Arquivo para a ‘Politics’ Categoria
Vaccine: Efficacy and Efficiency
25
Jan
The effectiveness of the vaccine basically depends on the action
that it can take on the virus in specific people and populations, as for the age, the physical type and the organic development of each person and certain comorbidities, diseases that collaborate with the infectious process.
The fact that a vaccine is 90% effective, for example, for it to be efficient, it would be necessary to vaccinate at least 56% of the population, where the development of the virus would be limited to contagion and infectious rates would drop until the end of the pandemic in a given period, and also the vaccination time is important and the availability of the vaccine for a percentage of the population dependent on its effectiveness depends on it.
The problem is that rich countries are having inputs to produce the vaccine, so they may be more likely to fight the pandemic, the poorer countries beyond this availability, which depends on the agility of governmental actions, need to have resources for purchasing inputs. to produce vaccines in their own country or buy vaccines.
There is a market dispute and also at the political level, WHO itself said that a moral problem could occur if the poorest countries have difficulties in obtaining the vaccine and / or the inputs to produce it.
The capacity of the hospital system and the organization of the health system is also an efficiency problem, Brazil has a good public organization in the SUS system, however there is an urgency for the state’s actions, the return of the disease to a critical phase was not so there is a big problem of efficiency in the response to the disease, the lack of oxygen in Manaus was this.
Finally, there is a cultural problem, which is the understanding that we have not yet emerged from Pandemic and any measure that favors the end of isolation is worrying and this has led to an exhaustion of the hospital’s capacity to respond to the new critical phase of Pandemic.
Serenity and calm
22
Jan
Vaccines are coming, but it is time for calm and serenity, that is, to
avoid anger (contrary to calm) and euphoria (the opposite of serenity), yes, it is possible even in times of tension and strong anxiety.
The explosion of anger and euphoria, we will still need to have isolation and preventive measures that require the pandemic, it is likely to still last for a long time, vaccines whose effectiveness is still small and the testing phase needs to continue to have more reliable rates.
Countries like England and Portugal, even with the beginning of the vaccination, register high infections and more serious cases, the variations of the virus are more infectious and reach a larger population, the vaccination what will do is to reduce the contamination rates, however, hospitals are full.
To maintain serenity, you can seek various forms of relaxation and spirituality, which seems almost impossible these days, are the cultural and psychological attitudes that cause more and more agglomerations and consequently higher levels of contamination.
Following a form of spirituality or meditation means precisely finding serenity and maintaining our “home of being”, as we posted last week closer to inner peace, never despairing, to get out of a long period of isolation you need calm and peace .
One must seek with heart and soul attitudes contained with joy and hope, not only because we are at the end (so we hope) of a pandemic, but because we want this exit to be safe and with the least possible deaths.
It is easy to observe, in the case of Brazil and some countries, that impatience is great, which causes an anxiety crisis and that we can exploit in anger or euphoria, typical of the absence of peace.
When calling the disciples to start a walk with Him, in addition to a necessary change of route (a new direction for a walk) it was also common to leave behind, even if it was for some time, their work and commitments.
As the majority of the disciples were fishermen, he stopped fishing for some time, and the reading says (Mt 1.19-20): “Walking a little further, he also saw James and John, sons of Zebedee. They were on the boat, repairing the nets, and then he called them. They left their father Zebedee in the boat with the employees and left, following Jesus ”, but then they went back to work.
So it is not difficult to stop, you need to find a way to go, but soon we will be back to work and day-to-day, we expect more calm and serene.
Collaboration and ingratitude
21
Jan
Seemingly so distant terms are deeply connected, collaboration
that almost always involves a dose of gratuitousness (may even be paid, but does it with some generosity), and the ingratitude, which is not acknowledging the gratitude, of what is done. with some donation dose. Even in pandemic period, there is little gratitude.
This always involves the means of power, in times of psycho-power, the choice of means for certain ends is fundamental, what the individual influences or challenges for his own benefit, is explained in Habermas using the concept of Hanna Arendt and polemizing with Max. Weber: “It is this capacity for disposition over means that enables one to influence the will of others that Max Weber calls power. H. Arendt reserves for this case the concept of violence ” (Habermas, 1980: 100).
Thus, it can be theorized that what does not lead to collaboration can lead to a form of power or violence, if we admit that collaboration has an essential opposition to ingratitude, or to even theorize, a dose of ingratitude.
Still in the field of theorizing, in phenomenological life I think that “means” have accelerated the idea of collaboration, Habermas will speak of a “methodological individualism” applying it to forms of power that do not allow “mutual understanding” or overcoming ” egoic sense of power ”, which leads to non-collaboration and non-recognition of gratuitousness.
I think Hanna Arendt is more straightforward because her model is “a communicative model” (interactive) where consensus would be reached by non-coercive means, by “reciprocal understanding” that would lead to “common will”, in my view, is still lacking, idea of gratitude.
In environments where collaboration and reciprocity, mutual actions of co-working, that is, working together, is already a reality, power is dispersed and the leader does not appear as coercive, Latin coercive power, meaning retention.
What is proposed then, starting from Hanna Arendt is to think of the way that allows collaboration as a communicative way of influencing the will of the other without coercing it, this leads to systems of ingratitude, misunderstanding and power struggle through of violence.
Habermas, J. (1980). A crise da legitimação do capitalismo tardio. (The crisis of legitimation of late capitalismo). Rio de Janeiro, Tempo Brasileiro.
Financial pandemic covid
18
Jan
The current crisis, which is a health pandemic may have
serious financial consequences, the warning is from World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart.
The prolongation of the Covid-19 Pandemic overloads domestic and business economies and evolves into an economic crisis. Reinhart calls this effect “cumulative cost”, explains that there are classic balance sheet problems.
In 2009 he published a book with Kenneth Rogoff, then a Harvard colleague, who analyzed the most recent financial crisis, the book “This time was different: eight centuries of Financial Folly “has become a benchmark for governments for recessions, bank runs and infringement proceedings.
Those who believed in a full return to normality are mistaken, as well as a plan for future pandemics and a co-immunity (concept created by Sloterdijk before of Pandemic), it is necessary to develop a kind of mutualism, that is, relationships that have mutual commitments, where the Other is not uncomfortable but part of the solution.
It must be imagined that this could promote a great change of mentality, this seems almost impossible , but the future of humanity depends on this, and learning must be fast, is one of Sloterdijk’s subjects in “Change Your Life”, written before the pandemic.
Desert, existence and dreaming
13
Jan
Existence already (pointed in others posts) depends on 
living the instant that passes, time of change imply to know and know that there are moments of desert in which existence itself seems in check at this moment must not stop dreaming, a future to come.
What we seek or what we find in the desert is the understanding of what we have developed this week in anguish, not the one that leads to frustration, but just without opposite, in the developed concept we aim not to live on borrowed meanings, to look at it as an opportunity.
The second feeling of desert is that which philosopher Kierkegaard has pointed to as repetition, the feeling that everything has stopped and there is nothing but the desert, existence has stopped and it may even seem that it has ended, there is another repetition that aims in the essentials. that is boy to go beyond.
She deals with frustration and keeps us dreaming, but we affirm it is not the pleasures, the fortune (here in the financial sense) and not even letting it happen and leaving the world as it is that dreams are found even in a desert.
Precisely because it is changing times, values and feelings are boiling, that we can find new dreams, achievable of course, but sometimes even crazy can be achievable.
What separates one from the other is not the depth of a dream, but the perpetuity of what one seeks, if we seek only the pleasures, the power or the preponderance over the Other, they are not dreams, they are at the very least evasive of true dreams, not they are generous to all mankind.
But what is most sought after is these transient dreams, and frustration follows them almost inevitably, of course some will get rich, will have ecstasies of value, but at a high cost.
It is like the biblical passage, when receiving the disciples of John the Baptist who lived in the desert, said the multitudes who followed him (Mt 11: 7-9): “What were you to see in the desert? A reed shaken with the wind? What did you see? A man dressed in fine clothes? But those who wear fine clothes are in the palaces of kings. 9So what were you to see? A prophet? ”, a prophecy is also a dream.
It takes philosophical anguish to dream, to enter a virtuous circle of a dream come true.
Science, conscience and complexity
11
Jan
Modern science, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, built a new 
world that renounced metaphysics, theory, and was methodologically rooted in the mathematical project of nature mastery and the experiments and measurements for this domain project.
But has dominated nature reacted and reacted in unthought ways, extreme climates whether from European summers or American colds, rains and burns, where even the oceans already show signs of depletion, dominate or destroy nature? and there are reactions from nature itself, such as the pandemic and natural disasters.
The very limits of science as logic and power are in check, will we rule our lives solely by markets and their values, do cold numbers say anything about man?
In addition to the physical and scientific paradigms about new technologies, there are emerging social problems that worry even those who have always taken advantage of markets, economist Federico Cingano in an OECD study said: “When income inequality increases, economic growth falls,” thus it is inevitable to approach the subject from any perspective.
Beyond the problem of consciousness, philosophically or technically, there is a social dimension that is correlated, not indifferent, this also holds for consciousness in the historical question.
Edgar Morin warns of the teaching system, where it is still hermetically taught: “We do not teach the understanding of the other, which is fundamental in our day, we do not teach uncertainty, what is the human being, as if our human identity does not it was of no interest.
The most important things to know are not taught, ”he said in the Fronteiras do Pensamento (Thought Borders), a Brazilian cultural program.
He sees the crisis of democracy as the obscure relationship with the “enormous powers of money, which has led to corruption everywhere.
The emptiness of thought, coupled with this corruption, leads to a loss of confidence in democracy, and this has favored the neutral authoritarian regimes as we have seen in Turkey, Russia, Hungary and as we now see in the crisis of democracy in Peru and Brazil, ”the case Bolivia today is a separate case.
He also sees with concern the fundamentalist and ethnic closure: “Unless people become aware of the human destiny community on earth, people will close in on their religious, ethnic identities, and so on.
We live in a dark period of history, the only consolation is that these dark periods are not eternal ”we believe in the future. Edgar Morin’s full interview on Thought Frontiers follows below:
The eternal and the current fragility
08
Jan
There is no way to think of eternal without thinking of God, so religions that give up the divine figure need reincarnation, to human return, it is a time of crisis beyond the pandemic, a revolt by supporters of Trump exploded in the United States, the richest nation on the planet it’s bad.
During the week we worked on the capacity for dialogue and the search for coexistence between opposite poles, the time we live goes in the opposite direction, the result is the explosion of conflicts.
Outside the American situation, the global situation is no less problematic, new situations of lock-down by the pandemic, the emergence of economic crises and the enrichment of uranium in Iran point to the weakness of the world balance, we are just a little less fragile than fetuses.
What is expected, at least, from the voices that have balance and that seek to send world peace is that they are attentive to these dangers and intervene in the fragility of world convivialities.
Nobody with a conscience expects a worse situation, the year of the pandemic was strenuous, but resilience and the search for dialogue must be permanent in order to avoid disasters and even more difficult situations than those already imposed on us.
For those who believe, asking for divine action on such a complex situation, if man cannot act according to grace, divine reaction is inevitable, where sin abounded grace abounds, says a Christian maxim.
The biblical manifestation of God the Father, Jesus had been baptized and thus received contact with the Holy Spirit and from there came a Trinitarian manifestation (Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God) that made the voice of God an imperative, says the evangelist Marcos ( 1.11) “And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my beloved Son, I put my good wishes in you'”, the time we live in is thus a time in which many extraordinary manifestations will show Divine love
Between the eternal and the temporal
07
Jan
There is no dualism between body and mind, as the
idealists want, the mind exists in a body and interacts with it, there is what is temporal and what is eternal, if not in a strict sense at least in the broad sense, principles are needed to determine the values and what guide humanity in critical times of society, and the spiritual helps.
Byung Chul Han, in a January lecture at the Barcelona CCB where he showed the tearing of our time between narcissism, self-consumerism and an absence of relationship with the other, which must revolutionize time, or the way we manage it.
He said of the other and in reference to the universities: “In any case, we live in a time of radical conformism: the university has clients and only creates workers, it does not form spiritually; the world is at the limit of its capacity; maybe that will short circuit it and we get that original animal back. ”
He stated at the Barcelona CCB: “The current acceleration diminishes the ability to remain: we need a proper time that the productive system does not allow us to have; we need some free time, which means standing still with nothing productive to do, but not to be confused with recovery time to keep working; time worked is time lost, not time for us. ”
Modern humanism criticized by his master Peter Sloterdijk who asserts this sense back to the original animal, of course, is not in the sense of wild animality, but the idea that he must regain his relationship with nature will not be saved and will even condemn planet. Sloterdijk clearly outlines these ideas in the video below.
What the natural man means and his relations with the eternal, now not only nature, but in a worldview of paradise and eternal life, means that we must look at remaining values.
When questioned by the Sadducees, who were a more aristocratic class in Judaism, about who a woman who would marry several brothers after their deaths, would tell them that believing in eternal life means that the people will no longer die, Jesus response the question would not make sense and also that God is “God of the living” (Luke 20:38).
Looking only at temporal values and conjunctural situations prevents us from seeing the future and the eternal.
Follows Peter Sloterdijk’s interview on the braziliam program Fronteiras do Pensamento *“Borders of Thought”).
2020: a year for which there was no preparation
30
Dec
The pandemic took us by surprise, so much so that there are still
people who do not believe that it is happening, in round numbers there are almost 82 million cases of covid-19, 46 million recovered, and it is reaching almost 2 million deaths in the All the world.
The Olympics in Japan has been postponed, if it occurs it will be in a much smaller scale than the previous ones, planes stopped after flight records in 2019, which reached 230 thousand flights in a single day, entire cities empty due to the lockdown: Paris , London and other major European cities were unrecognizable without the daily hype and economies around the world were weakened.
Many analysts anticipated a post-pandemic that is still uncertain and just as the pandemic was unpredictable, from apocalyptic to utopian, what will be the new normal may still be indefinable.
In politics, polarization continued, new crises of anthropologically serious social problems such as racism, machismo and xenophobia (see Sloterdijk’s analysis in the previous post) came to the fore, since they are problems that have always existed in human history.
Also a word that defines the year for those who are aware of this set of issues is resilience, but the proper use of this word implies an even greater knowledge of its meaning: the individual’s ability to deal with problems, adapt to changes, overcome obstacles or resist the pressure of adverse situations or some dramatic situation.
While some countries have managed to react with resilience, due to culture and political difficulties, most countries, at least in the West, oscillated between situations of restrictions with the closure of public places: shopping malls, bars, restaurants and entertainment venues, and a relaxation that almost always led to an increase in covid-19.
An absolutely abnormal year that a deeper analysis can only be made from some historical distance and what can happen after the vaccine is unpredictable
Sloterdijk’s new book
29
Dec
Peter Sloterdijk’s book “Las epidemias policas” is still in progress, but
there are already quotes and comments about it, which read that there is an “almost perfect synchronicity of the microbial pandemic with the informative one, and believes that the current crisis could lead to“ to a collective conscience within individualism ”, where a new optimism appears.
One of the most widely read comments on the proto-book is what was published on August 26, 2020 in by El Ciudadano, and which was commented on by the Brazilian magazine IHU (Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, do Brazil).
It states that society is not yet “in a position to look beyond the pandemic” and predicts that little will change as “many look forward to returning to the continual frivolity of the consumerist way of life” and only with time and reflection does this “Will lead to a transformation of the collective consciousness within individualism.
The name is because it sees the media as “carriers of infections” and that the current democracy is superficial to house the exchange of argument and dialogue, so we are always “between epidemics, strategies and vaccines” in a broader sense, where the information is just a network of “emotion, poisoning and destruction of public judgment”.
The analysis is accurate because dualism and polarization do not have only one side, but they have both equally and it seems that we are stuck in this logic where arguments matter little.
For example, he points out about hate speech, the fact that “people often tend to see each other as a source of danger is not a consequence of the current coronavirus pandemic, nor is it an invention of nineteenth-century pseudo-biological racism, Claude -Lévy Strauss pointed out, a long time ago that a dose of xenophobia is part of the ancestral heritage of the species homo sapiens ”.
Despite the systems that explained everything having failed, he detects that “now, almost nothing is as contagious as the enthusiasm for universalist ideas. When universalism fails, criticism arises. When criticism fails, mass resentment arises furiously ”and concludes that this is what leads to“ epidemics of anger ”, in short our difficulty in resignation and resilience.
He makes his historical synthesis analyzing that “In Europe, the Enlightenment started with the statement that common sense is the best distributed thing in the world. There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of this thesis”, we now know that security and immunities are poorly distributed.
