The deuteranomaly and protanomaly ones are very similar but they are different. The purple section ranges out a little farther to the right in the protanomaly one. Not seeing the difference between might not indicate color blindness but rather difficulty with color differentiation.
This came up at my work today when I was talking with a patient who had quit going to doctors out of frustration dealing with the broken Healthcare system and hadn't been told the new guidelines, so I thought I'd share here in case anyone else doesn't know:
If you're a Black American patient with Chronic Kidney Disease, you might want to verify that your eGFR levels from the past are accurate.
(Unfortunately a lot of the new guidelines rolled out during COVID¹ and might have been missed by patients and overburdened providers, but even now there's also just white doctors who may not think to mention it or who don't keep up with news they should)
Historically, lab reports here in the US used a "race multiplier" when calculating eGFR for Black patients because of some (racist bs that said Black people's kidneys "naturally functioned better") which gave higher than accurate numbers, masking early kidney damage, delaying referrals to specialists, and even worse, putting Black patients lower on kidney transplant lists.
As of late 2021/2022, most major labs and transplant centers have removed that factor and the new calculations are race-neutral, but if you were previously told your kidneys looked fine but you're experiencing symptoms, it might be worth revisiting the topic with a provider you trust. (Especially you have risk factors for kidney disease like high blood pressure, diabetes, family history.)
sources x, x
¹ speaking of COVID-era and respiratory medicine, pulse oximeters are more likely to overestimate blood oxygen levels in individuals with darker skin pigmentation. The device uses light absorption to measure oxygen, and higher melanin levels can affect the accuracy of the reading, resulting in "occult hypoxemia", which is when a patient has low oxygen saturation that isn't being detected by the monitor. This happens 3x more frequently in Black patients
peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it
There is a specific guy who caused this by the way. His name is Prabhakar Raghavan, and he said people weren't searching for long enough for ad revenue.
He also destroyed many other things like yahoo! Lord of enshitification himself.
PSA: if you're watching the new Knives Out mystery (Wake Up Dead Man), please be aware that around 1 hr 34 minutes in, there's a series of flashing/strobing lights. the sequence lasts about a minute.
[ID: comment reading "I have epilepsy went to see it yesterday and covered my eyes too late and had a seizure and all I could think was why are we STILL not putting strobe warnings on movies..." /end ID]
To be specific [spoiler warning for Wake Up Dead Man] there is a scene in the rain, the priest will slip on mud, run into the woods, and a fist will knock him out. Close your eyes immediately when you see the fist. Don't open again until you start hearing conversations.
hi, i hope you dont mind me asking this question! i often come across lists of reading recommendations for communists, and they are usually focused entirely on communist theory. which is important and im already on that, but i wonder if you also have recs for learning about history? especially the history of the soviet union, but also other past and present socialist states. i sometimes find myself reading theory and understanding the concepts in a vacuum, but with very little understanding of the historical context they were written in, if that makes any sense. and id like to get a basic grasp of the history of various socialist projects that isnt just the typical western "the ussr was evil!!!!" thing
Hi, historical context is indeed very important for works of theory, especially if it's more than a hundred years old. Lenin's What is to be Done, for example, is very conditioned by its historical context of Russia still being predominantly feudal, with only a timid appearance of the proletariat in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and therefore the very first trade unions, which he talks about. The understanding of these texts is amplified, and quite often enabled by knowing at least the basic historical context. Below I'll list the historical works I've read (and others) with some commentary, but I encourage anyone who has something to add to do so, since I am as of only recently getting more into historiography.
Anything by Anna Louise Strong (I've read The Soviets Expected it (1941) and In North Korea (1941), there's also The New Lithuania (1941), The Stalin Era (1956) and When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet (1959) for example). Her works, which I'd consider primary sources since they are written from her own experience witnessing events and talking to a lot of people, are extremely useful if you wish to form an idea about how some aspects of socialist states worked. The limitation of her works also resides in this specificity and closeness, these are not works that present a broad view of long processes, but a slice of the present with the sufficient historical context. They are still very, very good.
The Open Veins of Latin America (Spanish versrion), by Eduardo Galeno (1971). This one is focused on the history of imperialism in Latin America, how it evolved from the moment the first Spanish foot touched ground to the time it was written in (It talks about Allende before he was assassinated but after achieving power, for example). Perhaps it's not exactly what you're looking for, but it contains very important general context for any social movement that has happened since 1492 to 1971
The Triumph of Evil, by Austin Murphy (2002). I have mixed feelings about this book. While it insists on this weird narrative of absolute evil, which IMO takes away a lot of value from the overall points made, it is an astonishingly in-depth analysis of the economic performance and general merit of socialist systems against their capitalist counterparts. Most of the book is dedicated to comparing the GDR to the FRG, and both the economic and social data it exposes was very eye-opening to me when I read it about 2 years ago. If you can wade through the moralism (especially the beginning of the introduction), it's a gem. I've posted pictures of its very detailed index under the cut :)
Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti (1997). Despite the very real criticisms levied against this book, like its mischaracterization of China, it is still a landmark work. Synthetically, it exposes the relationship between fascism, capitalism and communism.
Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad (2019); The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, Walter Rodney (2018). I'm lumping these two together (full disclosure, as of writing I'm about four fifths of the way through RSOtTW) because they deal with the same topic, Prashad being influenced by Rodney as well. Like both titles imply, they deal with the effects the October revolution had on the exploited peoples of the world, which is a perspective that's often lost. Through this, they (at least Prashad) also talk about the early USSR and how it functioned. For example, up until reading Red Star, I hadn't even heard of the 1920 Congress of The Toilers of the East in Baku, or the Congress of the Women of the East.
From here on I'll link works that I haven't (yet) read, but I have seen enough trusted people talk about them to include them
How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report, by Domenico Losurdo (2008). This one talks about how the period of Stalin was twisted and exaggerated through destalinization.
Devils in Amber, by Philips Bonoski (1992). This is about the Baltics and their historical trajectory from before WW1 to the destruction of the USSR (I'm not very sure on those two limits, perhaps they fluctuate a bit, but it definitely covers from WW1 to the 60s)
Socialism Betrayed, by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny (2004). This one deals with the process leading up to and the destruction of the USSR itself.
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins (2020). This is about the methods the US used in the second half of the 20th century to stamp out, prevent, or otherwise sabotage communist movements and other democratic anti-imperialist movements.
I know some of these aren't specifically about socialist states, which is what you asked, but the history of its opposition is just as important to understand because it always exists as a condition to these countries' development and policies chosen.
I assume you’ve probably answered this before, but what exactly is the underlying politics of this blog? I don’t quite understand the connection between neoliberal capitalism and pictures of desolate housing listings.
Thanks if you take the time to reply! -anon
We live in a bizarre intermediate period where capitalism appears to be eating itself. I originally came across the Gramsci quote in the header via Noam Chomsky in 2015/2016, when he was using it to refer to the pre-Trump lunacy that was taking over the Republican Party. In the US, this seems to have been a sort of cancerous outgrowth of decades of austerity and privatisation and deregulation that began with the end of Bretton Woods and took off in earnest in the 80s under Reagan. Similar processes have been at work to varying degrees across much of the world, throbbing occasionally with particular enthusiasm depending on the elected government, abating temporarily during other periods of Third Way-ite labour stagnation.
Housing is at the core of these recent historical trends, and of the relationship between the government and its citizens. I don't know if it could exactly be called the main driving factor, but it plays an enormous role in how we work, how we form relationships, and how we interface with society generally. I remember reading a quote from a conservative politician in the UK in the 80s, responding to a question about why they didn't build more public housing to address the growing homelessness problem; he said something to the effect of 'that would just breed another generation of Labour voters.' I think the cannier politicians (and business leaders) are very aware of their capacity to shape our lives through housing like this.
A similar process has been at work in my country since World War II. We had a succession of two very good Labor Prime Ministers during the 1940s: John Curtin and Ben Chifley. They developed our version of the vast postwar public housing programs that most Western countries had. This provided stable, affordable (or often just free) housing for a huge chunk of the population who wouldn't have had access to it before the war. After Chifley, a conservative government under Robert Menzies came to power in a wave of anti-communist hysteria. Menzies appealed directly to a class of the population which he called the 'forgotten people': people in the middle strata of society who, in his characterisation, didn't get involved in trade unions or radical political organisations, didn't protest, and just wanted to get on with their lives in an apolitical solitude. In reality, this was less of a class of people that already existed and more one he set out to proactively create. He did this, in part, by altering the public housing scheme to give the baby boomers the right to buy the property the government had given them. This entrenched home ownership and, arguably, introduced a level of scarcity to the public housing stock in the long-run, and set the groundwork for later government support of housing as a financial asset, guaranteed to appreciate. It also, in a way, helped create that class of 'quiet' Australian: a solid middle 75-80% of the population that could be guaranteed a comfortable, suburban lifestyle, within an apolitical bubble quietly guaranteed by interventions into the economy by the government and regulation of the housing market in their favour. Over the years, this proportion of the population has gradually decreased, more markedly so since the overt financialisation of housing under John Howard in the early 2000s, and it's fallen off a cliff since COVID.
There's a tradition in art that I've been interested in for a while which involves broadening creative fields (in artmaking or criticism) through direct engagement with fields of work, of machine production, of lived experience or other symptoms of the oppressive political reality we live under (realism in the Linda Nochlin sense). You see it in the controversy around Courbet's paintings of manual workers, much of Andy Warhol's work and general contempt for the art world (his silkscreens of graphic photos of car crashes he found in the newspaper stand out to me), or more recently some of the controversy that came from Tracey Emin's installations. More broadly, there's something to be said about the conscious effort to make transparent and use aesthetically the machine behind the reproduction, or distribution, or amplification, etc., of art. The use of feedback in music seem to me to be an example of this. To use a couple of examples of a period of music I'm particularly interested in, grunge is one example, but so are reggae sound systems which use custom-made valve amps that give an enormous low-end to vinyls they would play, to the point of using the records as instruments to create a sort of rumbling distortion (Jah Shaka's sessions seem to have premediated alternative rock, operating on parallel tracks). These forms of creative production seem to organically emerge from the detritus of industrialisation, and seem to respond to its alienation and atomisation of human relations.
I'm interested in breaking the functionality of illegitimate systems. At uni I took a series of photographs of the backs of shops. There was something comforting in identifying how a commercial entity wanted to be presented visually, and then representing it in the exact opposite way. Similarly, though I don't know if this could be considered an art project, I like an incompetent realtor. The aesthetic qualities of a real estate listing that completely fails in its intended purpose can be quite rich, in some ways liberating. An enormous amount of imagery is generated by the institutional machinery of commercial institutions, much of it ephemeral. If you rescue some visual artifacts from this increasingly engorged flood and look at them against their intended purpose you get a little window into the broader world, where advertising agencies and algorithms and real estate agents and SEI specialists, etc., aren't constantly grabbing your face and forcing you to look at the most boring and monetisable parts of the visual world. You have the opportunity to experience fear, hate, genuine nostalgia and melancholy, various other complex passionate experiences inaccessible in the neoliberal digital machine perversion of visual culture and creative experience.
This is a kind of a roundabout way of answering your question. Maybe part of my motivation has something to do with the relationship between art and work. If you reject the art as some higher, privileged category interpretation (i.e. this is just a photograph, but this other photograph is Art), then the boundaries of what constitutes art, or what can be read as art, are pretty porous. The machinery of industrialisation and capitalism took away the ability of people working in home workshops to have some control and creative involvement in their own working lives and turned them into atomised, specialised machine parts at the mercy of their employers and the market. The parts of work that could be considered contiguous with what we call art have been severed. Art and artists have suffered the same effects; contemporary artists seem to me not that different from other independent professionals. If you go to a dentist's office on Cambridge Street in Perth they'll often have a brochure with a blurb about their history and their mission as medical professionals, etc., on the front counter, and by the same token every artist in an exhibition is taught to provide their own little didactic overview of their niche interests, mostly independent from deeper, shared commitments (lumped together like a sack of potatoes, per Marx). I feel it makes sense to reach back out into other parts of the economy force art into them.
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