A strip club in Oregon called Lucky Devil Lounge has created a “drive-thru” strip club experience to keep its business going during the pandemic, Oregon Live reports.
Customers slowly drive through a tent that contains four dancers and a DJ. The first 50 cars get a free roll of toilet paper.
“You pull in and you get one or two songs with the gogos, then we bring your food out to you and then you go on your way,” explained Lucky Devil Lounge owner Shon Boulden in a video report uploaded by The Oregonian.
“We’re continuing to keep our kitchen guys working, all of our bartenders, all of our dancers,” he added.
The venture’s food delivery service was formerly named “Boober Eats,” until Uber sent them a cease-and-desist letter, according to Oregon Live.
The business appears to be taking precautions to ensure the dancers’ safety. Reuters images uploaded to Twitter (NSFW) show masked and gloved strippers pole-dancing while customers remain seated inside their vehicles.
The photos “confirm that we have reached the neon anime sci fi part of our future dystopia,” Sean Craig, reporter for The Capital in Victoria, Canada, wrote in the tweet.
Even the official Twitter account of the upcoming video game blockbuster “Cyberpunk 2077” chimed in, writing “please release more footage” in a Twitter reply. The game, slated for release in September, takes place in a dystopian “Blade Runner”-inspired world.
“Every small business is feeling this pain, the same hurt, and we’re just another small business,” Boulden told Oregon Live. “We’ve just been able to create this niche and it worked.”
A strip club in Las Vegas attempted to open its own drive-thru experience last month, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The venture, however, met a wall when Nevada mandated all nonessential businesses to close in mid-March.
Other businesses in the industry have chosen to go the virtual route. A New York City strip club decided to launch virtual reality lap dances, according to the New York Post.
“People need human connection and need to be entertained,” founder Kalin Moon told The New York Post. “VR is a great way to accomplish this from the safety of your own home.”
Nigel GibsonAssociate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College
Disclosure statement
Nigel Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Thinking of the relevance of Karl Marx on the 200th anniversary of his birth on 5 May 1818, takes me back to a wonderful picture of him in Algeria. It was taken in his final year in 1882. Underneath the full white beard is that familiar glint in his eye. He is up to something.
Though seriously ill he took an active interest in local life penning a long letter to his daughter Laura. He wrote appreciatively:
For the Muslims there is no such thing as subordination; they are neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘administrés’ … something which Europeans have totally failed to understand. Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.
In his last years, after the Paris Commune of 1871 when working people rose up against the capitalist state, he became interested in alternative paths to socialism. In his Ethnological Notebooks compiled in 1881, he critically read ethnographers, praising the freedom that the Native American Iroquois women had compared to women in “civilized” societies.
It was live human beings and their reason that remained essential – not the mechanical materialism that Marxism is often reduced to. Marx was a revolutionary humanist, open to – and inspired by – the new passions and forces that spring up and open new avenues to a truly human society.
Capitalism’s relentless march
Marx spent most of his life analysing capitalism. No one would deny that today it is well-nigh impossible to escape capitalism as it rushes faster and faster down the path of what he called the general law of capitalist accumulation.
The accumulation of wealth on one side and the accumulation of misery on the other is reflected, for example, in the recent Oxfam report that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.
At the same time, what Marx called the increasing “absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour” and the absolute mass of the “surplus population”, is reflected in the size of the global workforce estimated at about 3.5 billion. The majority of them, of course, live in the global South.
Global wealth and global inequality are massive, and the pauperisation and precariousness of human existence is terribly real.
Marx’s critique of capital is based on a philosophic perspective that could be considered radically humanist. It’s not simply a critique of alienation but a critique based on the reality of human life eaten up by the fetish of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s bloody and violent “rosy dawn”, what Marx called “primitive accumulation”, is a process to which contemporary capitalism continuously returns.
Workers are free to sell their labour for wages because they are violently alienated from other means of survival. Capitalism becomes naturalised and takes on a fetish character as the subject of life. Alienation becomes the coin of all social relations. The idea that people fetishise commodities, spending their waking and dreaming time thinking about them is caused by the simple inversion that gives commodities subjectivity and reduces human labourers to objects.
Marx warned that, although unveiling the secret of the fetish was crucial, that alone wouldn’t free us from its blinding power. Rather, it was only human beings in struggle who could vanquish the fetish, capitalism.
We revolt because we have to. Resistance to capital is inevitable and takes new and unexpected forms inside and outside of production.
Capitalism, however, marches on in its endless search for free labour and free goods, ruthlessly exploiting human beings, animals and the environment. But, Marx argued, it is also resistance and capitalist crisis that forces it to innovate and defy spatial and temporal restrictions.
Commodifying everything, its ideological prizefighters dress up expropriation as the freedom to exploit oneself in casual and precarious labour. The “app” economy – described as the “economic activity surrounding mobile applications” – is just the latest manifestation of Marx’s prescience.
Theory of liberation
The founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism, Raya Dunayevskayadescribed Marxism as a theory of liberation – or nothing. Marx was not a lonely intellectual sitting in the British Museum. He was a philosopher and activist constantly involved with revolutionary movements.
To say that Marx was a genius is to recognise that his ideas were intimately connected with – and elucidated by – the logic and history of ongoing struggles.
It was the weavers in the Prussian province of Silesia in 1844 that taught him the importance of workers’ own self-conscious action. It was the Paris Commune that taught him the importance of self-activity in developing a new form of social organisation. It was the Fenian activity of the Irish workers opposing British imperialism that taught him the importance of the autonomy of the Irish struggle and the chauvinism of the British trade unions.
Marx viewed capitalism as a living hell that chewed up human life. It was the workers’ way of knowing, their self-organisation, that interested him as it spoke to the necessity of a dual movement: uprooting capitalism and developing a new society based on human needs. Thinking with Marx on his 200th birthday means recognising the importance of thought in this confrontation.
Klimt‘s explicit 1901 version of Judith and the Head of Holofernes was shocking to viewers and is said to have targeted themes of female sexuality that had previously been more or less taboo.[1]
The name Judith (Hebrew: יְהוּדִית, Modern: Yehudit, Tiberian: Yəhûḏîṯ, “Praised” or “Jewess”) is the feminine form of Judah.
Historical context
Original language
It is not clear whether the Book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew or in Greek. The oldest existing version is the Septuagint and might either be a translation from Hebrew or composed in Greek. Details of vocabulary and phrasing point to a Greek text written in a language modeled on the Greek developed through translating the other books in the Septuagint.[3]
The extant Hebrew language versions, whether identical to the Greek, or in the shorter Hebrew version, date to the Middle Ages. The Hebrew versions name important figures directly such as the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, thus placing the events in the Hellenistic period when the Maccabees battled the Seleucid monarchs. The Greek version uses deliberately cryptic and anachronistic references such as “Nebuchadnezzar“, a “King of Assyria“, who “reigns in Nineveh“, for the same king. The adoption of that name, though unhistorical, has been sometimes explained either as a copyist’s addition, or an arbitrary name assigned to the ruler of Babylon.[citation needed]
Today, I am retiring from the NBA after 13 seasons. Most people reading this probably don’t know me from SportsCenter. Most people know me as “the gay basketball player.” I have been an openly gay man for approximately three percent of my life. I have been a professional basketball player for almost half of it.
In order to understand why I am so lucky to be sitting here today as a person who is finally comfortable in his own skin, you need to understand how basketball saved me. I needed to live the past few years as an openly gay basketball player in order to be at peace retiring today. Why? It starts on a bus and ends on a plane.
*
“Hey Jason … Jason! How come we never see you with any women? Are you gay?”
The team bus was uncomfortably silent. Everybody from the front of the bus to the back heard the question. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. In sports, guys bust each other’s balls all the time. I had been asked that question a few different times by teammates in my previous years in the league, but this time was different. Whenever guys would go out on the town on road trips, I always had a built-in excuse—a trip to a local casino or a visit to a family friend or a college buddy in that city who I had to go see. Sometimes those friends were real. Sometimes I made them up and would sit alone in the hotel watching TV while the guys went out to enjoy the nightlife.
It was a lonely experience, even when I was around other people. It was always mentally draining, because I always had to be on, 24/7. Whenever I went out to dinner with teammates, I became especially skilled at steering any conversation away from the personal and back to the realm of sports or entertainment. After a while, guys just know you as the vet who loves to talk basketball. When you go to a new team, you have to create that character all over again.
“I think you’re gay, dude.”
Every other time, I could find a way to laugh it off. This time was different. I was 30 and unmarried. No kids. No crazy road stories. For years, I had dated women—never men, even secretly—but now I was starting to be more honest with myself about my sexuality. I felt like maybe the guards I had put up were starting to wear down. This time, the question stung like it never had before. There’s a very particular feeling in the pit of your stomach when the question comes up. I call it the blush. You feel angry, yet also embarrassed.
It felt like everybody on that bus was looking at me and could see right through me. Part of me was tired of running. Part of me wanted to scream out the truth and just get it over with, but I couldn’t. In a split second, that familiar survival instinct kicked in and I thought, Okay, I have to prove to these guys that I’m straight.
As ridiculous as it sounds, I asked myself, What would a straight guy do in this situation? So I pulled the fake-heated mean-mug face. Like, no way am I gay. Me? Are you serious? I started talking about a girl who had conveniently come to visit me that week. Of course, this girl was just a friend, but the guys didn’t know that. So I just kept talking, hoping I sounded believable. I felt like I was sinking in quicksand. It was so silent you could hear a pin drop.
Finally, somebody yelled out from the back of the bus, “Hey, what are you talking about? I saw him out with that girl the other night. Come on, man. You crazy. He’s straight.”
My teammate vouched for me.
Maybe he really saw me out with her, but I think he was just throwing me a lifeline. Whatever the case, the awkward silence broke. Guys started talking again. I slid back down into my seat. I had avoided the question one more time, but I knew I couldn’t keep up the act. It was exhausting.
On one hand, I felt pressure to be “The Perfect Son” for my family, which had always been incredibly loving and supportive of me. I wanted to keep up the hope for my parents that someday, when basketball was over, they would have the big traditional wedding and the grandkids from me and my wife. I was afraid of being rejected by my family and friends, much more so than being run out of the NBA.
On the other hand, by trying to keep everyone around me happy, I was becoming increasingly lonely. No matter your religion or what your political views are, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on. Most human beings are not meant to be alone. I know I’m not.
Later on that year, we faced the Orlando Magic in the playoffs, and I was given the unenviable task of guarding Dwight Howard. By that point, my battles in the post with Shaquille O’Neal over the years were starting to catch up with me. I used to play this game with Cliff Robinson where we’d come up with names for the moves Shaq used to punish you. “There’s the ol’ meat cleaver! Aw no, there’s the spine tingler!”
Shaq is responsible for a whole bunch of seven-foot-tall middle-aged men hobbling around America right now.
So my back was getting creaky, and Dwight was a 25-year-old beast. My job was the same as it had been my entire career: Make his life as miserable as possible. Bump him. Foul him. Stick a hand in his face and pull out every single wiley vet move under the sun to keep him from dominating the game.
Of course, he had his moments. He’s Dwight. He averaged 27 points a game. I averaged 1.8. But, when it mattered most, we kept him from hurting us. We won the series in six. Coach Van Gundy said it was the best defense he had seen on Dwight all year. But, I was essentially invisible. I barely talked to a single reporter during the whole series.
What a crappy, thankless job, right? To me, it was perfect. When I came into the NBA from Stanford, I had already decided what type of player I would be. I wanted to be the best player and teammate I could be, but not attract too much attention or make too much noise. I didn’t want people to start asking questions about my personal life.
I realize that might sound like a very convenient excuse for spending my career as a defensive grunt, but it’s just another example of the constant strategizing you do when you’re closeted. Every single moment, you’re paranoid that your words or actions could undo the whole charade.
With Twitter and Facebook, these mental gymnastics become all the more complicated. During that 2011 offseason, as the debate around “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA was heating up on social media, I had to pull out every last ounce of self-control to keep myself from retweeting something in support of marriage equality. Watching people I admired come out in support of the issues that were so dear to my heart was helping me get closer and closer to revealing the truth. But I was still scared.
When the 2011 NBA lockout kept me away from my normal routine, I had way too much time on my hands to be by myself—my authentic self—and read about the fight for equal rights in the LGBTQ community. I would keep track of what was going on via OUTsports.com every day, making sure to clear my browser history and cover my tracks. With basketball distractions taken away, I finally had to confront the reality of my existence as a human being on this planet. What did I want my legacy to be? What did I want out of life?
I had days and days by myself during the lockout and the only one I was able to have a full unguarded conversation with was Shadow, my German Shepherd. Granted, it was a one-way conversation.
I’d had enough. I wanted to be free. A few months later, after 33 years of not telling a single soul, I came out of the closet. First to a friend in Los Angeles, then to my aunt Teri. She said she had always known, and she was fully supportive. With that initial burden lifted, I told my family and close friends next. Unlike Teri, my twin brother Jarron was stunned. To be honest, I was pretty surprised that I was able to fool him for three decades. This is the guy I spent more hours talking to than any other person in my life. For the first time, he saw the real me. He had absolutely no idea.
Within a few hours, after the surprise wore off, everything with Jarron was back to normal and today, we’re closer than ever. He is one of the best men I know.
Of course, life is not a Disney movie. Life is messy. There were some people in my family who made gay jokes and used inappropriate language while I was growing up. Coming out to some people was more challenging than others, but in the end, I was amazed by how much my sexuality didn’t matter.Advertisement
That’s the secret that every single closeted person reading this—athlete or otherwise—should know. In the end, the people who genuinely love you will always love you and support you, no matter what. It’s the secret I wish I had known for 33 years.
When I decided to come out publicly with my letter in Sports Illustrated in April 2013, I was fully prepared to never play in the NBA again. Being an older free agent, I was dreading the “D” word. He’s a Distraction. Why bother? But I was also bracing myself to hear a lot worse, whether it was from opposing fans or from players. I had been in sports locker rooms since my high school days in the mid-’90s. I knew how guys talked. Athletes can be very … colorful with their language.
I had no idea what to expect.
*
“… Wait, who is this?”
I was coming out of a boot-camp workout in LA a few days after the Sports Illustrated article published when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was a 305 area code. I thought, who the hell is calling me from Miami?
“Hey, this is Tim Hardaway,” the voice said.
Tim was an old-school athlete who came up in the ’90s when homophobia was still commonplace, expected and accepted. When retired NBA player John Amaechi came out in 2007, Tim made some negative and unsupportive comments that made headlines. To Tim’s credit, he later apologized for his comments and has worked with several groups to educate himself on LGBTQ issues. Tim has since become an activist and straight ally for the LGBTQ community.
Still, when he called me, I was stunned.
He said, “I just want to tell you that I’m really proud of you, man. You have my support.”
Tim may never know just how much that meant to me. That was major. In that moment, I knew that it was possible for a person to change in their heart and mind. If Tim supported me, I knew there would be others that did as well.
Now that the burden of hiding was finally off of my shoulders, I was confident that if an NBA team came calling, I was capable of doing my job, maybe better than ever. I spent the rest of the summer torturing myself with workouts, running up and down the trails of Los Angeles in order to get in the best possible shape of my career. I lifted weights that would make a football player proud. You could see the veins in my biceps for the first time in over a decade.
I knew the easiest excuse for any NBA team to explain passing on me would be that I was out of shape. At 34, it’s not hard to get flabby. Despite interest from a couple of teams, the entire summer and fall came and went without an offer.
Then, in January, I was invited to Washington D.C. by the White House for the State of the Union address. I had the pleasure to join the First Lady in her viewing box during the speech. Afterward, there’s something called the receiving line, where all the invited guests of the First Lady wait in line to greet the President and take a picture with him. Usually this process is rather quick as you shake hands, say a few words, and move along for the next person. At least that’s how it works with normal people. Unfortunately, as my friends love to point out to me, I am the Black Larry David.
Awkwardness follows me.
So President Obama gets to me and without missing a beat he says, “Hey Jason, nice to see you. Have you been staying in shape?”
“Yes, Mr. President. I just ran five miles yesterday,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“That’s good,” he said, “Because you know, after the All-Star break is when all the free agents get picked up, so stay in shape.”
At this point, I should have smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. President, I will.”
I did not do that.
“Oh yeah, Mr. President,” I said. “I’d show you my six pack, but I don’t think the Secret Service or your wife would want me to take my shirt off right now.”
I have rarely seen the President at a loss for words. He is always smooth. This time, it took him a second.
“Uh, well yeah, that’s a good idea,” he said. “You should probably keep your shirt on.”
He grinned, shook my hand and turned to the next person.
*
President Obama turned out to be absolutely right.
After the trade deadline in late February, I went to my brother’s house with my friends and family for board game night. We played Celebrity, a modified version of charades. It was so fitting because it was one of those nights that made me realize how lucky I was to finally be free and happy in front of the people I love.
The next morning, at 8 a.m., my phone blew up with text messages and voicemails. One of the first messages was from my old teammate, Jason Kidd, who was then the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets. Most of the money I made in the NBA I probably owe to J-Kidd. He was one of the smartest players I ever played with—one of those point guards who could make a big man look so much better than he really is, just by feeding him easy buckets.
For seven years, J-Kidd and I played together in New Jersey. Now, he and the entire organization were welcoming me back to the Nets on a 10-day contract.
After that, everything happened really fast. I’ve often been asked if I was nervous to face the team for the first time. Honestly, I barely had time to think about it. I was more worried about how I was supposed to pack for a road trip. There’s only so much you can fit in a few travel bags, and when you’re a seven-footer, you can’t just roll up to the mall and buy normal-size jeans. I remember packing thinking that my wardrobe rotation was going to be very limited if I end up staying with the team for the rest of the year.
Everybody wanted to know what it’s like to play in a game as an openly gay man in the NBA. From the moment I stepped onto the court to the moment the final buzzer sounded—it was the same as my previous 12 years.
I was locked in. Nothing was different. I did what I always do. Being gay certainly didn’t affect how I played. I tipped rebounds to teammates, tried to de-cleat opponents with my screens, and I did my best to make life miserable for the opposing big. When the ball tipped off, I realized something that I wish I could instill in every single coach, GM, and player reading this.
IT’S STILL JUST BASKETBALL.
The ironic thing about the dreaded D word is that I had never felt more comfortable playing basketball than I was as an openly gay man. You know what a real distraction is? Maintaining a lie 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for most of your career, for most of your life. The energy involved in hiding the stress, shame, and fear of being gay is a full-time job. With all that removed, I was like a new person.
In the locker room after the first few games, there were a lot more cameras in front of me than usual. (A big thank you to Gary Sussman and Aaron Harris in the Nets media department for acting like my guard dogs, yapping at any media members who stepped over the line.) After a couple weeks, the media coverage shifted off of me because there are only so many ways you can write a story about having a gay teammate. It went back to being about the team and how we were making a push for the playoffs.
In my first 10 games with the team, we won eight and lost two. So much for that distraction theory.
As all good teams do, we were able to come together and have fun, and poke fun at each other as usual. One day, Andray Blatche got fed up with my wardrobe and called me out.
“Bro, I swear if I see you wearing those black jeans one more time,” he laughed. “You gotta switch it up, man.”
I responded to him saying, “Is that a t-shirt? Or a blouse you’re wearing? Either way, Prince & The Revolution just called and they want their clothes back!”
Yep, it’s still just basketball. Still just two teammates cracking jokes on each other.
On the team plane after the third game, I was watching a movie when a future Hall of Famer tapped me on the arm.
I had known Kevin Garnett since high school. When I was 15, my brother and I played against him at a tournament in Las Vegas. As a young man I was good; but KG was on another level. He had 19 blocks against us, and he was talking trash even back then. It was one of those monumental moments in life when I was like, I needed that. I’m not as good as I thought I was.
That game is one of the reasons I ended up making it to the NBA. Because there were two ways I could’ve gone. I could’ve tucked my tail between my legs and taken up golf. Or I could’ve gone back to the gym with a vengeance.
I got back into the gym. Now, here we were, 20 years later, two old vets sitting across from one another on an NBA charter flight.
“Hey JC,” Kevin said. “I’m really glad you’re back playing, man. That you’re back playing in the league and you’re on our team. You know, this is going to be big for society.”
It is extremely meaningful to me that he would express those words of support. At that point, my head was spinning just trying to learn the plays. I wasn’t thinking about the historical significance of a gay player in the league. I just wanted to be one of the guys again. For Kevin to go out of his way to say he appreciated me as a teammate meant a lot to me as a basketball player.
*
There are so many people I have to thank for helping me on my journey. My family, friends, and fans empower me each and every day. My teammates, coaches, and the Brooklyn Nets organization gave me an opportunity. The entire NBA family, where the leadership of David Stern and Adam Silver created an environment that made me feel safe to step forward. My agent, Arn Tellem, who is like the cool uncle everyone wishes they had. All the fans in New York who would see me walking on the street and say, “Hey Collins, good luck tonight!” or “We are proud of you!” To all the people who came out before me and helped clear the path for others to follow. And the many countless individuals who have fought and sacrificed for human and civil rights, period. Thank you.
Many people have asked, “What’s next?” I’ll continue to encourage others to live an authentic life. My hope is that everyone achieves that day when you step forward and reveal your truth on your own terms. Your life will be exponentially better when you celebrate all that makes you unique. Additionally, I hope to inspire others to create a world of acceptance and inclusion; not only by their words, but by their actions.
What would you have done if you were on that team bus with me?
It’s easy to say you would’ve done what my teammate did, or something else to alleviate the situation. But when you’re in that moment, it’s a lot easier to pretend that you didn’t hear what was happening, or to throw on your headphones, or perhaps easier still—to laugh along with others.
This scenario plays out every single day on buses, school cafeterias, and office buildings across the world. Maybe 10 closeted athletes will come out and be free over the next year. Or maybe not. People ask me all the time, “Don’t you think we need more athletes to come out?”
Yes, of course I do; that would be great. However, if we really want to make the world a better place, we also need more people like the teammate who saw me drowning and threw me a lifeline. You can be that person who speaks up.
Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:
Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”
Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”
This interesting take on the First Amendment was latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”
A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”
The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast who cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:
Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.
The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an “Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.
“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” said Erickson, a vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate. “Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear.”
The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious (at best) data collection methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to issue a joint statement to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests.”
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”
Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:
There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
Because Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with Conventional Wisdom’s takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance scolding fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take scolding was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against “expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s decision to end some shutdowns was, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”
At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable sources.
H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set injecting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.
Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.
When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order to explain the Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.
It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:
There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:
“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus is. The routine things work.”
There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.
“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).
On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed that because they weren’t paying attention, but also because they’d never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.
Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.
Authoritiesby their nature are often wrong. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been destroying our business for decades.
The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now proven to have been wrong to a spectaculardegree, if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.
We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. “Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?
From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.
Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.
Academy of Ancient Music **During the coronavirus crisis, please consider donating to help support our musicians, here: http://www.aam.co.uk/donate ** Internationally acclaimed vocal group VOCES8 headline the Academy of Ancient Music’s performance of Handel’s beloved oratorio Messiah, recorded LIVE at the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. Download the concert programme here: https://issuu.com/academy-of-ancient-… PROGRAMME: George Frideric Handel (1685 – 1749) ‘Messiah’ HWV56
PART THE FIRST 00:00:10 – Symphony 00:03:30 – ‘Comfort Ye My People’ (Blake Morgan, tenor) 00:06:54 – ‘Ev’ry Valley Shall Be Exalted’ (Euan Williamson, tenor) 00:10:33 – ‘And The Glory Of The Lord’ 00:13:24 – ‘Thus Saith The Lord’ (Christopher Moore, bass) 00:14:47 – ‘But Who May Abide The Day Of His Coming’ (Katie Jeffries-Harris, alto) 00:19:10 – ‘And He Shall Purify’ 00:21:38 – ‘Behold, A Virgin Shall Conceive’ (Katie Jeffries-Harris, alto) 00:22:15 – ‘O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion (Katie Jeffries-Harris, alto) 00:27:33 – ‘For Unto Us A Child Is Born’ 00:31:52 – Pastoral Symphony 00:33:00 – ‘There Were Shepherds Abiding In The Field’ (Eleonore Cockerham, soprano) 00:33:58 – ‘And Suddenly There Was With An Angel’ (Eleonore Cockerham, soprano) 00:36:09 – ‘Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter Of Zion’ (Penelope Appleyard, soprano) 00:40:50 – ‘Then Shall The Eyes Of The Blind’ (Katie Jeffries-Harris, alto) 00:41:26 – ‘He Shall Feed His Flock’ (Katie Jeffries-Harris, alto & Eleonore Cockerham, soprano) 00:46:56 – ‘His Yoke Is Easy’
PART THE SECOND 00:49:31 – ‘Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs’ 00:51:12 – ‘And With His Stripes We Are Healed’ 00:53:07 – ‘And We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray’ 00:56:58 – ‘All They That See Him, Laugh Him To Scorn’ (Euan Williamson, tenor) 00:57:38 – ‘He Trusted In God’ 01:00:10 – ‘Why Do The Nations So Furiously Rage Together?’ (Frederick Long, bass) 01:02:43 – ‘Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder’ 01:04:38 – ‘He That Dwelleth In Heaven’ (Oliver Martin-Smith, tenor) 01:04:52 – ‘Thou Shalt Break Them’ (Oliver Martin-Smith, tenor) 01:07:07 – ‘Hallelujah’
PART THE THIRD 01:11:06 – ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ (Andrea Haines, soprano) 01:17:55 – ‘Since By Man Came Death’ 01:20:23 – ‘Behold, I Tell You A Mystery’ (Frederick Long, bass) 01:21:08 – ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ (Frederick Long, bass) 01:25:24 – ‘Worthy Is The Lamb That Was Slain’ 01:29:03 – ‘Amen’
How do you say goodbye when you can’t go to a dying loved one’s bedside? (Collage: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Life/Getty Images)
Amidst reports of people dying alone, either at home or in hospitals or nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic, it can be hard to not feel hopeless and helpless about the possibility of losing a loved one — and then, on top of that, being robbed of the opportunity to say an in-person goodbye.
It’s a painful reality that many people are dealing with right now, including so-called “death doulas,” whose job it is to comfort and shepherd people through their own deaths with bedside sittings and counseling.
The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care is a Buddhist organization that provides multi-faith care to the ill and dying — about 100,000 people over its 14 years in operation — as well as trains laypeople and medical professionals. Now, cofounders and husbands Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell and Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison have had to readjust the ways they typically operate. That means moving a full calendar of in-person workshops, meditations (which have doubled in size), discussions, bereavement groups (also expanding) and palliative end-of-life care services online, to video platforms, to fit into our new, socially-distanced lifestyle.
“Everything has radically changed… But we have this time now, where death and the reality of our fragility is unavoidable,” Paley Ellison, a psychotherapist, monk, chaplain, Soto Zen Teacher and professor, tells Yahoo Life, explaining that it was his late grandmother, for whom he cared through her last days, who inspired the idea of the Center.
“Going with her to primary care visits, on ambulance rides, and eventually moving in with her, I saw through her and my eyes how afraid people are to be with people in their illness — beautiful, well-meaning people, but people very caught up in the business of distraction and fear,” he recalls. “People would come visit and be really afraid. I remember them standing at the foot of the bed and clutching the rail and not wanting to get close, and it was so powerful.”
Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison teaches how to come to terms with death — and not lose all joy — at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. (Photo: Courtesy of NYZCCC)
The experience would nudge both him and Campbell, who was a hospice volunteer at the time, to dedicate themselves to helping people confront their own fears and discomforts around some of the most inevitable truths: aging, illness and death.
But how can anybody do that properly now, when human touch and expected rituals around death and dying have been sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic? Here’s what Paley Ellison advises.
Embrace the idea that video connections are not “virtual,” but real
“I think it’s not virtual,” Paley Ellison says, speaking to Yahoo Life over Zoom. “I’m here in this room and you’re there in that room and we’re both real and we’re not virtual — the connection is a real connection. I can hear the timbre of your voice… bringing the human level.”
The center has been overseeing rituals from memorial services to marriages on Zoom, “and it’s all very real,” he says. “What we’re doing in the hospitals and with our care team is by and phone, but still working to be a steady presence in people’s lives. We have a group of elders in our community that used to meet monthly but now meets every other week because they are among our most vulnerable, and this is a way to talk with them about their fears and how they’re coping and learning how to lean into what they’re experiencing.”
Paley Ellison says that through their community, they’ve been “finding how to hold presence together over this technology. We are in some ways blessed because we have telephones and screens.”
Whereas, with texting culture, he says, “it’s hard to get emotional resonance. So we’ve been using phone and Zoom and FaceTime because we can still regulate and support each other emotionally by seeing someone’s face, and actually what someone’s voice and breath does to you. It’s really dropping into the humanness and saying, ‘I’m here and you’re there, and how can we be together?’”
Re-create rituals
To that end, aim to move in-real-life experiences to video, particularly when it comes to connecting with a loved one who may be isolated in the hospital. “It’s depending on the hospital, it might be possible and it might not,” Paley Ellison notes. “My cousin contracted [COVD-19] and he was at a hospital in Brooklyn and the staff was so overwhelmed that we couldn’t do it.” He wound up dying alone. And because of that, Paley Ellison and his family were forced to rethink the ritual of saying goodbye.
Video connections are not “virtual,” but real. (Collage: Nathalie G. Cruz for Yahoo Life/Getty Images)
They decided to come together for a Zoom memorial, “and talked about how painful it was, and what our wishes for him were,” he says. “So, I think yes, if it’s possible to do FaceTime with your loved one, try to do that. If it’s not, find ways to connect and give voice to what you want to say to that person. For us as a family, we all loved him so much and it was so painful to not be able to see him… But it felt like we also honored him.”
Paley Ellison stresses the power of imagination in any new ritual, noting, “we can still imagine we’re at somebody’s bedside, to use the beauty of imagination. The specificity of it is very important — what is it that we want to say and imagine for our loved ones?”
At whatever service you do create to honor a loved one, he says, “there might be prayers that are important, or poems, but the main thing is the remembering.” Because that’s when, he says, “you can tap into the real feeling — the grief and the joy and the laughter and the funny stories and how they were a pain in the a**. And their realness lives in each of us.”
Don’t wait to say “I love you”
“We’ve been having lots of community conversations…about unfinished business,” Paley Ellison says, which is simply facing a reality. “We live in a time where, if one person you know gets sick, you may not see them again. And what’s interesting is that it’s always been true.” Most people have not wanted to face that reality, but now, he says, he is encouraging people to have those conversations, and “to have deeper relationships, and reflect on what is it that’s left unsaid: Have you appreciated the people who have helped you be who you are? Have you really told the people you love how you love them? If you’ve hurt someone, have you apologized and said, ‘I’m sorry’?”
There’s also no better time to “wake up to how precious life is,” he says, noting that one of the biggest regrets he hears from terminally ill people is “I didn’t love well,” or “why was I so afraid of so many things?” So, looking at fear and love, he says, “has been really a central part of what we’re teaching these days.”
To that end, he’s offering a new workshop called Living Fearlessly. “It’s really looking at putting your affairs in order, and is based on the Steven Levine book, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if it Were Your Last,” he says. “But we’re doing it as eight weeks — bringing the urgency, and turning towards the urgency.”
Tag a friend that needs to see this!?This clip is from a recent interview with on London Real !To watch it click here: https://londonreal.tv/create-a-wall-of-armour-for-your-immune-system-how-to-protect-against-covid-19-dr-joe-dispenza/?fbclid=IwAR3YX8_Sfz1y8dPdwugcilgwt1XTOO0_HqvL7ug8nWfYKbeHf3BguchQEjU#londonrealarmy
Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners[1] (18 September 1883 – 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer, novelist, painter and aesthete. He is usually referred to as Lord Berners.
Biography
Early life and education
Berners was born in Apley Hall, Shropshire, in 1883, son of The Honorable Hugh Tyrwhitt (1856-1907) and his wife Julia (1861-1931), daughter of William Orme Foster, Apley’s owner.[2] His father, a Royal Navy officer,[3] was rarely home. He was brought up by a grandmother who was extremely religious[4] and self-righteous, and a mother who had little intellect and many prejudices. His mother, a wealthy ironmaster’s daughter with a strong interest in fox hunting,[5] ignored his musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural. Berners later wrote, “My father was worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed. My mother was unworldly, naïve, impulsive and undecided, and in my father’s presence she was always at her worst”.[6]
The eccentricities Berners displayed started early in life. Once, upon hearing that you could teach a dog to swim by throwing him into water, the young Gerald promptly decided that by throwing his mother’s dog out the window, he could teach it to fly. The dog was unharmed, though the act earned Berners a beating.
After devising several booby traps, Berners was sent off to the boarding school Cheam School at the age of nine. It was here that he would first explore his homosexuality; for a short time, he was romantically involved with an older pupil. The relationship was abruptly ended after Berners vomited on the other boy.
After he left prep school, Gerald continued his education at Eton College. Later, in his autobiographies, Berners would reflect on his experiences at Eton, claiming that he had learned nothing while there, and that the school was more concerned with shaping the young men’s characters than supplying them with an education.
Adult life
In 1918, Berners became the 14th Baron Berners after inheriting the title, property, and money, from an uncle.[7][8] His inheritance included Faringdon House, which he initially gave to his mother and her second husband; on their deaths in 1931 he moved into the house himself.[9] In 1932, Berners fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy, 28 years his junior, who became his companion and moved into Faringdon House.[10] Unexpectedly, Heber-Percy married a 21-year-old woman, Jennifer Fry, who had a baby nine months later. For a short time, she and the baby lived at Faringdon House with Heber-Percy and Berners.[11]
As well as being a talented musician, Berners was a skilled artist and writer. He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford‘s The Pursuit of Love.[12] In January 2016, he was played by actor Christopher Godwin in episode 3 of the BBC Radio 4 drama What England Owes.[13] He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness.
Berners was notorious for his eccentricity,[14] dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman’s horse Moti to tea.[7] There were paper flowers in the garden and the interior of the house was adorned with joke books and joke notices, such as “Mangling Done Here”. As visitor Patrick Leigh Fermor recalled:
“No dogs admitted” at the top of the stairs and “Prepare to meet thy God” painted inside a wardrobe. When people complimented him on his delicious peaches he would say “Yes, they are ham-fed”. And he used to put Woolworth pearl necklaces round his dogs’ necks [Berners had a dalmatian, Heber Percy the retriever, Pansy Lamb] and when a guest, rather perturbed, ran up saying “Fido has lost his necklace”, G said, “Oh dear, I’ll have to get another out of the safe.”[14]
His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower, Faringdon Folly, constructed as a birthday present in 1935 for Heber-Percy,[15] a notice at the entrance reading: “Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk”.[16] Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig’s-head mask to frighten the locals.[4][12]
He was also subject throughout his life to periods of depression which became more pronounced during the Second World War, and following the production of his last ballet Les Sirènes he lost his eyesight.[17]
Death and epitaph
He died in 1950 aged 66 at Faringdon House, bequeathing his estate to his companion Robert (‘Mad Boy’) Heber-Percy, [7] who lived at Faringdon until his own death in 1987.[18] His ashes are buried in the lawn near the house.[19]
Berners wrote his own epitaph, which appears on his gravestone:
“Here lies Lord Berners One of the learners His great love of learning May earn him a burning But, Praise the Lord! He seldom was bored.”
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
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