Hola camaradas. Hoy, encontré este sitio web con muchos artículos muy interesantes sobre el revisionismo trotskista. ¡Espero que lo disfruten!

https://espressostalinist.com/marxism-leninism-versus-revisionism/trotskyism

Gustavo, Marxmail es para discutir politica ahora, no historia antigua, por favor.

Project Veritas Video Was a ‘Coordinated Disinformation Campaign,’ Researchers Say
By Maggie Astor
NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020

A deceptive video released on Sunday by the conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington.

Mr. O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned after The New York Times published a sweeping investigation of President Trump’s taxes, the researchers said. They also noted that the timing and metadata of a Twitter post in which Mr. Trump’s son shared the video suggested that he might have known about it in advance.

Project Veritas had hyped the video on social media for several days before publishing it. In posts amplified by other prominent conservative accounts, Mr. O’Keefe teased what he said was evidence of voter fraud, and urged people to sign up at “ballot-harvesting.com” to receive the supposed evidence when it came out. (None of the material in the video actually proved voter fraud.)

Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. The researchers concluded that this timing was unlikely to be a coincidence “given the huge marketing about a 9/28 release date,” they wrote in an analysis that Alex Stamos, who led the research team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, shared with The Times.

“It’s a great example of what a coordinated disinformation campaign looks like: pre-seeding the ground and then simultaneously hitting from a bunch of different accounts at once,” Mr. Stamos said.

Many of the same accounts that had shared promotional tweets also shared the video as soon as it was released, moving it quickly into Twitter’s trending topics alongside The Times’s tax investigation.

Roughly an hour after The Times published its article, Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow and honorary chairman of Mr. Trump’s Minnesota campaign, tweeted a video of himself saying that Project Veritas’s supposed exposé would be released that night at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

“I just met James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, and James showed me footage of systematic voter fraud,” Mr. Lindell said. He did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Mr. O’Keefe posted the video on Twitter at 9 p.m. on the dot, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. tweeted it just seven minutes later. Two minutes after that, the president’s “war room” account retweeted him, and the president himself soon began commenting.

Three Main Ways to Vote: We may be in the midst of a pandemic, but whether you vote in person on Election Day, a few weeks early, or prefer to mail in your ballot this year, it can still be a straightforward process.
Do You Still Have Time?: Voters in 35 states can request ballots so close to Election Day that it may not be feasible for their ballots to be mailed to them and sent back to election officials in time to be counted. Here’s a list of states where it’s risky to procrastinate.
Fact-Checking the Falsehoods: Voters are facing a deluge of misinformation about voting by mail, some prompted by the president. Here’s the truth about absentee ballots.

“This detail, along with video metadata demonstrating that the Donald Trump Jr. version of the video was separately uploaded and re-encoded by Twitter, indicates that the Trump campaign possibly had access to the video before the general public and raises questions of coordination,” the Stanford and University of Washington researchers wrote, noting also that Mr. Trump posted the video on Facebook 10 minutes before Mr. O’Keefe posted it there.

Asked for comment, the Trump campaign said that Donald Trump Jr. had received a downloadable link to the video after it was publicly released. It did not comment on Mr. Lindell’s post or on the timing of the video’s release, and a spokesman for the younger Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

The video contains footage of a man, identified as Liban Mohamed, showing off ballots he says he has collected for a Minneapolis City Council candidate — something that, depending on when the video was filmed, may not have been illegal, because a district court judge in July temporarily suspended Minnesota’s ban on third parties collecting and returning large numbers of completed ballots. Mr. Mohamed was not working for Ms. Omar.

The video then claims that Democratic operatives connected to Ms. Omar’s campaign paid voters to hand over blank mail-in ballots and filled them out. This would be illegal, but the allegations come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown.

On Monday, the Minneapolis Police Department said it was “looking into the validity” of the claims in the video, which a spokesman for Ms. Omar described as “a coordinated right wing effort to delegitimize a free and fair election.”

Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas have a long history of releasing manipulated or selectively edited footage purporting to show illegal conduct by Democrats and liberal groups.

The researchers reported the video to multiple social media platforms. Facebook added a link to its “voting information center” to one upload of the video but placed no notice on the original upload. Twitter, YouTube and Reddit took no action. TikTok was the only platform that removed all uploads of the video.

Immigrants Say They Were Pressured Into Unneeded Surgeries
By Caitlin Dickerson, Seth Freed Wessler and Miriam Jordan
NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020

Wendy Dowe was startled awake early one morning in January 2019, when guards called her out of her cellblock in the Irwin County immigration detention center in rural Georgia, where she had been held for four months. She would be having surgery that day, they said.

Still groggy, the 48-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, who had been living without legal status in the United States for two decades before she was picked up by immigration authorities, felt a swell of dread come over her. An outside gynecologist who saw patients in immigration custody told her that the menstrual cramping she had was caused by large cysts and masses that needed to be removed, but she was skeptical. The doctor insisted, she said, and as a detainee — brought to the hospital in handcuffs and shackles — she felt pressured to consent.

It was only after she was deported to Jamaica and had her medical files reviewed by several other doctors that she knew she had been right to raise questions.

A radiologist’s report, based on images of her internal organs from her time at Irwin, described her uterus as being a healthy size, not swollen with enlarged masses and cysts, as the doctor had written in his notes. The cysts she had were small, and the kind that occur naturally and do not usually require surgical intervention.

“I didn’t have to do any of it,” Ms. Dowe said.

The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., drew national attention this month after a nurse, Dawn Wooten, filed a whistle-blower complaint claiming that detainees had told her they had had their uteruses removed without their full understanding or consent.

Since then, both ICE and the hospital in Irwin County have released data that show that two full hysterectomies have been performed on women detained at Irwin in the past three years. But firsthand accounts are now emerging from detainees, including Ms. Dowe, who underwent other invasive gynecological procedures that they did not fully understand and, in some cases, may not have been medically necessary.

At least one lawyer brought the complaints about gynecological care to the attention of the center’s top officials in 2018, according to emails obtained by The New York Times, but the outside referrals continued.

The Times interviewed 16 women who were concerned about the gynecological care they received while at the center, and conducted a detailed review of the medical files of seven women who were able to obtain their records. All 16 were treated by Dr. Mahendra Amin, who practices gynecology in the nearby town of Douglas and has been described by ICE officials as the detention center’s “primary gynecologist.”

The cases were reviewed by five gynecologists — four of them board-certified and all with medical school affiliations — who found that Dr. Amin consistently overstated the size or risks associated with cysts or masses attached to his patients’ reproductive organs. Small or benign cysts do not typically call for surgical intervention, where large or otherwise troubling ones sometimes do, the experts said.

The doctors stressed that in some cases the medical files might not have been complete and that additional information could potentially shift their analyses. But they noted that Dr. Amin seemed to consistently recommend surgical intervention, even when it did not seem medically necessary at the time and nonsurgical treatment options were available.

In almost every woman’s chart, Dr. Amin listed symptoms such as heavy bleeding with clots and chronic pelvic pain, which could justify surgery. But some of the women said they never experienced or reported those symptoms to him.

Both the reviewing doctors and all of the women interviewed by The Times raised concerns about whether Dr. Amin had adequately explained the procedures he performed or provided his patients with less invasive alternatives. Spanish-speaking women said a nurse who spoke Spanish was only sporadically present during their exams.

The diagnoses and procedures are “poorly supported” and “not well documented,” said Dr. Sara Imershein, a clinical professor at George Washington University and the Washington, D.C., chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Even if the patients had reported the symptoms recorded by Dr. Amin, “there would have been many avenues to pursue before rushing to surgery,” she said. “Advil for one.”

“He is overly aggressive in his treatment and does not explore appropriate medical management before turning to procedures or surgical intervention,” said Dr. Deborah Ottenheimer, a forensic evaluator and instructor at the Weill Cornell Medical School Human Rights Clinic.

But the doctors who reviewed the cases noted that aggressive overtreatment is all too common among doctors — especially with patients who do not have the resources to seek a second opinion.

Dr. Ada Rivera, medical director of the ICE Health Service Corps, said in a statement that the whistle-blower’s allegations “raise some very serious concerns that deserve to be investigated quickly and thoroughly.” She added, “If there is any truth to these allegations, it is my commitment to make the corrections necessary to ensure we continue to prioritize the health, welfare and safety of ICE detainees.”

Dr. Amin’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, said in a statement that the physician “strongly disputes any allegations that he treated any patient with anything other than the utmost care and respect.”

“Dr. Amin also strongly disputes that any patient was treated without full informed consent,” the statement continued. Mr. Grubman said that patient privacy laws prevented him from discussing any specific patient’s treatment, but in each case it “was medically necessary, performed within the standard of care, and done only after obtaining full informed consent.”

The statement added that Dr. Amin always uses an interpreter when treating patients who do not speak English and “always attempts to treat his patients with more conservative treatment, including medicine and less invasive procedures, before even recommending surgery,” which he views as a last resort.

Independent doctors that provide treatment for ICE detainees are paid for the procedures they perform with Department of Homeland Security funds. Procedures like the ones that Dr. Amin performed are normally billed at thousands of dollars each.

Dr. Amin’s billings had previously come to the attention of federal authorities. In 2013, the Justice Department named him in a civil case alleging that he and several other doctors had overbilled Medicare and Medicaid by, among other things, performing unnecessary procedures on terminal patients and leaving the emergency room staffed by nurses while billing for diagnoses and treatments as if they had been performed by doctors. The case was settled for $520,000 with no admission of fault on the part of the defendants.

‘I could not ask any questions’

In many cases, Dr. Amin’s patients said they were confused about why they ended up being sent to his office in the first place — some after raising medical issues that had nothing to do with gynecology.

Yuridia, a 36-year-old immigrant from Mexico, sought out a nurse at the center soon after she arrived because she was having pain in her rib after a fight with her abusive ex-partner just before she was picked up by ICE. She asked to be identified by her first name because she feared for her safety.

She was sent for a medical exam at Dr. Amin’s office, where she said he began to prepare an ultrasound machine. “I was assuming they were going to check my rib,” she said. “The next thing I know, he’s doing a vaginal exam.”

Dr. Amin recorded in his notes that Yuridia had cysts in her ovaries and scheduled a surgery to remove them. He also wrote that she had complained of heavy menstruation and pelvic pain. She said that she never experienced or reported those conditions and that she had not asked to see a gynecologist.

Weeks later, she underwent surgery. Pathology reports show that she did not have dangerous cysts, but small ones of the kind that occur naturally in most women and do not call for surgical intervention.

Yuridia said she had expected only a minor procedure that would be performed vaginally, but she was surprised when she woke up to find three incisions on her abdomen and a piece of skin missing from her genital area.

“I woke up and I was alone, and I was in pain and everyone spoke English so I could not ask any questions,” Yuridia said. Three days later, still sore and recovering, she was deported.

Yuridia’s case bears striking similarities to others that the panel of doctors reviewed. Many of them led to two surgical procedures performed simultaneously: “dilation and curettage,” often referred to as a “D & C,” which involves inserting tools into a woman’s vagina and scraping tissue from the uterus, and laparoscopy, in which three incisions are made to insert a camera into the abdominal cavity to examine or perform procedures on the reproductive organs.

The cases suggest a pattern of “excessively aggressive surgical intervention without adequate trial of medical remedies,” Dr. Ottenheimer said.

A report reveals longstanding complaints

It was the Irwin County center’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic that inspired Ms. Wooten, the nurse whose whistle-blower complaint was first reported by The Intercept, to come forward about another issue that troubled her: Dr. Amin’s surgeries. She said in an interview that she had for years noticed that an inordinate number of women were being referred to Dr. Amin. She said she would hear reports that they had undergone surgeries but that they had no idea why the surgeries were performed.

“After they get up from general anesthesia,” Ms. Wooten said, the women would ask, “Why’d I have this surgery?”

“And I don’t have an answer for why,” she said. “I am just as shocked as they are. Nobody explained it to them.”

Data from ICE inspection reports show that the center, which is operated by a private prison company, Lasalle Corrections, refers more than 1,000 detainees a year for outside medical care, far more than most other immigration detention centers of the same size. It is not clear how many of these referrals are for gynecological care. Lasalle Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

Concerns from women detained at Irwin emerged long before Ms. Wooten came forward.

Ms. Dowe, after being told by Dr. Amin that she had a mass the size of a “cantaloupe” on her uterus, had reached out in early 2019 to Donald Anthonyson, an immigrant advocate she had met through a fellow detainee. She was asking for help, Mr. Anthonyson said.

“She expressed real concerns about going to that doctor,” he said. “She was concerned about what was happening to her and what she was hearing from other women.”

Unlike some of the women who had no gynecological complaints, Ms. Dowe was experiencing intense menstrual cramping, which the doctors who reviewed her case said could sometimes justify the procedure she underwent — but only if the patient understands the options and elects to move forward. Even then, the doctors raised questions about several seemingly healthy and naturally occurring cysts that Dr. Amin might have removed unnecessarily while he was operating on her.

After the procedure, Dr. Amin wrote in his notes that Ms. Dowe requested a second surgery — a full abdominal hysterectomy and removal of her ovaries.

But Ms. Dowe insists she never made any such request. A note in her medical records from the detention center appears to corroborate her denial. “Detainee is requesting a second opinion to have a hysterectomy,” it reads, “OB/GYN scheduled hysterectomy and patient refused.”

Complaints about Dr. Amin had also been raised with senior officials long before Ms. Dowe’s case.

In November 2018, a woman named Nancy Gonzalez Hidalgo was left shaken after several visits with the physician, during which she said he performed rough vaginal ultrasounds and ignored her when she cried out in pain. Ms. Gonzalez Hidalgo’s lawyers sent an email to the warden of the center, David Paulk.

In the email, Erin Argueta, a lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center, explained that Ms. Gonzalez Hidalgo’s health was worsening because of complications she was experiencing from an earlier miscarriage.

“Nancy hesitated to seek medical attention because her last experience with Dr. Amin was so painful and traumatic that she did not want to be sent back to him,” Ms. Argueta wrote.

She referred in her email to several previous verbal complaints about Dr. Amin that lawyers had taken to the center’s inmates services director, Marteka George. “Ms. George stated that this was not the first time someone complained about Dr. Amin, and she said that she would look into whether Nancy could see a different provider,” the lawyer wrote.

The warden responded twice, stating on Nov. 30 that Ms. Gonzalez Hidalgo had been scheduled for an appointment with an outside provider “that is unassociated with Dr. Amin.” The other doctor, Warden Paulk said, was “reportedly well thought of by his patients.”

Warden Paulk did not respond to requests for comment.

Other women who questioned Dr. Amin’s care in the past said they had also faced challenges when they tried to seek answers.

On the morning of Aug. 14, Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez said, there was no interpreter present at the Irwin County Hospital when she was presented with consent forms in English to sign for a procedure she was undergoing that day.

She asked the technician, “Spanish, please? Little English.” The woman urged her to sign the forms — and so she did.

Afterward, she said, she filled out a form on numerous occasions at the detention center requesting her medical records but got no response.

“I wanted to know everything they had done,” she said. “I made requests for the biopsy, analyses, and they don’t want to give them to me. They said they don’t have the results. How can they not have the results?”

When she was released from detention on Sept. 21, she called her daughter in Virginia and then headed straight to Dr. Amin’s clinic with her lawyer to demand her records, which she received.

Some women said they had managed to avoid surgeries by Dr. Amin but not without facing resistance.

Enna Perez Santos said she objected when Dr. Amin suggested that she undergo a procedure similar to the ones that other women had complained about. Dr. Amin, she said, counseled her that it was a mistake to forgo the treatment and he wrote in his notes that she had asked to speak to a mental health care provider.

Back at the detention center on the same day, Ms. Perez Santos was given a psychiatric evaluation. “I am nervous about my upcoming procedure,” Ms. Perez Santos told the examiner, according to the practitioner’s notes. “I am worried because I saw someone else after they had surgery, and what I saw scared me.”

Ms. Perez Santos was brought three more times to Dr. Amin’s office over the next several months, she recalled. Each time, she said, Dr. Amin raised the prospect of a surgery. She felt “pressured” to agree, she said, but each time she told him she did not consent.

Three board certified gynecologists who reviewed Ms. Perez Santos’s medical files say that her instincts appear to have been correct. “Based on what I see here, Amin was inappropriately suggesting a D & C scope,” Dr. Ottenheimer said. “There is nothing at all there to support the procedure.”

NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020
Is Socialism Coming to America?
By Mitchell Cohen

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING
What’s Different Now About the Left
By John B. Judis

“Henry James once said that being an American is a complex fate,” the critic Irving Howe wrote in “Socialism and America” (1985), one of the most penetrating essay collections on the subject. “We American socialists could add ‘He didn’t know the half of it.’”

The word “socialist,” which signifies deep egalitarian commitments, was encumbered in the 20th century by many disasters done in its name, particularly Stalinism. Howe felt that socialists could not simply shed those “burdens.” He hoped for “friends of tomorrow” who would have “so completely absorbed the lessons” of what went wrong that they wouldn’t need to repeat them. After all, he added, ”yearning for a better mode of life … will reappear.”

Is that tomorrow now? Are the lessons learned?

Conservatives vexed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fret that tomorrow is here. Anti-socialist bluster riddled the 2020 Republican convention, even though the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist group, refused to endorse Joe Biden against Donald Trump (Sanders did the opposite).

In “The Socialist Awakening,” the journalist John B. Judis proposes that a new socialism is emerging among the young and educated. He builds on his earlier volumes on nationalism and populism, collectivist ideas that have surged because of a “breakdown” of the “consensus on the virtues of the free market and of globalization.”

Judis points out the new interest in the economic historian Karl Polanyi and his 1944 book “The Great Transformation.” Self-regulating markets, Polanyi argued, are myths. Governments always regulate; it depends for whom. Bypassing Marxism, Polanyi supported ethically based socialistic reforms through democratic regimes.

Market fundamentalism, inequalities, recession and a pandemic’s economic dislocations have, Judis says, brought what Polanyi calls a second movement in the opposite direction. Sanders captures it, championing universal health care, green politics and egalitarianism.

But Judis stumbles when it comes to history and ideas. He leaps from early-20th-century socialists like Eugene V. Debs to Sanders, with a bow to the New Left. Virtually airbrushed out are principal figures like Howe, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, who battled to disentangle democratic socialism from Communism. For Judis, they represent little more than moments in the Cold War. But the lesson Howe wanted absorbed was that they fought for socialism’s soul.

Turning to Sanders’s British contemporary, Jeremy Corbyn, Judis compares this recently replaced Labour Party leader with Clement Attlee, Labour’s most successful prime minister, who created a welfare state between 1945 and 1951. The key to Attlee’s success, Judis thinks, was nationalism. Yet while Attlee was a patriot, he would surely dissent from Judis’s formulation: “Stalin and the Nazis robbed the term ‘national socialism’ of any except the most heinous connotations, but what the Attlee government did combined a commitment to democratic socialism with one to economic nationalism.” But for Attlee, socialism expanded democratic citizenship — a concept unaddressed by Judis — through social rights like health care.

Corbyn’s fall is ascribed by Judis to declining nationalism within the Labour Party and to Brexit-induced party factionalism. More insight comes from a paradox noted after Corbyn became leader in 2015: Supporters hailed Corbyn as a renewer, but his convictions hadn’t altered one bit since the 1970s. Last December Corbyn led Labour to its worst electoral result since 1935.

For Judis, populism constitutes society’s underlying “logic.” It is, he says, like an automobile chassis, and it can be used for a variety of models: left, right or center.

The metaphor is a shaky one (and not only because in most cars these days chassis and bodies are fabricated as integrated structures). It fails to explain why right-wing populism is usually more successful than left-wing kinds. Polanyi, among others, rejected such mechanical modeling.

Populist rhetoric often opposes The People to the elites. But are The People homogeneous? Don’t populist enthusiasms obscure more particular divisions? Judis is no friend to American racism, but he might have asked why Black voters helped Biden defeat Sanders. He also minimizes bitter debates on anti-Semitism during Corbyn’s tenure.

Those like Judis who are sympathetic to socialism may need to think more about pluralism than populism, about securing equality-oriented social coalitions amid diversity. And they might consider melding collectivist ideas with other, admittedly imperfect, liberal notions like individual autonomy.

NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020
The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing
By Parul Sehgal

For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.

Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory.

Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection.

Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since.

Is there a correct way to regard these images? Should one view them, or any coerced image, at all? To whom do they belong? Do they quicken or numb the conscience? Does displaying them traumatize the living? Is it care or cowardice to keep them concealed? What do we owe the dead?

I am looking at the pictures now, in a handsome recently published volume; the deep crimson of its cover matches the plush interior of the portrait cases. “To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes,” edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers and Deborah Willis, convenes a group of scholars of slavery, American history, memory, photography and science. Their aim is to tell “more fully the complex story of the people in these iconic images.”

The specialists attend to their own sections, like the far corners of an immense puzzle. Slowly the era is pieced together in lavish detail, through histories of the daguerreotype and reconstructions of the daily lives of the subjects. The artist Carrie Mae Weems discusses her famous reinterpretation of the photographs. The novelist Harlan Greene delves into the racist history of South Carolina, where 165 years to the day after Zealy completed the series, a white teenager named Dylann Roof posted snippets of 19th-century racist pseudoscience on social media, and killed nine Black congregants of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Do these essays — so rich in context — assist us in seeing the photographs any better? Perhaps a better question is: Do they provide the necessary context? Do they resolve that tension I feel as I look at Drana and register both the appeal in her eyes and the absolute certainty (for she is proud — I feel it in the set of her chin) that she would hate being in this book, perhaps even hate being invoked in this essay — unclothed, stared at, opined upon? And yet the notion that she be forgotten, unseen, is also intolerable. It is the tension of “sitting in the room with history,” as the poet Dionne Brand has written.

It is the tension and the buried irony in the title “To Make Their Own Way in the World,” plucked from an essay by Frederick Douglass. Douglass, the most photographed American of the 19th century, is a recurrent character in this book. There’s no evidence that he knew of the daguerreotypes, but he spoke publicly against pseudoscience, and, like Sojourner Truth, cannily publicized his image as a counternarrative to racist portrayals. In “Lecture on Pictures,” he lauded the democratization of the daguerreotype. He wrote: “Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way in the world. All they can reasonably ask of us is that we place them on the wall, in the best light, and for the rest allow them to speak for themselves.”

At first glance, it’s an unimpeachable sentiment. The editors clearly want to give the viewer ample background information and then trust her and the photograph. Compare it to, say, the recent furor over four museums canceling a retrospective of the work of Philip Guston, worried that his depictions of the Ku Klux Klan lacked sufficient framing.

What’s curious about the title is that the story of the Zealy daguerreotypes is one of fraught and contested possession. Harvard, which owns the photographs, long zealously guarded the copyright, threatening to sue Weems, who duplicated the images in her 1995 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.” After deciding that she had a moral if not a legal case, Weems encouraged the lawsuit: “I think actually your suing me would be a really good thing,” she has remembered telling Harvard. “You should. And we should have this conversation in court. I think it would be really instructive for any number of reasons.” Harvard ended up acquiring the series.

In 2019, Tamara Lanier, a retired probation officer living in Connecticut, claimed to be a direct descendant of Renty. Her family had long passed down stories about “Papa Renty,” and Lanier devoted herself to finding him, combing census and death records and slave inventories, finally locating him in South Carolina.

Lanier’s findings have been verified by genealogists, including Toni Carrier, a contributor to the PBS series “African-American Lives,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who writes the introduction to this book. Lanier’s revelation arrives in the midst of decolonial movements around the world, calls for museums to repatriate stolen relics and universities examining their ties to slavery. She has found popular support. Forty-three descendants of Agassiz signed a letter to Harvard University President Lawrence S. Bacow asking the school to turn over the photographs. This month, the Harvard Undergraduate Council unanimously voted to pass a statement condemning the university’s ownership of the daguerreotypes, writing: “Imagine your great-grandparents were enslaved, exploited, forced to strip naked, photographed against their will, those photographs are publicly shared today … and there was nothing you could do about it.”

A few contributors to this book have expressed skepticism about Lanier’s lineage — although only Gates mentions her directly. Rogers, one of the editors and the author of a previous book about the images, “Delia’s Tears,” maintains that tracing heredity under slavery is complex. “It’s not necessarily by blood,” she has said of family records. “It could be people who take responsibility for each other.” In his introduction, Gates downplays Lanier’s connection to Renty. “In a larger sense, can any one person be the heir of these photographs, or does the responsibility for them fall to all of us to protect them as archival relics of history, to be studied, pondered and reckoned with?”

It’s an odd statement. Why would Lanier’s claim threaten the “pondering” and protection of the pictures? What does he imagine Lanier has in mind for them? Already some writers have taken to approaching her directly, to symbolically ask for her permission to use the images — Thomas A. Foster, for example, author of “Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men.” Lanier encouraged him, he has said, because “she believes that the story of the daguerreotypes and of exploitation under slavery, need to be told.” Lanier’s own lawyer has stated that one ideal use of the pictures could be a traveling exhibit.

But in one respect, Gates is absolutely correct. If Lanier has a claim, the photographs will no longer be known only as “archival relics.” Renty and Delia are not relics to Lanier — they are family. Renty is known not as an object of study but a source of comfort and pride, the star of the family bedtime stories, a man who secretly taught himself and others to read. In Lanier’s accounts, he was never invisible, never lost, never in need of “discovery.” What kind of scholarship, what kind of criticism will he prompt if seen this way — not as a figure in need of reclamation or object of fascination but as an ancestor deserving of protection, whose memory has been improbably preserved?

Daguerreotypes, as is often noted, are sensitive, mirrored surfaces. You need to find the precise angle that blocks out your own reflection. Everything you see depends on where you stand.

NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020
Trump Allies Say the Virus Has Almost Run Its Course. ‘Nonsense,’ Experts Say.
The C.D.C. and leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that as many as 90 percent of Americans are still vulnerable to infection.
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

In the last week, leading epidemiologists from respected institutions have, through different methods, reached the same conclusion: About 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic.

The number is important because it means that “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still very far off.

The evidence came from antibody testing and from epidemiological modeling. At the request of The New York Times, three epidemiological teams last week calculated the percentage of the country that is infected. What they found runs strongly counter to a theory being promoted in influential circles that the United States has either already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses, schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other distancing measures could be abandoned.

“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10 or 20 percent is just nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.

That belief began circulating months ago on conservative news programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. It has been cited several times by Dr. Scott W. Atlas, President Trump’s new pandemic adviser. It appears to be behind Mr. Trump’s recent remarks that the pandemic is “rounding the corner” and “would go away even without the vaccine.”

But it is also gaining credence on Wall Street and among some business executives, said prominent public health experts, who consider the idea scientifically unfounded as well as dangerous; its most vocal adherents are calling for mask-wearing and social distancing to end just as cold weather is shifting social activity indoors, where the risk of transmission is higher.

Even in places where the pandemic hit especially hard — a French aircraft carrier, the Brazilian city of Manaus, the slums of Mumbai and a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y. — infections did not noticeably slow down until almost 60 percent of the inhabitants were infected. And even those levels may not suffice, given that cases are increasing again in Brazil and in Brooklyn areas that had seen cases spike and then drop off.

“Immunity in 2020 is no closer to being just around the corner than prosperity was in 1930,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The route to immunity without a vaccine would be through graveyards filled with hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not have to die.”

In April, in an opinion piece for The Hill that endorsed letting the virus circulate, Dr. Atlas cited the conventional wisdom that herd immunity requires that about 60 percent of people have antibodies. But last week he said on “The Ingraham Angle” that “most of the immunity for this virus is felt to be due to T-cell immunity” and speculated that such immunity was why children rarely became dangerously ill and why Asian countries did well against the virus.

The calculations that 85 to 90 percent of all Americans are vulnerable come from numerous sources.

On Friday, the C.D.C., citing still-unreleased data from blood samples collected at commercial laboratories across the country this summer, said that less than 10 percent of samples contained antibodies to the virus.

Also on Friday, in a study published in The Lancet, Stanford University scientists examined 28,500 blood samples from dialysis centers in 46 states and found antibodies in just over 9 percent.

And the epidemic-modeling teams, at the request of the Times, used their models to calculate what percentage of the country is infected; the models were based not on blood sampling but on testing and death data from all 50 states.

Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who has been advising the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, has argued that “people have immunity, even people that didn’t get the infection.” Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Dr. Murray’s institute estimated that 29 million Americans, or 9 percent of the population, have had the virus. The Prevention Policy Modeling Lab at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health estimated the figure at 41 million, or 12.5 percent.

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said his team believed it was 10 to 12 percent. The Covid-19 Projections website consulted by Resolve to Save Lives, Dr. Frieden’s health advocacy initiative, calculated it at 16 percent.

Each model “has its warts” because they use slightly different assumptions about fatality rates and test accuracy, said Nicolas A. Menzies, a collaborator at the Harvard modeling lab. But all reach similar conclusions: Although some parts of the country were heavily infected in the spring — more than 20 percent of residents of the New York metropolitan area are believed to be immune, for example — the average across the country is far lower.

More than 200,000 Americans have already died, and models estimate that if people return to old habits, such as gathering indoors without masks, more than 300,000 and possibly 400,000 could die before a vaccine is widely available.

The chief proponents of the idea that herd immunity is somehow close at hand are American and European medical professionals who oppose lockdowns. They contend that most people in the world are immune to the virus thanks to “T-cell immunity” derived from having contracted common colds that were caused by the four relatively benign coronaviruses that have circulated for years.

But this theory is unfounded. Helper T-cells are white blood cells that, once “primed” by an initial infection, can linger in the tissues for decades until they meet the same virus again and destroy it, by triggering the production of antibodies and by summoning other virus-killers.

(Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, offered the metaphor of a Lego car. Antibodies recognize the car’s outline and attach themselves, disabling it. But T-cells recognize individual Lego blocks, even internal ones. If the car is already parked inside a human airway cell, for instance, the cell can effectively wave a car part around to attract the attention of primed helper T-cells, which in turn can recruit “killer T-cells” to inject toxic proteins that wipe out both garage and car.)

The immunity conferred by a common cold coronavirus appears to last a year or two, immunologists say, and then a person can catch the same cold again. Antibodies against it fade away; primed T-cells remain.

Primed T-cells may lower the odds of dying from the new, dangerous coronavirus, Dr. Crotty said, but that has not been proven. There is no evidence that they protect against becoming infected with it.

The experts who promote the theory that primed T-cells even stop infections typically are not immunologists. Dr. Atlas, a radiologist, has argued on Fox News since July that “people have immunity, even people that didn’t get the infection.” Dr. James Todaro, an ophthalmologist and, like Dr. Atlas, an early advocate of hydroxychloroquine, has echoed that idea. In Britain, a leading proponent of the theory is Dr. Senetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University.

During a congressional hearing last week, Senator Rand Paul, a former eye surgeon, engaged in a heated exchange on the topic with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert. The senator argued that New York’s outbreak slowed because of T-cell immunity. Dr. Fauci quickly countered: “If you believe 22 percent is herd immunity, I believe you’re alone in that.”

In a later interview, Dr. Fauci said that he “knew of no scientific evidence” that common cold-derived T-cells protect against infection with SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, he added, any contention that the pandemic was dying out “makes absolutely no sense at all.”

Senator Rand Paul had a heated exchange with Dr. Anthony Fauci last week. “If you believe 22 percent is herd immunity, I believe you’re alone in that,” Dr. Fauci said.Credit...Pool photo by Alex Edelman
Possibly the most detailed version of the unfounded theory was made in a 37-minute video posted to YouTube on Sept. 8 by Ivor Cummins; it has received 1.4 million views.

Mr. Cummins, a chemical engineer who typically posts videos about diet and heart disease, used numerous slides of cases and deaths to argue that the epidemic had “largely ended” by June in Europe and by late summer in the United States.

The virus, he said, harmed the 20 percent who were vulnerable, whereas “80 percent are already de facto immune through cross-immunity, T-cell mucosal immunity from prior coronaviruses.” Masks and lockdowns had little impact, he claimed, despite abundant evidence from conventional scientists. “Sorry, guys” he added, with a note of disdain. “Science is tough that way.”

Dr. Murray said he was amazed at how many people had seen the video.

“I’m getting calls about this hokey theory all the time from heads of major consulting companies, C.E.O.s, asking me, ‘Is this video right?’ I’m going to make a video debunking it.”

Cases were already rising in Europe when Mr. Cummins posted his video. He dismissed those as cases of “dead virus” found by intensive testing — a supposition that was soon proved hollow when hospitalizations, too, began to rise.

The video concluded with a hedge: Although the epidemic was over, Mr. Cummins claimed, Europe might have a winter wave of deaths during which “SARS-CoV-2 might dominate and kick out the influenza deaths.”

In Spain and Britain, public health officials believe that the winter wave has already begun, and have reimposed partial lockdowns.

The assumption that T-cells primed by common colds offer protection against SARS-CoV-2 is “completely speculative,” said Dr. Crotty of La Jolla, who was a co-author of the first study to show that primed T-cells exist in stored blood. “It’s possible they help. It’s possible they don’t do anything. And it’s possible they are harmful.”

So, he said, the claim that 50 percent of Americans have prior immunity and 20 percent have been immunized by infection, so therefore 70 percent herd immunity has been reached, as Mr. Cummins and Senator Paul have suggested, “is convenient arithmetic, but it’s just wrong arithmetic.”

He added, “Wearing a mask is much more effective than hoping you and the people around you have pre-existing T-cell memory.”

This framing makes it appear as if Floyd's "racial" characteristic (i.e. his skin color) caused Chauvin to commit his violent action, removing the agency and responsibility from the officer to the victim. Ultimately, it is the perpetrators of violent practices who benefit when race is conjured as an explanation.

I have removed wideangle@... from the Marxism list as well as other subscribers, beginning with Max Power, for a specific type of trolling. All were determined to interject Intellectual Dark Web themes into Marxmail in order to sidetrack us from more relevant topics.

Since some (or many) of you are not familiar with the Intellectual Dark Web, Wikipedia is a good place to start:

“The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a loosely defined informal group of commentators who oppose what they believe to be the dominance of identity politics, political correctness, partisan politics, and cancel culture in higher education and the news media.”

The flagship of the IDW is Quillette, a magazine that featured articles by the Canadian Jordan Peterson who embarrassed himself in a debate over Marxism with Slavoj Zizek, which is pretty hard to do.

Today, wideangle@... posted a link to a British version of Quillette, something called Unherd. James Bloodworth, who is a regular contributor to Unherd, tried to distinguish the magazine from Quillette (https://unherd.com/2020/07/the-emptiness-of-the-intellectual-dark-web/) but I don’t see much difference. Bloodworth, who hates Cuba and Venezuela, wrote an article praising Roger Scruton's book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands as “an impressively lucid take down of some of the most fashionable left-wing thinkers of the past 50 years”. Scruton is a rightwing philosopher who took money from tobacco companies in exchange for writing Spiked Online type material defending the right to smoke in public places, as I pointed out long ago (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/EricPosner.htm).

The Bellows (https://www.thebellows.org/) is a self-styled Marxist IDW outlet that these trolls have also cited. Right now, Bellows is featuring an article titled “We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal”. So, you get the idea. These are contrarians trying to get us tangled up in exchanges around outlier positions that drain bandwidth and energy better devoted to more important questions such as how to build a revolutionary movement.

All of these trolls (or maybe one, with multiple sock puppets) have the same footprint. They don’t use a recognizable email account like Verizon.net or gmail.com. Instead, they use a domain such as photographer.net that are generally used by businesses to distinguish themselves from ordinary accounts. If you own a bakery called “Bessie’s Donut Shop”, you might create a domain called bessiesdonuts.com to email your customers. However, domains are being used by these trolls to cloak their identity, not sell donuts.

Additionally, in each and every instance they are using a proxy server as an additional cloak. In countries where there is the threat of jail, torture or death for criticizing a government, a proxy server is a necessary tool. But on a Marxism list, it serves instead to hide a troll’s identity.

Ironically, I would be happy to engage with these shadowy figures if they dropped the disguises and simply articulated their own ideas. Apparently, they lack the intellectual depth to do so and use the crutch of a forwarded link. Pathetic.

Perhaps they don't intend to read Kendi or DiAngelo, but it seems they defend their ideas uncritically.

Who is "they"? Me? Anybody on the Marxism list?