Become Aware Of It, Pay Attention To It. Read About It, Learn About It, Write About It, Talk About It. Teach It.
Reflections upon anything under the sun and beyond. It may not be easy to be a Global Citizen, but it's not hard to engage the Globe.
Stochastic Parrots Have A Soul
AI is everywhere, enhancing and enriching our experiences and creating tremendous value. The genie is out of the bottle. Will we slow down and find wise ways to use AI to benefit life on earth, or will we make it the slave of our profits first ethic?
Please Become Familiar With David Swanson's Work
I’m sharing this from Let’s Try Democracy by David Swanson because I think he sees things clearly, and I want people to get familiar with his perspective.
Why? Because if we intellectually consume too much garbage, we will destroy any possibility of developing a healthy democratic culture. We must have a better bull shit detecter system, and people like David can help us understand how to create one.
Please read this post carefully and thoughtfully to see if it helps you identify the lies we constantly consume.
Ukraine and the Anti-Communications System
By David Swanson
Remarks on Massachusetts Peace Action Webinar
Much of the global so-called communications system suffers from similar faults; I’m going to focus on the United States. One can examine those faults through numerous topics; I’m going to focus on war and peace. But the worst fault, I think, is a general one that applies to all topics. It is that of endlessly suggesting to people that they are powerless. A few weeks back, the New York Times ran an article claiming that nonviolent protests all over the world had ceased to work. The article cited a study by Erica Chenoweth, but if you linked to the study it cost a fortune to access it. Later that day Chenoweth tweeted a thorough debunking of the article. But how many people see a tweet from someone they’ve never heard of, compared with how many people see a supposedly big and important discovery made and trumpeted by the New York Times? Almost nobody. And who ever sees a New York Times article suggesting, what is actually true, that war fails on its own terms far more than nonviolent action does — and on any reasonable terms, far more than that? Absolutely nobody ever.
My point is not about a particular article. It’s about millions of articles that all build into them the understanding that resistance is futile, protest is silly, rebellion is dumb, the powerful pay no attention to the public, and violence is the most powerful tool of last resort. This grandest of all lies is piled on top of the characterization of popular majority positions as fringe opinions, so that people who favor peaceful, just, and socialistic policies falsely imagine that few agree with them. Many opinions, including popular ones, are worse than marginalized. They are virtually banned. There’s a show of debate within an acceptable range. On the right you have, for example, the view that playing the World Cup in Qatar is perfectly fine, and on the left the view that such a foreign backward place using slave labor and abusing women and gay people should be shunned. But nowhere, left, right, or in the so-called Center, can the U.S. military bases in Qatar — the U.S. arming and training and funding of the dictatorship in Qatar — be mentioned at all.
For years there’s been, for example, a media debate on Iran ranging from the need to bomb Iran because it has weapons — weapons that could destroy the world if bombed and that it would be likely to use only if bombed, all the way over to the need to impose deadly sanctions on Iran because otherwise it will soon have those weapons. The record of decades of lying about and punishing and threatening Iran, and of Iran not actually developing any nuclear weapons, is inadmissible. The fact that the United States itself maintains nuclear weapons in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty is inadmissible. The fact that Iran has a horrible government is treated as shutting down any questioning of U.S. policies — policies likely to only make that government worse.
A primary justification of war in U.S. media is what it calls “democracy” — meaning, if anything at all, some slightly representative government with some slight respect for some select range of human rights. This might seem an odd position for media outlets that generally discourage the public sticking its nose into anything. But there is an exception, namely elections. In fact, people have largely been redefined as voters for one day every couple of years, and consumers in between — engaged self-governing people never. However, most candidates to oversee a budget, the majority of which goes into militarism, are never asked for a position on that budget or on militarism. Candidates for Congress with extensive policy platform websites typically make no mention that 96% of humanity exists at all — unless you consider it implied by their expression of devotion to veterans. You have a choice between the candidate with no foreign policy whatsoever, and the candidate with no foreign policy whatsoever. And if you judge them by their silent behavior or by that of their respective parties, or by which corporations are funding them, there’s just not much difference, and you’ll have to research all that information rather than have it thrust upon you by the media. So, when it comes to foreign policy, or budgetary policy — when it comes to the question of whether or not to dump into wars amounts of money that could transform the lives of billions of people for the better if spent differently — making elections the sole focus of public participation pretty well eliminates any public participation.
But there’s no announcement in the media that the public will have not even any pretense of a say over foreign policy. It’s just done that way as if there were no other, and it’s not thought about. Nobody knows that the U.S. once came close to mandating public votes before wars. Few know that wars were supposed to be authorized by Congress or that wars are now illegal whether or not authorized by Congress. Numerous wars happen with hardly anyone aware of their existence at all.
In the old joke the Russian sitting by an American on an airplane says he’s on his way to the United States to study its propaganda techniques, and the American asks “What propaganda techniques?” And the Russian replies, “Exactly!”
In an updated version of this joke, the American might reply either “Oh, you mean Fox,” or “Oh, you mean MSNBC,” depending on which church he belongs to. Either it’s obvious propaganda, for example, that Trump won an election and perfectly normal to have claimed for years that Trump was owned by Putin. Or it’s obvious propaganda that Trump works for Russia, but simple straightforward news reporting that Trump had an election stolen from him. The possibility that two competing propaganda systems both include the primary ingredient of horse manure doesn’t occur to people so long habituated to thinking of propaganda as something only others could be infected by.
But imagine what a media outlet that supported democracy would be like. Positions would be debated based on public opinion and activism, which would be encouraged. (Currently U.S. media gives halfway decent coverage to protests if they are in China or any designated enemy, but it could do much better even on those and should be doing it in the U.S. Media ought to treat activism and whistleblowing as partners.)
Solutions would not be speculated about while ignoring their success in numerous other countries. Polling would be in depth and include questions that followed the provision of relevant information.
There would be no special interest taken in the opinions of the wealthy or the powerful or those who have been wrong the most frequently. Whereas the New York Times recently ran a column by one of its staff who bragged about not believing in climate change until someone flew him to a melting glacier, basically suggesting that we ought to fly every jackass on Earth to a melting glacier and then try to find some path to undo the damage of all that jet fuel, a democratic media outlet would denounce the open scorning of basic research and condemn the refusal to admit error.
There would be no maintenance of anonymity for official liars. If a military official tells you that a missile that lands in Poland was fired from Russia, you first of all do not report that until there’s any evidence for it, but if you do report it and it later becomes clear that the official was lying, you then report the liar’s name.
There would be special interest taken in serious, competent studies of facts. There would be no reporting that an elected official was tough on crime through policies known for several decades not to reduce crime. There would be no reporting on anything called a national defense strategy without identifying the speaker as in the pay of weapons profiteers or without noting that the strategy is similar to others that have long endangered people rather than defending them.
People would be distinguished from governments, both within the United States and outside of it. Nobody would use the first-person plural to refer to something the U.S. military secretly did as if every person in the United States had done it collectively.
Meaningless dangerous phrases would not be used or quoted without explanation. A war that utilizes and increases terrorism would not be labeled a “war on terror.” A war whose participants mostly want out of it and which is, in any case, a policy rather than a person or a group of persons, would not be described as being encouraged by “supporting the troops.” The most obviously provoked war in many years would not be named “the unprovoked war.”
(My apologies if you’re new to the genre of webinars going over the countless ways in which the war was provoked, but there are thousands of such webinars already, and top U.S. officials, diplomats like George Kennan, spies like the current CIA director, and countless others warned of the provocations of expanding NATO, arming Eastern Europe, overthrowing the Ukrainian government, arming Ukraine [which even President Obama refused to do because it would be a provocation] etc., etc.. I fervently encourage you to catch up on a handful of the gazillion videos and reports freely available and generated over the past 9 months. Some places to start are
https://worldbeyondwar.org/ukraine
https://progressivehub.net/no-war-in-ukraine
)
Celebrations of war culture prior to sports events would not be mentioned without reporting whether tax dollars paid for them. Movies and video games would not be reviewed without mentioning whether the U.S. military had editorial oversight.
A democratic media would cease advocating for what those in power demand and begin advocating for wise and popular policies instead. There is nothing neutral or objective or godlike about focusing attention on Ukraine but not Yemen or Syria or Somalia, or about reporting on Russian horrors but not Ukrainian ones, or about denouncing democratic shortcomings in Russia but not in Ukraine. The opinion that Ukraine must be armed and negotiations must not be considered is, like it or not, an opinion. It is not some sort of absence of opinion. A democratic media would give the most, rather than the least, attention to those popular opinions getting the least traction in government. A democratic media would advise people, not just on fashion and diet and weather, but on how to organize nonviolent action campaigns and how to lobby for legislation. You’d have schedules of rallies and teach-ins and of upcoming hearings and votes, not just reports after the fact on what Congress has done as if you couldn’t possibly have wanted to know about it beforehand.
A democratic media in the United States would not leave out any of Russia’s outrages, but would include all the basic omitted facts that we’ve all told each other on thousands of redundant webinars for months. People would know about the expansion of NATO, the abrogation of treaties, the deployments of weapons, the 2014 coup, the warnings, the dire warnings, the years of fighting, and the repeated efforts to avoid peace.
(Again, you can start with those websites. I’ll put them in the chat.)
People would know the basic facts of the war business in general, that most weapons come from the U.S., that most wars have U.S. weapons on both sides, that most dictatorships are propped up by the U.S. military, that most military bases outside their nation’s borders are U.S. military bases, that most military spending is by the U.S. and its allies, that most U.S. aid to Ukraine goes to weapons companies — the five biggest of which in the world are in the Washington D.C. suburbs.
People would know basic facts about the failures of wars on their own terms and about the costs never considered: what could be done with the money instead, the environmental damage, the damage to the rule of law and to global cooperation, the boost given to bigotry, and the horrific results for populations.
Just as a German can recount statistics on the sins of Nazi Germany, a U.S. resident could tell you within a few orders of magnitude the number of people killed and injured and made homeless in U.S. wars
People would know basic information about nuclear weapons. In fact, nobody would believe the cold war ever ended or restarted, since the weapons never went away. People would know what nuclear weapons would do, what nuclear winter is, how many near misses there have been from incidents and accidents, and the names of individuals who have preserved all life on Earth even when they’ve been Russian.
I wrote a book in 2010 called War Is A Lie, and updated it in 2016. The idea was to help people spot lies, like those told about Afghanistan and Iraq, more quickly. There is, I argued, never any need to wait for facts to emerge. There is no need to discover that people don’t like their nations occupied. You can know that ahead of time. There is no need to become aware that Bin Laden could have been put on trial, since no difficulty in that regard could ever justify a war. There is no need to realize that Iraq has none of the weapons that the U.S. openly possesses, since the U.S. possession of those weapons justifies no attack on the U.S., and Iraq’s possession of the same weapons would justify no attack on Iraq. In other words, the lies are always transparent. Peace has to be very carefully and laboriously avoided, and even after it’s been avoided, the best policy is to work to get it back and institute the rule of law rather than the rule of tooth and claw.
In my 2016 epilogue I noted that activism had stopped the carpet bombing of Syria in 2013. The enemy had not been made frightening enough. The war had been too much like Iraq, and too much like Libya — both generally viewed as disasters in Washington and around the world. But a year later, I pointed out, scary videos of ISIS allowed the U.S. to escalate its warmaking. Since then the Iraq Syndrome has worn off. People have forgotten. Russia — in the figure of Putin — has been demonized intensely for years, with both truths and laughable falsehoods, and everything in between. And then Russia has been extensively reported on for doing the most horrible things that can be done, doing them as the U.S. accurately predicted, and doing them to people who look like newsworthy victims to U.S. media outlets.
Finally, war victims are given some coverage, but without anyone pointing out that all wars have those victims on all sides.
The propaganda success in and since February has been staggering. People who couldn’t tell you Ukraine was a country a week before wanted to talk about nothing else, and to complete strangers, and their opinions have in many cases not changed in 9 months. Arming Ukraine until an unconditional Russian surrender became and has remained unquestionable, completely regardless of what the chances were of that ever happening, of what the chances were of causing a nuclear apocalypse, of what the suffering would be from the war, of what the suffering would be from the diversion of resources into the war, or of what damage would be done to global efforts to address non-optional crises.
I tried to get the most careful mention of the possibility of negotiating peace into an op-ed in the Washington Post, and they refused. The Congressional Progressive caucus tried to publicly suggest negotiations, even in combination with unlimited free weapons, and was so viciously beaten back by the media that they swore they never meant it. Of course, Nancy Pelosi and probably Joe Biden cracked down on such heresy privately, but the media was the public voice of outrage — the same media that, when Biden and Putin met last year, pushed both presidents for increased hostility.
Shortly after the so-called Progressive Caucus’s fiasco, the U.S. media reported that the Biden regime was urging the government of Ukraine to pretend to be open to negotiations, because that would please Europeans, and because it looked bad for only Russia to be claiming to be open to negotiations. But why feed that information to the media? Was it dissent within the government? Obliviousness to the dishonesty? Miscommunication or inaccurate reporting? Maybe a little of each, but I think the most likely explanation is that the White House believes the U.S. public is so much on its side, and so habituated to pushing lies about Russia, that it can be counted on to support asking Ukraine to lie to help keep Russia from looking morally superior. Who doesn’t want to be in on the dirty secret tactics to defeat the forces of evil?
Last week, I received an email from the National Endowment for Democracy that said “Ukraine shows one way for America to use its power on behalf of freedom: Instead of sending troops to fight and die for democratic illusions in inhospitable countries, send arms to help an actual democracy repel a foreign invader. No U.S. troops, no meddling in civil wars, no nation building, no going it alone.”
So, you see, some countries you attack are inhospitable, and when U.S. troops are present someone who matters is dying, even if it’s only a few percent of the deaths. Those wars on terrible inhospitable places are actually the fault of the people there and can properly be recategorized as civil wars to help Steven Pinker omit them and pretend war is vanishing. Those big coalitions of weapons customers badgered into participating in those wars don’t exist, and the wars were actually the building of the nations being demolished. But when you just give mountains of free weapons to another country and tell them never to negotiate and then tell everyone that it’s that country that refuses to negotiate and that it would be immoral for you to question them, well that’s called not going it alone. It’s practically the next best thing to actually ratifying treaties and complying with them.
This is the story that has been sold. To unsell it, we would need a communications system that allowed basic communications. Did you know that you can put up billboards in U.S. cities to sell weapons but not, in most cases, to oppose war? It’s forbidden. Did you know that if you oppose war lies too much in the wrong way you can be silenced on social media by private companies that allow and encourage war promotion?
We need what we have always needed: better understanding and debunking of media, better creation of independent media, and 0.1% of the U.S. military budget with which to transform our communications system.
The first casualty of war, and militarism, is the truth. And the corporate mainstream media works diligently hand-in-glove with the US military-industrial complex to make this happen. Through its unquestioning repetition of government propaganda, its lies of omission, and its ratings-hungry war mongering, the media have become an essential part of the information war so endemic to US imperialism.
This webinar will describe this deadly relationship and how it has evolved to the point where virtually no dissent, no call for peace, no real understanding of declared adversaries is allowed. From Operation Mockingbird to CIA Director William Casey’s famous quote (“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”), the control of the US public’s perceptions of its government’s role in the world has been long in the making.
Now that we are on the brink of nuclear armageddon as a result of the US/NATO pursuit of continuous war against Russia and soon, it appears, with China, it has never been more important to see through the lies fed to us from the corporate media. This webinar is a step in that direction.
David Swanson
David Swanson is Co-Founder, Executive Director, and a Board Member of World BEYOND War. He is based in Virginia in the United States. David is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio.He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
Carl Sagan’s Bullshit Detection Kit
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Sagan shares nine tools:
The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.
1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
The Attack on Nature Is Putting Humanity at Risk: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
This week we feel compelled to share The Forty-Fifth Newsletter from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Too few see the degradation of natural services as a problem. We hate to think that it will take mass starvation before conservation and stewardship are seen as essential to average consumers and profits first business leaders.
In the last week of October, João Pedro Stedile, a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil and the global peasants’ organisation La Via Campesina, went to the Vatican to attend the International Meeting of Prayer for Peace, organised by the Community of Sant’Egídio. On 30 October, Brazil held a presidential election, which was won by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, affectionately known as Lula. A key part of his campaign addressed the reckless endangerment and destruction of the Amazon by his opponent, the incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory, helped along by vigorous campaigning by the MST, provides hope for our chance to save the planet. This week’s newsletter contains the speech that Stedile gave at the Vatican. We hope you find it as useful as we do.
Today, humanity is at risk because of senseless social inequality, attacks on the environment, and an unsustainable consumption pattern in rich countries that is imposed on us by capitalism and its profit-seeking mentality.
Part 1: What are the dilemmas facing humanity?
Climate change is permanent, and its impacts manifest every day with intense heat waves, global warming, torrential rains, tropical cyclones, and droughts in different regions across the planet.
The number of disasters/crimes has increased five-fold in the last 50 years, killing 115 people and causing economic losses of $202 million per day.
Environmental crimes have increased, such as deforestation, the burning of tropical forests, and attacks on all biomes, especially in the Global South. In 2021 alone, the world lost1 million hectares of tropical forests.
The Amazon rainforest, which stretches across nine countries, has already lost 30% of its vegetation cover as a result of encroaching deforestation caused by the push to produce timber and make way for cattle ranching and soybean production, which are exported to Europe and China.
All biomes in the Global South are being destroyed to produce raw agricultural materials for the Global North.
Predatory mining affects the environment, water, and land as well as Indigenous and peasant communities as thousands of garimpeiros (illegal miners) mine gold and diamonds using hazardous materials such as mercury in Indigenous lands.
Never have so many agrotoxins (agricultural poisons) been used in agriculture in the South, affecting soil fertility, killing biodiversity, polluting groundwater and rivers, and contaminating what is produced and even the atmosphere.
Glyphosate is scientifically proven to cause cancer. Some 42,700 US farmers who contracted cancer won the right to compensation from the companies that produce, sell, and use the glyphosate to which they were exposed.
Across the planet, more and more genetically modified seeds are being planted, including, as of 2019, a total of nearly 200 million hectares concentrated in 29 countries. These seeds cause genetic contamination in non-GMO seeds, affecting human health and destroying the planet’s biodiversity because they require the use of agrotoxins.
The oceans are polluted by plastics and other human waste, killing many species of fish and marine life. The massive use of chemical fertilisers has also caused ocean waters to acidify, putting all marine life at risk. Evidence of this can be seen in the large garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, which covers over a million square kilometres.
The carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossils fuels and by individual transportation in automobiles causes pollution in large cities, which in turn causes the death of thousands of people, with 7,100 in the northeast and Mid-Atlantic region of the United States alone dying as a result of vehicle emissions in a single year.
Humanity is suffering under a public health crisis that is also inextricably connected to nature. Epidemics and pandemics have increased, creating a massive global health crisis that puts millions of people at risk. This phenomenon, often propelled by the increased transmission of diseases from animals to human beings (known as zoonoses), is a result of the simultaneous destruction of biodiversity alongside the expansion of the agricultural frontier by agribusiness and energy, mining, and transportation megaprojects as well as urban and large-scale livestock farming.
Many areas on our planet are protected by peasant and Indigenous communities. Capital attacks and seeks to destroy them in order to take control of the natural goods they protect.
We are undergoing an ecological-social crisis of the Earth system and of the balance of life. This global crisis affects the environment, the economy, politics, society, ethics, religions, and the meaning of our own life.
The billions of the world’s poorest people are the most impacted by the lack of food, water, housing, employment, income, and education. Deteriorating living conditions have forced them to migrate and have killed thousands of people, especially children and women.
This generalised crisis is endangering human life. Without bold action, the planet, which is under attack, could still regenerate, but without human beings.
Eduardo Berliner (Brazil), House, 2019.
Part 2: Who is responsible for putting humanity at risk?
Capitalism is facing a structural crisis. It is no longer capable of organising the production and distribution of goods that people need. Its logic of profit and capital accumulation prevent us from having a more just and egalitarian society.
This crisis manifests itself in the economy, in increasing social inequality, in the state’s failure as a guarantor of social rights, in formal democracy’s failure to respect the will of most people, and in the propagation of false values based solely on individualism, consumerism, and selfishness. This system is economically and environmentally unsustainable, and we must put it behind us.
The main parties directly responsible for the environmental crisis are large transnational corporations, which do not respect borders, states, governments, or the rights of peoples. Some of these corporations, such as Bayer, BASF, Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont, manufacture agrotoxins, while others run the mining, automobile, and fossil fuel-run electric energy sectors, and yet others control the water market (such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé) and the world food market. Associated with all of them are banks and their financial capital. In the last decade, these corporations have been joined by powerful transnational technology corporations, which control ideology and public opinion (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook/Meta, and Apple). The owners of these companies are among the richest people in the world.
However, corporations are not the only ones to blame for the environmental crisis; they are aided by:
governments that cover up and protect corporate crime;
the mainstream media, which seek profit and serve corporate interests all whilst deceiving the people and hiding those who are responsible; and
international organisations formed by governments and captured by large corporations under the cover of phantom foundations, which directly influence these organisations and only repeat rhetoric and hold ineffective international meetings such as the Conference of the Parties (COP), which has now met 27 times. This is even the case with the United Nations and the Food and Agricultural Organisation.
All of these entities must respect the law.
I welcome the courageous position taken by Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022 and the encyclicals of Pope Francis. Both are a wake-up call to the entire world.
Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil), O Vendedor de frutas (‘The Fruit Vendor’), 1925.
Part 3: What solutions are we calling for?
There is still time to save humanity, and, with it, our common home, planet Earth. For this we need to have the courage to implement concrete and urgent measures on a global level. On behalf peasants’ movements and people’s movements in urban peripheries, we propose:
Prohibiting deforestation and commercial burning in all native forests and savannas across the world.
Prohibiting the use of agrotoxins and genetically modified seeds in agriculture, as well as antibiotics and growth promoters in livestock farming.
Condemning all decoy solutions to climate change and geoengineering techniques proposed by capital that speculate on nature, including the carbon market.
Prohibiting mining in the territories of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities as well as environmental protection and conservation areas and demanding that all mining be publicly controlled and used for the common good – not for profit.
Strictly controlling the use of plastics, including in the food and beverage industry, and making it mandatory to recycling them.
Recognising nature’s goods (such as forests, water, and biodiversity) as universal common goods at the service of all people that are immune to capitalist privatisation.
Recognising peasants as the main caretakers of nature. We must fight against large landowners and carry out popular agrarian reforms so that we can combat social inequality and poverty in the countryside and produce more food in harmony with nature.
Implementing an extensive reforestation program, paid for with public resources, that ensures the ecological recovery of all areas near springs and riverbanks, slopes, and other ecologically sensitive areas or areas that are experiencing desertification.
Implementing a global policy to care for water that prevents the pollution of oceans, lakes, and rivers and that eliminates the contamination of surface and subsoil drinking water sources.
Defending the Amazon and other tropical forests of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands as ecological territories under the care of the peoples of their countries.
Implementing agroecology as a sociotechnical basis for food sovereignty, including the production of healthy food that is accessible to all.
Subsidising the financing needed to implement solar and wind energy systems, which will be under the collective management of populations worldwide.
Implementing a global investment plan to provide public transportation based on renewable energies that makes it possible to reorganise and improve living conditions in cities, allowing for urban decentralisation and making it possible for people to remain in the countryside.
Demanding that the industrialised countries of the North guarantee the financial resources to implement all of the necessary actions to rebuild the relationship between society and nature in a sustainable manner, understanding that these countries are historically responsible for global pollution and continue with unjust and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.
Demanding that all governments stop wars, close foreign military bases, and halt military aggression in order to save lives and the planet, rooted in the understanding that peace is a condition for a healthy life.
Anita Malfatti (Brazil), Tropical, 1917.
For these ideas to materialise, we propose an international pact between religious leaders and institutions, environmental and people’s movements, decision-makers, and governments, so that we can carry out a programme that raises the consciousness of the entire population. We propose that an international conference be held so that we can bring together all collective actors who defend life. We must encourage people to fight for their rights in defence of life and nature. We must demand that the media assume its responsibility to defend the interests of the people and to defend equal rights, life, and nature.
We will always fight to save lives and our planet, to live in solidarity and in peace with social equality, emancipated from social injustices, exploitation, and discrimination of all kinds.
This text from João Pedro Stedile is a clarion call from the MST, which Noam Chomsky calls ‘the most important mass movement on the planet’. We hope to hear from you about these proposals, and we hope that movements around the world will take them up in their work.
Warmly,
Vijay
The New Normal "R"
The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)—Not a book review.
Have fun with it and figure it out, or don’t. Enjoy the colorful “Truth.”
I think it's wrong to ban bad books. I think it's wrong to silence the most stupid, uninformed, and vicious conspiracy theories. Throughout history, the powerful tortured and killed heretics. We can now use powerful high-tech tools to brainwash and destroy people. But where freedom dies, and opposition is suppressed, there can be no "progress" and no "democracy," only tyranny. So "Q" and Stanley Kubrick's most significant film, "The Truth About Apollo 11," should be welcomed and responded to enthusiastically, tongue-in-cheek, and with an earnest desire to understand what is going on.
(Truth, as it were, being ever so illusive, cheeky, and difficult remains mostly out of reach.)
We are slavish consumers of fashion. We crave novelty. We ascribe to New Normals because most of us are natural followers—we want to Fit In. Rare people indeed live in the new normal for years and years, and then one day take a pill or become readers in hip stuff, and suddenly they put on the magic glasses and think they're privy to some dark, deep secret. It feels good, I know. But as the Good Lord is my witness, they haven't a clue as to what to do about any of it; they haven't the imagination to build a better tyranny.
I'm sad they banned her book, but I'd skim it and put it back on the shelf if I encountered it.
Anyone wanting to know what's going on can read good books and figure it out themselves. Then they can become the pet (team player) they were meant to be or build a cabin in a village with lots of spuds and cabbages. They can hang up their thinking caps and start watching birds and handling worms. If they are lucky, they will share some projects with folks and have a few friends to chat with daily.
(I feel bad that I presume to know what a good book is. There's simply no accounting for it, but I have a tad bit of confidence in my judgment. Hopefully, that will continue to grow until C19-related Altheimer's sets in and destroys what's left of my precious, little brain.)
Entertaining, obsessional people know how to preach to their choir and give their "market" what it wants. “THE ANSWERS, damn it, I want all the answers!”
Vanity, it's all vanity.
To chat about nothing in particular and feel relaxed doesn't have to be an art. Embrace the pastime.
Asking The Consilience Project for Perspectives on Communication
I’m at Stanford Director’s College. In a talk about what went wrong with Enron, Charlie Munger (vice-chairman of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway) told a thought-provoking joke about Max Planck.
After winning the Nobel prize, Max Planck went around Germany giving talks. His chauffeur heard the talk so many times that he had it by heart, and so one time, he asked Max Planck if he could give the address. Planck agreed, they changed places, and the lecture came off famously. But then came the Q&A, with the very first question being one that the chauffeur had no hope of answering. The chauffeur replied: "I'm surprised to hear such an elementary question on high energy physics here in Munich. It's so simple, I'll let my chauffeur answer it."
(Munger actually referred to this not as a joke but an “apocryphal story.” How nice if it were true!)
I’m aware of the Feynman Technique and trying to practice it as best as possible.
1. Identify the topic.
2. Teach it to a child.
3. Identify your knowledge gaps.
4. Organize your explanation, simplify it, and refine it.
Am I lacking something fundamental when I speak with my more fanatical ideological friends from the extreme right and left sociopolitical realms? Is my condition genetic, or am I simply inept?
How can we get people interested in imagining things outside contexts more likely to excite them?
The Keyhole To The Light
After listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens talk on a recent The Great Simplification Podcast episode, I reached out to The Consilience Project to see if they had materials regarding my communication concerns.
My note to The Consilience Project’s contact form:
I have been researching perspectives on the Right for the last eighteen months. I followed Daniel Schmachtenberger's advice, teased the algorithms on various platforms, and discovered activities from growing social networks on the New Right, New Traditionalists, Alt-Right, Extreme Right, and Save Western Civilization movements. I am uncertain how large or impactful any or all of these groups are or might become, just as I am uncertain as to how large The Woke Mob actually is and how dangerous they are to our global culture. We are all slaves to fashion to some degree, and fashions always change.
My main concern is how to bring information to people involved in these movements that might help them have a better informed, and nuanced perspective on the problems we are facing that they feel are most salient. OKAY, so many of them are informed and have nuanced views concerning their topics, but can we find a bridge towards more understanding of various perspectives that are essential to any project concerning our future? I sense we are barred from any kind of synthesis by extreme ideological myopia. People from polarized positions always blame their opposites for being ideological extremists while maintaining their own grasp of reality as sacred.
I am also concerned with communicating with less educated and well-read people in the WEIRD world who may share our intuitions. (Feynman's explaining things to fifth graders without insulting someone's intelligence.)
When I was seventeen, my father said, "You think he cannot explain himself, but that's not so; he lacks the cultural audacity to do so."
What are the best ways to build bridges with these communities? Is it even possible? Why do many of my Rightist or Reactionary acquaintances find people as benign and loving as Nate Hagens or Jamie Wheel, for example, confusing and inaccessible? It seems as if they are unable to tune into our message. It's white noise, ignorant or antagonistic to them. I'm unsure if it's a language or style issue or if they are stuck in a particularly confrontational perspective. (Hobbsien in the broadest sense.) Or, perhaps, my kind of people are wrong.
(The far Left is annoyingly much the same in temper.)
I will share this network with you as an example. There are many others.
https://polmatch.com/. It is, perhaps, the antithesis of Jim Rutt's Game B platform.
OREL -Polmatch Project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLDPjq0bVvLg-CsRJAwnbgg
A conversation with Christien Perennialist Aarvoll and Greg Orel of Polmatch: https://youtu.be/RVGvi9b8xLY
Will people attracted to this type of pathos ever be interested in our content? I am most interested in learning what version of Western Civilization they adhere to (it’s a big basket) and what their culture is. What are their solutions to specific problems? As much as I rummage around in their sandbox and play in their playground, I am still unsure about the particular values that animate their definitive version of Western Culture. I have recently read several books by their ideological patriarchs. I have been well acquainted with "the literature" throughout my life.
Are these merely niche playgrounds for acting out childish catastrophizing, another form of entertainment, a game, or could these groups with their passionate beliefs be signs of a more significant, ominous cultural trend brought on by the terrible challenges our global civilization faces?
(Many New Right pundits call Progressives Fascists who advocate tyranny and want plebs and proles reduced to serfdom.)
Many of the influencers within these movements are scholarly and serious intellectuals/entertainers with profound influence in Right-leaning communities. These "leaders" could make Lane Craig and Sam Harris blush. I'm thinking of Jay Dyer's Orthodox Christian scholarship and Curtis Yarvin making Gish Gallop look like a trot on dressage ground. ;-)
(I was very disappointed with Jim Rutt's interview with Curtis Yarvin on The Jim Rutt Show. I don't feel he engaged Curtis enough.)
I should add that I don't identify with Right Wing or Left Wing movements—I am not a neo this or a "trad" that. I am a humanist who loves the miracle of the web of life. I stand with people like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheel, and Nate Hagens. I want our human adventure on earth to continue for many more generations. This is not to say that my friends on the Right don’t.
This is my website: https://www.globehackers.com/
www.cospolon.eu
With love and admiration for everyone involved with The Consilience Project, Steven
Info Testing & Feynman from Farnam Street
I’ve followed FS for a long time. I think I was listening to his podcast from day one. His site is full of useful articles that will help make you wiser.
Today I want to share two FS posts here. I don’t think Shane will mind.
I am certain you will enjoy these articles.
Richard Feynman
Needed: A Revolution in Thinking
By CARROLL QUIGLEY Professor of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Originally published in 1968)
Every event, every human experience, is unique. It occurs at a certain place, at a certain moment, to persons at a specific age and condition and in an arrangement of all these which will never be repeated. Never again will that event happen at that place, at that time, to those people, under those conditions.
People can deal with such unique events by action. The baseball player at the plate faces that unique and never-to-be repeated pitch and by making a never-to-be-repeated swing at it may be able to hit the ball over the fence for a home run. This is an example of how individuals, by action, can deal successfully with the unique events that make up the living experience of humankind.
But people also try to deal with the continuous stream of unique events which make up their lives by other methods besides action. They try to think about them and to communicate with others about them. To do this, they classify unique events into general classes or categories and they attach names or labels to such categories.
This process of classification and labeling ignores the qualities which make events unique and considers only those qualities which events are believed to share or to have in common. In this process, each society (and each person in that society) classifies its experiences and events into categories and then gives labels to these categories and puts a relative value on them -- regarding some of them as good or desirable and others as less good and less desirable.
Each society has such a system of categories and of valuations of categories. This is known as the society's "cognitive system." It is the most important thing we can know about any society and the most difficult to learn. When individuals speak of the "inscrutable Chinese" or the "mysterious East," they are really saying these remote peoples have cognitive systems that are different from theirs and are therefore more or less incomprehensible to them.
Getting to know the cognitive system of any people (or even of other persons in our own society, since no two persons have exactly the same cognitive system) is difficult because it is not easy even to take the first step to recognize that we ourselves have a cognitive system, a distinctive way of looking at the world that is not the way the world actually is but is simply the way our group conventionally looks at our world.
The best way to recognize that one's own group has a distinctive way of looking at things and that our own way is not the way things necessarily are is to deal with groups who have cognitive systems different from ours and who are just as certain that their way of seeing things is the way things actually are.
Such an experience, called "cultural shock," may lead to cognitive sophistication -- the recognition that all cognitive systems are subjective; that each is misleading to those who have it; and that although each enables those who have it to function within their own group, it handicaps them in dealing with persons from other groups. Moreover, even within a single society or group, cognitive sophistication is necessary whenever the experiences of that society are changing so rapidly that the old ways of looking at actuality handicap rather than help in dealing with the society's problems.
When people or groups with different cognitive systems interact, frictions and clashes occur, in many cases, without anyone's being able to see why. This happens even where there may be a maximum of goodwill on both sides. The difficulty occurs because individuals are unaware that they have a cognitive system of their own and, while seeing fully what other people do that irritates them, they cannot see why anything they are doing should irritate anyone else.
Cognitive sophistication makes it possible to know both one's own cognitive system and that of the different group with which one works so that one may be able to translate both talk and actions from one such system into the other, while recognizing the conventional and arbitrary nature of both.
Cognitive sophistication is so rare and so difficult to acquire that interaction across cultural barriers is a frequent cause of conflict. This applies to all relationships across cultural barriers -- not only to those with other nations and major cultures but also to those within a culture, such as relationships between suburbanites and slum dwellers or between races or social classes.
The cause of such cognitive conflicts may arise in large part from the different ways in which peoples look at time. Time is undivided duration, but in order to think or talk about it, each culture must divide it.
Our culture divides time into two parts, the past and the future, which meet at the present moment -- an instant without duration. This is reflected in European languages, which have tenses in the past, present, and future. But some peoples, such as the Bantu of Africa, do not have time classes of this sort in their language or social outlook. Many Bantu tongues divide verbs into those concerned with completed and uncompleted actions. They have no future tense because they categorize the future and the present together into a single form concerned with unfinished actions. (Similarly, in English we sometimes say, "I am going to school tomorrow," using the present tense for a future action.)
In the usual Bantu cognitive system, time is quite different from what it is to middle-class Americans, since it consists of a present of long duration and great importance; a past of less importance and moderate duration, such as can be held in personal memory; and almost no future distinguishable from the present.
Among some of these people, the future is not conceivable beyond the next few days and certainly has no meaning in terms of years. These people live in and value the present with all its problems, pleasures, and human relationships. Such people, even if they are given birth-control devices, are unlikely to use them, simply because they have no training in subjecting present relations to a hypothetical event nine months in the future.
Such cognitive differences are of great significance, especially when value systems are different. The African values the present, whereas many middle-class Americans put all emphasis on the importance of the future and are ready to make almost any sacrifice in the present for the sake of some hypothetical future benefit. In contrast to both, the aristocrat of today, like the ancient Greek, usually puts highest valuation on the past.
In our society, the latter viewpoint is now generally ignored, but the conflict between the "future preference" of the American middle-class suburbanite and the "present preference" of the lower-class slum dweller leads the former to regard the latter as shiftless, irresponsible, and lacking in self-discipline, while slum dwellers may regard the suburbanites' constant present sacrifice for future benefit as making them dehumanized and inhibited. In my opinion, the collapse, over the past two decades, of middle-class efforts to export our "self-enterprise" economic system to "underdeveloped countries" or to abolish ignorance and poverty in our own cities has been caused primarily by the existence of cognitive barriers -- specially the one associated with time.
But there is much more to the problem than this. People can deal with their experiences consciously only if they have a cognitive system. This is why individuals cannot remember the events of the first year or two of their own lives, before they had acquired a cognitive system by learning to talk and rationalize. The events of that period of "infantile amnesia" are incorporated in people's neurological and metabolic systems, as can be shown by getting individuals to relive an early experience under hypnosis, but they cannot consciously recall and verbalize the experience until they have categorized it, something they could not do when it occurred.
The cognitive system of any people is of major importance because it includes all those unconscious classifications, judgments, and values which trigger most of an adult's initial responses to events. Every culture, including our own, has a cognitive system at its very foundation, and this is what really keeps it functioning, because it enables large numbers of people to live in the same society without constant clashes and conflicts. A few examples will serve to show this.
We divide the whole range of colors, as found in the rainbow, into six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. With our European background, we think a view is beautiful if it consists of alternating horizontal bands of green and blue, as in a landscape consisting of a foreground strip of green shore, a blue lake beyond, a farther shore of green trees and hills, and a blue sky beyond that.
But to a Bantu of dry Africa, such a view is a rather boring panorama of a single color, for many natives of that language group place green and blue in a single category with one name, although they divide the lower red-orange-yellow portion of the spectrum into a larger number of basic colors with different names. That is why what impresses us as a beautiful view of shore, lake, and sky strikes them as a rather monotonous field of one color, whereas, conversely, an African landscape, which to us seems to be a dull expanse of semi-parched soil with dry grasses, may seem to them to be an exciting scene of many different colors.
(As Americans of European background have become familiar with the African-like views of Arizona and New Mexico, many have come to feel that these semi-desert views are preferable to the more "conventional beauties" of New England, Wisconsin, or upper Michigan. And the Navaho or other natives of our Southwest show their preference for the red-orange-yellow portion of the spectrum by their extensive use of these colors and their scanty use of green, blue, or violet in their arts.)
A somewhat similar example exists in respect to distinguishing and naming the various states of H2O. In our culture, we divide that range into no more than five or six categories, such as ice, snow, slush, water, and steam. But some Eskimo groups who are vitally concerned with how a dogsled moves on snow divide snow alone into 50 or more different categories, each with a distinct name. Today, in our own culture, as the sport of skiing grows more popular, we are developing numerous names for snow conditions on ski slopes to describe different skiing conditions.
Another significant example of any culture's cognitive view of experience may be seen in the way it divides the life span, especially the preference it places on these divisions.
Many native societies of Africa, for example, are formally divided into six or seven rigid stages, and the transitions from one to another are marked by formal, often painful, "crisis ceremonies.” Frequently, there is little contact between different age classes. Thus, youths of seven to 11 years may live together in bands with almost no contact with parents, while the age group 18 to 28 may be almost totally devoted to war or hunting and forbidden to marry until they move, as a group, into the next age range, say from 28 to 45.
By contrast, in the medieval period, Christian Europe divided a person's life into only two stages, childhood and adulthood, separated at about age seven by First Communion. There was a slight tendency, arising from the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, to make another division at about age 13, marked by the sacrament of Confirmation, but generally, anyone over seven was spoken to and treated as an adult.
Over the last five centuries or more, however, our Western culture has changed its cognitive view of this matter to become more like the African, until today we have at least six or more age classifications: infants, children, teens or adolescents, the college crowd, the young marrieds, middle-aged people, and retired persons. There is increasing segregation of these -- in education, in living quarters, in reading and entertainment, and in commercial markets (as in a department store).
The generation gap has become a familiar problem, and communication across age-group barriers has become a major issue. Moreover, female preference for the adolescent period has given us hordes of 40-year-old women trying to look like adolescents. The influence of such cognitive changes on all aspects of life is evident.
The power and affluence of Western civilization do not result from our technology, our political structure, or even our economic organization but from our cognitive system, on which they are based. That system began to develop before 500 B.C. with the introduction of the idea, in Palestine and Persia, of one God -- omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect -- and with the growth of two-valued logic in Persia and Greece.
Although our cognitive system has made our civilization the richest and mightiest in the world, its continued use without cognitive sophistication is leading us to disaster. Lynn White, Jr., pointed this out in his article, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," in Science for March 10, 1967.
Professor White's thesis is that when the Judeo-Christian faith established the view that there is no spirit in nature other than the human, the world was reduced to a created object to be exploited by humans, and the way was thus opened to the destruction of nature and to the total pollution of the world -- a consequence that may have become inevitable with the rejection, in the latter thirteenth century, of the message of St. Francis to treat all nature as sacred.
The cognitive techniques derived from our underlying outlook have included ( a) using analysis rather than synthesis in seeking answers to problems; (b) isolating problems and studying them in a vacuum instead of using an ecological approach; ( c) using techniques based on quantification rather than on qualification study done in a contextual situation; (d) proceeding on the assumption of single-factor causation rather than pluralistic, ecological causation; and (e) basing decisions and actions on needs of the individual rather than needs of the group.
In our society, if we want to know how something functions, we take it apart, cut it up, isolate it from its context; we analyze its factors and assume that only one is an independent variable. We then quantify the changes this independent variable makes in all the other variables that are assumed to be dependent on it. Then we make the independent variable one link in a chain of such independent variables, each surrounded by its system of dependent variables, the whole forming a chain going back to some original cause in the past or extending forward in a similar chain to some ultimate goal in the future.
From such reasoning, given to us from the Greeks through Aristotle, we got the "final" causes ( or goals) and the "Unmoved Mover" (that which is the first cause of all movement and does not itself move) of Aristotelian metaphysics, and, today, we still use this way of thinking, even though we no longer believe in Aristotle's metaphysics.
The now obsolescent mode of thought and cognition just described might be contrasted with a newer method which is, incidentally, closer to the thinking processes of southern and eastern Asia, which were never much influenced by transcendental Hebrew monotheism or by Greek two-valued logic.
This newer (or older) way of looking at experience tries to find how anything functions by seeing its relationships to a larger system and, ultimately, to the whole cosmos. To do so, it uses an ecological and qualitative approach, seeking to grasp the whole contextual situation of innumerable factors, all of which are changing at once, not only by quantitative changes within a fixed identity (such as Western logic can handle) but with constant shifts of identity and quality.
This more intuitive and less logical point of view is now sweeping the West as is evidenced by the fact that our traditional Western categories and cognitive assumptions were rejected not only by youthful hippies but also by those hardheaded, analytical people on whom the survival of the West depends.
The stumbling block, of course, is that our whole institutional setup is based on the old method of thought. For example, our educational system is based on the methods of categorization, specialization, and quantification, which must be replaced. This old method of thought is seen on the lower levels, where objective tests assume such things as two-valued logic (True, False), the principle of contradiction (Yes, No), and the principle of retained identity, just as, on the highest levels, the great increase in the use of computers assumes the possibility of objective analysis and quantification of life experiences.
It is difficult to reform our old methods of thinking no matter how bankrupt they may be. Standing in the way of change are the pressures exerted by institutionalized establishments, the profits of powerful groups producing equipment based on old ways of thinking, and the need which the large bureaucratized organizations have for persons with narrow technical training in the older cognitive patterns.
On the other hand, if we do not make such reforms, we may well be destroyed by problems that cannot be handled by the established methods of specialization, isolation, and quantification. These problems are already swallowing us up in the crises of environmental destruction, urban blight, social and racial tensions, poor mental health, and international conflicts that threaten to lead to nuclear annihilation.
American Men Take Up Their Vow of Chastity
Men have neglected their responsibilities toward women and the family for too long.
Gentlemen, it's time for you to stand up and let the world know what a good Christian conservative means when he commits to the right to life.
From now on, your behavior must be exemplary. A man's behavior mustn't contribute to unwanted pregnancies.
When men behave responsibly, we can get the government out of making laws regarding reproductive rights and family healthcare. Abortion will be a thing of the past.
It's up to us, good, Christian, Western men.
Conservative Men make this commitment to future mothers and wives.
1. We will not fornicate with women.
2. We will not temp women with our dress, style, or demeanour.
3. We will not have premarital sex.
4. After marriage, we will only have sex for reproductive purposes.
5. Married couples may enjoy intimate play in private.
6. Men will encourage wives, daughters, and female family members and acquaintances to dress modestly.
7. We will ensure, through the law of our holy land, that online dating sites, porn, chat sites, adult entertainment, prostitution, nudie bars, strip clubs, massage centers, and other forms of sexual entertainment are illegal in all jurisdictions of the Realm.
8. We will guard the purity of our female family members and acquaintances.
9. Dating will be a controlled activity until marriage.
10. People will not be allowed to dance provocatively.
11. Music that agitates sexual desire must be outlawed.
12. Movies will no longer have scenes portraying any sexual activity.
13. There will be no more nudity in any content.
14. We will limit our drinking to three drinks on special occasions.
15. Drug use will be punishable by a trip to hell.
More rules of proper male behavior and virtues will be announced as the country reforms itself through the genius of our dear and holy leader. He alone will determine the law and the correct interpretation of the Constitution. His appointed clergy will teach according to his understanding of scripture.
God's will makes every man free to be a good man.
Take up your cross and protect women from our sinful world.
Yours Truly,
Noble Edward Tali Bon
Executive Advisor and Earl of Kansas
IS CAPITALISM SUSTAINABLE?
I implore you to read this book and others like it. We must understand the material basis for economic growth and its limitations. We are at an inflection point where circumstances outside our control dictate how hard we land after almost two hundred years of industrial and technological development made possible by exploiting fossil fuel resources. There is a vast amount of literature across domains of science addressing our need for energy and materials to continue our current economic growth paradigm. We will either understand what these efforts are telling us and work to mitigate the harshest consequences of our actions or blindly crash. The results of inaction will be dire.
The essay below by the author of Sustainable Capitalism is simply common sense. It’s not a sophisticated treatment of modern capitalism and consumer society, nor the science of sustainability, but it captures the spirit of many people’s concerns. I have recommended many books concerning these topics.
The Players of The Great Game will never address the core concerns and science of sustainability unless people make them.
"John Ikerd combines insights from philosophy, psychology, ecology, sociology, and economics to question many of our current free-market assumptions and to make a case for employing common sense to build a more sustainable future for our plant."—Fred Kirschenmann, University of Iowa
"A seminal contribution to the concept of sustainability."—J. Paul Mueller, North Carolina State University
"John Ikerd has shown an uncanny ability to address the questions that need to be answered—now. This is a must-read book for students, teachers, and policymakers who strive for a framework to ensure economic sustainability and intergeneration equity."—E. Ann Clark, University of Guelph
John Ikerd is a professor emeritus of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
I implore you to read this book. We must understand the material basis for economic growth and its limitations. We are at an inflection point where circumstances dictate how hard we land after almost two hundred years of fossil-fuelled industrial and technological development. There is a vast amount of literature addressing issues of energy and atoms across domains, all pointing to limitations under our current economic growth paradigm. We will either understand these issues and work to mitigate the harshest consequences of our actions or blindly crash. The results of inaction will be dire.
I realize most readers of this magazine are operators of small farms. But, some questions are too important to leave the economists and politicians. If our capitalistic economy is not sustainable, neither are our farms or our society or humanity. Some questions are so important that no one can afford to remain uninformed, uncommitted, and uninvolved.
Is capitalism sustainable? Not the type of capitalism that dominates America and most global economies today. This is not a matter of personal opinion but a direct consequence of the most fundamental laws of science. Sustainability ultimately depends upon energy because anything useful in sustaining life on earth relies on energy. All material things that are of any use to humans, food, clothes, houses, and automobiles, require energy to make and energy to use. All practical human activities, working, and thinking require energy. Physical scientists lump all such functional activities together and call them "work." All work involves energy (definitively.)
Energy is continuously transforming. The natural tendency of energy to change from more concentrated to less concentrated forms gives energy its ability to perform work. All material things, such as food, gasoline, plastic, and steel, are just highly concentrated forms of energy. Matter converts into energy, as in eating food or burning gasoline—the structure of energy changes by using heat to make electricity and electricity to produce light. However, even though work invariably changes matter to energy or changes the form of energy, no energy is lost. This is the first law of thermodynamics, energy conservation law, as in Einstein's famous E=MC2.
At first, it might seem that energy could be recycled and reused forever as if sustainability would be inevitable. However, once energy performs work before, it must be reconcentrated, reorganized, and restored. Unfortunately, it takes energy to reconcentrate, reorganize, and restore energy. And, the energy used to reconcentrate and restore energy is simply no longer available to do anything else. It has lost its usefulness. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the tendency of all closed systems toward the ultimate degradation of matter and energy, toward inert uniformity, an absence of structure, pattern, organization, or differentiation. The barren surfaces of the Moon or Mars are examples of systems near entropy.
Since the loss of energy to entropy is inevitable, it might seem that sustainability is impossible. Even if waste and pollution could be avoided entirely by using and reusing energy, the tendency toward entropy would continue. Life on earth would not be sustainable without the daily inflow of new solar energy. Sustainability ultimately depends upon using solar energy to offset the unavoidable effects of entropy.
Capitalism is a very efficient energy extraction system, but it provides no incentive to reconcentrate and restore energy to offset entropy. Capitalists have no economic incentive to invest in energy renewal to benefit future generations. Capitalists reduce waste and pollution or reuse resources only when it is profitable to do so. Capitalists have incentives to use renewable energy to support current consumption but not to re-storing energy for future generations. Capitalism inevitably tends toward physical entropy.
The law of entropy applies to social energy as well as physical energy. All forms of human energy labor, management, innovation, and creativity are products of social relationships. Humans cannot be born, reach maturity, and become useful without the help of other people who care about them. People must be educated, trained, civilized, and socialized before becoming productive members of complex societies. All organizations, including business organizations, governments, and economies, depend on the ability of people to work together for a common purpose, which in turn depends upon the sociability and civility of human societies. Human productivity directly results from healthy personal relationships within families, friendships, communities, and cultures.
Capitalism inevitably dissipates, disperses, and disorganizes social energy because it weakens personal relationships. Maximum economic efficiency requires that people relate to each other impartially, which means impersonally. People must compete rather than cooperate if market economies are to function efficiently. When people spend more time and energy working and being economically productive, they have less time and energy to spend on personal relationships within families and communities. When people buy things based solely on price rather than buy from people they know and trust, personal relationships within communities suffer from neglect. Capitalism devalues personal relationships and disconnects people, thus dissipating, dispersing, and disorganizing social energy.
Capitalistic economies use people to do work while doing nothing to restore the social capital needed to sustain positive personal relationships. There is no economic incentive for capitalists to invest in families, communities, or society to benefit future generations. Capitalists build relationships or contribute to social causes only when such contributions contribute to their profits or growth. Capitalists do not waste energy by investing in social capital. Capitalism inevitably tends toward social entropy.
Economies are how people facilitate their relationships with other people and their natural environment in complex societies. Economies transform physical and social energy into raw materials to create products and services for impersonal marketplaces. All economic capital uses natural or social capital. Once all our natural and social capital is exhausted, there will be no need for financial capital. Without capital, an economy loses its ability to produce; it tends toward economic entropy. Today's capitalistic economies quite simply are not sustainable.
A sustainable economy must be based on a fundamentally different paradigm, precisely, on the paradigm of living systems. Living things by nature are self-making, self-renewing, reproductive, and regenerative. Plants have the innate capacity to capture, organize, and store solar energy to support other living organisms and offset the energy lost to entropy. Living things also have a natural propensity to reproduce their species. Humans, for example, devote significant amounts of time and energy to raising families, with an insignificant economic incentive to do so. Individual life is not sustainable because every living thing eventually dies. But, communities and societies of living individuals have the capacity and natural propensity to be productive while devoting a significant part of their life's energy to conceiving and nurturing the next generation.
Relationships within healthy living systems must be mutually beneficial and thus must be selective. All living organisms are made up of cells, and a selective or semi-permeable membrane surrounds each living cell. These semi-permeable boundaries keep some things in and let other things out while keeping some things out and letting other things in. Likewise, living organisms are defined by boundaries, skin, bark, and scales that selectively allow different elements, air, water, food, and waste, to enter and leave the organism's body. If these boundaries were completely permeable or impermeable, reproducing life forms could not exist.
The same principle holds for all living systems: ecosystems, families, communities, economies, and cultures. The relationships among elements of healthy natural ecosystems are, by nature, mutually beneficial. However, relationships among humans and between humans and nature are matters of choice and thus must be consciously and purposefully selective. People must be willing and able to choose to maintain positive relationships with other people and decide to take care of the earth to benefit themselves and benefit future generations.
Capitalism provides no economic incentives to sustain life on earth, but humans have the innate capacity and natural tendency to do so. Throughout human history, people have chosen families, communities, and societies over isolation, even when it was not in their short-run individual self-interests. Many cultures had respected, revered, and cared for the ecosystems they depended on without financial incentives. Modern self-interest is a very new thing. It puts material consumption over everything that makes us human. Not until the last few decades were the social and ethical constraints removed, turning capitalism into an unsustainable system of extraction and exploitation with no consideration for future generations.
To restore sustainability, people must make conscious, purposeful decisions to rely on renewable energy, not just for consumption but also to rebuild stocks of natural capital for the benefit of future generations. To restore sustainability to capitalism, people must make conscious, purposeful choices to rebuild positive, mutually beneficial relationships with other people, not just for economic gains but also to restore depleted stocks of social capital. No economic system approaches the efficiency of capitalism in utilizing natural capital to meet individual material human needs and wants. But, natural and social capital must be continually renewed and replenished to sustain economic prosperity. Our current breed of politicians and economists hasn't the mindset to address sustainability issues in a capitalist frame. They are only concerned with their careers and profits.
Is capitalism sustainable? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand energy and entropy. All people have the ability and responsibility to understand the importance of this question, commit, and become involved. If we don't, greed will destroy our species sooner than we think.
Thoughts That Bubbled Up While Listening To PhilosophiCat and Aarvoll
I am new to this line of philosophical inquiry within this ideological context. I am not sure if linking this to the New Right or traditionalism is fair, but I think this is their perspective. Aarvoll is a fascinating scholar I recently discovered. I had not known of PhilosophiCat until I watched this video.
Below are my comments on the video.
This was an excruciatingly exciting conversation. I am always thrilled when I find people having this kind of discourse in this manner.
I don’t feel any of the following is profound. (I am not steeped in the literature, although I have read some of the books.)
Thoughts that popped up while listening.
There are no subsets distinct from the set.
I have a good relationship with my self but am not entirely enamored with my self.
I endeavor to experience truth and behave as truthfully as possible, but I can’t imagine knowing “the truth” about anything esoteric. I feel humans are limited by too many things to have a deep understanding of reality. It is the root of all suffering that complete understanding constantly remains out of reach. “The Truth” is impossible for us to grasp, so we keep experiencing the same cycles in pursuit of it. Modern science with the latest, best of breed, tools brings us a particular type of knowledge (if we are able for it) while we are attracted to the musings of “The Ancients” in a constant desire for more profound meaning. (We are hanging on, grasping at straws.)
After great effort, is “letting go” essential to a life well-lived?
I sense similar relative cycles involving goods, or “The Good.” Any virtue is part and parcel of human experience close to culturally acquired focus.
It is difficult for “The Will” to escape/transcend experiential programming.
I can’t begin to imagine how any human could define God.
When considering “The Infinite,” how deep could our understanding be? Even if we assume that we possess some divine, ineffable qualities due to our ability to reason or something else, that is not something because it is immaterial.
What is Time? How many answers to this question can there be, and within what constraints? Can time dilate so fast that it’s eliminated? Can there be “The Void?” Can there be anything in “The Mouth” of “The Void?”
What is the quality, character, and utility of a city-state where wisdom and truth are prime and core values? From a violent, ignorant ghetto, how does that arise? It seems to get snuffed out again and again, but the need for some individuals is to keep trying to make it happen. Most people can’t focus on metaphysical ideas. Even simple virtues are excruciatingly hard to live by on the ground of sin and desire. What scale of human society can have such a community? Could there be a world with a million distinct enlightened communities?
Why do saints exist at all? Is it as simple as there can be no saints without sinners? God created “man” to have a creator?
For God to experience the greatest good, there must be a modicum of free will and many deleterious avenues to focus one’s attention. God needs hyper-normal stimuli to experience himself? How can this be? How is God a self, a subset of the set?
We know nothing of God; we only dissect and examine our selves (if we have the ability to do this in us for various mysterious reasons).
Most people are parrots, robots, monkeys because, _______________________________. It is some people’s desire to fill in the blank.
As always, why, why, why, and then you die.
It is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be, by virtue of having been.
Until death, I will imagine that I know what is going on: This is how I live with myself.
You may say he lacks the ability to explain himself, but that’s not so; he lacks the artistic audacity to do so.
Forgive me if I have gotten it all wrong.
Strive To Understand The Whole Picture
When Steven Pinker says, I'm paraphrasing, that all that's required to tackle the worst probable outcomes of climate change is knowledge, I must beg to differ. Complex problems require a lot more than that.
Who would argue that climate science isn't complex and climate, as it relates to functions of civilization, aren't complex? The climate affects every aspect of our lives in many ways. I won't go into systems theory, complexity science, climate science, and how those domains relate to economics, politics, food, ecosystems, etc. You can read up on those things as you wish. I have posted book recommendations and website links on my website at globe hackers.
The main point I am trying to make is that when we point to various areas of progress that we have experienced since, say, 1750, we need to understand it within an ever-changing context.
If we notice that a woman in China might prefer a factory job over working in rice paddies because the money she would earn from the factory will impact her life in more positive ways, we also need to understand the many changes that go along with that, their probable directionalities and cultural impacts; issues of sustainability and so on. They may all be good but will they always be good and relative to what? It is likely that when the woman working at the factory makes enough money, she might want to start a business or be a real estate investor or broker. Who knows, but she will probably move on from the factory if she can and wants to.
Immigrants to Brooklyn in the eighteenth century may have sewn caps in their tiny apartments and worked the docks to earn money to pay for their children's education, a noble thing, by the way. Still, their children will be working within a vastly different context with different desires and needs. Everything we inherit these days is in flux—today, much more so than in the early eighteenth century.
We have taken for granted fossil fuel energy, what Nate Hagens metaphorically refers to as 50 billion "slaves" (because fossil fuel energy allows us to do much more work than a mule fed with oats) for many generations, and it's given us more wealth than anyone in the seventeenth century could have possibly imagined. But things change, and it turns out fossil fuels have some economic externalities and environmental impacts that are not good for the health of ecological systems and public health.
We have known about climate change for decades, and our leaders and people have chosen to ignore the problem and instead carry on as if this particular set of circumstances can last forever without a hitch.
We all hope that free enterprise, science, engineering, and technology will facilitate solutions to our problems and allow us to continue our GDP based economic growth forever so that all people around the world can have air conditioners, white goods, shopping malls, Amazon warehouses, cars, medicine and so on. That is perfectly reasonable. However, it may require that we modify our way of doing things to achieve this constantly evolving state of progress.
We can do so many positive things to ensure a brighter future for most people and maintain a healthy balance in the natural services surrounding us and upon which we depend. Again, I refer you to books and internet resources if you feel you want to educate yourself regarding the various challenges we are facing.
We need to understand the broader and constantly evolving and changing context we are in both on a micro and macro level. We need to ensure that our way of life allows us to maintain good health and a positive mental attitude. We need to strive to understand the multitude of perspectives required to understand something well. Staying in our ideological safe space will not do.
When I say context, I mean across domains of knowledge.
Our culture needs to be conscious of the need to do this, as do all of us as individuals. If we are not aware of what is going on, there is nothing we can do to affect what's going on.
We can't assume that people who benefit significantly from how the system works in this era want to change the system as needed because they are rational. (If they don't, it won't benefit them, so they must.) A profits first mentality is horrendously short term.
We need to consider immediate needs, five-year, ten-year, and 25-year blocks at a minimum, and take action for nature's long-term health and welfare. We are part and parcel of the biological systems from which we evolved. People who can't recognize this need help. They need education.
If war is expensive, destructive, and potentially devastating to life, we need to work to end our need to wage war. This project is not some naive hope; it's imperative in a world where technology drives our ability to be more and more efficient at destroying things. We could create a new game that would allow us to compete without the need to kill. If you can't imagine that possibility, then, in many crucial ways, you are a deficient person.
If we want to look back with pride at how things have progressed twenty or one hundred years from now, we will have to recognize how things must change, and we are the only ones who can do that work.
Some things that are needed:
Consciousness-raising
Knowledge
Structural and systemic change
New concepts of economic growth
Better management of crucial global resources
Better environmental stewardship
A better understanding of negative externalities from business
A science-based approach to regulation, health, and business
The above list is not to say that we haven't made progress in these areas. I want to emphasize that we must continually evaluate the effectiveness of what we are doing in light of new information. (Let's pay attention to the data and the science and act accordingly.)
I'll end the bulleted list there. It is by far too short. Let's add all the positive and still relevant things The Enlightenment has given us. I am not for throwing babies out with the bathwater. We should build upon the institutions and systems that have proven to work and stood the test of time.
We need:
More free speech
More freedom
More free enterprise
More creativity
Better critical thinking and sense-making skills
Ethical business leaders
Leaders who are committed to our welfare and general health
We will not get these things through brutal, short-term, game-theoretic competition. As we always have, we will get there through cooperation, broad knowledge networks, economic activity, cultural exchange, etc.
Those of you who believe this is impossible need help. You need to get to work and educate yourself. You need to realize that you can be an active part of the solution.
We have to fight to stop those who would make this project impossible wherever they are, whatever ideology they subscribe to. We need an open society. Going back to closed societies is untenable in the twenty-first century.
We move on, or we go back. One way or another, our choices and actions will bring about the circumstances that will ultimately dictate the result.
DiEM25 Manifesto
Follow the link and read the DiEM25 Manifesto.
Are you in favor of more or less democracy? Do you feel government represents you? Do you feel your elected officials put people first?
Europe will be democratised, once its oligarchy is overthrown!
A MANIFESTO FOR DEMOCRATISING EUROPE For all their concerns with inflation, migration, populism, climate change, pandemics, security and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy! They speak in democracy’s name but only to deny, exorcise and suppress it in practice. They seek to co-opt, evade, corrupt, mystify, usurp and manipulate democracy in order to break its energy and arrest its possibilities.
For rule by Europe’s peoples, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of:
Big Tech, Big Pharma, permanently bailed out bankers, fund managers, insurers, the security-military-industrial complex – in short, the resurgent tapestry of cartels perpetually contemptuous of the many and their organised expression
Their army of unelected bureaucrats, ‘technocrats’ and lobbyists pulling the strings of governments in general and of EU institutions in particular
Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom, environmentalism, social justice etc., only to betray their most basic principles when in power
Governments whose policy of socialism-for-the-financiers and harsh-austerity-for-everyoneelse fuels nativist populism which these same governments audaciously pretend to rail against
Corporations that use terms like “sustainability” and “net zero” to continue with business-asusual, greenwashing their planetary-scale vandalism Media moguls who have normalised disinformation and weaponised fear-mongering
Our pledge We are inspired by the vision of a non-exploitative Europe that nurtures Reason, Freedom, Tolerance and Imagination made possible by real Solidarity, comprehensive Transparency, and authentic Democracy. We aspire to:
1. A Democratic Europe in which all political authority stems from Europe’s sovereign peoples
2. A Postcapitalist Europe that practises democracy at the workplace and in all aspects of life, not just in electoral politics
3. A Social Europe that cherishes not only freedom from interference but also the basic income, care and goods that render one free from need and exploitation
4. A Sustainable Europe that lives within the planet’s means, minimising its environmental impact through living harmoniously with all living beings, conserving and restoring biodiversity, eliminating pollution, and leaving all fossil fuels deep inside the earth
5. An Ecological Europe that leads a green and just transition world-wide
6. An Internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends-in-themselves and works in active solidarity with exploited peoples across the world
7. A United Europe whose peoples show as much solidarity across nations as they do within them
8. A Pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, nations, languages, philosophies and cultures where one can be, at the same time, European and patriotic
9. A Diverse Europe that celebrates difference and ends every discrimination based on social class, education, gender, skin colour, age, national origin, philosophy, faith, disability or sexual orientation
10. A Decentralised Europe that uses central power to maximise democracy in towns, cities, regions and states
11. A Transnational Europe in which political representation transcends national borders
12. A Transparent Europe where all decision-making takes place under the citizens’ scrutiny
13. A Sovereign Europe that presses its home-grown technologies into the service of solidarity
14. An Honest Europe that seeks a bright future without hiding from its imperialist past
15. A Cultured Europe that harnesses its people’s rich cultural mosaic and promotes not only its invaluable cultural heritage but also the work of Europe’s dissident artists, musicians, writers and poets who contribute to a progressive democracy
16. A Creative & Technologically Sovereign Europe that releases and safeguards the innovative powers of its citizens’ imagination
17. A Peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its Eastern, Mediterranean and Aegean regions, ending its colonial projects in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere as well as acting as a bulwark against the sirens of militarism and expansionism everywhere
18. An Open Europe that is alive and attractive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness thus spreading insecurity in the name of security
19. A Welcoming Europe that recognises that, after centuries during which Europeans colonised or dominated the politics of the rest of the world, it is now necessary to welcome migrants and refugees
20. A Liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence wither, enabling people in Europe and beyond to be born into fewer stereotypical roles, to enjoy even chances to develop their potential, and to be free to choose more of their partners in all aspects of life, work and society
Carpe DiEM25
www.diem25.org
Big, Fast and Shameless Growth
"Everyone holds his future in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it's the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I was a kid, we used to see a lot of westerns. I grew up in the States and spent part of each summer in Ireland. My family there ran the village post office and had a salon where aunt Breeda fixed people's hair. We had a small vegetable garden in the back near a wall that separated our garden from the neighbor's and a few fruit trees at the end of the garden where there was another wall with a small river behind it. My cousins would stick two pitchforks in the ground in front of the orchard, and we'd take shots on goal. Across the street was McConnell's Pub, and to the right, down a few doors, there was a movie house. It was small with simple benches in the front for kids and some raked seating in the back. The last few rows had excellent padded seats with arms like you'd find in a bigger movie theatre in Limerick.
Every Thursday night, they had a film. The most popular ones were American. We lads like Westerns. Much as in the States, I'd play Cowboys and Indians with my friends in the village. The ways Westerns often dehumanized native Americans never crossed our minds. There were good and bad guys, which was all you needed for a good story. I guess that's why we also liked gangster films, full of colorful characters. Gangster films are still universally appreciated. We couldn't get enough.
These days I've discovered a new genre that represents our time and American culture like nothing else — The Unicorn film or series. It's my new favorite genre, one that makes me laugh out lough at the outrageousness and ego-bouncing lack of self-awareness of the colorful characters that mark these anti-morality tales.
The messianic cult leader
The coattail riding actual inventor of the goods or services that couldn't sell shit to the sewer
The wisecracking lawyers and consultants who've seen it all before, but not this particular jackass
The woman behind the man
Sexual harassment
A media that can't get enough
Cool-headed investors and bankers
Mentors who just want to see everything work out for the best
and on and on...
Guaranteed belly laughs and downright hysteria if you've actually been around these types.
The story arch is predictable because you followed it in the papers. It's a roller coaster ride with luscious schadenfreude and a climactic crash as the Players move on to the next, next thing.
Anything is possible in a world where everything is a commodity and anyone can become a brand. Hell, with enough money, you can potentially buy trips to Mars and immortality. You can transcend nature.
Welcome back to the real world.
Unicorn is a term used in the venture capital industry to describe a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion.
Lately, I've been watching Super Pumped and WeChrashed. Both are stories about hyper-competitive, egomaniacal, narcissistic, sociopathic, and ambitious entrepreneurs trying to get filthy rich by changing the world with their startups. Hubristic: Not for characters like these, the world is progressing fast, can be changed practically overnight, and always for the better.
Anyway, it occurred to me that these films represent the deepest desires of our current culture. Get attention, lead people, inspire people, make as much money as you can doing outrageous things and make sure people know how special you are. We see this with some startup entrepreneurs, and we see this from some of our Tubers and social media influencers. It's all over sports culture and celebrity culture; even our politicians have succumbed.
We think we have to be outrageous, crazy, and reckless to be attractive and successful. Well, these traits have always been American. But one thing struck me. I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the only businesses that matter anymore are businesses that make some asshole obscenely rich no matter how they make their money. They can cheat, lie, and break the law as long as there are potentially billions in the market for their offering. No matter how they make their money, they always get a pass. If you are a Player, you want to become too big to fail and too big to jail. That's the real mark of success, and that's how the big business game is structured.
If you raise money, you are worth money. It's not your money. Your salary is your money, but it's as if the investor's money is your money, and everything depends on the valuation of your company. I'm familiar with this culture, but I won't go into it. This stuff is mundane. What bothers me is that it seems so much like a scam. People make similar bets repeatedly, and win or lose; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happens to people or workers. Individuals should be responsible for their choices—only the markets matter.
VCs and investment banks make intelligent bets and huge sums on service fees and markets.
The Game is everything that matters.
There are no limits to how much money one can make.
The Game is exciting for the players and entertaining for spectators.
Most of us are happy to be spectators, and if we have enough money or credit to buy a ticket to the show, we are delighted. If we have a little more cash and credit, we can ape the behavior of the wealthy entrepreneurs, bankers, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, sports stars, and celebrities we worship. We just want to fit in. We don't even think of the dehumanizing qualities of the Game.
I was also thinking about the hundreds of thousands of businesspeople running businesses for decades, not to get super rich but to get wealthy in an honest way by providing good products and services to their customers and communities. If we put in a little effort, intelligence, compassion, and care, our businesses allow us to live a good life. That's most of us.
But that's boring.
Lead with the noisemakers. Any publicity is good publicity. The founder makes potentially billions by bringing motivation, energy, excitement, ideas, technology, processes, people, etc., to the company they founded.
Grow fast, get big, establish monopoly power, and exit with billions.
I respect the founders of WeWork and UBER. I don't begrudge them for playing the Game hard and exiting with lots of money. I can't even fault them for how they played the Game because it required them to do precisely what they did. Could they have played nicely? Some people can; some people can't. Maybe Tim Cook is a nice guy. I don't know. Maybe Bill Gurley is a gentleman and only trying to help good people create great businesses.
Ordinary people will always pay attention to, marvel at, and wish they were the tough guy, the hero. The fantasy keeps us going in a world where nothing is more meaningful or valuable than money. If you take risks like the big Players, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail before getting started. If you are determined, you start again. Neither of these founders stopped creating startups after they were ousted. They made billions and continue to develop businesses—it's what they do. If they are genuinely fortunate, they've learned from their experiences and might do better next time. If they are psychopathic, they will continue using their talents to wreck things.
Whether a Player is a good guy, a bad guy, or a complex guy with fascinating nuances, they know how to use their money to protect themselves within a culture hungry for winners.
The creative destruction thing is at the core of American values.
Gangsters,
cowboys,
soldiers,
guns,
war,
power,
competition,
spectacle,
entertainment,
drugs,
alcohol,
lots and lots of religions,
speed,
tech,
progress,
life-extension,
the singularity,
AI,
Ex Machina,
Sex robots,
Al Capone,
Scarface,
award shows,
American Idol,
sports stadiums,
skyscrapers,
Ballers,
big oil,
big pharma,
union bosses,
876 military bases around the world,
forever wars,
political correctness,
social justice warriors,
the Far Right, the Alt-Left, Far Left, New Right, Leftish,
WOKE,
graffiti,
jazz,
rap,
hip-hop,
etc., etc.
Live Free or Die.
Go big or go home.
There are no limits.
Everyone can be a winner.
This culture is exciting as hell, and it will terminate our species sooner than we think.
Great stuff!
Be Skeptical of the Western Media's Account of the Ukraine War
There are many ways to look at an elephant as long as you never know it’s an elephant.
azov rehabilitated and the arming of civilians approved—behold, the meat grinder
To arrive at the truth, one must have a fine-grained understanding of many perspectives. Unfortunately, lies win the battles of The Great Game.
How many good Emporers and benevolent dictators have there been? The profit motive will always dictate to a faux democracy beholden to corporations.
I feel it’s imperative to augment your understanding of the war in Ukraine with perspectives from European intelligence experts with a broader understanding of the events in question and not entirely obedient to the status quo.
Rather than understanding the realities, complexities, and the fog of war in an unbiased way, we will follow the media narrative and cheer on a bloody war that could be limited or ended if we could understand the motives of the actors and had the power to do something.
Tragically, we will only watch as the players, the only people and entities that stand to benefit from death and destruction, do whatever they want while passing on the cost of the mayhem to us.
As a minority attempts to mitigate the madness and unravel the misinformation, as protests mount, people in Ukraine will be torn apart and killed.
I feel compelled to share this article because those paying attention over the past forty decades will have recognized a horrific and avoidable pattern. We shall have to repeat the lessons this pattern teaches us as many times as is necessary before we learn how to make and maintain peace or until our species is extinct. —SC
“Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.” — Lao Tzu
Former NATO Military Analyst Blows the Whistle on West’s Ukraine Invasion Narrative
Posted by SHEERPOST in English from:
THE MILITARY SITUATION IN UKRAINE
JACQUES BAUD
Former Colonel of the General Staff, former member of Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist in Eastern European countries.
What's Wrong With Joe Rogan
So what is wrong with Joe Rogan?
If you find Joe's podcast entertaining, nothing. If you want to learn something, read a book or use some of the thousands of excellent online resources to learn about any domain that interests you.
I think most people enjoy doing the work.
Podcasts, videos on tubes, and blogs have introduced me to many things I would not have known of if I didn't have them.
However, we should be careful to stay humble when our knowledge of a subject is shallow.
Always cross-reference extraordinary claims, and don't be afraid of experts. They are not all bad.
Can you recommend a good book you heard about on the Joe Rogan podcast?
Joe Rogan: Just an average Joe?
Looking into Ontological Coaching with Maximilian Hachtmann
ontological coaching is about generating positive changes in a client’s way of being.
Until I met Maximilian, I was not aware of Ontological Coaching. Through our conversations, I realized it could be a valuable transformational process for people who feel stuck. I’m looking forward to learning more by listening to Maximilian’s podcast.
Below are some takeaways from our conversation. I’m only scratching the surface. Contact Maximilian Casper Hachtmann to learn more.
transforming the way we understand and interpret ourselves and those around us
we are critical observers of ourselves and our relationships
we are constantly growing and changing
we can shape change
we can adapt our way of seeing the world
when we actively change, everything changes in subtle or significant ways
developmental integrated dynamics involve our emotions, language, and thoughts
we can better understand our internal narratives and beliefs
the process involves relationships
somatic psycho/physical awareness
Key Questions
“How am I observing this?”
“What is it about my way of being that has me observe this way?”
“What is it about my way of being that needs to shift so that I can observe differently?”
Ontological coaching helps people feel more confident, empowered, and inspired by letting go of beliefs, behaviors, and patterns that no longer serve them and embracing possibility.
We can change our perceptions, emotions, and attitudes and develop effective language and communication.
Manage one’s responses and emotions.
Recognize and understand the fears, triggers, motivators, and stories that keep us stuck.
find clarity about the following
How do I perceive?
How do I respond?
What thoughts keep me sad, paralyzed, and depressed?
Who and how do I forgive?
How am I taking care of myself?
Am I fulfilled?
What is my purpose?
What behaviors do I need to change to be clear, centered, and confident?
Mad Smile
We had so much; we were so well entertained, and laughter came so easily. When I see carefree young people laughing, my stomach tightens, and my heart feels like it's in someone's clenched fist.
We finally know what it means to be a nanosecond from doomsday.
Can we be forgiven? None of us could have prevented this.
The system's logic was intended to be akin to god's will and who can thwart god's will.
Will wealthy players enjoy a fulfilling existence in their bunkers, knowing that they can eat a month longer than the family in the village?
Will they feel wise that they moved out of harm's way in time?
In Beyond Good and Evil, after cautioning the reader that someone who fights monsters risks becoming a monster himself, Nietzsche said, "if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you?"
Most of our leaders are narcissistic sociopaths. They believe the destruction they cause is creative. Rewards for taking charge are plentiful in this world and even more significant in the next.
Men of action always know what must be done.
The Abyss represents the parts of ourselves that we fear, the aspect of our creative will that is god, or fears god, or hates, or is hated. When the Abyss stares back, it sees the weakness of the conscious ego that thinks it can control the Abyss. When the conscious self stares into the archaic unconscious, it realizes that we are darker and more animal than we like to admit.
Some may feel guilt or shame.
Ordinary folks don't dare to contemplate the Abyss, so it hypnotizes them.
At the end of the world, we are all monsters afraid to confront that truth. We summon the Devil to make the final, fatal blow, releasing us from fear.
When we fail to confront reality, reality swallows us whole like Moby Dick.
Still, we are assuaged. It is the Devil's fault.
And so, those of us who understand what it means to roll the boulder up the hill keep smiling while we stare into the Abyss.
What's Wrong With Yanis Varoufakis
The answer will quickly be apparent.
Yanis Varoufakis is a deep thinker with skin in the game, and he's been busy fighting for what he believes in for a long time.
Yanis Varoufakis
Here is a brief bio from Berliner Festspiele. "Berliner Festspiele stand for a cultural programme where the new becomes visible."
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and politician who, as Greece's finance minister in 2015, led the struggle against the European Union's and the International Monetary Fund's austerity and bank bailout policies. Since then, he co-founded DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement) and is the leader of MeRA25, DiEM25's political party in Greece. Before his election to Greece's Parliament, Varoufakis taught economics in universities in Britain, Australia, the United States, and Greece for three decades. He holds a chair in economic theory at the University of Athens and is Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Torino, Visiting Professor of Political Economy at King's College, London, and Doctor of the University Honoris Causa at the University of Sussex. His best-selling books include: "Adults in the Room: My struggle against Europe's and America's Deep Establishment" (London: The Bodley Head); "Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A brief history of capitalism" (London: The Bodley Head), "And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's crisis and America's economic future" (New York: Nation Books, 2016); and "The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy" (London: Zed Books, 2011,2015).
As with any public figure in politics, he has his opponents, detractors, and critics. An excellent place to start to understand what people have made of his work, particularly during the Greek debt crisis, start here: A critical review of the critical reviews of the book' Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis.
As Adam Tooze writes in his indispensable overview of the critiques, the debate around Yanis Varoufakis's account relates to Europe's political economy, and in particular to the question of how to break away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated the history of the "Old World" for decades, and what strategy to adopt to do it.
Here is a review of his recent book, which I have read, "Talking to My Daughter About the Economy."
And for a hard look at his book "Adults in the Room," which I have read, I refer you to this article from The New Republic:
"If you are not the sort of person who is already likely to read a 500-page book on the former Greek finance minister's efforts to save his country from the machinations of the International Monetary Fund, then you aren't going to become one because I leave you in suspense. So let me spoil Yanis Varoufakis's Adults in the Room for you now. He failed."
Yanis Varoufakis is currently active in a political movement he helped found, DiEM25.
"DiEM25 is a pan-European movement of democrats, united under the conclusion that the European Union will only survive if it is radically transformed."
I am sure you know where I stand already. Yanis Veoufakis is a flawed but committed campaigner for the progressive transformation of our current institutions. He is a good man trying his best to make a difference without allaying himself with the destructive forces that run our global political, financial, and economic system.
Have a look at this and decide what you think.
Is neutrality Ukraine's best option?
So let me tell you what motivated me to write this brief post. I often encounter trolls (sorry for the disrespect, but that's all you are) who have read something about someone somewhere and instantly decided that they hated someone based on an article or two. This form of narrow-minded and dogmatic judgment most likely arises because something about the critique of the person in question excited a response. The troll thinks, "Yes, this makes sense, so and so is an idiot, all bad, and I see it now. I vehemently concur with the article in the Economist or the New York Times or so-and-so’s blog.”
Generally speaking, most trolls have a shallow understanding of what they criticize. They may not even know much about the domains surrounding the subject, or if they do have some knowledge, it's based on having read a book or an article. People are three-dimensional, to say the least, and politics, economics, big business, and geopolitics are complex subjects.
A troll is comfortable with one sentence or two parroted from their meager sources that are supposed to sound final—a kind of mic drop. They will say things like: "She messed up this or that!" "He is responsible for wrecking everything!" No further comment needed, nothing constructive, no alternatives, not even an honorable mention of who would have done better, what might have been a better outcome, who might have been a better leader, or how things might have been done more effectively. "He's stupid, he's bad, enough said, and if you post anything ever again about this villain, I'll repeat myself until you finally understand how stupid you are to pay attention to this guy." Trust me, I am not immune to this kind of childishness, we are still living in the Trump era whether you believe it or not. (Giggle.)
I'd suggest people withhold their opinions until they have something constructive to say. Go back and study political philosophy, read up on various points of view on events, read primary sources concerning the subject from earnest people who have formed their opinions through hard work.
What have you done lately? Are you a Player?
Regardless of who you dislike or whether this little blog poster agrees with you or not, make an effort to provide good sources and arguments for your beliefs so I can learn something from you.
Maybe we will all be able to imagine our own, Another Now.
What Is Game B?
For over forty years I have thought that our way of doing things as a global civilization has to be redesigned. We need new systems, new institutions, new structures and most importantly new cultures. This is not to say that there are not many components of what we have now that would help constitute these new ways of managing human affairs.
UNDERSTANDING THE BLUE CHURCH—JORDON HALL
A number of folks noted that they were not familiar with the concept of the Blue Church and wondered what was meant by it. The Democratic Party? Liberalism? Progressivism? As I mentioned in SA:2017, I had originally lifted the idea wholesale from that Reddit post with only an intuitive sense that it (and its juxtaposition with a Red Religion) was useful and pointed at something real.
In this essay, I dive into the concept. Below I endeavor to provide an answer that is adequate to Deep Code. I believe that the results are well worth the effort, but this is not a simple journey. Few things of importance these days are. If we want to get to the bottom of the contemporary situation, we are going to have to get comfortable going deep.
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.