Tattoos, Weakening Child Labour Laws, Ontario's Uninsured Patients, Stakhovite Capitalism - Dinner Table Digest № 47
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
It may be April 1st, but there are no tricks here, only what I hope are treats for your reading pleasure. I mean, some of what I share is somewhat depressing, so they may not be treats, per se, but… ah what the hell, here you are:
Sections:
Tattoos and Your Immune System / GOP’s Weakening of Child Labour Laws / Congelia / Ontario's Uninsured Patients / Capitalist Soviet Propaganda
Tattoos Do Odd Things to the Immune System - Katherine Wu - The Atlantic
Have you ever wondered why tattoos are permanent? What is it about inking ourselves through the use of tiny needles repeatedly inserted into our skin that results in images that not only look good, but remain where they are, ostensibly forever?
When a tattoo is stamped onto skin, the body considers it an assault. The skin is the immune system’s “first barrier,” and is heavily stocked with fast-acting defensive cells that can leap into action when it’s breached, says Juliet Morrison, a virologist at UC Riverside. Those cells’ prime directive is to suss out anything foreign and destroy it so the healing process can begin.
That mission is generally quite successful—allowing burns to heal, scars to fade, and scabs to fall away—except, for some reason, when ink gets involved. The particles in pigments are bulky and difficult for an immune cell’s enzymes to degrade. So when inks get gulped down by immune cells such as skin-dwelling macrophages—which spend their lives devouring pathogens, cellular debris, and other schmutz within just a teeny patch of flesh—it can transform into a microscopic version of gum. The pigment particles lodge themselves inside macrophages’ innards, refusing to be broken down. When ink is visible at the surface of the body, it’s not just interlaced among skin cells—it’s shining out from the bellies of macrophages that can’t digest it.
Sandrine Henri, an immunologist at France’s Center of Immunology of Marseille-Luminy, and her colleagues have found that macrophages’ taste for ink can help explain why tattoos so tenaciously stick around, even after the cells die. At the end of a macrophage’s days- or weeks-long life, it begins to come apart, releasing the pigment at its core. But that ink then immediately gets snatched up and wolfed down by another macrophage in the vicinity that more or less takes its predecessor’s place, no more than perhaps a few micrometers away—less than the width of a human hair.
Why Is the Republican Party Suddenly Weakening Child Labor Laws? - Jack Schneider - The Nation
In addition to the news that Ron DeSantis will be extending the ‘Don’t Say Gay"‘ bill through all years of public schooling, we are stating to hear of Republican-led states who are majorly weakening child labour laws. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trump’s former Press Secretary and current Governor of Arkansas, was recently successful in passing a bill that would remove protections for workers as young as 14 years old, and nine other states have bills in various stages of passage in their legislatures looking to do similar things.
Today, we take this for granted. Obviously children shouldn’t work in factories. Of course they receive a free education through the end of 12th grade. Yet arriving at this consensus took a radical intervention in the nature of American society, establishing a collective responsibility for one another’s children. Even as late as the mid-20th century, observers were making the case that ending child labor would require “improv[ing] school opportunities, strengthen[ing] compulsory school attendance laws, and improv[ing] instruction to meet the abilities and special needs of all pupils.” Today, many of us have forgotten how long it took to achieve that.
As Republican legislatures across the United States work to undermine public education—through private school voucher schemes, efforts to roll back minimum requirements for teachers, and the imposition of limits on what teachers can teach and children can learn—they are also opening the door to an alternative: employment. Getting students out of school and into the workforce will save taxpayers money, and may even help some families meet their bottom lines. But it will come at a significant cost, at least if we are concerned with inequality.
Congelia - Enslaved
On April 8th, I’ll be seeing Norwegian Progressive Black Metal legends Enslaved for the first time in Toronto. Here is one of my favourite songs from their newly released album, Heimdal, called Congelia.
Ontario extended hospital care to uninsured patients during pandemic, but that's ending - CBC News
During the pandemic, the Ontario Ministry of Health extended funding to family physicians so that they could handle uninsured patients. While it’s common in Canada to assume that everyone has health care coverage, this isn’t always the case. Not surprisingly, those who don’t have access to health care services - migrant workers, the homeless, etc, - are among society’s most marginalized. Now that governments consider the COVID pandemic to be over (surprise - it’s not over, we’ve just decided to ignore it) they are starting to take away some of the social services that are vital to life for the marginalized.
"With lower rates of COVID-19 and the ending of public health restrictions, the province is winding down its pandemic response measures to focus resources on delivering services Ontarians need the most," the ministry's email reads.
"As was the case prior to the pandemic, from April 1, those who are not eligible for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) and do not have any other form of health insurance coverage are encouraged to speak to the treating hospital and/or physician to develop plans for future care."
FYI:
Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda - Bogdan Costea, Peter Watt - Fortune Magazine
Sometimes when people think of communism, they think of lazy people who are unwilling to pull their fair share of weight in the workplace, hoping to squeak by on the work of others. This couldn’t be further from the truth, especially during the Stalinist Soviet years. The Stakhanov movement created an internal competition structure among Soviet work cadres that ultimately meant that workers were required to produce more than what was reasonably possible. Meet Alexei Stakhanov
One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes).
Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov’s achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied then – which spread all over the USSR – has been invoked by managers in the west ever since.
Stakhanov’s personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin’s Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as “Stakhanovism”.
Over the course of the rest of the 1930s, young Soviet workers competed with each other to try and ‘beat’ Stakhanov. Soviet managers looked kindly upon those who threw themselves into their work and hit production targets, which were often inflated numbers handed down from a Central Committee that was out of touch with what was going on in the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union.
Of course, one might look at these competitions and see them for the capitalist bullshit that they actually are. That’s precisely what makes the modern language that came out of the Stakhanovite movement so potent:
Stakhanov was a kind of early poster boy for refrains like: “potential”, “talent”, “creativity”, “innovation”, “passion and commitment”, “continuous learning” and “personal growth”. They have all become the attributes management systems now hail as the qualities of ideal “human resources”. These ideas have become so entrenched in the collective psyche that many people believe they are qualities they expect of themselves, at work and at home.
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