READING NOTES #16
On Tibet during the CCP's 100 year celebrations, Ivermectin, Capri, the Third Pole, Benjamin Bratton's psyop, Brent Gogan and Jeffrey, and so on.
TIBET AND THE 100 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE CCP
A few days ago—1 July 2021—it was the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party. The day before a video went viral that can be seen here. The description reads:
In this video, the person is sobbing. She says that she walked around Lhasa & the city is no different from any Chinese city, and no Tibetan to be seen during her walk.
A version of the video with subtitles can be found here, archived here. The caption on Instagram reads:
Footage from #Lhasa circulating widely on social media today. The Chinese government are celebrating the CCP’s centenary. You can hear the emotion and distress in the woman’s voice. #Tibet
The speech in the video, from these subtitles at least, may be transcribed as:
Now, look, there are Chinese people everywhere. We walked from Shöl, all the way here. But we were told we’re not allowed to circumambulate. There are so many Chinese people here. It’s exactly the same as being in China.
Tsering Woeser, the formidable Tibetan activist, blogger and poet living in China, added on Twitter that the subtitles miss out [translated from the Chinese by Google]:
We want to go to Xia Kuo [the Potala Palace transit road] but are not allowed to go.
A couple of articles describing the general situation in Tibet during the centenary celebrations can be found here and here. For instance:
Another source in Yushu confided to Tibet Watch that Chinese authorities were being extraordinarily restrictive ahead of this official centenary celebration, and that Tibetans have been ‘pressured into silence’. The source advised Tibet Watch not to contact them via social media until the end of August.
I have written about Tibet and how it relates to online Sino-fetishism in its various forms here and here, and also here and here. I have also written—too briefly—about Tsering Woeser here.
A picture of the Tibetan heritage Palace draped in a CCP centenary banner—hard to convey the obscenity of this—also circulated online:
Across Woeser’s social media output could be found a sort of quiet visual counterattack of other images of the Palace unadorned by communist Chinese writing, for instance here and here (both below):
CHINESE ‘VIDEO-SEARCH’
An interesting comment from Kelly Zhang, the young product manager credited for the rise of Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese doppelgänger.
‘Video search’ hasn’t quite arrived in the West yet. A Chinese video showing what it looks like can be watched here and is archived here.
LUCIFER TWEET
WHO CAPITAL PUNISHMENT STORY
India threatens capital punishment for a doctor who provided misleading information about ivermectin use, here and here.
NEW BRUNSWICK AREA
Lest we forget, Brent Gogan and his friend Jeffrey:
IVERMECTIN
Matt Taibbi published an article about what is happening ‘as ivermectin gains a reputation as a “right wing drug”’. He comments on how one conclusion to be drawn from the ivermectin affair is that ‘it’s nearly impossible to get everyone to agree on something, even if their lives depend on it’. To repeat: the (presumably increasing) impossibility of agreeing on something upon which life (or lives) depend.
At the same time, many of the replies to the Taibbi article seem to me correct in saying he does not go far enough. Taibbi pretends that the question as to the drug’s effectiveness is yet to be resolved (awaiting the Oxford trial), whereas in reality:
I think you’re down playing the ample data on Ivermectin. You didn’t address the recent meta-data analysis showing the efficacy of Ivermectin for both treatment and prophylaxis. As Weinstein, Kory and countless highly reputable doctors and researchers have stated, the call for a big-budget, large scale study seems unnecessary in light of all the data coming in from around the globe, and impractical given the limited time we have with respect to virus spread. The squashing of Ivermectin as a covid prevention is, to me, notably egregious especially as more and more news of variant breakthrough infections comes in. As Weinstein points out in the Rogan interview, the inventor of mRNA tech admitted that if a national Ivermectin protocol were put in place the virus could be eradicated.
And then another reply says:
The evidence for ivermectin and fluvoxamine is a hell of a lot better than it ever was for remdesivir, yet somehow the expensive on-patent drug that requires a hospital stay got pushed a lot harder by everyone in charge.
The pharmaceutical companies appear to have fully captured the regulatory process, the media (with massive sums spent on advertising), and the medical journals which are instrumental in the peer review process. I simply cannot come up with another explanation that covers the full breadth of resistance to using it even trying safe and well understood drugs that happen to be off-patent. The Argentinian results on ivermectin alone are sufficient reason to prescribe it given its safety profile.
I continue to dream of Argentina, of the check-and-treat booths in Mexico City, of simply swallowing a pill that would have treated us all a year ago. If I had time, I would have researched what seems to be a connection between John McAfee and an alternative to conventional antibiotics:
And for now the whole of this article:
In early May, Belizean television news crews ambushed McAfee at the Belize City Airport as he returned from the United States and prompted him to allude to persecution from pharmaceutical companies, ‘. . . because if I succeed in what I am doing here in Belize then it will put many of these large international companies out of business’.
THE THIRD POLE
An amazing archive of films about ‘the third pole’, that is, the ongoing effects and consequences of the Himalayan Melt event.
HIMALAYAN MELT-EVENT
For my analysis of how this event relates to and determines Chinese polity see the notes at the end of this blog, which I replicate here.
Tibetanization.—What happened to Tibet happens to you. Therefore, study Tibet and hesitate before going-to-China. The future belongs to water not oil wars. Tibet is the Third Pole, massive reserve. Dams create ‘run-away-with-the-river’ effects, ‘monsoon clouds bounce’. Mount Everest as white phantom melt-event.
BENJAMIN BRATTON PUNCHES DOWN ON ‘ANTI-VAXXERS’
What strikes me about this tweet is how it could be applied to others, for example Benjamin Bratton.
When Barrett Avner posted a validly gnarly burn on Bratton on Twitter, making a Bratton-Daszak equivalence that is perfectly real if you look at Bratton’s track record of state-equidistant COVID comments, Bratton’s first gesture is to reach for the state’s own counter-burn (‘anti-vaxxer’). I just can’t with this type of NYU-Shanghai-funded punching into nowhere.
I haven’t read Bratton’s chapter on Agamben in his new book yet but I have (such is the internet) read excerpts here. Is Bratton living in 2017? He wants us to put a bad mark next to Agamben’s name from now on, a bit like the American state is shooting the dead man Donald Trump when he is down except both Agamben and Trump are not dead. Why does Bratton sound so in the past when he is in charge of million dollar projects thinking about the design worlds of the future? Smdh all the way to the Strelka pop-up Pfizer exhibit.
Notice how in those excerpts Alex Jones is a ‘Texas good ol’ boy’, which is basically a way of saying Alex Jones can’t possibly understand what a UC San Diego Professor can. And the critique of Agamben itself, on this evidence at least, is super thin and overly rehearsed, amounting to a series of Brian Stelter-tier slurs drowning in their own, uh, bongwater. I can’t with how thoughtless the continued Agamben pile-on is. Like, Bratton is Daszak.
🍀
Around this time—~ 26 June 2021 onwards—people on Twitter started using the four leaf clover emoji to post about Ivermectin.
RACE WARS
Fast & Furious was almost titled Race Wars, among other names.
DEAD OR EXTINCT TREE?
If the tree was extinct, why does it arise from the dead, and not the extinct?
They wish they could have stayed, stayed away from Paris, from Normandy, from Bennington and Bard, from the rooftop, from all this.
To have stayed away from all this.
THE VATICAN MAKES AN ANNOUNCEMENT
THE OXFORD TRIAL
The best critique of the principles of the Oxford IVM trial I have been able to find can be found here.
SPLENDID GIFT FROM THE EARTH
Perhaps an exaggeration and too optimistic but still? Here.
BIDEN ANNOUNCES $3 BILLION TO FIND A NEW PILL FOR COVID!!!!!
This censored article is archived here.
WHAT BETTER PLACE TO WAIT FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
‘What better place to wait for the end of the world than in a city that calls itself eternal?’ So it came as something of a shock last spring when Vidal decided to stop waiting for the end and take up immediate occupancy in Eden. He gave up his penthouse apartment overlooking the ruins in Largo Argentina (See Architectural Digest, October 1985) and settled full-time into his sumptuous villa in Ravello overlooking the Amalfi Coast.
Godard’s, Homer’s, Benjamin’s, angelicism01’s etc Capri is nearby:
The pool had to be dug by hand, since there are no roads to the property; its color was intended to approximate the Blue Grotto on nearby Capri.
In Justine McGill’s ‘The Porous Coupling of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’ we find:
This transformation began when Walter Benjamin gallantly used his knowledge of Italian to help Asja Lacis purchase some almonds in a shop on Capri in 1924. This chance meeting would lead to a passionate and long-lasting connection, but one that never progressed into the settled form of marriage or a de facto relationship.
And:
Back in 1924, when Lacis met Benjamin on Capri, he showed ‘tremendous interest’ in her children’s theatre, and declared that he would write a program for it, providing a theoretical foundation for her practical work.
I stayed on Capri with the love of my twenties or that’s how I thought of it at the time. It felt erogenous in terms of what my life would become and I didn’t want to leave. Benjamin wrote in ‘May-June 1931’:
Only when I came to unpack my suitcase in Capri or Naples did I discover what a mad rush I’d been in: I had just packed whatever came immediately to hand. Many essentials were missing, while a hundred superfluous things had been brought along. Yet the real turning point of that trip was not my swift resolve to leave Berlin (my friends managed, with difficulty, to leave a few days later) but, five or six weeks later, when my financial resources were exhausted, my decision to put up with anything as long as I did not have to leave the island. I even considered in all seriousness the possibility of living in one of its large caves, and the images I still have of this are so vivid that today I no longer know whether they were mere fantasies or were based on one of the adventure stories that abound on the island. There have been similar reports of someone actually doing this during the war. In this way my wish was granted with my stay on the island, and later because of it. For I am convinced that to have lived for a long time on Capri gives you a claim on distant journeys, so strong is the belief of anyone who has long lived there that he has all the threads in his hand and that in the fullness of time everything he needs will come to him.
Agamben sadly has been proven right in his assessments. I can't think of another philosopher who even attempted to make one. The other guy that you mention testifies eloquently to the current intellectual and ethical level of successful regime intellectuals and his response to the issue has been quite predictable.
nice one ty