General News Thread

[Twelveseal]

Welcome to partisan mind control. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Also, thanks Newt, you greased the machine's wheels gud.

[asterism42]

The idea that "doing things halfway" is always the better choice is an idiotic fallacy. There's no ethical or sane way to "do things halfway" between - oh, I don't know, just off the top of my head, "don't keep people in cages" and "keep people in cages".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

[rxrx]

The virus is really an eye opener. When it comes down, ALL governments don't give a fuck about people's lives. It is still amazing how some countries are fighting the virus politically. What, you kill it with the media?

[forumghost]

The virus is really an eye opener. When it comes down, ALL governments don't give a fuck about people's lives. It is still amazing how some countries are fighting the virus politically. What, you kill it with the media?

Did anyone actually think they did? Governments are fundamentally made up of those with wealth and power. And people with wealth and power only really care about maintaing and/or expanding that wealth and power.

We're more or less species-wide programmed to be entitled dicks.

[Dullahan]

The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and is outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets; and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the 'crows', who can be left to die: these are 'people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices'. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.

Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: 'A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance', guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, 'as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion'. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they 'observe their actions'. Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name, informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them - 'in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death'; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: 'In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.' Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the dead.

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the 'lock up', the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears'the name, age, sex of everyone, notwith- standing his condition': a copy is sent to the intendant ofthe quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities - is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note 'to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates'. The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it.

Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room 'the furniture and goods' are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the rooml after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, 'in the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as they left that they did not have on entering'. Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an unintermpted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omniplesent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body, his 'true' disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, vhich to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague.

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. [...] Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

[...]

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks."

[...]

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.

[...]

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.

Having read these you may now return to your regularly scheduled 'orange man bad'/'biden is definitely not a robot leaking battery acid'/'china numbah one'/'we will all die lmao xd'/'heheheh, you've never debated a leftist like ME before'/etc. posting

[Tobias]

So Biden maybe did a little rape huh, that’s cool
Real shame we have to make him our nominee, would be cool if there was someone else in the race but I just can’t think of anyone

Dang. And there goes me thinking that if someone brought up that little bit of altright tabloidesc nonsense by the woman who had changed her story a couple times already and penned an open I love Russia letter to Vladimir Putin it would be posted to BL by trubo.

[Mcjon01]

Was trying to spoil the betting pool mostly tbh

[AsGryffynn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

An example of a fallacious use of the argument to moderation would be to regard two opposed arguments—one person saying that the sky is blue, while another claims that the sky is in fact yellow—and conclude that the truth is that the sky is green.[4] While green is the colour created by combining blue and yellow, therefore being a compromise between the two positions—the sky is obviously not green, demonstrating that taking the middle ground of two positions does not always lead to the truth.

Vladimir Bukovsky maintained that the middle ground between the Big Lie of Soviet propaganda and the truth was itself a lie, and one should not be looking for a middle ground between disinformation and information. According to him, people from the Western pluralistic civilization are more prone to this fallacy because they are used to resolving problems by making compromises and accepting alternative interpretations—unlike Russians, who are looking for the absolute truth.

Guns and healthcare are about fact tied as sodium and tritium.

- - - Updated - - -

As long as you inform the patient in a timely manner AND refers her to another medical professional who can and will perform the operation, yes, AND ensure she receives appropriate medical treatment.
It's not exactly "I don't want to do this, sucks to be you".

That's how it works, usually. The "sorry, but I cannot do this procedure. Other doctors in this department should be able to assist you."

Leaving aside the ethical concerns regarding prisons, are you being deliberately obtuse in ignoring the reference to ICE's raids and detention centres?

That would depend on what "cage" constitutes and who gets put in those. No complaints on ICE criticism.

Oh, it's an absolutely awful state of affairs, and I agree! Though here in Brazil (though I'm told it's not much different in the US?), when people try to provide said political education, they're accused of "communist indoctrination".

How about making sure educators provide said education and not politicians who believe they are able to teach anything other than stealing from the public budget?

[Tobias]

Was trying to spoil the betting pool mostly tbh

thats what I get for taking the favorite

[AsGryffynn]

The NRA is a private organisation with a vested interest in selling more guns. They should have absolutely no say on whether a person is qualified or not to own firearms.



I'd argue that people's actual political opinions often matter less than whether they see themselves as represented by specific politicians. To put it another way: they're not voting for a political platform, they're voting for the candidate they "stan".

The NRA gets to add further restrictions, not permit stuff to happen. They can review you positively and that means the actual evaluation you had goes through. They review you negatively and you don't get any. If the government says no, it's no. If the government says yes and NRA says no, it's no. If both say yes, it's yes.

That politics is a popularity contest even when the state risks its collapse is not news to anyone who has been following politicians since at least 2005.

Yes but that is not an ideal state of affairs and I think better political education and socialization can mitigate that.

[Mcjon01]

thats what I get for taking the favorite

I mean, setting aside whether you believe it or not you do have to admit that “Come on, man, I heard you like me!” has some serious Joementum

[OverMaster]

Ok, weird disease shit...

Ok, this is potentially scary.

We're fucked.

[Kamera]

https://www.usnews.com/news/business...o-virus-crisis

financiers literally on suicide watch

[rxrx]

Seeing how the West is still fighting the virus using the media and shifting blame by inciting racial hate, I'm afraid it will eventually lead to war as governments use China as a scapegoat to cover the fact that they suck in protecting the lives of their people.

[AsGryffynn]

The NRA is a private organisation with a vested interest in selling more guns. They should have absolutely no say on whether a person is qualified or not to own firearms.



I'd argue that people's actual political opinions often matter less than whether they see themselves as represented by specific politicians. To put it another way: they're not voting for a political platform, they're voting for the candidate they "stan".

We're fucked.

No we are not.

We're just not out of the water just yet.

Like... these guys totally forgot this is still a strain of SARS? The virus that could induce Pneumonia and lead to COPD if not kept in check? Also, the virus that could reoccur unless the patient was restored to full health after hospitalization?

It's almost as if the original SARS never happened and everyone forgot how we dealt with that... or worse, that H1N1 was a lot less of a crisis even though H1N1 killed around 200,000+ people?

It's almost as if people lost the sense of scale and hasn't realized that we have been hit by way worse in the past and we didn't go into meltdown.

Seeing how the West is still fighting the virus using the media and shifting blame by inciting racial hate, I'm afraid it will eventually lead to war as governments use China as a scapegoat to cover the fact that they suck in protecting the lives of their people.

This even resembles the WWI era: dumb politicians, shutdown of the world economy, social upheaval and a war ready to start as soon as someone decides they want to do something and don't realize bombing enemy countries will not make the virus go away as much as overshadow casualties.

[rxrx]

This even resembles the WWI era: dumb politicians, shutdown of the world economy, social upheaval and a war ready to start as soon as someone decides they want to do something and don't realize bombing enemy countries will not make the virus go away as much as overshadow casualties.

I still wonder what the hell has happen to the West. Is aging population such a huge problem that they decide to let the old die off?

[Trubo]

Dang. And there goes me thinking that if someone brought up that little bit of altright tabloidesc nonsense by the woman who had changed her story a couple times already and penned an open I love Russia letter to Vladimir Putin it would be posted to BL by trubo.

Cute. Going to overlook that Biden's supposed stance on these sorts of cases is that they should be treated seriously, even if frivolous? Yet media has been completely mum about it because can't let anything hamper their golden boy.

[Tobias]

Same thing I told them when a patient accused me. Take it soberly and treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Which, in this case, after a quick review of the facts, there is a good reason why outlets that actually care about their credibility have considered the story bunk.

[SpoonyViking]

Weren't there a few accusations, though? I seem to remember more than one accuser being mentioned.

[Tobias]

There are several people who people who have claimed he hugged them or ran his fingers on their arm in an unsettling way, which he actually does do and has professed to work on.

This charming young lady however claims that in broad day light in the halls of Congress, Biden forcefully digitally penetrated and started shouting after her when she ran off. Again. In a well trafficked area in broad daylight, somehow without any witnesses.

Incidentally the reason I know that is because when I heard about it I actually went and looked for the story, because I don’t believe in standing by your candidate when he no longer deserves your support. However the more I looked through things the less she struck me as a victim and more she struck me as one of the several patients I saw who viewed a rape charge as an easy and salacious way to get back at people they didn’t like.

see when you take these charges seriously, sometimes the appropriate response is to look someone in the eye and say “you are absolutely talking out of your ass.”