EL INCONSCIENTE ÓPTICO: LAS MASCARILLAS

 

 

 

A partir de hoy serán obligatorias las mascarillas en los centros de salud y los hospitales de toda España. Mónica García dará más detalles de la nueva norma, pese a las reticencias de la mayoría de los gobiernos autonómicos https://t.co/WOnHf8CQv4

— EL PAÍS (@el_pais) January 10, 2024

Super 40 second video illustrating nicely the absurdity of masks for virus transmission - blue masks don't even stop stray hairs blowing out around the edges, and don't start me on viruses! https://t.co/4XvFjrNXkA pic.twitter.com/eB0oc3LB1A

— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) January 10, 2024

 

 

La cámara nos permite descubrir el inconsciente óptico, del mismo modo en que el psicoanálisis no hizo descubrir el inconsciente pulsional

 

WALTER BENJAMIN (La obra de arte en la era de su reproducción técnica)

https://t.co/HWcrGFIN7t pic.twitter.com/CDHQTTBJH2

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) January 16, 2024

LOS AGRICULTORES Y LOS FANTASMAS DE MAO Y STALIN (FARMERS AND THE GHOSTS OF STALIN AND MAO)

 

Therefore, he reasoned (Preobrazhensky), private property and the market should be abolished in the countryside, so that all investible surplus could be squeezed out of it by the government suppressing agricultural prices. Such surplus was then to be shifted to the industrial sector, where the planning authority could make sure that all of it was invested. In the short run, this would suppress living standards, especially for the peasantry, but in the long run it would make everyone better off, because it would maximize investment and therefore the growth potential of the economy.

 

(...)

 

However, in 1928, it all changed. Upon becoming the sole dictator, Stalin filched his rivals' ideas and implemented the strategy advocated by Preobrazhensky. He confiscated land from the kulaks, the rich farmers, and brought the entire countryside under state control through collectivization of agriculture. The lands confiscated from the kulaks were turned into state farms (sovkhoz), while small farmers were forced to join cooperatives or collective farms (kolkhoz), with a nominal share ownership.

 

Stalin did not follow Preobrazhensky's recommendation exactly. Actually, he went rather soft on the countryside and did not squeeze the peasants to the maximum. Instead, he imposed lower-than-subsistence wages on industrial workers, which in turn forced urban women to join the industrial workforce in order to enable their families to survive.

 

    Stalin's strategy had huge costs. Millions of people resisting, or being accused of resisisting, agricultural collectivization ended up in labour camps. There was a collapse in agricultural output, following the dramatic fall in the number of traction animals, partly due to the slaughtering by their owners in anticipation of confiscation and partly due to the shortage of grains to feed them thanks to forced grain shipments to the cities. This agricultural breakdown resulted in the severe famine of 1932—3 in which millions of people perished.

 

The irony is that, without Stalin adopting Preobrazhensky's strategy, the Soviet Union would not have been able to build the industrial base at such a speed that it was able to repel the Nazi invasion on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Without the Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front, Western Europe would not have been able to beat the Nazis. Thus, ironically, Western Europeans owe their freedom today to an ultra-left-wing Soviet economist called Preobrazhensky.

 

Why am I nattering on about some forgotten Russian Marxist economist from nearly a century ago? It is because there is a striking parallel between Stalin's (or rather Preobrazhensky's) strategy and today's pro-rich policies advocated by free-market economists.

(Ha-Joon Chang: 23 Things they don't tell you about capitalism; pages 138-140)

The Great Leap Famine and Amartya Sen (LA HAMBRUNA DEL GRAN SALTO ADELANTE Y AMARTYA SEN)

The Great Leap Famine and Amartya Sen: Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate argues, “in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.”[1] According to Sen, severe famine does not happen if a country is autonomous (independent), fair and accountable (democratic), and encourages free exchange of ideas (free press). Autonomous government has the power to allocate resources according to domestic concerns, and democratic government has duty to accommodate societal concerns guided by the rule of law. Relatively free press allows citizens to express their concerns freely and notifies government with challenges in society. The Great Leap Famine in China could also have been prevented if China at the time was independent, democratic, with a relatively free press, as Sen suggested. The Great Leap Famine was led by three key factors: Mao ignoring precautionary alarm suggested by the political elites; Mao silencing intellectuals from suggesting alternative agricultural-scientific theories; and top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was not informed about the villagers dying of famine. These could have been easily prevented under the Sen’s conditions because democratic institutionalization allows political elites to freely discuss policies, freedom of expression encourages intellectuals to freely criticize scientific theories, and democratic election and mass media coverage motivates citizens to freely address their concerns.

The infamous Great Leap Famine in 1959 to 1962 is the worst famine in modern Chinese history. The catastrophic famine caused gigantic causalities, estimated from 23 million to 46 million people.A professor from Hong Kong University of Science and technology, James Kaising Kung and a professor from Peking University, Justin Yifu Lin, argues that political radicalism created the Great Leap Famine.2 Ineffective policies were carried out – grain procurement and steel and iron production – while government officials focused on protecting their careers by enforcing unrealistic goals which starved peasants to death.

 

 

   

 

YAN LIANKE

Flesh and blood, body and soul are gone. All is well, and the little fulcrum of truth that could lift the world is lost. As such, history becomes a collection of legends, of lost and imagined stories, that are baseless and unfounded. From this perspective then, how important it is that we can remember, and possess our own memories that are neither revised nor erased. It is the least amount of certainty and evidence that we can provide when we speak a little truth. 

 Memories cannot change the world, but it gives us a genuine heart. 

If there comes another Great Leap Forward someday and people revert to using backyard furnaces, it can at least convince us that sand will not turn into iron, and one mu [a unit of measurement, approximately 667 sqm] of yield will not weigh 100,000 catties. We will at least know that this is the most basic common sense, and not some miracle of consciousness producing matter, or air creating food. If there’s another Cultural Revolution of some sort, we’ll at least be able to guarantee that we will not land our parents in prison or on the guillotine. 

Because of this, I hope that each of you, and all of us who’ve experienced the catastrophic Covid-19 will become people who remember; people who derive memories from memory. 

Writing poems after the Auschwitz concentration camp period was indeed barbaric, but it is even more barbaric if we simply choose to forget it in words, in conversations and in memories—it is indeed much more barbaric and horrifying. 

If we can’t be a whistle-blower like Li Wenliang, then let us at least be someone who hears that whistle. If we can’t speak out loudly, then let us be whisperers. If we can’t be whisperers, then let us be silent people who have memories. Having experienced the start, onslaught, and spread of Covid-19, let us be the people who silently step aside when the crowd unites to sing a victory song after the battle is won—the people who have graves in their hearts, with memories etched in them; the people who remember and can someday pass on these memories to our future generations.

"Air creating food"  stands also for "politicians or policies or corporations or the State" producing food. History shows the catastrofic outcomes of it.

Farmers are a key part of the "little fulcrum of truth".

 

Western elites are seeking today, without any memories and/or insight and under the disguise of climate change concerns (instead of communism), a similar "Great Leap Forward" addressed, as said by German farmer@AnthonyLeeLsvD, to get rid of farmers, their economies and knowledge.

"THE MAD #FARMER LIBERATION FRONT": WENDELL BERRY IN #GERMANY & #EUROPE (8-01-2024) https://t.co/TasS3DNL3D

La gente debería escuchar al #agricultoralemán@AnthonyLeeLsvD
Contra toda la #sociología y contra todo pronóstico, una "revolución" del #campo en el siglo XXI

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) January 8, 2024

 

 

 

https://t.co/qhbVKttIuI
LOS #AGRICULTORES Y LOS #FANTASMAS DE #MAO Y #STALIN
Las élites occidentales buscan hoy, como Mao y Stalin, prescindir de los agricultores, sus economías y conocimiento@JuanviPalleter https://t.co/vM9xe915aa

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) January 10, 2024

"THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT": WENDELL BERRY IN GERMANY & EUROPE (8-01-2024)

 

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

 

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

 

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 

 

 

 

🇩🇪 German farmer @AnthonyLeeLsvD tells me about the farmers’ uprising:

“We’re sick of the lies. We’ve been here for generations, we work 24/7, we’re the people who put food on your plates!

We are all united in getting rid of the politicians who are trying to get rid of us!” 🔥 pic.twitter.com/Z69cjvSmYF

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) January 8, 2024