Tweet

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Feb

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Private equity's nursing home killing spree; Malcolm X's true killers; A voyage to the moon of 1776; German covid coinages; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acc…

#Pluralistic

1/

Tomorrow, Zeynep Tufekci and I are delivering the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Contemporary Political Struggle: Social Movements, Social Surveillance, Social Media: ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

2/

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1364222739419045899

Private equity's nursing home killing spree: Pre- and post-covid.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1364222739419045899

Read 20 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Feb

From backpfeifengesicht to kummerspeck to fingerspitzengefühl, the world of German compound words is a pure delight, an endless font of phrases that perfectly capture the zeitgeist.

1/

German covid coinages are a pandemic kuddelmuddel!

coronamüde: Tired of covid

Coronafrisur: covid hairstyle

Abstandsbier: distance-beer

Hamsteritis: stockpiling food

Maskentrottel: mask-idiot

CoronaFußgruß: corona foot-greeting

theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…

2/

There are at least 1200 covid-related German coinages: from Maskenflickenteppich (mask rag-rug, the patchwork of masking regulations) to Homeofficepauschale (home office flat-rate, a called-for €100/m home worker stipend), and so, so many more.

owid.de/docs/neo/liste…

eof/

Read 4 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Feb

Filippo Morghen styled himself "Engraver to the King of the Two Sicilies"; in 1776, the Neapolitan artist broke from his naturalistic subjects to produce a book of ten fanciful engravings about a voyage to the Moon.

publicdomainreview.org/collection/fil…

1/

@PublicDomainRev

"The Suite of the Most Notable Things Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon," featured today on @PublicDomainRev, went through three editions, and it's not hard to see why.

2/

The engravings show a lunar civilization mixing "technological innovation, colonial imagination, and a sense of rococo excess," part of a genre of Moon voyage fiction including Francis Godwin's "Man in the Moone" (1638) and John Wilkins' "Discovery of the World in the Moon."

3/

Read 4 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Feb

The official story of Malcolm X's death is that he was killed by factional enemies in a power struggle over the leadership of the Nation of Islam.

1/

That story has always been in dispute: America's law-enforcement and intelligence agencies loathed X, and had a long history of political assassination. They had motive, means and opportunity.

2/

Raymond Wood was an NYPD undercover officer who infiltrated racial justice groups between 1964-71. When he received a cancer diagnosis in 2012, he penned a letter describing the "deplorable and detrimental" work he did for the NYPD during that period.

3/

Read 12 tweets

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

23 Feb

As the pandemic's death-count has surged and retreated, an oft-heard official excuse for mounting bodies is that the numbers are skewed by nursing-home deaths, implying that elderly people are disposable, their deaths inevitable.

1/

In fairness to the politicians who made this ghastly excuse, they're only asking us to be consistent. After all, we've sat by as the eldercare industry was taken over by private equity, which transformed (pre-covid) nursing homes into abattoirs.

2/

@nber

The @nber paper "Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes" tallies up the slaughter: 20,000 dead as a result of being entrusted to PE-backed nursing homes.

nber.org/papers/w28474

3/

Read 12 tweets