The horrendous conditions in meatpacking plants

Crusading journalist, novelist, and one-time socialist candidate for governor of California in 1934, Upton Sinclair wrote a novel The Jungle in 1906 that lifted the veil off the horrendous working and living conditions of the workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry in Chicago. Upton’s novel focused on the lives of the recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who took these jobs because they had little choice. He had gone undercover as a worker in the stockyards to experience first-hand the conditions. His novel caused an outcry and led to reforms.

I had not realized that it was Sinclair who wrote that well known aphorism, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Sinclair could be considered as one of the originators of the of the movement we now know as democratic socialism.

He also said:
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Seeking justifications for war

Unless one is a pacifist who opposes all wars on principle and is willing to live with the consequences, one is faced with the difficult problem of deciding when wars are justified and when they are not. The search for criteria for ‘just wars’ has evolved over time but while much of that effort has focused on finding legal rules, modern warfare has exposed the need for moral rules that go deeper. In a review of a new book Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos by Neil Remic, Anand Gopal writes about the criteria that had been in place.

We have been conditioned to judge the merit of today’s wars by their conduct. The United Nations upholds norms of warfare that, among other things, prohibit such acts as torture, rape, and hostage-taking. Human-rights groups and international lawyers tend to designate a war “humane” when belligerents have avoided harming civilians as much as possible.

But now modern remote controlled warfare that leaves one side immune from any casualties has changed the calculus. Gopal starts out by looking at what happened to the city of Raqqa as a result of sustained aerial bombardment by the US .
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The use of elite media as agents of propaganda

Some media outlets are better than others when it comes to providing news but we should be alert that because of their reputations they are sometimes co-opted to promote propaganda. Max Blumenthal writes about recently leaked documents that claim that Reuters and the BBC seemed to be willing to work covertly with the British government in advancing its propaganda goals.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”
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John Oliver on the Texas freeze fiasco

He roundly criticizes all those responsible for what was a foreseen and avoidable disaster.

Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shames Ted Cruz by raising $5 million to help Texans while he was gallivanting off to Cancun.

We should also recall that Cruz was one of those people who objected to aiding people in other states who got hit with natural disasters. I am sure that he is opposing all federal aid to Texas now because he is a person who stands on principle, right?

Falsification and neoliberalism

Karl Popper’s idea that science evolves by means of falsification and that it can also serve as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from nonscience was quickly attacked by other philosophers of science who showed that not only was the idea unworkable in practice, it did not even correspond to actual scientific practice. My own book The Great Paradox of Science discusses the problems with falsification in some depth and argues that there are much better ways to understand the evolution of scientific theories.

Charlotte Sleigh extends the criticisms of falsification even wider, arguing a cadre of prominent economists and scientists used the concept to advance the cause of neoliberalism.
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Depressing milestones in coronavirus deaths

The number of pandemic-related deaths worldwide is now close to 2.5 million.

The US has now around 500,000 deaths due to covid-19. I remember when the figure reached around 200,000 and experts warned us that it would go over 300,000 and I thought, “Wow, that’a lot. Surely it won’t reach such a high figure?” Then it was repeated when the toll reached 300,000 and then 400,000, and now here we are.

Even though infection, hospitalization, and death rates are falling and people are getting vaccinated, it seems likely that the ultimate toll will reach over 600,000 and maybe even 700,000. And that is assuming that there are no fresh outbreaks due to a combination of new, more contagious variants taking hold and careless behavior on the part of people not taking basic precautions.

We are a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic when Trump predicted back in February of last year that we would have 15 deaths, tops, and that the virus would disappear when spring arrived.

What the fall of the Roman empire might tell us about our current times

Rome was not built in a day, the saying goes, but it did not fall in a day either, instead decaying slowly as norms got eroded until there was a sudden, final collapse, like a building whose structures were slowly weakened by termites before it imploded. A 2018 review of the book MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny by Edward J. Watts summarizes that the fall was preceded by a steady erosion of norms that had held it together and what insights that process might provide for our current times.
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