Interestingly, I just finished a medical appointment less than an hour
ago. Because of the pandemic a worker in the doctor's office informed me
on Friday that it would take place by video chat. When I informed her
that I didn't have any video equipment she asked in a rather surprised
voice if I had a smart phone. I said that I only had a land line phone
so she told me that the appointment would be conducted over the phone.
Sheesh! I start to understand that smart phones are really getting to be
ubiquitous when they start being surprised and a little shocked that I
don't have one. Anyway, the doctor asked me questions about my blood
pressure, weight and blood sugar averages and told me to make another
appointment for three months from now. There were things that by
necessity had to be left out. I didn't get a urine test, for example,
and I didn't get my A1C checked. I wonder if I will be going in three
months from now or if it will be another phone call.
___
Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker
On 5/4/2020 6:24 AM, Frank Ventura wrote:
Carl, around here the RTs are still doing all the normal daily living training
for clients. The difference is that they are doing it by video chat. They
report that the video method is great. The idea is that the RT can see the
student during the lesson and tell when they are having difficulties. The
problem is that it may be working too well. Because of the necessity to be able
to see the consumer on the video conference it will no longer be possible to
employ blind RTs. That is going to be just one more position they say a blind
person can't apply for.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2020 5:00 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis Is
Here
Frank,
New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts do all have staggering numbers, as opposed
to the four counties comprising the Olympic Peninsula, which have no deaths and
very low numbers of people identified with COVID-19. And yet, Governor Inslee is
continuing the state shut down through May 31. This restricts many of the
activities of the Washington Department of Services for the Blind. , although most
of the VRC's and RT's are doing what they can via telephone. I do know that the
adult training center(OTC)is closed, and the Talking Book and Braille Library is
closed, although those of us using BARD EXPRESS are able to continue down loading
our books. But such areas as the teaching of Daily Living Skills and O&M
Skills, are currently on hold.
I know that such training is only on hold until we go back to "business as
usual", because that is what will happen unless there is some leadership, both in
the nation in general, and within the blind services.
You spoke of equipment used by the blind. We have always recycled equipment no
longer needed by clients. Now such exchanges can be dangerous, or at least
will need a different method of handling it. I know that at my age, and my
wife's level of tolerance to infectious diseasesputs us in a high risk catagory
and we do not plan to haul used equipment into our home. This reminds me of
the care we had to take when we brought my Mother-in-law home, because her
apartment building had become infested with bed bugs.
Anyway, our future Service Providers in all fields of services will need to
change.
Yet, I see no conversations being posted.
"Hello Rehab Providers of America. Is anybody home?"
Carl Jarvis
On 5/3/20, Frank Ventura <frank.ventura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl, although this virus has been absolutely deadly here in
Massachusetts, I think we are 2nd in the nation for deaths, it really
hasn't had much of a current impact on services for the blind. Note,
that I said current; I'll speak to that more later. Up until now we
have been able to get technology to non-VR clients. One of the
positive, and probably unintended, consequences of this is that the AT
and RT staff have been continuing to do training remotely, often
utilizing technology. In other cases good old fashion phone training
is going on. Years of doing help desk and phone tech support hardened
me on that one. Now back to that caveat about the current situation
versus the future. In the last fiscal year for non-VR clients
(referred to as SR here in MA) we received about $300,000 in
technology funding. Originally, the money was to be split evenly
between providing technology and sub-contracted training. Then some shadowy
entity lobbied the state house and the money had to be used for the training
sub-contractor.
That left those of us who are tasked to provide the technology to fend
for ourselves as to finding technology to deploy. When we were doing
physical field visits we would get somewhat of a stream of equipment
back from VR client who didn't want it. Now that we are not doing that
we have to source
100 percent of the SR equipment ourselves. Going forward it isn't
looking any better. For sanitary reasons we probably will not be able
to take back anymore VR equipment. So we will forever have to source
(fund) the SR equipment ourselves.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 8:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship
Crisis Is Here
Miriam,
Cathy and I saw our last client, face to face, on March 13. Since
then we have done a fair amount of telephone counseling, but nothing in the
Field.
I see a note from Governor Inslee, keeping the state in shutdown
until the end of May. We finally have a notice from our Program
Manager that I have not read yet. Of course our choices are slim and
none. We either risk exposure or we risk a shortfall in the paycheck.
In our situation, we can live about at the current level without the
money our program brings in, now that we've gone to just two counties.
But it has to be hurting several of the IL Contractors who depend upon
the program money. The Program has offered several on-line training
courses, and will pay for those who complete them, but after the years
we've given to providing rehab services, it would be like taking candy from a
baby.
Our contract actually extends through June of 2021, so we will
probably pick up enough extra clients to enable us to meet our full
grant. But I'm not sure whether I want either of us to expose
ourselves to the possibility of contacting COVID-19.
Meanwhile, I certainly have enough to keep me busy from a distance, in
the WCB and our JCCB chapter. Right now I still serve on two
committees, Aging and Blindness and History. On the Aging and
Blindness committee, I am helping draft a resolution regarding our
WCB's support of the US Postal System. On the History committee, I do
a monthly History Quiz, that is supposed to help members remember the
strong organization we have been since 1935. I usually do an article
for our Newsline publication, and once in a while the Braille Forum, along with
my more active Radical sabre waving.
We also received a notice today, telling us that we will receive our
$1,200 each, on this coming Wednesday...we'll see.
Too bad this nation doesn't have any Leadership. We could be
educating ourselves, and preparing for future Pandemics...which we will surely
have.
Over 100 years since the damage brought on by the Flu Pandemic of
1918, and all we have to show for it is a snot nose of a president,
telling us how wonderfully he has led the nation, and any negativity
has not been his fault since the Virus came from a Chinese Lab, and
the Democrats spread it around the nation.
Lots of Snake Oil being spread at the White House these days.
Do take care, and stay safe.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What isn't, these days?
By the way, what are you and Cathy doing about your work and
visiting your clients?
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, May 2, 2020 2:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship
Crisis Is Here
Dee Pressing!
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis Is Here By Matt Taibbi,
Matt Taibbi's Substack
02 May 20
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid
calls for China-style control of the Internet
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 the latest in a
line of "Let's rethink that whole democracy thing" pieces 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, that 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.
As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a
widely-circulated video about coronavirus, citing a violation of
"community guidelines."
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 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 this 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 its 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 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 elite advice 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 ingesting
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 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:
Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than
coronavirus, for
now: Washington Post
Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA
Today
Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do
Every Winter : Time
Here's my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:
We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus
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 to voters (their
ostensible jobs), 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.
"Authorities" by their nature are untrustworthy. 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 slowly 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 spectacular
degree, 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 the
best sources. 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.