tingilinde

life aboard a slave ship

A damning document 

a tip of the hat to Sukie

And the larger site on the slave trade referenced.

 

nina totenberg's tribute to ruth bader ginsburg

Friends for fifty years.  

disease denialism

An opinion piece in the British Medical Journal on disease denialism in the US.

snip

...

In the early 2000s, I worked, and for part of that time lived, in South Africa. Those were the years of AIDS denialism, when the President of the Republic, Thabo Mbeki, rejected mainstream views about HIV/AIDS, denying that the human immunodeficiency virus caused the disease and that antiretroviral therapy, saving lives around the rest of the world, was akin to poison. The entire state apparatus was overhauled to ensure that the President’s views became national policy, with his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, following Mbeki’s lead on HIV and suggesting that beetroot, garlic, lemons, and African potatoes were better than AIDS drugs for the disease, while quack cures like Virodene got championed by President Mbeki and his Deputy President Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Most of the provincial leaders followed suit, except in the Western Cape where activists from the Treatment Action Campaign, doctors and nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières, and the provincial health department started a programme to get antiretroviral drugs to the people who needed them. After Thabo Mbeki resigned in 2008 after almost ten years in office, a Harvard University study estimated that over 350,000 deaths were attributable to the refusal of his government to provide AIDS treatment to his citizens. South Africa rebooted its AIDS response quickly after his departure and now has the largest AIDS treatment programme in the world.

If Thabo Mbeki had his Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Donald Trump has found something of an equivalent in the shape of Scott Atlas, from Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Atlas was the subject of a scathing piece in the Washington Post in late August, which reported that he has championed the idea of sequestering the elderly and letting the coronavirus rip through the rest of the nation, akin to the Swedish “herd immunity” model which was tried unsuccessfully earlier this year, and in which deaths mounted and the economy suffered, even though this laissez-faire approach was supposed to ameliorate both. After the Washington Post story, Atlas claimed he was being misrepresented and that there was no White House policy to achieve herd immunity. But, there seems to be no question that he has pushed for decreasing testing of asymptomatic people even if they have been exposed to someone with covid-19, and has repeatedly pushed for schools and colleges to reopen and for lockdown orders to be lifted. If Sweden’s approach to “herd immunity” was a failure, trying anything like it in the US, with its patchwork of a healthcare system, and with millions of people without healthcare insurance and living with underlying conditions which predisposes them to serious complications from covid-19, is likely just to pile disaster upon disaster.

...

 

 

acedia

A word for our time - an essay by Jonathan Zecher.

 

qanon is just a nazi cult

Some argue it's a right wing photo-religion for people with a poor grasp of reality mixed with paranoia.  Others argue it's just a form of Nazism.  Both cases are probably valid. Here's a take on it being a Nazi cult.

a tip of the hat to Matt

 

dealing with fire

A piece from last year by Susie Cagle - how native people have managed fire.

 

 

white supremacy and american christianity

Michael Luo writing in The New Yorker.

snip

...

n the early nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening, which brought with it a moral fervor to perfect human society, helped spark abolitionism and other reform movements. Even outspoken critics of slavery, however, remained committed to the entrenched racial hierarchy. Charles Finney, an influential revivalist preacher and abolitionist, barred slaveholders from taking communion in his churches, but he opposed the intermingling of races and prohibited Blacks from holding church office. For Finney, social reform was always secondary to the ministry of the Gospel. “When I first went to New York, I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject,” he writes in his memoir. “I did not, however, turn aside to make it a hobby, or divert the attention of the people from the work of converting souls.” In the South, church leaders developed an elaborate system of scriptural justifications for slavery. A Baptist pastor in Alabama, the Reverend Dr. Basil Manly, Sr., became the country’s leading religious voice in support of the institution, playing a central role in the establishment of the Southern Baptist Convention—formed in the aftermath of the Baptists’ schism over slavery—and delivering the invocation when Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederacy.

After the South’s defeat in the Civil War, Southern church leaders struggled to help their congregants make sense of their loss. The result was the religion of the Lost Cause, a mythology that ennobled the Confederacy and idealized the antebellum South as a bastion of Christian piety and morals. This fusion of religious and cultural values, delivered from the pulpit, helped to legitimize a social order that continued to subjugate Blacks. Later, as evangelical Christianity, anchored in the South, grew to become the dominant expression of Christianity in America, its cultural scaffolding, rooted in white supremacy, spread as well. During the era of Jim Crow, when Southern statutes enforced the strict separation of races and restricted the rights of Blacks, Northern Protestant churches remained largely segregated and muted in their criticism. Many white Christians saw segregation as simply part of God’s plan for humanity.

...

 

 

comment on history

The history of Nazis holding rallies in left-wing areas of Weimar Germany, instigating street fights, and then telling the press that only they could save Germany from the "violent communists" seems like an important thing for people to be studying right now.

 

rick perlstein on modern conservatism

I've been meaning to read Rick Perlstein's three - and now four - volumes on modern conservatism.  They certainly come highly recommended.  This New Yorker interview pushes me closer..  but not before the election.

christians and nazis

On German churches as the Nazis came into power.