[FRIAM] ivermectin

Sat Sep 25 03:57:00 EDT 2021

Fascism looms large over South Africa too.
We just had a narrow escape. Our previous president, Jacob Zuma, had us on
the way to total disaster.
I have very high hopes that the tide has turned and that our current
president, Cyril Ramaphosa is leading us to the moral high ground we had
under Nelson Mandela.
I really enjoy living in this exciting world!

On Fri, 24 Sep 2021, 11:56 pm David Eric Smith, <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> It’s okay, Jochen, but I do want to avoid false equivalences.  If one
> refrains from using the term fascism until one has committed to meaning a
> specific thing by it, and then tries to use that meaning as an aid in
> sense-making, that is not the same as hurling epithets.  Fascism looms not
> just over Germans, but over people.  It happened to Germans and Spaniards
> and Italians and Argentines in particular eras, and they will unfortunately
> not only carry the latent rules of the game like everybody else does, but
> also almanacs of how various courses of play unroll, which are then
> available as a learning set for others.  I wish there weren’t any people
> who suffer under that, but given that the past has happened, it seems not
> at all wrong to try to learn from it where possible.
>
> Hindsight in the US will be 20/20, but if we are going to recognize that
> there is a serious problem and try to find some way to head it off, now
> would be a very good time to do that.  Much better than after the problem
> has played out and we can affirm that, yes, that was the collapse of
> American society into barbarism.  And later historians can say, as they
> always say, “How did people just let it happen, when surely there were many
> of them for whom that wasn’t at all wanted?”  Well….
>
> Perhaps — a Total Waste of Mailing-List Time — I can entertain you with
> how I ended up at Riefenstahl.
>
> 1. Joshua Cheptegei from Uganda won the 5k in the Tokyo Olympics, a race
> that was adjacent to the one I was urgently eager to watch, which was the
> men’s marathon in which Eliud Kipchoge created the kind of moment of grace
> I had been hoping for.
>
> 2. Last year in Atlanta, while riding in an Uber, the driver-woman was
> very concerned about flooding in Uganda, and I was aware I didn’t have a
> mental picture of Uganda’s location, topography, and geography.
>
> 3. Cheptegai seemed somehow similar to a Kipsigis name, but I was unsure,
> and wikipedia’d him.  There I learned that he has a middle name Kiprui.
> Aha!  He is a Kalenjin!
>
> 4. So where exactly is Uganda?  Oh!  It is just a continuation on the
> Kalenjin side of the part of Kenya spanning the East-African rift system on
> the north side of Lake Victoria.  Of course.  Why then are there fewer
> really successful Ugandan Kalenjin runners than Kenyans?  Is it something
> about national wealth or corruption or development index?  Or have the
> populations changed a bit going east.  We can see, within Kenya, that the
> Kalenjin, the Maasai, and the Luo have very different relations to running
> (the Luo not eat all, the Maasai rarely and more in middle distance), and
> for some of these differences it is easy to understand why.
>
> 5. Related to that: since we know there was successful Bantu migration as
> far east as Kenya, Bantu groups among the major political pillars often
> opposed to the Luo, is there a large Bantu presence in Uganda?  How does
> that affect politics and opportunities there?
>
> 6. I realize I _really_ need to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the
> population structure of the Nilotic peoples across that regions, and check
> whether I can reasonably-reliably identify them by look, as I normally
> think I can.
>
> 7.  Riefenstahl had this photo-book of the people she called “Die Nuba”,
> which I saw many years ago (not a real group, which is in keeping with a
> woman of not-great intelligence but Dunning-Kruger levels of energy and
> self-assuredness): who were those people?  My memory of them is of a
> Nilotic look, were they?  (Never found a reliable answer to that question).
>
> 8. And oh, by the way, I remember criticism of Riefenstahl’s having skewed
> or staged things about the lives of the people she lived with; but had no
> frame to have a view of the criticisms at the time; do I have a frame to
> have a view now?
>
> 9. Somewhere in that stream, I ran across Sontag, realized I didn’t
> remember who she was or why she was at one time a meme, and off we go down
> the track of reading I forwarded.
>
> 10.  That track of reading helps clarify places where I feel confused on
> many fronts.  I hard long seen Nietzsche as an antidote to Platonism —
> where here, circling back to Nick’s question a week ago, I mean people who
> prefer their own preconceived notions to faithful witnessing of experiences
> — and a precursor to the existentialists.  But Sontag makes me aware and
> cautious that Nietzsche is a more complicated figure than that.  He is full
> of what she calls the fascist aesthetic: “My eagle and my snake”; living on
> “honey, ice-fresh” etc.  Just stuff that seems arbitrary and nonsense if
> you aren’t coming from the ecstatic perspective.  Honey is about as far
> removed from ice as anything I can imagine having in my mouth.  So
> Nietzsche is coming from this complicated, scattered sensibility, as it
> seems in my eyes.  On one hand, his life-affirming philosophy wants to get
> away from much of what I regard as poisonous in platonism and in
> christianity, and profoundly healthy.  On the other hand, those who wanted
> to peg him as an icon of Nazism have material to draw from, and his own
> protestations, that he is not “a good German, but a very good European”
> become complicated to evaluate.
>
> But of course, who would possibly write all that irrelevant digression
> into a mailing-list post….
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Sep 24, 2021, at 7:03 AM, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
> Leni Riefenstahl? Ugh. Sounds like an example of Godwin's law: as an
> online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison
> to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
>
> Here in Germany there is nearly every week a documentary on TV about the
> time of the Nazis, often at midnight. Hitler's dogs, Hitler's drugs,
> Hitler's home in Austria, etc. For me it feels as if the past is haunting
> us. There might be a psychological aspect behind (collective) spooky
> phenomena :-/
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
> Date: 9/23/21 23:45 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ivermectin
>
> So the Monbiot article below is really interesting.
>
> Let me put in the link to a pdf (I don’t know whether legitimate or in
> violation of some paywall) to an article I mentioned before:
> https://campus.albion.edu/gcocks/files/2013/08/Fascinating-Fascism.pdf
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcampus.albion.edu%2fgcocks%2ffiles%2f2013%2f08%2fFascinating-Fascism.pdf&c=E,1,GD2kduWeTsQVaHex1Um8pFzIjkTJGq6FbLdUPmPYq-Ie7n_v8dwyTsarS140673LSz4XngkRXIx3D26xDKrwmYNXxkrCRYTCos402V0ekx_L&typo=1>
> specifically the first section on Leni Riefenstahl and what Sontag called
> “fascist aesthetics”, a term that appears to have quite strongly affected
> my thinking, because many things keep coming back to it and taking an
> orientation from it.  (n.b. the criticism of Sontag’s philosophical style
> in the great-fun article by Justin E.H. Smith that Glen forwarded a few
> days ago; I am aware of that at the same time as sending this link because
> I think there is worth in it.)
>
> That the Nazis should have advocated many things that (raised in other
> contexts) we consider good choices, like non-destructive land management or
> things of that sort, the Sontag article brings me to the question of not
> what they endorsed, but why they endorsed it.
>
> I would quasi-summarize her idea of fascist aesthetics in a line or two by
> saying that it wants ecstatic experience to be the ground for choosing.  I
> couldn’t tell you why my dislike for this orientation is as intense as it
> appears to be — I”m sure it reflects something wrong with me, but I don’t
> really care, reflecting something else wrong with me I’m sure — but it
> seems to be commanding decision-making in a lot of areas at the moment.
>  (b.t.w. this is also why I can’t summon the delight in William James that
> some people keep wanting me to experience, people who seem to think James
> and Peirce were of a piece on what Pragmatism is, where to me they seem
> almost poles.)
>
> There seem to be communities that are now dismayed, or just bored, with
> the way scientific argument gives you a back-trace to its conclusions.
> Arguing that they follow from “first principles” is I think an error: all
> this language is very much middle-out, and figuring out how to properly use
> a middle-out language is a profound and interesting problem (“problem”
> sense of “puzzle to be worked on”, not sense of “thing to be denied or
> rejected”).  But the back-trace connects some choices to other choices, and
> its big value is that it is more than nothing.  Getting more than nothing
> is rather a rare prize, and something worth working toward and then
> protecting if you can have a little bit.
>
> But those bored with it, who seem to endlessly repeat their position, and
> when asked to clarify, will repeat it again, seem to have a position
> something like “you’ll see when you see”.  It is distastefully close, in my
> perception, to those who will say “you really are a spiritual person, and
> you just won’t admit it.  When you stop resisting and admit it, you will
> come around to where I am, and you will see.”  That doesn’t seem to me like
> any way to make decisions that differs from what leaves us in our current
> mess, since people have been doing it forever.  Yet those who are into it
> now are convinced that this time they hold the true innovation.
>
> Very hard for me to understand.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Sep 24, 2021, at 1:57 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2fcommentisfree%2f2021%2fsep%2f22%2fleftwingers-far-right-conspiracy-theories-anti-vaxxers-power&c=E,1,YQWY-Qx-D6GAp4uFSbw9DpsNm0UPherqjbJBTzVjSG_of5c03uW3M1Peo6dUo_IiTgPC8e0gxQA9PhkeNnQbLgsUGzPtJnH2zqUVd0qr3S7PDBI,&typo=1
>
> "The notion of the 'sovereign body', untainted by chemical contamination,
> has begun to fuse with the fear that a shadowy cabal is trying to deprive
> us of autonomy."
>
> On 9/23/21 5:24 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>
> Well, I for one am always very suspicious of what my doctor tells me.
>
> It's not that I'm against modern medicine, IMO they do wonders, but are
> their interests always aligned 100% with mine as a patient? Me thinketh
> not, modern medicine is money-driven.I go to the doctor for advice, but
> ultimately I claim responsibility for my own body; I don't abdicate my
> health to somebody else.
>
> For example, I just listened to a documentary "Big Pharma - How much power
> do drug companies have? "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z_W3yRA9I8 <
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z_W3yRA9I8> on Youtube, going into
> details of the greed of the pharmaceutical companies.
>
>
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
>
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