[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
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[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The one thing the layman can trust is he can’t trust the experts. Because they don’t trust him.
Experts, if they aren’t fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.
There’s a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society’s energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest—the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.
The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.
It’s not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign—that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.
How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?
Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people—us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.
They want you to “shelter in place” because they don’t trust you to carry out basic instructions.
Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let’s not expect it. But it’s becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counter productive.
...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.
This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.
They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%
The elite’s reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing—recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.
But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It’s like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.
The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring “science” and valuing “jobs” over “lives”.
That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.
Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.
Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?
Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it’s acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can’t have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.
Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:
American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country’s unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns
Eight ‘pandemic profiteers’ have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company’s staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company’s day-to-day running.
According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent.
Dr. Frank Salter’s immensely vital academic contributions to the genetic understanding of European ethnic groups, their health and welfare, and the need to safeguard these in a largely multicultural Western world, are explored in this video essay…
Smalls was having trouble following social distancing requirements. The powers that be want to promote blacks as the left unionizing heroes. But it’s not ok for you to unionize in your interests, Whitey. In fact, they are watching for where there is too large a majority of Whites, and thus susceptibility of your unionization, collective bargaining power.
Whole Foods, an Amazon subsidiary, tracking “lack of diversity” to head-off susceptibility to unionization
The heat map apparently uses more than two dozen different metrics to track which Whole Foods stores may unionize. The heat map focuses on monitoring three main areas: “external risks,” “store risks,” and “team member sentiment,” Business Insider.
Here are some examples of “external risks,” reports Business Insider:
Some of the factors that contribute to external risk scores include local union membership size; distance in miles between the store and the closest union; number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board alleging labor-law violations; and a “labor incident tracker,” which logs incidents related to organizing and union activity.
Other external factors include the percentage of families within the store’s zip code that fall below the poverty line and the local unemployment rate.
Here are some examples of “store risks”:
Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents.
And here are some examples of how “team member sentiment” is tracked:
Amazon has resisted Whole Foods unionization efforts before — in 2018, the company sent a 45-minute anti-union training video to Whole Foods team leaders that was obtained by Gizmodo. “Throughout, the video claims Amazon prefers a ‘direct management’ structure where employees can bring grievances to their bosses individually, rather than union representation,” according to Gizmodo.
Whole Foods used similar language about direct management in a statement to Business Insider, which it also shared with The Verge. “Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to decide whether union representation is right for them,” Whole Foods said in the statement. “We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship with Whole Foods Market and its leadership, where Team Members have open lines of communication and every individual is empowered to share feedback directly with their team leaders, is best.”
Amazon has not replied to a request for comment from The Verge.
Amazon has a history of aggressively combating unionization efforts, and its anti-labor stance has also come to light due to recent organizing efforts by warehouse employees to protest Amazon’s handling of worker safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. In late March, Amazon fired a warehouse worker named Chris Smalls who organized a walkout in New York City, claiming he violated COVID-19 safety instructions after coming into contact with a co-worker who tested positive for the virus.
However, Amazon executives later attacked Smalls on Twitter after Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) criticized the company. Shortly after, notes from an Amazon executive meeting obtained by Vice News revealed a plan to publicly smear the worker in an effort to discredit broader labor movements within Amazon.
Update April 20th, 6:31PM ET: Whole Foods provided the same statement to The Verge that it provided to Business Insider.
It should be noted that left-leaning organizations have made use of the same technology in their organizing efforts, although some predictably differentiate their use of heat maps from what Bezos and Amazon are doing by calling the latter, “surveillance.”
The Black Socialists in America (BSA), for example, have created a “Dual Power Map”, a digital tool originally created to help organisers find and connect with other groups or initiatives building alternative, democratic and anti-capitalist structures or institutions.
Now, at the request of organisers throughout the US, BSA is also using the map to plot where strikes and Covid-related mutual aid efforts have happened, so that people can tap into a wider network of support and coordinate further actions together.
As a small organisation with limited resources and capacity, BSA has been using open, publicly available data collected and aggregated by a range of journalists and grassroots groups to feed into the backend of the Dual Power Map.
“In this particular situation, you’re talking about one thing that’s designed by Leftists for public use and covering efforts that are already out in the open, led by poor and working-class people who want their efforts signal boosted and supported, and another thing that was a secret, private surveillance tool designed by members of the ruling class to stop working-class efforts before they can even begin,” said Z, one of the founders of BSA and its current national coordinator, who has adopted the name to protect their identity.
In the age of COVID-19, where discussion about drone use and public cameras employed to help identify outbreaks has revolved around making sure civil liberties are also being protected, Bezos’ heat map strategy to prevent unionization at Whole Foods could come under scrutiny.
Of course, Smalls being a Negro and his wanting to unionize, either for Negroes or being encouraged to do so in order to have a more diversified working class, now that’s ok and newsworthy. Unionizing for your interests, Whitey, that’s not ok, that’s “racist.”