Nonspecific Randomness

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Overview from JANUARY of this : https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/01/02/india-south-africas-covid-vaccine-proposal-wto-patent-waiver-must-considered-compulsory-licensing/id=128652/

Update from February: https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news21_e/trip_23feb21_e.htm

Recent coverage of the deal not being met (again): https://www.law360.com/lifesciences/articles/1363457/wto-fails-to-reach-deal-on-covid-ip-waiver-proposal-again

Map of the vote (colorblind-friendly): https://twitter.com/comradesquirrel/status/1370595876536729600?s=21

[Image description: a world map. Countries in black (US, Brazil, most of Europe, Japan, Australia) opposed; countries in green (Africa not including Algeria/Libya/Western Sahara/Eritrea; China, South Asia, and most of southeast Asia; and Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua) are co-sponsors/full supporters; countries in yellow (Canada, Mexico, Chile) are undecided; countries in light brown (Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, the Phillipines, and Papua New Guinea) are general supporters; and the remainder are gray, which is not designated as anything]

Meanwhile as India is getting hundreds of thousands of new cases a day and running out of oxygen tanks for hospitals, the US won’t lift restrictions on raw material exports that would support vaccine production: https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/us-defends-restrictions-on-export-of-covid-19-vaccine-raw-materials-amid-indias-request-to-lift-ban/

On vaccine nationalism: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-vaccine-justice/

every government in the americas turned down the s.s. st. louis (the source skirts around this but yes that includes the usa)

Meanwhile, the budget includes the following:

A 41% increase in the Department of Education, most of which would find high poverty schools, the largest increase to Title I schools ever

23% boost to Health and Human Services including nearly $9b for the CDC

$69 billion for affordable housing, a 15% increase

$14b across agencies for every agency to address climate change in their purview

I can’t find the numbers but a massive increase to the IRS budget so they can audit large tax evading corporations

This is a total 16% boost to domestic spending and barely a 1.5% boost to defense.

Source

Y'all misinformation and manipulation isn’t just limited to the right. I’m not saying this is a great budget and defense should be cut but like. This isn’t a significant increase.

I’ll lay odds that a fair number of the people who decided to mock and pillory her “you can only have 30 books” idea (myself included) had no idea who she was, what nationality she was, or even what she looked like. Her name isn’t particularly obviously Asian, and it’s not like the various articles of comment specified her ethnicity in the headline, which let’s be honest, is all any of us read before w started crafting our comedy.

All I knew was there was another tidiness guru trying to tell us to simplify.

And Henry David Thoreau notwithstanding, the whole modern minimalist movement is aimed at the wealthy.  They’re the ones who make claims like “You don’t need to have all these plates, just keep a few, and if you’re having a big party, buy more”.  It all centers on the idea of you’re rich enough not to have to hang on to all this stuff till you need it, you can just buy more.  

Well,no, sorry, that ain’t the case.  And so us poor and middle class people hang on to that half a bottle of antibiotics we didn’t finish, cause they cost money, and maybe the next time we get sick we can take those and save the cost of going to the doctor.

And we keep all those books and DVDs because, again, they cost money, and maybe we won’t watch that movie again for a couple years, but we don’t have the money (or the interest to spend the money we have) to throw it out and buy it again when we want to have it, just so we can have room on our shelves for one more Longaberger basket filled with potpourri.

So put your faux offense away, stop trying to get us to apologize for things that weren’t even under consideration, and let us have our rage about one more person who telling us to get rid of our stuff.

First of all, she never said “you can only have 30 books.” She said that if having BOOKSHELVES UPON BOOKSHELVES of books sparks joy, leave it be. HER PERSONAL bookshelf has 30 books.

Secondly, Marie Kondo’s advice has NEVER been about getting rid of plates and dvds for the sake of having less. Plates have use. They spark joy by being there when you need them. A DVD or a book sparks joy for a poor person because it’s there, and you don’t have to spend any more money than you already did for a little R&R. Antibiotics, under her philosphy, would spark joy for you the same way as plates: by being there when you need them (even though your stance on antibiotics is medically unsafe and dangerous for both you and those you meet AT BEST).

You obviously don’t know shit about Marie Kondo because if you did, you would know that she literally isn’t anything you described. Her method is tailored to the person she’s helping. If you can find any reason an object is useful to you, including “it makes me feel secure to know its there” or “i cant afford another one so i need this one” you keep it. The fact that you hate her so much is a product of you buying into the media shitstorm that has surrounded her and distorted her message.

Kondo isn’t trying to tell poor people to eat off of one fucking plate and own one plant and thats it. She’s helping hoarders and people who feel guilty about getting rid of things. She’s helping people get rid of gifts they never used, shirts they never wore, and above all she is helping people who WANT to declutter. For fuck’s sake, she’s not holding a gun to your head and telling you to keep a single spaghetti noodle in your pantry.

All you’re “raging” at is a woman who genuinely wants people to feel less overwhelmed in their life and to develop healthy levels of attachment and inattachment. If you don’t feel overwhelmed or want to declutter, she’s not asking you to. The media is twisting her words so heavily as an act of racism, and decrying her cultural reasons behind her philsophy as “asian woo woo”. By mindlessly buying into her recharacterization as a stupid western minimalist, you’re buying into everything else as well.

Marie Kondo is straight up not a minimalist. She doesn’t focus on getting rid of stuff. She doesn’t focus on having particular numbers of books or plates. 

She has a background as a Shinto shrine maiden, and her approach to objects is heavily informed by the animism of that background. She believes that any object you own should be cared for and respected. It should have a use, even if that use is just making you happy, and in return YOU treat it with care by having a place for it. 

That’s it. She NEVER tells anyone how much or little they should keep, and she NEVER shames anyone for keeping a lot. She helps people look at the mountains of clutter and gives them the tools to make choices on whether or not those things are useful.

There’s one episode of her show with a husband who collects sneakers. Has collected sneakers since he was a little kid. He has literally HUNDREDS of pairs of them, some of them literally falling apart in their boxes and never worn. In the end, I think that guy still kept about 80 pairs. Got rid of a lot, yes, but 80 pairs. And Marie was happy for him, because he sat down and decided which ones he really wanted to keep and care for. 

One episode is about a couple who’s kids are all in college. The husband has thousands of baseball cards. He collected them with their kids. They are on old, yellowing boxes, stacked to the ceiling in a side room. In the end? I think he kept ALL of them, but he got some nicer boxes for them to keep them from being damaged and found a better way to display them. They all sparked joy for him, so he found a way to care for them better. And Marie told him that she was happy and proud of him for that. 

It’s not about what you get rid of. It’s about what objects you want in your life and treating them as such. 

For example, one woman was a widow and was having a hard time letting go of her husband’s things. So Marie switched up her whole method and did it out of order so this woman had more time to address other parts of her house before having to, first thing, go through her husband’s things to donate or throw away that obviously had deep emotional meaning to her. She knew this would be an emotional process for this women and decided to leave the harder part for last, even though it’s usually first in her methodology, because Marie understood going through other things would help this woman get comfortable with the philosophy and how to follow it in a way that worked for her so when she finally had to face her husband’s things, it would be a little easier because she already had experience in following Marie’s approach.

Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!” 

Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.

Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)

You know what’s older than racism?

You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?

fucking rabies

You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.

Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.

Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.

Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.

Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.

Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.

After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?

I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.

Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.

healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.

Not Disabled Enough:

Thrown off benefits

Dying after being deemed fit to work

Seen as scrounger

No suitable or accessible jobs

Right amount of disabled:

Inspiration porn

Too Disabled:

No ventilator if you catch Covid

Social care cuts

Independence thwarted

Seen as burden

“There’s always assisted dying”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-22/food-plant-solutions-malnutrition-farming-edible-plants/12580732

https://fms.cmsvr.com/fmi/webd/Food_Plants_World

This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.

hahahahahha………………..

-screamers

-flashing images

-fake emergency announcements

-images/videos of dead things

-loud videos

-jump scares

-lewd/NSFW pictures/videos

-unreality

For April fool’s, this account CANNOT promise a lack of:

-rickrolls

-stickbugs

-gnomes

-animals doing weird but cute things