Satoshi Akima
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“Death in Hamburg” by Richard J Evans. A book written in 1987 for our COVID age. Evans gives a historical epic unfolding in a grand Dickensian narrative, set in a Victorian-era bleak house of indescribable inequities on the backdrop of the satanic mills of a post-industrial revolution landscape. 5/5
10:33 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
It reads like it was written for the COVID age, and it is surprising to find it was first published in 1987, at the height of the HIV pandemic. The book is equally a commentary on the rise of neoliberal Thatcherism in Britain and its adoption of decentralised laissez-faire economics.
10:36 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
It was the same laissez-faire economic ideology that, to disastrous effect, had dominated the decision-making of the ruling Hamburg merchant clique at the time of the 1892 Hamburg cholera epidemic. It contrasted to centralised public health policy in Berlin, where no outbreak occurred.
10:38 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
The 1892 cholera outbreak should never have happened—they already “had all the tools” to prevent it with public health interventions. Only political forces moved to undermine an emerging scientific consensus around germ theory. History has simply forgotten the lessons from this failure
10:40 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
Since 1987, libertarians have become more extreme in their anarcho-capitalist radicalism than Thatcher or FA Hayek could ever have imagined, thus making this book even more relevant today than ever before. Hayek accepted central planning for infectious diseases. His heirs do not.
10:43 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
Hamburg's laissez-faire economics led to a rejection of Robert Koch's germ theory, favouring instead Max von Pettenkofer’s theory that cholera acted as a contagion only in deep-seated groundwater, necessitating no engineering overhaul of sewerage systems, plus rejection of lockdown and quarantine.
10:48 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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Pettenkofer held that cholera never induced pathology as a waterborne contagion ingested through drinking water. He thus held boiling or filtering drinking water to be useless and clung to a fatalistic dogma that once an epidemic had erupted, it was futile for the government to take decisive action.
In response to Satoshi Akima.
10:50 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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Satoshi Akima
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In response to Satoshi Akima.
Today’s disaster is that we see the victory of Hamburg-styled laissez-faire undermining the scientific consensus around the principle that #COVIDisAirborne—demanding another Koch-styled state-lead engineering intervention to clean the air like the 19th century cleaned our drinking water.
10:53 PM - Mar 25, 2023
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