On Cancer Doulas

When last we left our heroine, she had just had an invasive tumour removed, but found out there could be traces of cancer left behind. She was left to choose between surgery, radiation, tamoxifen, or nothing. Let's see what she does next...

I had never heard of Healthcare Navigators before, and it seems they don't exist as much in Canada as they do in the more expensive and privatized healthcare to the south (except for Indigenous needs), but they're becoming more of a thing here. In Ontario, some hospitals have them, and we're apparently leading the way to integrating a navigator even before an official diagnosis, but I didn't encounter any and don't know how to find one. Believe me, I've looked. If you're pregnant, you can get a doula to help you through all the issues that come up when you're at your most vulnerable and being bombarded with contradictory information. Cancer is very similar. It's just way too confusing to navigate alone. I'd like one that comes around to appointments with me, not one that stays in the hospital. Without a partner, I've had to rely on my barely-adult children to come to my appointments and try to make sense of everything. They have exams to study for and essays to write. This isn't a burden I wanted them to take on, and there's so much I would have liked to have known.

It would have been great if someone mentioned shaving my pits ahead of time. It's not something I ever do, and they put surgical tape right up in your pits, then send you home with arm exercises. I couldn't raise my arms without ripping out the hairs, and I had to get my poor children in there with tiny scissors freeing me from my own physical constraints. It also would have been great to have someone suggest I DON'T do both surgeries at once. Yes, it's fewer times under anesthetic, but it's a longer time, which can be worse. And the after care for one (plenty of walking after the oophorectomy) was contraindicated for the other (bed rest after the mastectomy). Now I know, but it's useless information to me at this point.

On Social Control in Universities

Chris Hedges has concerns with Trump's impact on intellectuals:

Trump and his Christian fascist minions, sooner than most of us expect, will seek to shut down the small spaces left for free expression. Dissent will become difficult and sometimes dangerous. ... The Trump administration will hand our Christian jihadists a platform to champion a repugnant religious chauvinism that fuses the symbols and language of the Christian religion with American capitalism, imperialism and white  supremacy.

He spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker, author of several books on McCarthyism, who says this has been in the making for the past four decades since America has been "cannibalized for profit." They spoke mainly about the Powell memorandum launched in the 1970s and the current rise of watch lists targeting leftist academics for discrimination against conservatives or for criticizing capitalism, an act allegedly committed by Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist on the list. Left-leaning alternative media is also being targeted.

Schrecker refers to Martha Nussbaum's discussion of the importance of the humanities to give us a taste for the other through literature, history, and sociology. They think it makes you a better person and citizen when you put yourself in another's place mentally, but the pressure on people to focus on the self is very strong, even from parents who dissuade students from degrees in the humanities in order to focus on more lucrative professions.

Hedges ends with a plea for us to hold fast to

values of compassion, simplicity, love and justice....Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.

This article is timely for me because I recently watched Jordan Peterson talk about the demise of universities, but from the completely opposing side. [He gave a 3-hour interview about many topics - some I agree with entirely, so I'll get to more of them another day.] A prof at U of T, he's been given written warnings after refusing to use alternative gender pronouns upon request. His refusal is in part to make an important point about freedom of speech. His concern, and here he runs parallel to Hedges, is that our speech is being micromanaged in a way that could be dangerous if allowed to continue. He's also concerned with the lack of a cultural history in the populous. And, like Hedges, he praises Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago for its compelling story of the inner workings of the Soviet Union. They're both concerned with the erosion of civil liberties, and Hedges takes from Solzhenitsyn's book that,

"unless these informants on the streets, in the prisons and manning our massive, government data-collection centers are disarmed we will never achieve liberty."

But that's where the similarities end. Peterson seems to take from Solzhenitsyn's book that horrors of the time were entirely due to Marxist ideas, which he further conflates with anything left-leaning, and deduces that therefore the problem with the universities is the leftists who are all Marxists, who are all unwittingly (or dimwittingly) promoting the horrors of the Gulags. The fact that Trudeau said anything nice about Castro makes him suspect in Peterson's eyes.

The atrocities of the Soviet Union might be pinned on Lenin's revolutionary actions, but Marx and Lenin had marked differences, primarily in their view of control over the people. Peterson sets up a straw man when he suggests that the Marxists all think it didn't work with Stalin because he was a monster, but it could work if they were in charge. And then he argues that we would all end up as brutal dictators given that much power. But he misses the point. Marx didn't want an authoritative body to be in charge; he wanted workers to be in charge of the factories: "to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class." His writings promote anarcho-syndicalism more than what we currently call communism.

Peterson thinks people like Marxism because it's compassionate, which is nice and all but doesn't work with a large group because we can't treat one another as kin once society gets too large. So it's misguided to have equality of outcome. All positive motivation renders the world unequal. He's on the conservative side of this meme below in terms of handouts, expecting the little guy to be motivated enough to negotiate the solution shown on the right. But, as far as he's concerned, if we just set it up like in the right image, then nobody will be motivated to do anything.

Here's a little history of this meme.

So, if I understand him, if we ensure that everyone has what they need, compassionately, then all progress will end. Here's Marx's response to that claim,

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

Peterson's analysis implies an underlying premise that the poor don't work hard, which basically suggests that the rich and poor are divided entirely through their efforts. But it's clear to me that there are elements of luck and mass oppression and exploitation of others that lead some to become outrageously wealthy with relatively little effort. And there are many working a variety of jobs but just barely surviving. He's concerned with the lack of progress that would entail with equality of outcome, but then later gets all Taoist. But progress is largely antithetical to the Tao. Curious. He's a little hard to pin down.

Furthermore, Marx insisted that "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations." He wanted to end the exploitation that enabled the few to become exceedingly wealthy off the backs of the many, not to end the profit that comes from innovation.

Peterson rails against the left, but left and right are a slippery dichotomy. In some regards, Marx is not that different, ironically, from John Locke who some call the father of capitalism. Marx wanted to stop the exploitation of the factory workers by the managers, and Locke wanted to stop the exploitation of the peasants by the aristocracy by allowing them to own the land they worked:

The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

The father of communism and the father of capitalism and Adam Smith and Aristotle and many others, all implore us to compassionately reject exploitation of the masses and most of them want to ensure the people all have the basics to thrive. Here's Aristotle:

It is manifest therefore that a state is not merely the sharing of a common locality for the purpose of preventing mutual injury and exchanging goods. These are necessary preconditions of a state's existence, yet nevertheless, even if all these conditions are present, that does not therefore make a state, but a state is a partnership of families and of clans in living well, and its object is a full and independent life.

Back to universities. Peterson thinks the leftist ideology boxes people in. It controls and suppresses the marketplace of free ideas. He includes in this Woman Studies Departments which all dangerously foster revolution with a false anthropology that claims there used to be an egalitarian paradise before patriarchal oppression. For evidence he implores us to look at any Women Studies website, but his specific concerns seems to be that they promote class-guilt in their belief that we're responsible for the sins of our past and that they believe the oppressed deserve special compensation. [I'll dismantle that bit another day.] Because of the Marxism of the universities which is leading to the "slow creep toward social control," he thinks universities do more harm than good. We can educate ourselves online better now. Wisdom has moved outside the universities.

And then he spent many minutes applauding the reach of his own monetized videos and possibly being convinced by the interviewer to shift to a podcast model for an even wider audience, and it all started sounding a bit like an infomercial.

But then he took a decidedly left-wing view and argued for limits on the profits to be made by managers in a university. He notes the proportion of funds going to administration has massively increased and that administrators are essentially stealing the future earnings of the students who aren't allowed to declare bankruptcy on their student loans. Or, one might say, the proletariats of the system are creating indentured servitude. Interesting. He adds a capitalist twist to it with a concern that this burdens citizens at a time when they're most likely to take entrepreneurial risks. For a minute there, it almost seemed like he was forming a compassionate kinship regardless the size of our society.

He loves YouTube because it documents issues without interrogation. He calls it a revolution as overwhelming as the Gutenberg press and a re-birth of genuine journalism where people can seek out contrary viewpoints. I agree, except I'm not convinced it's entirely a good thing to promote as potentially the dominant form of education. Information needs some form of curation. There's a lot of crap out there. And if Marxist courses are the problem in universities, then people like him should stay put to offer an alternative viewpoint.

But I do agree with his concerns about social control, just like I agree with Hedges' concerns. I'm fascinated with the idea that both are concerned with social control, but both think it comes from opposing places: external right-wing think tanks and internal left-wing humanities departments, and targets opposing groups. I worry to what extent Peterson's crusade is muddling the truly frightening concerns from the other side? But maybe that's just my brainwashed leftist ideology talking.

Peterson says "university is a place to be confronted by horrible ideas. History is a bloodbath....Stay home to be safe." I agree absolutely. We must be able to express minority, dissenting views freely and openly, especially in educational facilities. I support him on that even though I'm exactly the kind of person he's blaming for it all - a crazy Marxist feminist egalitarian schooled in a leftist humanities department.

I'll get to those pronouns next time.  (ETA - here's my discussion on that)

ETA: Philosopher Richard Wolff takes on error Peterson makes when he discusses Marxism.

Swiss Army Man

I first saw this at the theatre and, despite the fact that it starts with a whole lot of farting in a wide variety of tones and tempos, the ending had me in tears. I highly recommend it. The surface story is about Hank, trapped on a deserted island - sort of - who finds a dead body, Manny, who slowly comes back to life - sort of, and they try to get back home in a Wizard of Oz kind of way. Here are a few different things I think it could be about; I'll likely read much into it because it had me thinking and questioning at every turn. Authorial intention be damned! There are a ton of spoilers, but they won't really ruin anything. This is a film that can be watched over and over.

A Shift in Values

Further to my last post about the current values and the boundaries of the social imaginary that prevent us from making any significant and necessary changes in the world, George Monbiot has data to show that actual shift in pervasive attitudes:

A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007 in the US. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among nine- to 11 year-olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows such as Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th, benevolence to 12th.

He relates the link between corporate capital and celebrity. Adam Curtis explained how that was orchestrated by Edward Bernays in the Century of the Self as I recapped in an earlier post:

There was a growing concern with industrial overproduction, so Bernays helped the US shift from a culture focused on satisfying needs to one obsessed with fulfilling desires. He promoted the idea of regular citizens buying shares in companies, and he got film stars to come to parties at the White House, forever after linking politics with celebrity right up to today when Americans are choosing between Meryl Streep and Scott Baio.

What Happens in the Arctic, Doesn't Stay in the Arctic

There are more and more signs of climate change about to pull a number on us, but we still won't listen. We've got ammonia in our atmosphere and a spike in methane concentrations:

"CO2 is still the dominant target for mitigation, for good reason. But we run the risk if we lose sight of methane offsetting the gains we might make in bringing down levels of carbon dioxide.... Methane has many sources, but the culprit behind the steep rise is probably agriculture.... [Methane] is about 30 times better than CO2, over a century timescale, at trapping heat in the atmosphere.... If we want to stay below two degrees temperature increase, we should not follow this track and need to make a rapid turn-around."

And the Arctic is taking the brunt of these changes. It's a flashing warning light for the whole world:

The average air temperatures were “unprecedented”—the highest on observational record.... Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger, or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year.... Average annual air temperature over land areas was the highest in the observational record, representing a 6.3 degree Fahrenheit (3.5 degree Celsius) increase since 1900.... 

Scientists who produced the annual Arctic Report Card warned the situation was changing so quickly it was “outpacing our ability to understand and explain” what they were witnessing.... This is a frightening moment. We have seen how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil-fuel industry.

Unfortunately people are still generally in favour of doing what improves their current life rather than focusing collectively and long-term. Politicians are not kicking corporations out of their beds or their investment portfolios. Parents who would do anything for their kids won't change their own behaviour to help their children's habitat remain viable.

Requiem for the American Dream

This is Chomsky's last long-form documentary. It came out in January, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. I paraphrased/transcribed the 72 minute video liberally with links to further readings below.

It's about the American Dream: the idea that you can be born poor but work hard enough for a home and car and good schools - that's all collapsed. We profess to like the values of democracy, so public opinion should have an influence on policy and the government should carry out actions determined by the population, but the privileged sector doesn't like democracy. We have extreme inequality with a super wealthy group in the top 1/10th of the top one percent. It's unjust in itself, but it's got a corrosive effect on democracy.

The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, especially as costs of elections skyrocket forcing politicians into the pockets of corporations. This translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth through fiscal policy (taxes, deregulation, rules of corporate governance) designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a vicious cycle of progress.

On Retaliation

Both Hedges and Reich are writing about Trump's frightening behaviour. It's not just the weird tweets, but the follow-up from him and from supporters.  Reich discusses Chuck Jones' experience: "I’m getting threats and everything else from some of his supporters.” And he talks about Trump's tweet proposing cancelling a fictitious Boeing order, which resulted in a nosedive for Boeing shares. And then he got to 18-year-old Lauren Batchelder who was brave enough to share some concerns about Trump:

"Almost immediately, Batchelder’s phone began receiving threatening messages. “I didn’t really know what anyone was going to do,” Batchelder told the Washington Post. “He was only going to tweet about it and that was it, but I didn’t really know what his supporters were going to do, and that to me was the scariest part.”

Hedges' recent column focuses on the media:

He will seek to domesticate the press and critics first through the awarding of special privileges, flattery, gifts and access. Those who cannot be bought off will be destroyed. His petulant, childish taunts, given authority by the machinery of the security and surveillance state, will be dangerous.

The Next 1,000 Years

Stephen Hawking thinks we have a millennium on this planet. This is old news; Mound wrote about it a almost a year ago, but it's making the round again (here and here and here and here) largely because he spoke about it at Oxford recently.

I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. 

If we keep going at this rate, I'm not convinced we have nearly that long. But he wants to put all our eggs in one bucket: “I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go to space.”

I think he puts the deadline so far away in order to ensure we keep funding the work. It's a long process to get there:

However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.

So, three things I don't understand about this. First, moving away won't stop our malicious nature that enables us to build weapons capable of destroying huge populations at once. It reminds me of my attempt to solve some friend issues as a teenage by changing cities, and then ending up with an identical group of friends in the new place. It's a ridiculously short-sighted solution for such a brilliant man.

And the Saga Continues

Ok, so, after getting a preventative bi-lateral mastectomy, performed shortly after both a mammogram and MRI both showed zero cancer, of course they found cancer in the breast tissue sent to the lab. The good news is it's all out, but...

They found two non-invasive tumours about a centimetre each. The surgeon isn't worried about that at all, but I'm baffled that they went completely undetected by either the mammogram or the MRI. That's pretty disconcerting. Both procedures are horrible to go through, and apparently mammograms have a false negative rate of 20% and MRIs aren't much better! Back when I had them done, the geneticist told me the idea is to do both, and then they cancel out the false negatives, but it looks like there are still some exceptions!

But the lab also found one micro-invasive tumour that is more of a concern because it's invasive, but it's not too much of a concern because it's micro. They could only see it under a microscope. It's officially stage zero cancer.

There's Still Climate Denial?

This is from a local climate change group, Hamilton 350:

But even better is the list of sources the post included:

I swear, if I didn't block the trolls I'd be at this all day every day. It is simply the most tedious thing on the planet. Rational people can be reasoned with, but climate deniers are not rational people. At best, they are only ever rationalizing ones.  

So here are the findings of the largest collective scientific effort in all of human history. And a list of the many scientific organizations that agree. Of course, it's an incomplete list. In the scientific community, this information is considered to be commonly understood. Professional scientists no more feel the need to publicly state their agreement with the fundamentals of climate science - that the world is warming, that we are causing it, and that it is a clear and present danger - than they feel the need to make public statements that they agree that gravity exists, that evolution happened, or that smoking is linked to lung cancer. 

All evidence suggests that scientists are lowballing the problem, as real world impacts continue to happen faster and more severely than the science predicted. Can anyone provide a link to a single position paper from any professional academy of sciences anywhere that states it does not agree? Even one? We're not looking for a list of outlying individuals who claim to disagree, nor a political lobby group, but an actual association of professional publishing scientists. I didn't think so. 

Meanwhile, the US department of defence very definitely agrees, identifying climate change as a threat multiplier. Here the top officer in charge of US forces in the Pacific agrees. It's not just the US military that recognizes the facts. More than 70 per cent of countries in the world have officially agreed that climate change is a primary threat to their national security. The insurance industry agrees. A majority of economists agree. A majority of the people on the planet agree. Thermometers agree.  Tropical storms agree. Rainclouds agree. Wildfires agree. Droughts agree. Plants agree. Birds agree. And so on, and so on, and so on.  

If you don't agree, feel free to tell us in the comments why we should gamble everything we have on a bet that you personally know better than pretty much the entire global scientific community, the pentagon, economists, the insurance industry, birds, rainclouds, plants, fires, storms, and thermometers all do.

And they didn't even get to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report that came out a couple years ago.