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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-79
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Julian Assange:
Syria/OPCW:
Covid-19:
The pandemic can be described in percolation theory terms. Low incidence in a population keeps the growth rate low (currently in Germany). But after a critical incidence rate is passed (due to super-spreading events) the growth rate suddenly jumps upwards (currently in Spain, UK and elsewhere). Speaking colloquially: When there is sufficient shit flying around some of it will eventual hit the fan.
Leading the world:
Use as open thread …
@oldhippie
“Trump did a pharma advertisement.”
I was thinking exactly that as I listened to the list of drugs. Doesn’t matter whether is a fake. He’s commodified himself 100%
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I agree with the current pope and vk (quite a combination) that a fundamental lesson of this pandemic is evidenced through how the various states cared for their peoples, some doing quite well and others failing exceptionally. I live in a failed exceptionally state. Politics captured science.
While some barflies complained recently (I did not have time to comment then) that the “Fratelli Tutti” encyclical I provided a link for says nothing about making systematic structural changes, they are simply wrong. Perhaps they did not read the encyclical?
I understand the reluctance to give much ear to any doctrine, especially a patriarchal one. However, these are educational letters. This encyclical is the third letter of a remarkable collection of teachings. They are written for billions of our brothers and sisters regardless of our own beliefs or thinking. I see a person of stature loudly saying to billions of people in the world that the West has failed people everywhere; it must structurally change from the bottom up.
So, the pandemic teaches us of the West that we cannot simply do more of the same. We must create new systems. Here’s Francis on that:
7. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”
He doesn’t use bluntness to name the root of the problem explicitly, but he comes close:
”168. The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of “spillover” or “trickle” – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged “spillover” does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at “promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity”[140] and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, “without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist”.[141] The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, “we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need”.[142]
169. “In some closed and monochrome economic approaches, for example, there seems to be no place for popular movements that unite the unemployed, temporary and informal workers and many others who do not easily find a place in existing structures. Yet those movements manage various forms of popular economy and of community production. What is needed is a model of social, political and economic participation “that can include popular movements and invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny”, while also ensuring that “these experiences of solidarity which grow up from below, from the subsoil of the planet – can come together, be more coordinated, keep on meeting one another”.[143] This, however, must happen in a way that will not betray their distinctive way of acting as “sowers of change, promoters of a process involving millions of actions, great and small, creatively intertwined like words in a poem”.[144] In that sense, such movements are “social poets” that, in their own way, work, propose, promote and liberate. They help make possible an integral human development that goes beyond “the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor, much less part of a project that reunites peoples”.[145] They may be troublesome, and certain “theorists” may find it hard to classify them, yet we must find the courage to acknowledge that, without them, “democracy atrophies, turns into a mere word, a formality; it loses its representative character and becomes disembodied, since it leaves out the people in their daily struggle for dignity, in the building of their future.”
He also denounces so-called just war doctrine:
”We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a “just war”. Never again war!”
What will Pompeo and associates not do to bury his teachings? Asked rhetorically of course.
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http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html
Posted by: suzan | Oct 7 2020 3:45 utc | 288
Nowadays I need a bit of humour to get the nod off to sleep n playing vids on those damn flatcreens screws with my eyes, so I’ve been reading a bit.
Decided to read some Sven Hassel, who wrote about his life as a member of a german penal unit during WW2.
The books are fiction, but at least the first few are semi-biographical and the one I’m reading is his first “Legion of the Damned”.
Basically Hassel was a Dane deemed to be of ‘German extraction’ so he was conscripted after the Nazis invaded Denmark.
Now chaps like him who didn’t get off on murdering for Adolf were literally stuffed between a rock and a hard place, Hassel shot through (deserted) straight after basic training, then got caught, then threatened with the death penalty. ‘Death’ was serendipitously converted into 25 years hard labour, then, after having been enslaved, starved, and beaten to within an inch of his life for 18 months or so, he was offered an opportunity to perhaps ‘redeem’ himself by joining a penal company attached yo a panzer regiment.
This meant ‘dregs’ such as he, might get a 2nd chance to butcher innocents, if they agreed to do every dirty & dangerous mission that no one else wanted.
The platoon leader was a bloke they called the Old ‘un, because he was close to 30 when the rest of the platoon was late teens, early 20’s.
Here is the Old ‘un on the chances of Germany having a revolution when Adolf & the rest of the nazi scum come grinding to a halt:
_”Now don’t be naïve, Hans. As long as there is one single officer who sticks to discipline we will keep silence, step and direction. Just look how it went in 1918. In 1918 it wasn’t till the whole thing collapsed that the lads in field gray revolted. But God preserve us from a revolution. Pointless, aimless stupidity. No, my lad, the little German sausage eater is so frightened of everything that he doesn’t dare think, and you don’t make revolutions with frightened men whose stomachs turn at anything strong. It ended as it had to: the clever ones ran off with the swag. The bloodhounds were allowed to go scot-free, and today there they are, cracking their whips over us again. I have no doubt that the whole thing is going to collapse again, but you may call me Adolf if that leads to revolution. It will be the same story again. The clever ones will find their like and take care of Number One, and when a suitable time has passed they will help the bloodhounds up again and shove nice new whips into their paws, and then we will have to put our backs into it all over again. Until my highly esteemed fellow countrymen begin to discover what it’s all about, I have no confidence in them. Hitler and his dregs will be slaughtered, of course, and the sooner the better, but what are they but filthy puppets? And it’s not making a revolution if you just smash the puppets and let the director run off with the takings.”_
Thus, The Old Un in 1941.
Amerikans take note, nothing has changed as long as amerika remains a huge nation where the ‘leaders’ are remote from the citizens, people can hurl rocks, molotov cocktails and obscenities at each other while the arseholes laugh at your naivety.
One: Everyone who isn’t a plutocrat needs to hang with everyone else who isn’t.
Ditch all that bible bashing nonsense along with the race nonsense and get together,
Now I know that many normal amerikans on both sides of the divide (not the artificial dem/rethug divide, but the difference between those who know they will never get a look in and those who hope that maybe if they play their cards right they may get a look in, still believe that the republic/union can be saved.
It cannot for one simple reason the current amerikan population is at least 10 times too large for any wannabe leader to communicate with citizens without the assistance of some third party newspaper, TV station, social network or cable media player.
That means messages cannot be objective, uncorrupted or truthful once a population gets beyond a couple of degrees of separation between the citizens.
There is simply no way if a national entity wants a representative / leadership form of government that such a system can work fairly, free of power imbalances and corruption ,once its population is > 8 to 10 million citizens.
Indeed the number may be somewhat lower than that, the best, most workable maximum population should be calculated by swots prepared to put in the graft that I am not.
Two: Don’t tear off more than you can chew, stay small enough that potential leaders cannot hide away in some ‘center of government’ and do an amerika redux, small enough that most citizens know the leaders, or at the least know someone who does.
All is not lost, waiting until when the shit hits the fan in amerika will be too late, IMO amerikans need to be working right now now at developing common ground between the scared whitefellas and the angry blackfellas, because they have much more in common with each other, than any of ’em they have ever had with the arsehole elites.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Oct 7 2020 8:16 utc | 294
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