[Marxism] Planet of the Censoring Humans - Reporting by Matt Taibbi

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The campaign to remove Michael Moore’s new documentary from the Internet 
– led by Moore’s erstwhile progressive “allies” – is a significant 
advance in the censorship revolution


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/planet-of-the-censoring-humans

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] The Gang Leader as President | Talking Points Memo

[John A Imani via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

I have seen people on the news calling him a 'gangleader' or a 'mafiosa'.
He is nothing of the sort.  He is a wanna-be-bully who would turn and run
on any street corner.  He doesn't have the intelligence, the guile, the
courage, nor the interpersonal abilities.  He is a clown.  A Ronald the
Donald Clown only missing a round nose and huge fake clown-feet with toilet
paper stuck to the bottom  and
dragging along behind him.  He is what he has come to be only because he
has said aloud what so many for so long have only dared to think.  Now they
have begun to act upon it.

JAI
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] The Universe Shouldn’t Exist, CERN Scientists Announce - Big Think

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-universe-shouldnt-exist-cern-scientists-announce

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] The ‘Liberal World Order’ Was Built With Blood

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times Op-Ed, May 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
The ‘Liberal World Order’ Was Built With Blood
As the United States reckons with its decline, it should understand 
where its power came from in the first place.

By Vincent Bevins

If you read the commentary coming out of New York and Washington, or 
speak with elites in Western Europe, it’s easy to find people panicking 
about the loss of “American leadership.” From Joe Biden’s campaign 
pledges to trans-Atlantic think tanks, exhortations to revive American 
supremacy and contain China are everywhere.


They have reason to be worried: This moment is shaking the foundations 
of America’s hegemony. It is painfully clear that the United States is 
ill-equipped to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, which does not play 
to American strengths (we can’t shoot it, after all). President Trump 
has for years been dismissing allies and antagonizing international 
institutions. And China is seemingly laying the groundwork for its 
arrival as a great power. American officials are now talking openly 
about a “new Cold War” to confront Beijing, and China now seems such a 
threat that Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute wonders 
whether the United States should get back in the business of covertly 
toppling unfriendly governments.


It’s unsurprising that establishment pundits, American policymakers and 
their allies would be alarmed about American decline. The United States 
and Western Europe have been the winners of the process that created 
this globalized world, the main beneficiaries of Washington’s triumph at 
the end of the Cold War. But a lot of people feel very differently.


In early April, I received a message from Winarso, a man I know in 
Indonesia who runs an organization that cares for the survivors of the 
mass murder that took place there in the 1960s. He was trying to raise 
money to buy rice so his community wouldn’t starve under lockdown. A 
dollar still goes a very long way in Indonesia, as Winarso knows too 
well. To explain America’s economic and political power, he points to 
the Cold War. It’s easy to see that Washington was truly victorious in 
the 20th century, he told me, because “we all got the U.S.-centered 
version of capitalism that Washington wanted to spread.” I asked him how 
America won. He answered quickly. “You killed us.”


I have spent the last three years with the losers of that great game, 
the individuals whose lives were shattered so this global order could be 
constructed. I spent most of my time interviewing the victims and 
survivors of a loose network of mass murder programs that targeted 
civilian opponents of Washington’s Cold War allies. I got to know people 
on four continents who lived through the coups and C.I.A. plots that Mr. 
Brands is talking about. To fully understand the nature of American 
power — and its future — their experiences are as important as those of 
anyone in a Paris boardroom or Washington think tank.


Winarso’s country is the most significant example. In 1965 and 1966, the 
American government assisted in the murder of approximately one million 
Indonesian civilians. This was one of the most important turning points 
of the Cold War — Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, 
and policymakers at the time understood it was a far more valuable prize 
than Vietnam. But it’s largely forgotten in the English-speaking world 
precisely because it was such a success. No American soldiers died; 
little attention was drawn to one more country pulled, seemingly 
naturally, into the United States’ orbit.


But the process was not natural. The U.S.-backed military used a failed 
uprising as a pretext to crush the Indonesian left, whose influence 
Washington had been seeking to counter for a decade, and then took 
control of the country. Recently declassified State Department documents 
make it clear that the United States aided and abetted the mass murder 
in Indonesia, providing material support, encouraging the killings and 
rewarding the perpetrators.


It was not the first time the United States had done something like 
this. In 1954, the American ambassador to Guatemala reportedly handed 
kill lists to that country’s military. And in Iraq, in 1963, the C.I.A. 
provided lists of suspected communists and leftists to the ruling Baath 
Party.


Indonesia in 1965 was the apex of anti-Communist violence in the 20th 
century. The slaughter obliterated the popular, unarmed Partai Komunis 
Indonesia, the largest Communist party outside of China and the Soviet 
Union, and toppled President Sukarno, a founding leader of the 
Nonaligned Movement and an outspoken 

[Marxism] Minnesota Attorney General Suggests Auto Zone Riot Starter Was 'Provocateur'

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

This video was shot in 2007 at a protest in Quebec.  Dave Coles, a right wing 
union official, exposed three police provocateurs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow 


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-went-undercover-at-montebello-protest-1.656171
 


The videographer, Paul Manly, is now a Green Member of Parliament from my 
constituency.

ken h
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] A historian of racial capitalism uncovers the city’s bloody past—and the possibilities for its future - Elias Rodriques - Bookforum Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

A historian of racial capitalism uncovers the city’s bloody past—and the 
possibilities for its future

ELIAS RODRIQUES

THE BROKEN HEART OF AMERICA: ST. LOUIS AND THE VIOLENT HISTORY OF THE 
UNITED STATES BY WALTER JOHNSON. NEW YORK: BASIC BOOKS. 528 PAGES. $35.


https://www.bookforum.com/print/2702/a-historian-of-racial-capitalism-uncovers-the-city-s-bloody-past-and-the-possibilities-for-its-future-24052

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] FREE Ebook: Police Violence

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://mailchi.mp/haymarketbooks/wt7stkhm8t-2030586?e=dd26bf9f3f

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] The Gang Leader as President | Talking Points Memo

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-gang-leader-as-president

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Minnesota Attorney General Suggests Auto Zone Riot Starter Was 'Provocateur'

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

More evidence that the cops will use agent-provocateurs disguised as 
black bloc anarchists.


https://thesource.com/2020/05/29/minnesota-attorney-general-suggests-auto-zone-riot-starter-was-provocateur/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Does neo-feudalism define our current epoch? | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

When I learned that we were entering a new period called neo-feudalism, 
my first reaction was to wonder if that was any worse than what we have 
now. After all, the serf might have suffered from a lack of freedom but 
at least had lots of time off as Michael Perelman pointed out in “The 
Invention of Capitalism“:


"Although their standard of living may not have been particularly 
lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most 
traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. The common people 
maintained innumerable religious holidays that punctuated the tempo of 
work. Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth 
centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were 
spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate 
that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria."


Then again, I wondered if they were using the term feudalism in the same 
way I do. When I first began to hear about Trump as a “neo-fascist,” I 
stubbornly insisted on using the term fascism in a strict sense. I 
didn’t find him that different from past American presidents, including 
F.D.R. who threw Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in defiance 
of constitutional guarantees to citizens.


FULL: 
https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/29/does-neo-feudalism-define-our-current-epoch/


_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Are you​ a Moby-Dickhead?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 5/29/20 8:31 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


Vol. 42 No. 11 · 4 June 2020
The Last Whale
by Colin Burrow

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
by Richard J. King. > Chicago, 430 pp., £23, November 2019, 978 0 226 51496 3


This was from the London Review of Books.


_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Where does the phrase 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts' come from?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The phrase that Trump used and Twitter flagged came from a southern 
police chief cracking down on protests.


https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-when-looting-starts-shooting-starts-come-n1217676

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Are you​ a Moby-Dickhead?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Vol. 42 No. 11 · 4 June 2020
The Last Whale
by Colin Burrow

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
by Richard J. King.
Chicago, 430 pp., £23, November 2019, 978 0 226 51496 3

Complete Poems
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
Library of America, 990 pp., £37.99, August 2019, 978 1 59853 618 8

Are you​ a Moby-Dickhead? If so, are you enough of a Moby-Dickhead to 
have visited the Phallological Museum in Iceland to inspect a sperm 
whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken 
by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His 
book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to 
know about whales but were too ashamed to ask. The fact that the sperm 
whale’s penis, or ‘grandissimus’, is four and a half feet long is just 
one of its juicier details. All but the truly dedicated cetologist will 
learn the following from King’s book: that right whales can be 
identified by the shape of the callosities around their blowholes, which 
are infested with cyamids, or whale lice; that a whale’s spout or blow 
contains snot as well as seawater; that ‘belugas have an extraordinary 
range of sound out of their blowholes – think whoopee cushions and 
bagpipes’; that a giant squid’s eye can be 11 inches in diameter; that 
ambergris (which sells for $15,800 a pound) is found in the rectum of 
only about 1 per cent of sperm whales and is an accretion that builds up 
around indigestible material such as squid heads.


Herman Melville culled his knowledge of whales from his voyage aboard 
the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from 
William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through 
encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling 
Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against 
up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns out that, 
with due allowance for the state of knowledge in the 1850s, Melville got 
a surprising amount right about whales: their size, their bone 
structure, their mass, even their emotional lives. Melville knew that 
the destruction of the Pequod by the white whale was physically 
possible, King argues, because in 1820 the Nantucket ship Essex was 
rammed by a sperm whale and sank. King even cautiously allows, after 
what one hopes was a carbon-neutral visit to the cetologist Marta Guerra 
Bobo in New Zealand, that a sperm whale could bear grudges against an 
Ahab, or can at least in theory recognise individual humans. Anyone who 
isn’t completely turned off by sea creatures will enjoy surfing the 
waves of information that roll genially from this book.


Ahab’s Rolling Sea also has a big thesis. King argues that Moby-Dick 
offers a ‘proto-Darwinian decentring of the human and the elevation of 
the whale’. Moby-Dick, King claims, is an ecological fiction that not 
only displays sympathy for whales but sets acquisitive human 
perspectives against the wide and impersonal horizon of the sea. 
Melville’s novel can offer ecological counsel for today since it 
encourages us to think about the violence mankind is doing to the 
natural world. The statistics support this argument: the global 
population of North Atlantic right whales, for instance, has dropped 
from an estimated twenty thousand before industrial-scale hunting in the 
19th century to 458 today.


It would be hard to fault either the motives or the facts underlying 
King’s ecological zeal. But it’s also hard to believe that Moby-Dick 
belongs near the top of any global list of ecological fictions. Melville 
does ask ‘whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase ... whether 
he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, 
like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and them himself evaporate in 
the final puff’. But he then contentedly concludes that whales aren’t 
actually being exterminated as a result of being hunted: they’re just 
changing their routes to avoid whalers, or are ingeniously hiding 
beneath the ice caps. ‘Hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle 
seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their polar citadels, 
and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up 
among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting 
December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.’ King says that 
‘Ishmael’s belief that whales can survive the pressure of American 
hunting in the 1850s reflected the mainstream knowledge of his day.’ 
Fair enough, but that does nothing to boost his ecowarrior credentials.


It’s possible to filter out the krill from the turbid mass of Moby-Dick 
and 

[Marxism] The Odyssey of Elias Demetracopoulos

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-odyssey-of-elias-demetracopoulos.html

-- 
Check out my newest books* Trumpism: Winter in America

(PDF version only), **Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
,
and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
 *
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Teaching Marx in a Pandemic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


Barnaby Raine writes to mark the launch of a new class  on Marx and his 
writing, as part of The Brooklyn Institute summer season


https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4723-teaching-marx-in-a-pandemic

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] 7 Shot at Louisville Protest Over Breonna Taylor’s Death

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.thedailybeast.com/shots-fired-at-louisville-protest-over-breonna-taylors-death

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] George Floyd Protest In Union Square Met With "Aggressive" NYPD Response, Multiple Arrests - Gothamist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://gothamist.com/news/george-floyd-protest-union-square-aggressive-nypd-response-multiple-arrests

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] With Nation Focused on Pandemic, Trump Interior Dept. to Greenlight Killing of Bear Cubs and Wolf Pups in Their Dens | Common Dreams News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/28/nation-focused-pandemic-trump-interior-dept-greenlight-killing-bear-cubs-and-wolf

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Why Does W.E.B. Du Bois Matter Today? - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

By Paul Buhle.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/29/why-does-w-e-b-du-bois-matter-today/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] In Search of a Lost Socialism - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

In May 1914 — 107 years ago this month — a small, yet vibrant socialist 
colony on the edge of Los Angeles County took root. In the Age of 
Covid-19, and with the continued violent assault on black and brown 
people across the US, one must visualize a more peaceful, egalitarian 
future, where healthcare is free and police are non-existent. The seeds 
of revolutionary change are all around us, they just need planting.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/29/in-search-of-a-lost-socialism/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A Rendezvous with Destiny? | TomDispatch

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The Great Depression, Coronavirus Style
Crashes, Then and Now
By Nomi Prins

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176706/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Chronicle of Higher Education
Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder
Despite what they say, administrators have no idea who is vulnerable to 
the virus

By Maggie Levantovskaya MAY 28, 2020  PREMIUM

The last time I entered a classroom, I pulled my sleeve over my hand to 
open the door. As students took their seats, I passed around a small 
pump bottle of Purell. What else could I do? I was on multiple 
immunosuppressants, which kept my lupus under control but also made me 
especially vulnerable to viral infections, like Covid-19. “What if I 
already have it?” I wondered. “What if one of my students has it?” I 
stood at the front of the class, terrified of the air we were all breathing.


It was still early in March but Santa Clara County, where I work, 
already had 71 confirmed Covid-19 cases. Down the road, Stanford 
University had announced its transition to online instruction. The night 
before teaching what turned out to be my last in-person class, I shared 
my concerns with colleagues. They urged me to move my classes online, 
but I showed up the next day anyway. I was at the end of a one-year 
contract and couldn’t afford to attract any negative attention. After 
seven years of precarious employment, it’s not the first time I’ve had 
to put my job before my health.


“Will we return or won’t we?” That question has been on my mind every 
day of quarantine. Then, in mid-May, with all the suddenness of a power 
outage, my employer, Santa Clara University, announced plans to reopen 
its campuses in the fall. Many other colleges have also declared their 
intentions to resume in-person instruction. Universities are complex 
machines, and there are many factors to weigh in making these decisions. 
But by pushing for a return to campus in the midst of a pandemic, these 
institutions are sending a clear message to the chronically ill and 
disabled: Finances and prestige are more important than the safety of 
those who are most vulnerable.


Are finances and prestige more important than the safety of those who 
are most vulnerable?
Calls to reopen colleges started rolling in just a few weeks after many 
schools stopped in-person instruction. Mitch Daniels, president of 
Purdue, infamously wrote that his campus community is “made up of young 
people,” with 80 percent of Purdue’s population occupying the “35 and 
under” age bracket (thus echoing Oklahoma State football coach Mike 
Gundy’s controversial comments that “A lot of them can fight [the virus] 
off with their natural body”). But raw numbers never tell the whole 
story. Many people are diagnosed with a severe chronic illness before 
the age of 35. I was a 26-year-old graduate student when I found out I 
had lupus. Moreover, colleges are not closed ecosystems — no campus is 
an island. In coffee shops, grocery stores, and on the street, students 
and employees interact with kids, the elderly, doctors, and essential 
workers.


Less than a week after Daniels’s statement, The New York Times published 
a pro-opening op-ed from Brown University’s president, Christina Paxson. 
Paxson said she put her trust in “evidence-based public health 
protocols” such as requiring students and employees to wear masks. But 
masks protect you only if you (1) have them and (2) know how to use them 
properly. More important, social distancing and masks don’t prevent 
infection if exposure, even in low doses, happens over a prolonged 
period of time. Even in a community with what ableist culture deems 
“favorable” demographics, a virus can spread with disastrous effects — 
but not all people will suffer the same. Those who happen to be 
immunocompromised are at greater risk for becoming ill and dying. That 
is, people like me.


For all the talk of disability awareness on campuses, higher education 
can be quite hostile to those who are ill and disabled. Such hostility 
encourages us to keep our conditions a secret, if we can, and to suffer 
in silence. But because I’m open about my disease, colleagues and 
students regularly share with me the difficulties they experience. Many 
have confided in me about living with Crohn’s, Pott’s, diabetes, 
rheumatoid arthritis, and other conditions requiring treatments that 
compromise the immune system.


There are many reasons to keep these diagnoses a secret. For one, people 
value their privacy and want to avoid the intrusive questions and 
microaggressions that often follow disclosure even in academic settings, 
where one is presumed to know better. People also worry about being 
discriminated against or simply underestimated. For years, I told only a 
few colleague friends about my health problems, and only when I was 

[Marxism] Killing twelve chickens a minute – Some thoughts on organising in Irish meat plants | Lefteast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/killing-twelve-chickens-a-minute-some-thoughts-on-organising-in-irish-meat-plants/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Ray Dalio says we need to reform capitalism to make it work for everyone - Marketplace

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Ray Dalio is the CEO of the largest hedge fund in the USA.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/05/29/covid-19-ray-dalio-economy-capitalism-restructure-equal-opportunity/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Twitter adds warning label to Trump tweet for 'glorifying violence' - CNN

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/tech/trump-twitter-minneapolis/index.html

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez has been arrested while covering Minneapolis protests live on the air Friday. - CNN

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arrested/index.html

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Venezuela in the 2020 pandemic

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/29/venezuela-in-the-2020-pandemic


_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com