Owen Dempsey’s Blog:

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden …a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one (Ursula Le Guin)

Hello, I’m Owen Dempsey, an ex General Medical Practitioner in the UK, and more recently a post-doctoral reseacher interested in the psychopolitics of disease screening and totalitarianism in general

On Xenophobia during the Pandemic – A Lacanian Perspective

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12631 Abstract The aim of this article is: (a) to argue that the UK governments’ authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic is inciting a qualitative shift in discourse structures that are transforming xenophobia into a radically totalitarian force; and (b) to demonstrate that even ostensibly voluntarist libertarian discourse also creates conditions for the psyche that … Continue reading On Xenophobia during the Pandemic – A Lacanian Perspective

Lockdown Scepticism may have its roots in white capitalist supremacism

https://youtu.be/fayeKcjnDNELord Sumption in May 2020 Something in here about disavowing, or eliding: a)    The increased risk for vulnerable groups of people who are not very old, the poor and BAME minorities b)   The value of the lives lost ‘prematurely’ c)    The power of the state to do more to alleviate the harms of lockdown d)   … Continue reading Lockdown Scepticism may have its roots in white capitalist supremacism

False reassurance and Mass rapid testing for asymptomatic Coronavirus infection and infectiousness

This requires a little bit of background. The Johnson PM of the UK government announced a ‘moonshot’ programme, many months ago in September 2019, in which there would be mass daily screening for C19, for the asymptomatic, at a cost of over a billion UK pounds. … literally millions of tests processed every single day … Continue reading False reassurance and Mass rapid testing for asymptomatic Coronavirus infection and infectiousness

The Pandemic and an Ethics of Responsibility

Hanaamayer (usefully but, ultimately, inadequately) draws upon Weber’s (transcendental) ethics of responsibility to challenge EBM (Evidence Based medicine) principled conviction (rules-based) to determine good medical practice in terms of a supreme good that ‘maintains life’ on the basis of primarily empirical data and mortality outcomes. The ethics of responsibility places responsibility on individual clinicians to … Continue reading The Pandemic and an Ethics of Responsibility

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