[Xmca-l] Re: FW: Unbelievable: number 19th strain according to Fox News?

[Bonnie Nardi]

Watching the debacle of Trump reveals, to me at least, how important class
analysis is. Trump is deranged, and his everyday actions fall completely
outside all social norms of decency, yet he is *consistently supported* by
(1) his Republican cohorts, (2) big business (Bill Gates: “I don’t rule out
voting for Trump if I have to pay too much in taxes”…) and (3) the
alienated/uneducated class who’d rather at least have the fun of throwing a
brick through the window than put up with any more PC bs (or abortion
rights or separation of church and state). A potent and scary mix. The
"complicity" Greg mentioned has several sources, all class-based in my
view, but oddly variable.

Trump is a symptom of a society running off the rails. He could not have
come to power had not the underlying conditions been ripe for it. He wasn’t
the lesser of two evils for many voters — he was finally someone who they
thought spoke for them whether they occupied corporate boardrooms or NASCAR
bleachers or evangelical pews. Europe is also producing fascist-leaning
leaders and other places have them firmly ensconced.

It’s damn weird to me that we’ve gone, in my lifetime, from U.S. leadership
in gay rights, civil rights, disability rights, and environmentalism,  to
the current horrendous situation. (Europe has implemented better
environmental policies but the groundwork was laid in the U.S.) I love the
U.S. the way a parent still loves a teenager gone bad, but that’s beside
the point, this is now global, as Julian points out.  We are all in this
together. Neoliberalism deftly divides us (I see it, e.g., in the virus
discussions about how old people, are, let’s face it, expendable, and we
worry too much about them -- the young need to get back to work, etc.
There’s as much of this on reddit as there is from Republicans.)

What to do? The first thing is to rethink what a society can and should be.
As part of this exercise I recommend Andre Gorz's *Paths to Paradise*. It's
short, sweet, and prescient. Gorz recognized that environmental problems
come from too much frenetic economic activity and that we are spending too
much of our lives in alienating workplaces. He recommended a lot more
automation and a lot more sharing of wealth. He has been a touchstone for
me and others in the Computing within LIMITS community (see
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://computingwithinlimits.org/2020/__;!!Mih3wA!X6Z1zy1ywvBUsh4PLzAdjWe7J-gfCIiKCjavnOndv0aE8iksRfWM1OkKDsjdIra1sk7s_Q$  for all the papers going back to
2015).

I think we absolutely have to address the big picture and smaller efforts
(like growing meat in labs and so on) are not going to do much.

The pandemic has shown Gorz to be right about the environment -- I have
been astonished at how quickly air and water are clearing, how animals are
benefiting, etc. I didn't expect all that to happen so fast. In the San
Francisco Bay Area where I live, air pollution is down 40%. There's lots of
good media reporting on these kinds of changes which are global.

I think we must look to what CHAT has written about personality. I have
never really understood that work but I sense that it's important. The
culture now produces neoliberal "entrepreneurs" with their self-branding
and paddle-your-own-canoe philosophies, but other eras produced other
types. I live in a coastal town, and while the beach parking lots are
closed, the surfers, walkers, and cyclists are out when they aren't
normally out. They are probably getting their work done virtually in less
time than normal (without a commute and the distractions of the office),
and doing what they love doing!  Maybe we need a world of walkers and
surfers -- that personality type. I'd be happy if people were more focused
on knitting, and baking, and carpentry -- all those homely ways of
producing rather than working, often for very little money, so they can buy
everything at the store. Most of it ends up in landfills, by design, or, if
it's food, it is so awful it contributes to the chronic diseases. Or
working hard at high end jobs and ending up feeling one is entitled to what
one has (the Bay Area has been badly affected by this) and that if you are
poor it's kind of your own fault.

Yes, I recognize that staying home more has costs and that we can't produce
everything ourselves, but the solution to the big picture is not to send
everyone off to the workplace for most of their lives but to address issues
of violence, production, quality of life, and so on in direct ways. We
can't rely on by-products of our current work habits to stem violence, for
example. That is just not right.

The post-growth movement in Europe is doing thoughtful work, and I
recommend what they write. They cite Gorz (as well as Gandhi, Donella
Meadows, and so on), and I think they are on the right track.

Best,

-

Bonnie




Bonnie Nardi
Professor (Emer.)
Department of Informatics
School of Information and Computer Sciences
5088 Bren Hall
UC Irvine 92697-3440
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie__;!!Mih3wA!X6Z1zy1ywvBUsh4PLzAdjWe7J-gfCIiKCjavnOndv0aE8iksRfWM1OkKDsjdIrbdA0uVBQ$ 
NEW BOOK: Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and
Capitalism (with Hamid Ekbia, MIT Press, 2017)

On Apr 16, 2020, at 11:14 AM, Julian Williams <
julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

Mike, hi

Surely not funny, of course. And we should have an even greater concern
about India, where 1.4billion people are supposedly ‘shut down’ ( actually,
many millions are walking hundreds of miles ‘home’ from the cities to their
villages, wearing masks, but ..  ), and nationalist, anti-Muslim extremism
- rampant before the crisis – is growing:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/16/arundhati_roy_coronavirus_india?utm_source=Democracy*Now*21&utm_campaign=5b85440b98-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-5b85440b98-192514813__;KyU!!Mih3wA!X6Z1zy1ywvBUsh4PLzAdjWe7J-gfCIiKCjavnOndv0aE8iksRfWM1OkKDsjdIrYgJC4CPQ$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/16/arundhati_roy_coronavirus_india?utm_source=Democracy*Now*21&utm_campaign=5b85440b98-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-5b85440b98-192514813__;KyU!!Mih3wA!UAMlfob2n_Lh-WqpyVZk7kkIB6_iTHxnCHcoi9KlYa0gsgp20bbtBYAvZg22fqto0zXcVg$>

We can anticipate at least 40 million deaths in India  if this gets going -
 and the fascists are planning to emerge dominant from this – all
encouraged by your big man in the WH.

These deaths will perhaps make the holocaust seem like small fry – will we
ever see trials for crimes against humanity? Perhaps not, because it will
be difficult to pin these deaths on to intentional action, but maybe there
should be a crime for intentional inaction? The abject state of public
health systems (long term) and the incompetence and political management
(short term) being the main charges.

Then in the US we can see some analyses of the way the deaths are hugely
discriminatory against black/ethnic minorities and the poor: “More than 70
per cent of COVID-19 deaths in the state of Louisiana were
African-Americans, despite accounting for just a third of the general
population. In New York City it's 17 per cent of deaths, for a 9 per cent
share of residents.”
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-16/drum-covid-african-american-affected/12153268__;!!Mih3wA!X6Z1zy1ywvBUsh4PLzAdjWe7J-gfCIiKCjavnOndv0aE8iksRfWM1OkKDsjdIraMabnSgA$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-16/drum-covid-african-american-affected/12153268__;!!Mih3wA!UAMlfob2n_Lh-WqpyVZk7kkIB6_iTHxnCHcoi9KlYa0gsgp20bbtBYAvZg22fqs1xrPL7g$>
  Globally translated – this will become a terrible indictment of the
world’s structure of poverty:

I had to pause the other day – is this kind of admittedly political posting
appropriate to xmca listserve’s concerns: I think that’s a question for
xmca – “are we/is xmca relevant to the millions of deaths likely as the
pandemic spreads to the poor nations?” The question is moot – only you
people out there can say, or do by saying.

Julian

PS It’s good that in some parts of the world this information is still
getting out. The middle east, and Africa, in many parts, maybe is more
difficult.

*From: *<xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mike cole <
mcole@ucsd.edu>
*Reply-To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
*Date: *Thursday, 16 April 2020 at 18:36
*To: *"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
*Subject: *[Xmca-l] Re: FW: Unbelievable: number 19th strain according to
Fox News?

There is absolutely nothing funny about the crypto fascists running this
government, Julian.
Trump is pushing towar monarchy in a fashion that might be funny if it were
a Gilbert and Sullivan
musical.
mike

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 2:27 PM Julian Williams <
julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

Dear all,

Kellyanne *Conwa*y … I think I heard her name a while back – what a Con, Ha
ha?

But perhaps not so very funny, right?

God help us – it all fits – and now international pandemic and the next
step is to defenestrate our only World Health Organisation…

I can’t see anything short of a massive rebellion being an appropriate
response… get those idiots out of the white house?

Julian


*Subject: *Fwd: Unbelievable

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway falsely suggested Wednesday that
there had been 18 previous strains of the novel coronavirus as she defended
President Trump’s decision to suspend funding to the World Health
Organization.

"This is covid-19, not covid-1, folks, and so you would think the people
charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on
top of that,” Conway said during an interview on Fox News.

In fact, the “19” at the end of the virus’s name denotes that it was
discovered in 2019, not that it is the 19th strain of the virus. At its
outset, it was referred to by health officials as the “2019 novel
coronavirus.”






-- 

the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper
and distinctive method of sociology.  H.G.Wells

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