@adamgreenfield@social.coop
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adamgreenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop

Endurance athlete, heavy-music fan, compulsive greeter of cats. My next book is “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World on Fire,” coming from Verso mid-'24. #syndicateofinitiative

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adamgreenfield, to random
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So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the , is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.

adamgreenfield,
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Mind you, this is not a critique of those people: I’m sure that there may be many excellent reasons why they are not, from fear of liability or of breaking the law to their own exhaustion and burnout. But as I’ve written about extensively, this is something the Greeks did in the depths of the Crisis, this is something the Black Panthers did when institutional racism prevented poor Black people from accessing healthcare. It may be difficult or dangerous, but it can be done.

adamgreenfield,
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Why are we not establishing neighbo(u)rhood-based solidarity clinics, to provide communities with at least some access to the kind of acute care such clinics are best able to provide? Would that not both serve obvious humanitarian ends, as well as take some heat off the NHS? We’re not talking about major surgeries, chemotherapy or MRI scans: the Greek solidarity clinics generally had to arrange these things by surreptitious barter with public hospitals & the BPP clinics were generally unable to.

adamgreenfield,
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But minor wound care, evaluation of routine illnesses & infections & treatment where indicated via cheap, home or easily accessible remedies, above all listening to people and taking their need seriously: these are things such clinics are great at. I have to believe we could be doing more of that, and that it could be making a real difference in British lives, right now.

adamgreenfield,
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@pete I think that’s reasonable, as wel as a lot of what @passenger is saying in another branch of this thread. But I’ve got people pushing back saying It Can’t Be Done, as though the Greek experience had never happened. Maybe they didn’t know about it?

adamgreenfield,
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@pete @passenger Ah, there’s a section about the Greek clinics in “Lifehouse,” so all the data is still right on my desktop. This is recent experience, in a developed economy, with a public health system.

adamgreenfield,
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I’m still trying to figure out why people pushed back so hard not so much against the wisdom of this idea, but that it was possible at all. The first thing that comes to mind is that I’m simply not the most effective advocate for it – which, OK. But another possibility is that folks remain unaware of some of recent cases in which people under pressure have set up just the kind of community-based free clinics I’m talking about here.

adamgreenfield,
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I’ve tried to shine a light on some of these practices in “Lifehouse,” particularly the extensive solidarity infrastructure of clinics and pharmacies developed during the Crisis years in Greece, but I also want to share some of the primary sources I relied upon in writing the book. Not to be evangelical about it, but if we’re not talking about these stories – and it feels like for the most part we aren’t, even here – then people won’t calibrate their expectations of the world to include them.

adamgreenfield, to random
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I’m so sorry to have to make this explicit again, but I suppose people keep showing up here (which is good!) and haven’t had a chance yet to fully internalize community norms. So! Please understand that I cannot accept your follow request if you have an empty profile, few or no visible posts, and no other way for me to get a sense of who you are. This goes double if you have a cryptic name and/or an account on an instance that’s likely to be poorly moderated. Thanks for your understanding.

kissane, to random
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Are there other Weird Studies listeners lurking around here? It’s a relatively recent discovery for me and I am having such a good time in the archive.

adamgreenfield,
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@kissane Have we spoken of “Blindsight”? We must have, no? Watts’s deployment of vampires, zombies and aliens is extraordinary.

jonty, to random
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🚨 Underpants gnome startup alarm 🚨

The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database. So, we basically ended up owning a merch production operation end-to-end, just so that we could ensure premium quality of these t-shirts!

adamgreenfield,
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@jonty Check the date on this announcement?

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

I am once again begging Eric Topol to use the term "machine learning" or "pattern recognition" rather than "AI"

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline @MayInToronto It was a pretty good book, though, c’mon.

adamgreenfield, to random
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I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.

adamgreenfield,
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And what I will never understand, if I live to be one thousand years old, is why some people, out of a perfectly justified desire to hold “the West” or “the global North” or NATO or the United States up to critique, wind up embracing one of the planet’s other bloodthirsty, extractive empires, and rationalizing away its vile deeds. This isn’t a binary choice, you know? You can do better than being a useful idiot for a power that cares nothing for your fate. Putin-senpai will never notice you.

adamgreenfield,
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And do not come at me with some line about how the transcendently-justified patriarchal hierarchy of Tibetan culture needed to be smashed. Ethnic cleansing is odious wherever it is practiced, and can never be justified, and if this is not an absolute, non-negotiable baseline for you then I’m afraid I’m not interested in anything else you have to say.

adamgreenfield,
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@gwil @Nicovel0 Uncle Noam has not precisely covered himself in glory these past few years (see also: reacting with prickly defensiveness when questioned about Epstein, as if that of all things is a hill worth dying on). It’s a shame.

adamgreenfield,
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@Nicovel0 @gwil As a matter of fact, his experience moves me to articulate as a general principle: Endings are such delicate times. You can maybe not erase outright, but certainly obscure, a lifetime of clear thought and principled action by beclowning yourself in your final phase.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Guys I have the mother of all reply guys on the line

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline wait what

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline oh good god. is there something in the water lately?

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline [Yet You Participate In Society, Curious Intensifies]

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline I think he blocked me too! At least I was not able to click on this one guy’s profile when I looked, despite having not to my knowledge done anything at all to offend him.

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline @todrobbins daFROGzone, please.

adamgreenfield, to random
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Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another thread. I’m intensely mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.

adamgreenfield,
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And what was very clear to me, and most exciting, was that people equipped with these alternative technics could step outside of the monstrous waste and inhumanity it was even then clear to me (at the age of 13, in 1981-82) was the purpose and motor of the mainstream economy. It would be years before I heard the expression , but I already understood the truth it encapsulated, and I wanted nothing to do with the purpose I saw unfolding in the world.

adamgreenfield,
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And so I read Illich, and Freire, and “Shelter.” I read about New Babylon and Christiania and Drop City. When I saw posters of Clifford Harper’s legendary Visions illustrations a few years later, tacked up in the place I was living, they immediately made sense to me. https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/antecedents-of-the-minimum-viable-utopia-cliff-harpers-visions-series/

adamgreenfield, to random
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Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances.

adamgreenfield,
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@courtcan It really feels like it could become part of folk culture hereabouts!

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