We all know the rich consume far more carbon than the rest, and that, as you put it, “individualistic, consumer-focused, guilt-laced appeals” are wrongheaded on both moral and strategic fronts. Yet the aspirations of many working-class Americans (if not their current living patterns) clash with ecological limits, something that Fox News—based on its scaremongering over cars, big homes and hamburgers—knows and exploits quite well. How can the left—in its attempts to secure the mandate of “the democratic road”—convince the American working class that many of their aspirations are worth giving up for the sake of an economically secure but perhaps more materially austere future?
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fuckin uuuuh. unhinged benrey
Control and concomitant responsibility over one’s own health is a fantasy fed from two very American ideological currents: the individualist and techno-idealist. If the understanding of public health as merely an agglomeration of personal actions becomes entrenched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it will not be solely because of libertarian tendencies and Trump populism; the fantasy of having one’s own health entirely within one’s own control has been long in the making, cultivated by progressive techno-elites who have been at the forefront of personal optimization technologies that assume and entrench an aspirational, technologically augmented, continuous journey towards the individual “best self.” This notion of personal health control is at least honest insofar as it displays the degree to which good health in the United States is massively dependent on socioeconomic standing.
cooltimesonline-deactivated2023
Wthout illegal maneuvers — without, above all, the anticompetitive buying of potential rivals — there might be no Big Tech, but rather a much wider array of smaller, better, more specialized tech companies.
Exhibit A is Facebook, whose documents are the most damning. Emails from Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, strongly suggest that since about 2008 he has had a method for controlling what in a 2012 email he called “nascent” companies that posed “very disruptive” threats to Facebook. His method has been the buyout or the aggressive cloning of features to compel a company to sell itself to Facebook. He foresaw that there would be a limited number of “social mechanics,” or areas of innovation in social media, each of which would have one winner. “Instagram can hurt us,” he wrote in 2012, right before acquiring the company and eliminating the threat that its photo- and video-sharing technology posed to Facebook.
Amazon doesn’t come off much better. Its documents show an apparent willingness to lose money to keep competitors under water. Early on, because of low pricing, Amazon lost more than $200 million from diaper products in a single month. It ran its chief competitor, Quidsi, into the ground. (Quidsi owned Diapers.com.) Then Amazon bought the weakened company. This approach, like Facebook’s acquiring of competitors, is how John D. Rockefeller built up Standard Oil in the 1870s. It’s “join us — or face extermination.” Likewise, Amazon has admitted to sometimes selling its smart speaker, Echo, below cost, presumably on the theory that collecting huge amounts of data on users and securing direct access to their homes will present an insurmountable barrier to potential rivals.
Then there’s Google. In the company’s early days, its documents suggest, its executives had little interest in YouTube as a product, but they feared its rise would threaten Google’s monopoly on search. The answer? Once again, buy away the problem — rather than compete to see who can offer users the best service. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
The picture that emerges from these documents is not one of steady entrepreneurial brilliance. Rather, at points where they might have been vulnerable to hotter, newer start-ups, Big Tech companies have managed to avoid the rigors of competition. Their two main tools — buying their way out of the problem and a willingness to lose money — are both made possible by sky-high Wall Street valuations, which go only higher with acquisitions of competitors, fueling a cycle of enrichment and consolidation of power. As Mr. Zuckerberg bluntly boasted in an email, because of its immense wealth Facebook “can likely always just buy any competitive start-ups.”
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as a leftist one of the most headache-inducing things is nestor makhno and the free territory of ukraine. with 7,000,000 in the territory and a better military force than the anarchist militias in revolutionary spain, it potentially could’ve been better than revolutionary spain. but we have like no information that isn’t neckdeep in ideological bias, and the discourse around whether makhno was a rapist, an antisemite, etc are just a mess with leninists constantly citing that article from IS Review and anarchists conceding that sections of the black army did organize pogroms while producing evidence that contradicts claims of makhno’s attitude toward it (i.e. makhno and his wife executing anti-semites and rapists, jewish proletarians serving in his army, etc) and that’s not even counting the normal anarchist/leninist bullshit about “the free territory was a state” and just ughhhhhhh
like at least we have a good idea of what went down in revolutionary spain from mostly impartial sources but the free territory is just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
if i had three wishes they would all be to make web 2.0 utterly illegal and go back to normal html
how do we explain to children that all our tech briefly worked perfectly and over time we threw it all away for sleek menus and corporate opacity
“we could give you a link to this mp3 OR we could run it in a proprietary player app that must connect to the internet every time you hit the resume button”
when i upgraded from a flip phone to an iphone and realized i could no longer record and set a custom ringtone because apple wanted me to buy radio pop ringtones, i realized, oh cool new tech isnt made for us it’s made to exploit us and we are going to let it happen
The intelligence report, titled “The Syrian Conflict and its Nexus to the U.S.-based Antifascist Movement,” mentions several Americans, including a left-wing podcast host who traveled to Syria to fight ISIS. The report includes a readout of these individuals’ personal information, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and social media accounts, much of the data generated by DHS’s Tactical Terrorism Response Teams. As the intelligence report states, “ANTIFA is being analyzed under the 2019 DHS Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism (CT) and Targeted Violence.”
“Designating someone as foreign-sponsored can make a huge legal and practical difference in the government’s ability to pursue them,” explained Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s a crucial distinction. Once someone (or some group) is identified as an agent of a foreign power, they are subject to warrantless search and surveillance in a way that would be illegal and unconstitutional for any other US person. The whole apparatus of US intelligence can be brought to bear on someone who is considered an agent of a foreign power.”
The first individual mentioned in the intelligence report, Brace Belden, cohosts the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon, and fought with the YPG in 2016. The information appears to be partly drawn from a 2017 article on Belden in Rolling Stone. Belden is described as “a minor criminal and drug addict who started reading Marx and Lenin in drug rehabilitation treatment and became involved in a number of political causes before deciding to fight alongside the YPG.”
Research in recent decades has shown the extent to which the environment in the Americas was crafted by Indigenous people. A 2017 study, published in the journal Science, found that the single greatest artifact of Indigenous agriculturalists is the Amazon rainforest: researchers identified eighty-five different fruit- or nut-bearing trees that were domesticated by the Amazon’s Native inhabitants. What is seen by some as a wilderness is actually, over large tracts, an overgrown orchard—one made wild by the disease and depopulation that came with European contact.
The process of domesticating plants is what turned a bitter red berry into strawberries. It’s how the people of the Balsas River Valley, in southern Mexico, turned a wheat-like grass with small grains, called teosinte, into corn. It’s how ancient civilizations from Ancón-Chilló, in modern-day Peru, made a relative of toxic nightshade into potatoes. It took the raw ingredients of this continent and, through the patient work of generations of Indigenous farmers, created half of the fruits and vegetables cultivated in the world today.
I’m literally obsessed with this picture of my cat. It is the definition of renaissance painting imagery. The shading. The pose. The thoughtful twinkle in his eye. Sublime
With an election impending, a wave of evictions imminent, and the possibility of the deepest global recession since the Second World War, homelessness is about to get a lot more real for a lot more people.“This is going to be a tumultuous year,” Fister told me after the eviction. “People are ready to throw the fuck down.”
In the 1950s, in the United States, investment in solar energy came to an end with the development of suburbs, the promotion of low-cost prefabricated homes (the famous Levittowns) and very aggressive marketing on the part of electricity companies. In 1968, Congress commissioned a study of these practices. General Electric was even threatening building developers not to connect new estates if they offered alternative sources of power. For such developers, offering only electricity made it possible to reduce construction costs and shift energy expenditure onto the homeowners. This was how, in the 1950s and ’60s, the thermodynamic aberration of electric heating was promoted in the United States without any technological necessity for it.
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene
probablyasocialecologistReblogged butchflirtpr0jectneedlemouseFollowIn the remote mountain forests of Nabari, Japan, there is a giant Sonic statue - purchased from a now-defunct SEGA World location, and nailed to some trees on the side of a rural highway.thivusshrine to a local god169,54313,166
probablyasocialecologistReblogged werewolfstripteaseutwoFollowSanta Monica Cabin© M. Beavers#guilty pleasure#house910,53717,756
probablyasocialecologistDecolonizing ecologyFrom traditional fishing technologies to bringing back the bison, Indigenous ecological practices are our best bet to save the planet – and ourselvesbriarpatchmagazine.comThe destruction wrought by colonization cannot be undone, but we can recover from it. Tiffany explains that one must “be strong enough to let the land govern you.” In this sense, “Land Back” is not just the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of First Nations, but a reminder that “the land is sovereign and the land is what you should obey,” she says. It is a call for us all to take responsibility in maintaining a meaningful relationship of reciprocity with the land. We could use our technological advancements and industrial scale, guided by Indigenous knowledge, to reintroduce the bison herds onto the Prairies at the same time that we install wind turbines to power the cultivation of food that nourishes people with minimal land use or waste. We can rapidly reforest areas that were clear cut for industrial agriculture or pipelines, and revive animal populations in traditional food forests. We can use low-carbon infrastructure to cultivate mollusks that clean polluted waters, feed people, and create habitat for other species all at the same time. We can create new social norms and cultural institutions that centre children, the elderly, and our interdependence with life on Earth. Our current problems are the result of a number of historical conditions being realized, and are not a fundamental manifestation of our nature, evolutionary trajectory, or destiny. Designing a society that makes happy humans with healthy bodies and minds in resilient ecosystems does not involve “going back” to any ideal period of history, but it does require us recognizing that Indigenous knowledge and ecological stewardship are and will continue to be successful; that ecosystems have regulating functions that are better at preventing pandemics and responding to climate change than present human technology; and that the legacy of industrial agriculture, capitalism, and its exploitation of people and the planet should no longer be the standard that shapes our vision of progress.Source: briarpatchmagazine.com#ecology#sustainability#indigenous#colonialism745858
probablyasocialecologistReblogged wizardofsnacks-deactivated20240tamamitaFollowtamamita3925,61327,719
probablyasocialecologistThe Dollar and EmpireHow the US dollar shapes geopolitical powerphenomenalworld.orgWidespread use of the dollar means that most trade and financial flows are settled through plumbing controlled by either the US state or entities regulated by the US state. This gives the US state, mostly via the Treasury Department, a kind of tactical or operational power vis-à-vis non-US financial systems in non-crisis situations. The global financial plumbing system uses the Fed-wire, CHIPS and SWIFT networks, which largely settle through New York. Regulatory oversight of the networks and non-US banks’ need for a presence in the United States give the US state the ability to compel behavior from non-US banks. For example, the threat of exclusion from clearing networks compels foreign banks to comply with sanctions against geo-political enemies. SWIFT expelled Iranian and North Korean banks from its payments network, greatly hindering their nuclear programs and their normal commerce. The US state also used the threat of expulsion from the payments network to compel banks to enforce sanctions on some Russian banks and firms after Russia invaded Crimea. The US state similarly used SWIFT data on global financial transfers to identify and target terrorist groups. The Fed supplies the carrot of crisis management, while the Treasury wields the stick of exclusion from the payments system.Source: phenomenalworld.org#usa#finance#money#dollar2752
probablyasocialecologistRebloggedtomiyeeeFollow“Goodbye, Gordon.”#hlvrai22,1984,797
probablyasocialecologistMedia’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Debate Obscures Direct Threats to First AmendmentMuch of the Harper's discussion misses the fact that the powerful inordinately have the ability to “cancel” individuals.fair.orgA short and rather vaguely worded open letter published in Harper’s Magazine earlier this month caused an unlikely media storm that continues to rumble on. Glossing over right-wing threats to the First Amendment, the letter, signed by 150 writers, journalists and other public figures, decried a new intolerance to dissent and a threat to freedom of speech coming from the left.The vagueness of the letter was both its genius and its shortcoming, allowing people of all political persuasions to put their names to it, but also for others to read into it virtually anything they wanted. As the Los Angeles Times described it, the letter became a “Rorschach test of subtext.”However, much of the public discussion of the Harper’s letter misses the fact that it is the powerful, not the masses, who inordinately have the ability to “cancel” individuals for their actions, and that it is the left and those challenging power who consistently suffer the brunt of the consequences.Source: fair.org#Harpers Letter#free speech#cancel culture97164
probablyasocialecologistRebloggedart-of-thomas-elliottFollowHave you heard the good news about our Lord and Saviour Nurgle, Father of Plagues? With all theis Covid-19 stuff going round I thought now would be a good time to do a picture of a plague marine.#warhammer1313884
probablyasocialecologistRebloggedex0skeletal-undeadFollowI Felt a Funeral in My Brain by Boris Groh #art34,2376,026
probablyasocialecologistThe 'female' brain: why damaging myths about women and science keep coming back in new formsFrom having small brains to being better at reading, it is often argued that women aren't well suited to do science.theconversation.com|Gina RipponHistory shows that women played a large part in the development of different scientific disciplines. But, as science became more professionalised, women were deliberately excluded from scientific institutions, explicitly based on their innate deficits.One would like to think that we have put all of that behind us. But the underlying narrative still pops up in various forms, most likely putting women off. There is evidence of powerful beliefs that great scientists are born and not made – and, more particularly, are born male.This is despite the fact that research has shown that the concept of a “male” and “female” brain is flawed. The experiences you have can actually change the brain, including the stereotyping you face. If you are encouraged to read, your brain gets better at reading. What’s more, it has been shown that when people have negative thoughts about how well they will do on a task, they actually avoid it and perform worse.Many factors related to success in science, including hiring and promotion, also show clear evidence of gender bias against women. In a large study of research reports in chemistry, female-led papers were more likely to be rejected by journals, and less likely to be cited.Source: theconversation.com#sexism#science#Neuroscience#STEM#neurosexism4255
probablyasocialecologistIn reality, on the eve of the First World War Germany was not obviously less ‘democratic’ than the United States, where racial oppression raged, or than Great Britain, which completely disregarded universal male suffrage (on which elections to the Reichstag were based), and exercised imperial domination on a global scale and even in Europe itself, at the expense of Ireland.Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History #liberalism#world war one#democracy518
probablyasocialecologistReblogged primatechnosynthpopcute-animals-onlyFollowx-files bgm ♪cookpot[image description: Four photos of a small wildcat standing up on two legs, looking toward the camera through a layer of glass. In the second two photos their head is turned upside down, but they continue looking around normally. End description.]Source: twitter.com4727,09636,607
probablyasocialecologistRebloggedlittle-godzillaGodzilla vs. Biollante (1989)#Biollante170343
probablyasocialecologistReblogged mermaidbonesboohwanj-deactivated20240316-de2020-05-30Canon EOS R + RF85mm f1.2Lhttps://www.instagram.com/hwantastic79vivid/#photography32,0092,715
probablyasocialecologistThe Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are FreeThe political economy of bullshit.www.currentaffairs.org|Current AffairsLet’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence. The content of the Wayback Machine, all of the newspaper archives, Google Books, Getty Images, Project Gutenberg, Spotify, the Library of Congress, everything in WestLaw and Lexis, all of it, every piece of it accessible instantly in full, and with a search function designed to be as simple as possible and allow you to quickly narrow down what you are looking for. (e.g. “Give me: all Massachusetts newspaper articles, books published in Boston, and government documents that mention William Lloyd Garrison and were published from 1860 to 1865.”) The true universal search, uncorrupted by paid advertising. Within a second, you could bring up an entire PDF of any book. Within two seconds, you could search the full contents of that book. Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man In Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers? What’s amazing is that the difficulty of creating this situation of “fully democratized information” is entirely economic rather than technological. What I describe with books is close to what Google Books and Amazon already have. But of course, universal free access to full content horrifies publishers, so we are prohibited from using these systems to their full potential. The problem is ownership: nobody is allowed to build a giant free database of everything human beings have ever produced. Getty Images will sue the shit out of you if you take a historical picture from their archives and violate your licensing agreement with them. Same with the Walt Disney Company if you create a free rival to Disney+ with all of their movies. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan because if you founded it here they would swiftly put you in federal prison. (When you really think about what it means, copyright law is an unbelievably intensive restriction on freedom of speech, sharply delineating the boundaries of what information can and cannot be shared with other people.) Source: currentaffairs.org#copyright#paywall#open access#information31,2641,553
probablyasocialecologistHow compulsory unionisation makes us more freeBeing an employee is a threat to your liberty. But while firms exist, compulsory unions are a basic safeguard of freedomaeon.coFew relationships are as fraught with opportunities for abuse, exploitation and mental, physical and economic domination as the employer-employee relationship. In other words, being an employee is a serious threat to one’s liberty. Just ask any employees what they fear most – it is the possibility that their manager will, for one entirely arbitrary reason or another, fire them, or do something to make their working life more physically or mentally onerous, less financially rewarding and, in any event, more psychologically distressing. So it’s ironic indeed that those on the political Right claim that compulsory (what I call universal) unionisation infringes on workers’ liberty. This is similar to those who are protesting lockdown and social distancing measures, effectively claiming that they have the liberty to infect themselves and others if they want to.Source: aeon.co#trade unions#capitalism#unionisation11212
probablyasocialecologistReblogged ohmeursaultblockpain-deactivated20210824129216
probablyasocialecologistPolanyi characterised fascist movements arrestingly as a ‘virus’ endemic to capitalism. The virus, during normal times, remains latent. At times of systemic crisis, however, it becomes virulent. The association of fascism with capitalism arises because of the inherent tension between capitalism and democracy, according to Polanyi. Capitalism is the sphere of private property, accumulation and, if the project of free markets holds sway, vast economic and hence political inequality and social dislocation. Democracy, in contrast, is theoretically the sphere of political equality where popular sovereignty governs decision-making. The countermovement of societal protection inevitably looks to the sphere of electoral politics and government to protect its constituent elements from the destructiveness of unleashed market forces. At times of crisis, demands may escalate, threatening even the basic principle of private property. This clash between the economic and political spheres releases the virus of fascism into the body politic.
Extrapolating from Polanyi’s thinking, we can portray fascism in countries with some degree of democracy as a counter-revolution. For those determined to restore the ‘natural’ order of private property, class privilege and profitability, a key question arises: how to achieve this goal in an electoral democratic where ostensibly the majority rules? The only way is to attack liberal values as corrupt and channel popular anger via evocative stereotypes and conspiracy theories that inflame nationalist, racist or religious cleavages. These tactics neutralise class struggle, which might otherwise overwhelm the coping mechanisms of the minority. If the top-down strategy succeeds, the outcome is an authoritarian, regulated capitalism with secure property rights that governs by stoking fear and hatred of outgroups.
The ‘virus’ metaphor is apt. Fascism is like influenza. Often, flu takes a relatively mild form (right-wing populism), but under certain conducive conditions, it assumes the virulent form of National Socialism, which threatens death and war. The mild forms can mutate into the more virulent one.Richard Sandbrook, Karl Polanyi and the formation of this generation’s new Left#Karl Polanyi#capitalism#fascism1832
probablyasocialecologistInternet Archives Fires Back in Lawsuit Over Covid-19 Emergency LibraryAfter the Internet Archive made over one million books available for free for the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic, powerful publishers sued. Now, it's fighting back.www.vice.comIn a brief filed in a New York district court on Tuesday night, the Internet Archive fired back in response to a lawsuit brought against it by five of the world’s largest publishers. The lawsuit seeks to shut down an online National Emergency Library started by the Internet Archive during the Covid-19 pandemic and levy millions of dollars in fines against the organization.“The Internet Archive does what libraries have always done: buy, collect, preserve, and share our common culture,” the brief said. “Contrary to the publishers’ accusations, the Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world.”Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive in June, claiming the site was a hub of piracy that had cost authors untold millions. Worried that the lawsuit could destroy the Internet Archive entirely, some have taken it upon themselves to archive the archive.Source: Vice Magazine#internet archive#libraries#books#National Emergency Library3952
probablyasocialecologistRebloggedhumanoidhistoryFollowPlanet Earth, June 6, 1966, photographed from the Gemini 9 spacecraft.(NASA/University of Arizona)Source: humanoidhistory336398
