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Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

Many wonder how epidemiology could have become so politicized. But epidemiology - like climate science (the other "mysteriously politicized" subject) has intrinsic politics: to take epidemiology seriously, you have to acknowledge that our species has a shared destiny.

1/

 Much of the debate over "liberty" can be summed up as "you do you" - I'll swing my arm over here, you keep your nose over there, and so long as we both respect each others' "freedom," I won't punch you in the nose and your nose will remain unpunched.

2/
This breaks down when applied to epidemiology: "You wear your mask, I'll leave mine at home, and we'll both exercise our freedoms" is like "You swim in the no-pissing end of the pool, I'll swim down here in the pissing end, and we'll both get our way."

3/
We're in the same epidemiological pool, and the science is clear: masking's benefit is primarily in protecting others from you - your presymptomatic, asymptomatic (or symptomatic) spread of particles. Your decision not to wear a mask puts me in danger.

4/
If your worldview ascribes political outcomes to individual choices (implying that poverty or misfortune are the result of a combination of laziness and inferiority), then anything that demands a systemic view challenges its very foundations.

5/
Empathy is hard work. From the trivial (considering how your actions affect your family) to the thoughtful (expanding that to your community) to the profound (thinking of the effects for 7 generation to come), empathy constrains your happiness in service to a wider worldview.

6/
No one wants to think of themselves as selfish. Even the most Ayn-Rand-addled private equity ghoul can be found at the playground shouting as his toddler, "TIMMY! YOU BE NICE AND SHARE!"

https://t.co/XYm89kNaIp

7/
The advantage of neoliberal ideology is that it allows you to act selfishly while thinking of yourself as unselfish. There are two ideological tools used to construct this otherwise contradictory edifice:

8/
I. Efficient markets hypothesis: the belief that markets "clear" (allocate efficently) when everyone acts according to their own self-interest. If this is true, then being kind to other people actually makes us all worse off, while selfishness makes things better all around.

9/
II. Moral hazard: the belief that acts of kindness create "learned helplessness" in others - that socializing health, housing, education, nutrition or other human rights actually makes people dependent and incapable of fending for themselves.

10/
It's akin to the idea that feeding wild animals undoes their independent, wild nature, causing it to become habituated to human company.

As it turns out, this is true of wild animals, and not true of humans, which presents a serious real-world ideological challenge.

11/
Because the haphazard domestication of wild animals turns out to be another one of those things where individual choices affect others around you. This is very wittily elucidated in @hh_matt's 2020 book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear.

https://t.co/FVncmVlVmJ

12/
Hongoltz-Hetling chronicles the rise and fall of a libertopian "freetown" takeover of the New Hampshire village of Grafton. From the start, Freetown is riven by the contradictions of individual actions with systemic consequences, most vividly in human-bear relations.

13/
Bears roam the world without regard for human property boundaries, but by nature, they tend to avoid contact with humans - a good thing, since bears are fast and strong and can easily kill people if they choose to.

14/
So when some Graftonites decide to semi-domesticate bears by feeding them, and others decide to cope with the problem by poaching them, the town - and neighboring towns - are beset by previously unheard-of deadly bear attacks.

15/
It's easy to say, "Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose," but what if your activities turn bears into stochastic terrorists that end up maiming me? What if your campfires burn down not just your back 40, but my homestead?

16/
What if your CO2 emissions trigger floods that wipe out my city? What if your exhalations don't just endanger you, but also me?

The freetowners lump all laws - bans on pot smoking, bans on bear feeding - into one bucket, and so does Hongoltz-Hetling.

17/
They're both wrong. Smoking pot is your business. Emitting CO2 (or viral particles, or untamed campfire combustion, or semi-domesticated 600lb bears) is everyone's business.

18/
The stuff that's "everyone's business" is systemic: that means that it doesn't have reliable cause-and-effect relations. Your bear-feeding and your neighbor's bear-mauling don't have a bright line connecting them. Same for your mask-refusal and your neighbor's covid death.

19/
This unfortunate distance between cause and effect opens up space for legitimate and manufactured doubt. It allows people to do selfish and dangerous things while telling themselves efficient market/moral hazard fairy tales so they can look themselves in the mirror.

20/
That's why covid's politicized. To accept covid is to accept that a class of existential, urgent challenges that are systemic, not individual. That there's a freedom (the freedom not to drown in your own mucus) that requires curbs on other kinds of freedom (to go unmasked).

21/
Covid science denies neoliberalism. It's yet another example of reality's pernicious left-wing bias. THAT'S why masking (and not masking) are political acts.

Not just small-p political. As Congress hid in undisclosed bunkers from trumpist mobs, GOP members refused to mask.

22/
It was an enclosed, poorly ventilated space. GOP Congressjerks jeered at Democratic colleagues who begged them to mask up.

Now, three Dem Members of Congress have covid: @Schneider4IL10 [IL], @PramilaJayapal [WA], and @RepBonnie [NJ].

https://t.co/LGnkeVeKrr

23/
A video from the siege shows GOP members mocking @LisaBRochester [DE] as she offers them masks.

https://t.co/LLwCnQoLzR

24/
Jayapal has called for the Sergeant at Arms to begin fining and removing Congressjerks who refuse to mask up.

https://t.co/ULGIaf1KYS

eof/
ETA if you'd like to read this thread as a surveillance-free, ad-free single webpage with a permalink here you go: https://t.co/rV4IyAuaIr

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
@doctorow
It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/


Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

1/


These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

2/

These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

3/

The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

4/

PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/cKWPSzuYHE

#Pluralistic

1/


Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with mittens?

https://t.co/Zcs71oUras

2/
FUN
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

1/


Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

2/


Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

3/


The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

4/


#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

5/
SOCIETY

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The Sixth Carbon Budget (2033-2037) charts the decisive move to zero carbon for the UK. The CCC shows that polluting emissions must fall by almost 80% by 2035, compared to 1990 levels – a big step-up in ambition. (1/12) #UKCarbonBudget 🧵


Our recommended Sixth Carbon Budget would achieve well over half of the required emissions reduction to 2050 in the next 15 years, but decisive action must start today. (2/12) #UKCarbonBudget


The recommended Sixth Carbon Budget and UK NDC also reflect the goals and requirements of the Paris Agreement, recognising the UK’s responsibility as a richer developed nation and its respective capabilities. (3/12) #UKCarbonBudget


When we recommended the UK’s #NetZero target for 2050, we demonstrated that any negative economic impact was likely to be small and the overall impact could turn out to be positive. Our analysis for this report reinforces that finding. (4/12) #UKCarbonBudget


Our estimate of the annualised resource cost (which measures the net additional cost each year to deliver the same services with lower emissions) has fallen to less than 1% of GDP through to 2050. (5/12) #UKCarbonBudget
CLIMATE CHANGE
Zeke Hausfather
Zeke Hausfather
@hausfath
Fascinating new paper by @AndrewDessler and colleagues arguing committed warming might be higher than expected given historical pattern effects. Its combining a lot of different concepts together, so lets spend some time disentangling them https://t.co/ILi5z515Qy

A thread: 1/19

The paper's headline number is that we previously thought the world was committed to 1.3C warming, but that number is actually over 2C (> 1.5C by 2100). This is quite a different message than we get from Earth System Models, which suggest committed warming is only ~1.2C. 2/19

This would imply that the 1.5C by 2100 target is effectively impossible, and that long-term warming of >2C would be very difficult to avoid. However, the devil is in the details, and the picture is not quite as dire as it would seem at first glance. 3/19

When we talk about "committed warming" folks are generally talking about one of two scenarios: either constant CO2 and other GHG concentrations (and forcings), or getting all emissions (or just CO2 emissions) down to zero immediately. 4/19

In the first method – constant concentrations – we find that the world warms up another 0.5C or so, as the oceans continue to take up heat as more energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases than is being emitted back to space. Much of this additional warming happens by 2100 5/19
CLIMATE CHANGE
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Ketan Joshi
Ketan Joshi
@KetanJ0
I don't have time to make this detailed, but here's a little thread about the world's first major politically-charged blackout that was blamed on renewables, in South Australia, in 2016............

On September 28, 2016, an unprecedented tropical storm progressed rapidly across South Australia. Truly - this thing was unusual. The sky folded in on itself. It tore towns to bits.


Australia's @climatecouncil pointed out that the storm was so unusual at least partly due to the influence of climate change, and that this is due to get worse.

https://t.co/76ekkfJpR8


I'm going to use brief snippets from my book to fill this out! The storm's primary impact on the grid was the destruction of several major transmission lines. When I say destruction - I mean they snapped like twigs.


Here's what happened in the following seconds:

- A voltage spike from the line falls
- Wind turbines automatically shut off due to software settings that trigger shutdown during a spike
- The interconnector to Vic tried to compensate, failed and died
- All of SA blacked out
CLIMATE CHANGE
mCenter Drexel
mCenter Drexel
@mCenterDrexel
1/ In reflecting on my work this year I have just realized that everything I published concerned climate change: here is a roundup of my 2020 writing on #climate #justice, climate #reparations, climate #debt, climate #displacement, climate #mobilities & #disaster #recovery

2/ My most recent online piece is on #Arctic #Mobilities, #climate #displacement and #Indigenous rights, originating from a great workshop @PennLaw_CERL

3/ Last month I also wrote about #climate #displacement and the case for #climate #reparations and #open #borders for those fleeing climate disasters

4/ Which originally appeared here

5/ Both of these came out of thinking about Caribbean #climate #colonialism and #climate #debt in my book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene @DukePress YOU CAN STILL GET IT for 50% off with the code E20SHELL https://t.co/i5DIaNAgsg
CLIMATE CHANGE
michaelharriot
michaelharriot
@michaelharriot
It was a dark and stormy night...

(I’ve always wanted to tweet that) But seriously, there was a tropical storm when a group of people gathered in the woods.

If they were white, we’d call them “founding fathers” but they were slaves who were about to change the world

A thread


Voudou priestess Cecile Fatiman danced with a knife. Then she split a pig and everyone drank the pig’s blood from a wooden bowl while enslaved priest Cutty Boukman prayed:

“The god who created the earth; who created the sun that gives us light. The god who holds up the ocean;

who makes the thunder roar. Our god who has ears to hear. You who are hidden in the clouds, who watch us from where you are. You see all that the white has made us suffer. The white man’s god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good...

It’s He who will direct our arms and bring us the victory. It’s He who will assist us. We all should throw away the image of the white men’s god who is so pitiless. Listen to the voice for liberty that speaks in all our hearts.”

Then , the meeting adjourned & everyone went home.

A week later, on Aug. 21 1791, it began.

In one week, 1800 plantations on the Island of St. Domingue would be burned to the ground and 1,000 white enslavers would be dead.

The shit had finally hit the fan.
CLIMATE CHANGE

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Jaya_Upadhyaya
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HORANADU ANNAPOORNESHWARI, CHIKMAGALUR (KAR)
#bharatmandir

Annapoorneshwari is the Devi of nutrition and food. The literal meaning of Annapoorneshwari is “Feeding one and all”. Anyone who comes here is offered meals and shelter within the premises.
@LostTemple7


Maharshi Agastya is believed to have done pratishtha here.

Once, Shiva and Parvati had an argument. Shiva declared everything in the world including food to be Maya or illusion. To prove him wrong, Devi Parvati disappeared resulting in entire Earth becoming still.


Taking pity, Devi appeared as Annapoorna and relieved everyone.
Another belief is that once Shiva beheaded Brahma and his skull got stuck in Shiva’s hand. He was cursed that till the skull is not full of food or grains, it will remain stuck to his hands.


Shiva went everywhere and asked for food but the skull was never full. He finally came here and Maa Annapoorna filled the skull with grains and reversed Shiva’s curse.

It is believed that who ever visits Devi Annapoorna here will never be without food in their lives.
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Velimalai Kumaraswamy Kshetram
Kumarakovil, #Kanyakumari
#Tamilnadutemples 🚩

Velimalai Kumaraswamy Temple is a Murugan temple located in Kanyakumari District of Tamilnadu.

Muruga faces east and is said to be facing Sthanumalayan (Paramashiva) of Suchindram. Muruga is of


eight feet vigraham and Valli thayar is six feet tall. Eventhough Thiruthani is believed to be the place where Subrahmanya married Valli, it is also believed that Valli’s thayar's marriage took place with Murugan here.

There is a Kalyana Vinayakar sannidhi
who helped Muruga's


marriage with Valli. Kumarakovil is also known as Kumara Kshetram and Subrahmanya Sthala. The Tamil epic Chilapathikaram refers to the temple as Chera Nattu Aeragam

Wedding of Valli and Murugan is celebrated here in the Tamil month of Panguni (March-April).

Om Muruga
🙏🕉🙏
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Pegasus of Dharma
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@HarduttSuhas
The BATTLE OF PAVAN KHIND (13 July 1660)

300 MARATHAS against 10000+ ADIL SHAHI TROOPS

A Sparta style last man stand at a mountain pass which ensured Shivaji Maharaj's safety.

Valour, loyalty and sacrifice!


Baji Prabhu Deshpande was one of the most able lieutenants of Shivaji. He sacrificed his life defending Shivaji in a heroic last stand known as the "Battle of Pavan Khind" in which his force was hugely outnumbered.(1)

In this battle he became a martyr, but managed to halt the enemy forces for several hours, which secured Shivaji’s safety and victory on another front. Without this heroic last stand Shivaji’s glorious career may have been cut short.(2)


Baji Prabhu was senior to Shivaji. In the beginning he opposed Shivaji being from a rival Maratha clan, but realised that Shivaji stood for national resurgence. Henceforth he became a friend and loyal supporter of Shivaji.(3)

In 1660, Shivaji was trapped in the fort of Panhala, under siege and vastly outnumbered by an Adilshahi army led by general Siddhi Jauhar.(4)
HISTORY