on Race in America

First one is. Finns weren't considered white for a bit. 
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Right Wing Violence.

Always the worst. And always, given the state of most institutions and republics, are allowed to get off Scott free. Witness the deaths of BLM leaders in the US (and no investigation even) back in 2015 or so as well as the 2020 broad day killing of someone who dared to defend himself against MAGA crazies in Portland. So it goes that even post WWII someone who dared to heckle Belgian Royalty was duly killed and the killers never found:

On 11 August 1950 Baudouin took the constitutional oath as regent before the united Chambers of the Belgium Parliament. During the proceedings, one of the Communist deputies present shouted "Vive la République!" ("Long Live the Republic!"). Lahaut was reported to have been the deputy responsible, though in the confusion of the moment this remains unconfirmed. A week later, on 18 August 1950, Lahaut was assassinated by two unknown gunmen outside his home in Seraing.

I came upon this after reading a post on Lumumba and reading how Belgian royalty only recently returned to the Congo, and returned his tooth (because they dug up his body, threw it in acid and kept his teeth as souvenirs). 
Crazy stuff if you ask me. Anyhow, I'll post links of other work soon enough.
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