Rosa Luxemburg on "Premature" Revolution

“[I]t is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act. To consider that as possible is, again, to lend color to conceptions that are clearly Blanquist. The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once so that for the first time, from the viewpoint of the final outcome of the struggle, it will have necessarily come to power ‘too early.’

“In the second place, it will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of State power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions of the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution.”

-- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1900, seventeen years before the Russian Revolution of 1917

Schooling Metro on Autism

 Today's Philly edition of Metro features an article titled "Students with Autism grapple with challenges of virtual learning." Below is my letter responding to it.

Your article refers to "children who have autism or other intellectual disabilities." This is inaccurate because autism is not an intellectual disability.

Autism sometimes co-occurs with an intellectual disability, or with sensory processing issues that can interfere with learning (see for instance Types of Intellectual Disabilities: List and Examples | HealthyPlace). But autism itself is not an intellectual disability; in fact, some forms of autism tend to be associated with higher than average intelligence.

Autism is officially characterized as a developmental disorder but, like many other #ActuallyAutistic people, I consider this a biased description. If it's true that autistics often have difficulty reading the emotions of neurotypical (non-autistic) people, it's equally true that neurotypicals often fail to read the emotions of autistics. So it's more objective to describe autism as a neurological difference rather than as a disorder or disability.

Blue Bubbled on NPR

BLUE BUBBLED: On Weekend Edition Saturday, Emily Feng calls the lab leak hypothesis "unscientific," even though, as Nicholson Baker points out, there is no more evidence for the currently prevailing "zoonotic" hypothesis about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

At 17:52 in this podcast, biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying discuss some of the reasons for suspecting a lab leak origin, which they've addressed in more depth previously:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGlrjmIalJY

The WESat segment:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/23/959884124/life-in-wuhan-one-year-after-the-covid-19-outbreak-began