alanjjohnstone
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The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said that the UN should not use the coronavirus pandemic “as an opportunity to advance access to abortion as an ‘essential service'” during the crisis.
John Barsa accuses the UN of “cynically placing the provision of ‘sexual and reproductive health services’ on the same level of importance as food insecurity, essential health care, malnutrition, shelter, and sanitation” in a Covid-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan.Barsa hailed the president’s anti-abortion agenda, saying that the president “has made clear that we will never tire of defending innocent life” and warning the UN against “intimidating” member states “that are committed to the right to life”.
Akila Radhakrishnan, president of the Global Justice Centre, called the USAID’s demands “a disgraceful and dangerous attack on essential health services at the worst possible time”.
“No matter what the US government says, abortion is a fundamental human right and reproductive care is always essential, including during a pandemic,” Ms Radhakrishnan said in a statement. “At a time when countless lives are at risk, the US has yet again decided to put its efforts into restricting healthcare instead of expanding it.”And here is another related item to the topic – the culling of livestock
“…ventilator shutdown (VSD) would “essentially cook the pigs alive”.”
WHO under pressure and the politicalisation of COVID-19
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52718309
Classic diversionary strategy…
Science as an ideology?
“Ministers have been using the mantra of “following the science” as a “simple defence” to justify decision-making during the Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Brian Cox and that use of the defence had been masking “a whole area of debate” going on between advisers and politicians behind closed doors.
“I’ve seen instances of the phrase ‘we were following the science’ as a very simple defence to a difficult question,” said Cox, during a discussion held by the Science Media Centre. “The politicisation of science or scientific advice might deliver some short-term political advantages. It’s very tempting, I think, to blame the science if a decision is made which subsequently turns out to be suboptimal in some way. But, this will have, I think, have serious long-term consequences because it undermines public trust in science.”
As expected, as the pandemic recedes in the developed nations, the increased cases and deaths in the undeveloped and developing world drops from the media headlines.
“I must admit I getting really bored with this and I am learning absolutely nothing here at all.”
I think there are some very important social ramifications to the pandemic yet we appear to be concentrating upon the narrow medical pathology aspect of it on this forum.
We seem to be failing to make known the politico-economic connections, changes in social relationships.
There has been some negative consequences such as the strengthening of nationalism and populist calls for protectionism and de-globalisation, while paradoxically, there is a growing identification that humanity goes beyond national divisions and we have just as many calls for international cooperation and collaboration
I’m not doing the issue justice with such a brief passing comment, and I don’t think we as a world socialism movement have focussed as much as we could have on the different post-pandemic world scenarios.
We don’t seem to have a consistent coherent message to push that is clear and simple that brings the attention towards the case for socialism.
I may be wrong so tell me what we should be doing more of and perhaps i might learn something which is a positive contribution to the campaign for socialism.
I think we all recognised that there were serious problems with statistics.
One particular conflict has been Sweden. I think this article reflects the general view.
The reformists with all their revolutionary and radical rhetoric emerge for post-pandemic “change”.
Chomsky makes himself available for interview a bit more freely than others of his influence and stature. Fact he replied to the review shows he is more receptive to exchanges than others.
Perhaps the editors of the SS could follow up on his response to the article by requesting a short interview on Skype, a video to feature on our website and the transcript to go into the Standard
Despite what we think about him, anything with Chomsky featured in it would bring a wider audience.
Costs nothing to ask, just have to set out some ground rules to agree with him about and make the arrangements.
Need not be unnecessarily adversarial as Tristan’s response to his intellectual ownership article showed.
Intellectual Property: a further restriction on personal freedom
Bijou, I stand corrected by someone much better informed. And I appreciate your advice on where to learn more.
It was a bad example and an inaccurate one but it should not distract from my claim that those who work in slaughterhouses and abattoirs become harmed by the experience and that it spills over into the wider community.
Researchers describe such detrimental damage to mental health as “Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Syndrome”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetrator_trauma
Why do people work in such places? The camaraderie? For the job-satisfaction? Because they enjoy such work?
Of course not. It is poverty and it is as I said the reason that all around the world the majority of workers in such places are immigrants, forced by poverty to accept such jobs. And to risk another well-deserved slap, it is similar to the reason for the recruitment of immigrants into the sex trade.
The individual is not to blame but the society that drives people to such extremes that such jobs are their only choice.
It is no wonder that factory farms and slaughter houses are the few places that don’t welcome school visits or work-placements nor invite the general public. In the US new secrecy laws are being passed to ensure no adverse publicity.
ALB, the case is not against meat-eating but the scale of it. It has become even under capitalism ecologically unsustainable.
We have been here before and I think we all concurred that the amount of meat in the Western diet, and now increasing in the diets of parts of the world, will be reduced. I know from my youth, that the only regular meat I had was such things as sausages, cheap cuts of meat filled out with various non-meat ingredients, or it was Spam, corned beef. Not much has changed in modern-day. They just disguise processed meat better and call them chicken nuggets.
Recall my light-hearted banter in the past with Bijou over Greggs sausage rolls? How things have now changed so quickly with their vegan versions being the most popular. What changed was not that people’s desires changed, but the availability was offered at no sacrifice in taste to the consumer and a win-win solution for all.
Perhaps we will return to the day where the main meat meal will be the once-weekly Sunday Roast, or even annually, the Turkey Christmas dinner (again, for myself, it was chicken as they were still pricey for everyday but much less expensive than turkey. Rabbit was cheaper than chicken and our substitute. Goose? Duck? Unimaginable.
You know also from past debates that I have argued that many things that we consider as daily staples such as tea and coffee and sugar will be reduced and become luxuries. Not by consumer habits but by the producers who will no longer have poverty to chain them to the fields and submit to the arduous back-breaking work. They will either switch to more nutritious crops to primary serve their local needs or they will simply migrate to more hospitable conditions.
In a perhaps not perfect analogy, we have in the US a shortage of pork because workers at Tyson, the world largest food processors, are declining to turn up at the factories due to the risk of contracting Covid-19. (But factories closing is being done unplanned and irrationally)
Our case is that when we have socialism and if the means to obtain raw materials were too exacting on the health of the producers or the environment we would expect a socialist society to come up with either another way of extracting the resources, reducing the burden on the workers or the damage to the eco-system, or society would find an alternative product that if not an entire substitute but which can serve as second-best if not equally as good. I think that will be the case. Liebnig’s Law of Minimum.
A humane society I suggest will not expect its members to face psychological harm just so others can benefit when there is no requirement. It is what I have read in our arguments against shift work. It may be more efficient but it is proven to be detrimental on our general health. Where it can be ended, it will be. Where it is essential, a form will be designed which minimises the ill-effects. Society will collectively carry the cost of “abolishing” it.
Of course, being a world commonwealth, what happens here may not happen there.
No great social change happens overnight and takes place simultaneously everywhere. Just as various organs of the State will rapidly disappear, others will lose their function and wither away gradually and some will remain greatly modified. But we do say socialism will be State-free. We can generalise and still accept exceptions.
I think JO and I are saying that the Party should not hold back from presently unpopular conclusions. Our eating habits will radically change. We can confidently say that. For the better of the individual’s well-being and for society as a whole. We are not demanding a menu of immediate reforms but a recognition that some reforms are good and should not be opposed.
Regards non-meat food, again I remember fresh veg and fruit was seasonal. The local (locavore) food movement may not be perfect and their claims of lower carbon-footprint challengeable but people can go without newly picked strawberries for part of the year. Satsumas and mandarins were again for me a festive treat that I never enjoyed year-round.
But more seriously Africa already suffers from the consequences of imported food handicapping domestically grown agriculture, driving the urbanisation. Should, as you suggest, the division of labour determine that Thailand and Vietnam supplies Nigeria with its rice? Or will socialists concentrate on raising the productivity and output in Nigeria?
I’m not calling for autarky but to have proper autonomy in decision making and versatility and variety, decentralisation of manufacturing and farming may well take place, even if the scales of economy makes it less efficient. Is it becoming the cook-shop of the future to acknowledge that when we have socialism, and a good reason for seeking it, is that it will be a social system which will facilitate relationships where we will treat people with compassion but also foster compassion for other creatures.
The killing lines are being sped up in the USA right now, with even less veterinary oversight, the presence of which is not to reduce the cruelty to the animals but to ensure diseased animals don’t enter the food supply.
Yes capitalism is the cause, or rather it extenuates and exacerbates a belief that has existed previously ever since the Old Testament declared God gave Man dominion over animals…
But the cruelty is contagious is my point. Place men and women in circumstances that pain and suffering is the normal pattern then they too will become effected by it themselves.
Soldiers develop a self-defence mechanism where they express a lack empathy for the enemy. They dehumanise the enemy by making them anonymous with names such as gooks or rag-heads. Prisoners are no longer taken. They begin wanton acts of violence against civilians and non-combatants. There is a debate that it was the wartime atrocities of the Easter Front that facilitated the Holocaust
Just as some abused children are said to go on to become abusers themselves, people involved in the meat trade take home their problems. They suffer from PTSD and have higher rates of domestic abuse as well as substance abuse.
“Slaughterers will kill hundreds of animals every day – and they are the perpetrators. Dr Obuaya likened the work to child soldiers, forced into a conflict situation in which they have to commit horrific acts of violence.”
We as a Party have no reluctance to condemn employers who ignore health and safety, even if we fully understand that such is due to costs cutting into profit margins. We see it as another act of capitalism “dripping blood from every pore” and we expose every factory or occupational death for what it is – callous .
Surely JO is right to condemn the inhumanity we participate in or are passively complicit in, even though we are powerless to bring an end to it without ending capitalism itself.
To protect our fellow workers’ mental health, we have to say that socialism will not countenance barbarity against animals just to satisfy our present eating habits and diet. Even the most humane methods of slaughter are not without cruelty, so socialism cannot be a predominantly flesh-eating society.
We may be victims but as I said earlier, it is up to us as individuals to shed the conditioning and brainwashing that capitalism tries to instil into us. It is slow work to free ourselves from the indoctrination we have received and still subject to, even more difficult when such isms as racism doesn’t receive the same degree of saturation with continual constant advertising from the food industry does in its efforts to present themselves, not as profit-driven as you say but the providers of wholesome, healthy food, that the medical experts cannot compete against when they expose the adulteration of cancer-causing processed meats.
And partly why we are do pliable to the PR is we have less free time to prepare and cook nutritious food. Time-saving convenience food is what we seek.
Nor is it just the meat industry, sadly. What was the Mars bar slogan – “work rest and play”, not fill yourself up with the high of a sugar-buzz.
I still believe eggs are healthy because of the “go to work on an egg” campaign even thought my doctor tells me the cholesterol might kill me. Lucozade lost its sick-room market as doctors deemed it harmful to the ill so they changed to a sports energy drink.
Just as I am confident that socialist society will decline to condemn fellow-workers to careers and occupations that detrimental to their physical well-being, socialists will not permit them to suffer the trauma of slaughtering and butchering sentient animal. I don’t think it is he type of work that can be rotated nor compensated by as we sometime suggest for other dirty dangerous and demanding jobs. Nor automated and performed by robots.
I think all JO is proposing is that we recognise the reality of what is happening today as we do the mass misery and suffering of all capitalism’s social problems and suggest that it will effectively if not entirely end in a socialist world, just as crime will not miraculously disappear but become an aberration.
So AOC joins one of Biden’s task-forces – co-chairs the one on climate change and provides him credibility when Sunrise previously gave his environment policies a F. Her new colleague is that well-known radical John Kerry (irony and sarcasm) who is there to rein her in from demanding the full Green New Deal limiting it to re-join the Paris Agreement
Unity above all even for those so called radicals.
“believes the movement will only be successful if we continue to apply pressure both inside and outside the system”
Another of the squad co-chairs Pramila Jayapal, health.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, is the token trade unionist.
Worth a read
“…Pouring our energy and anger into the wrong direction ultimately hurts us, not the elites that conspiracy theorists claim to target.”
“…the party is deeply divided and might be too splintered to unify behind Biden in November…”
