CV Pandemic Daily Notes, 200629, 200630, 200701, 200702, 200703, 200704, 200705
-1. ¿Categories?, Impermanence, Impossible to Return to Normal, Grief (SPARTAS), Context Is Meaning, Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty, 2. Gender Climate Science History, 3. Mass Elephant Die Off, 3.1. Plague and Prejudice
-1. One of the observations about disasters in general and biocalamities and parademics specifically is that categories erode, blurring with other categories, becoming increasingly irrelevant as a template for understanding the world, what is considered normal behavior between social categories, and the creation of new categories or redefining the previous ones.
-A. This is part of the observation that disasters reveal non sustainable flaws and weaknesses in structures, organizations, behaviors and society in general. Pre the disruptions of disasters that tend to be ignored while things are stable, but reveal themselves quite forcefully as needs that have to be addressed with event he slightest instability of unprepared for normal variation of the open systems of the bio and geospheres. Continuing to ignore deficiencies, defects and gaps becomes more intense and more perilous to larger areas and populations. In fact part of parademic is to identify social faultlines and shortcomings before they hinder systems intended to mitigate and prevent biocalamities. Preferably this would have been done before accelerations and the inevitable we versus they that manifest during social disruptions.
-B. Historically, after a disaster life becomes stable again (a new normal), or the area depopulated creating a void for new life and/or lifeways. The problems that lead to the population crash are forgotten or never recognized. This however is no longer the case given the multiple accelerating existential biocalamities. It is not a matter or adjusting to new normals, but having to socially and possibly biologically adapt to very different circumstances and biomes. These may have very little in common with previous conditions, i.e. becoming unimagined categories and habitats.
-C. The changes result in conditions of uncertainties where what is known (actually assumed) are no longer be valid, causing more disruption as people persist in previous behaviors, which can be fatal. The previous explanations of worldviews, synchronicity, blame for failure and ritual no longer provide credible explanations that give a sense of control and predictability. Words fail to describe what is, some norms become lethal. One begins to suspect that what humans perceive as reality is not particularly stable, and not that persistent of an illusion.
-D. In such extreme uncertain conditions behaviors similar to the Grief Cycle*E manifest through out communities. 1) Initial shock, inability to respond, ineffective response. 2) Disbelief, denial, defiance, greater frequency and intensity of previously successful behaviors that at one time were successful, Trump Maintains Coronavirus Will Just Disappear at Some Point. 3) When the circumstances continue to not return to what is desired and recognizable there is likely to be anger, othering, intimidation and banishment of scapegoats, deleterious movements that are counterattacked, hoarding, increasing competition and violence, and open armed conflict. 4) There may be the beginnings of adaptative behaviors, reinterpretation of the meaning of observations and events, behaving in different ways, testing of new paradigms. 5) Unknown at this time if there will be sufficient social change, and enough time to change, for communities and populations to move from current maladaptive behaviors, to transform to meet the rising selective pressures on sustaining life. One can speculate on what these changes may be, but at this time the possibilities and improbabilities are so wide that this is a worthless exercise. Misdirected efforts that do not address more immediate and existential needs, and may likely make the deteriorating circumstances worse.
-*E. Parademic has a working acronym for the phenomena of global grief. SPARTAS” Slow shocks, Persistence and perseveration, Affray and adaptation, Reinterpretation and reinventing, Testing and trials, Assimilate and allay, Satisfaction and start. Like the grief cycle SPARTAS is not steps of a process, but descriptions of several concurrent processes. Being composed of individuals, communities, populations, ecologies, SPARTAS is a heuristic of an imaginary heptagram rotating in different directions, at different speeds, about shifting axises.
-F. Categories, like words, are not self defining, having no inherent meaning. Context is what the interpretation of the context is, and that provides meaning. What becomes the meaning of a category is what is put in the void of a category, the assemblage defines its category. As collections of collections categories become spaces. Kitchen, medical office, ICU, government, community, nation become from what they contain and how used. Moreover, categories are defined by the context of other categories. A kitchen is part of home, a medical office is part of the medical field, an ICU is in a hospital, government is people organizations and buildings (with hopefully some devoted to public health, public maintenance, public safety. In other words collective categories are systems and ecologies that evolve as context and use changes. Disaster and accelerating biocalamities are rapid changes that outstrip the ability to reinterpret, develop new technologies (not just the material ones) and learn new meanings; not to mention overwhelming capabilities to prevent, mitigate, learn and adapt.
-G. Last, the order, format, emphasis or muting, linguistic form, historical background, and organization of categories influences interpretation of meaning, Parademic’s preference is to not to categorize, to not use a priori definitions for phenomena that can seem to fit, but in fact are misleading. In existential clarity one discovers that previous meaning, categories, systems never functioned and interacted as one assumed. These insights of newly seen juxtapositions and proximities tend to give the appearance of disorganization and chaos, a place of mirrors and rabbit wholes. Without motivation to make the effort to understand in what way the conundrum is functional and of value the sense of disaster remains and may even be dismissed.
-2. Overlooked No More: Eunice Foote, Climate Scientist Lost to History. In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist and activist for women’s rights, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was quickly forgotten, and she faded into obscurity. There isn’t even a known photograph of her today. The idea that greenhouse gases warm the planet is anything but new, and anything but unsettled.
-3. Hundreds of Elephants Dead in Mysterious Mass Die Off. Botswana Yet to Decipher Mysterious Mass Die off of over 350 Elephants. Some species do experience mass die off on occasion, but among elephants at these numbers in quite a while. Not usually a direct problem for human but always worth checking into the cause as it may indicated a pathogen or environmental toxin that will have direct impact. Such as the die off among primates before the 2014Ebola.
-3.1. Plagues and Prejudice. For people living in places where plague epidemics had come in swift, deadly waves, it was common knowledge that an excess of dead rats preceded and predicted a multitude of dead people. While leading scientists such as Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo, armed with the burgeoning knowledge of bacteriology in the last decades of the nineteenth century, had discovered the causative bacteria for plague and an anti plague serum was in development, the method of transmission was still in question. Even as the correlation between dead rats and dead people had been observed for centuries, many leading scientists believed that both rats and people acquired the bacteria by eating infected food or breathing the dust of contaminated soil. In 1898 it was demonstrated in 1898 that the vector of plague transmission was in fact a bite from the flea living on the rat, but no one in the medical or scientific community took his observations or experimental results seriously until years later.
-A. Instead, the accepted belief was that plague resulted from filth, and filth was a pejorative commonly applied to the Asian immigrants who had come to work in the United States and its territories in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the areas known as Chinatown in cities such as Honolulu and San Francisco, suffered from overcrowding, crumbling buildings, open sewage, and heaps of garbage, a situation arising from the intersection of largely absent landlords, neglected infrastructure at the municipal and state levels, and the racist attitudes of white citizens who wished to keep Asian communities confined within a particular area. Clifford Wood, the president of the powerful health board, testified before a congressional committee that the residents of Chinatown “wallowed in [filth] as only Asiatics can and live”. It was also a commonly held belief among those of European descent that plague would not affect them because of their superior genetics, hygiene, and diet. When the first deaths occurred in Honolulu’s Chinatown in December 1899, one woman assured her mainland friends in a letter that she was not afraid because plague “seldom attacks clean white people”.
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