There isn’t such a phenomenon in my country, perhaps because there is more or less environmental awareness due to the waste crisis we dealt with couple of years ago, and the government and parliament’s role in exacerbating it. There were nationwide protests even. Yet the awareness didn’t go beyond trash disposal back then. As long as we hid our debris behind walls, the environment would be fine!
However, the last two years were different. We successfully protested against building a harmful dam, heavily invested in green energy, and climate change was at last acknowledged as the reason for this year’s horrendous weather (it only began to rain in the spring, which harmed crops).
Don’t put too much hope on apartment buildings. My country is plagued with buildings since it’s a passive source of income for wannabe landlords. In the last twenty years the entire coast was cluttered with concrete blocks and the countryside is witnessing a similar trend.
As long as population is uncontrollably accruing due to artificial economic growth, no solution will be adequate enough.
While those suburbs you have in America are a nightmare, this poster is too simplistic to give you a full picture of the situation.
My comment on the subject: it’s interesting, for me at least, the different way cultural property is perceived. For indigenous peoples, these items have a practical, mundane use. Meanwhile, colonialists of the previous age and museums consider them to be “historical artefact” to be studied and contemplated, even giving them a mystified caracter.
What makes a laymen science book popular is it being diluted enough to appease a wide range of demographics. Thus it will inevitably be filled with oversimplifications. And the more popular the less “adequate from the Marxist point of view” it is.
Nevertheless, the closest thing I can recommend to your liking is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. I didn’t read it, though Graeber is an anarchist (close enough) and the book was released fairly recently so it will contain fresh data and studies.
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I will refrain from debating our initial topic (including the insulin example) any further since nothing of worth can progress the conversation. I thank you nontheless for taking interest.
As for the eurocentrism of mathematics, there is an article that I’d recommend if it is of interest for you, “Western mathematics: the secret weapon ofcultural imperialism” by Alan Bishop.
“Surpassed” isn’t an accurate term; it implies that there exists an objective linearity in human development, which itself is a Western, modernist conception. The divergence in the values of different cultures leads also, more or less, to divergence in development.
The insulin example does not refute my thesis in particular.
Its discoverers released their patent cheaply in order for the world and common people to have unrestricted access.
This is technology in its decontextualized form…
American Medical Firms have intentionally restricted production and availability within that nation’s borders, ensuring they can profit grossly off of people’s need of it.
… And this is its long-term implications.
Even the conception of insulin is the product of modern medicine which concentrates on eliminating the side effects only temporarily. It is an artificial and unsustainable solution by my standards that will inevitably lead to exploiting it for “wrong” objectives.
And mathematics are only objective and universal in appearance, but in fact they are (predominantly eurocentric) constructs.
Maybe my theory requires refinement and a bit more nuance, but I still stand by the general idea.
I’d like to counter your argument and say that computers (and broadly speaking modern technology) are in their design and nature penchant for injustice and un-ethicality. They were afterall designed under a capitalist mode of production that emphasizes efficiency and profitability. Perhaps if we decontextualize technology, like you did up there, it might seem as neutral but if we take into consideration its history and its long-term prospects it will certainly show up in a negative light since it was designed to be used (and not abused) for the exploitation of the people.
I understand, however, what you’re saying concerning big firms exonerating themselves from their shady activities. I am not simply repeating the “technology bad” boomer argument, instead the technology is as bad as its creators and exploiters.
According to geopolitocs “experts”, what I’m inclined to believe is that every country is poised to become a major player, lol.
I don’t see anything going well for either continent to be fair. South America being used for big transit and trade projects is merely fulfilling the purposes of foreign powers. They might flourish for some time with such initiatives but I think it takes more than just that.
With (para)military groups roaming places of conflict, Africa is still far from achieving anything durable, not without stability. Intil it rids itself from the colonial legacy and, more urgently, neocolonialism, Africa will continue to suffer.
Regardless of the disease’s severity, the manipulations of the public opinion that occured to push government and corporate agendas aren’t to be dismissed.
Covid is a story how big pharma capitalized on the failure of industrial society and how governments increased surveillance and curbed civil rights under the guise of insuring public order.
If by “problem” you mean capitalism, then class conscious education is indeed central to the cause. A contrario, legal reform will never achieve real change if it is to be carried out prior to the fall of capitalism. In other words, you’d be only helping the status quo survive, since the direction of “reform” is always governed by the overarching system. And in a liberal, representative democracy controlled by bourgeois legislators, passing revolutionary laws is inconceivable. Instead, once the system is brought down from outside the legal realm, we can then speak of legal reconstruction.
Now, what the content of this legal reconstruction or of the aforementioned education is depends largely on the sociopolitical history of the region in question; it’s a no-size-fits-all matter.
You being a moderator of the anarchism community, how is law viewed from an anarchist perspective?
I think capitalism can destroy itself quicker than with intervention. When the State intervenes say, to legalize unions this does not mean that the proletariat got any closer to winning. This can only be construed as the formalization of class antagonism.
Even when it is apparently providing real or specific justice for deprived groups in society, the state always maintains the legal form, and its justice is always formal.
[A]dministration picks at specific problems, abstracts them within the legal form, thus inevitably leaving particular lacunae or creating new problems that cannot be solved by those moments of abstraction, to be dealt with by the next wave of administration, in response to class conflict.
Miéville, China. “Between Equal Rights”, p.111-12, 2005.
In addition, even when revolutionnaries themseleves, extra-legally, attempt to burn down capitalism, it may cause at best temporary harm to innocent people and at worst, if revolution fails, irreparable trauma. Either way, whether we actively or indirectly combat capitalism, the means will have to necessarily justify the ends. I think the best approach is to adopt an intermediary position: helping capitalism weaken itself then burn it down when it nears the brink of collapse.
A mind map tool for android.
There is a good non-FOSS app on the play store, Simplemind, which was tracker-free, required no internet connection and also had a healthy privacy policy. Sadly it stopped working because I don’t have google play services on my phone and it doesn’t let me through the license wall. Smh.
Many people see there’s the good and there’s the bad in many things in life, including AI. They believe that moderation and regulation is the ideal model. That is understandable and logical as long as we look at the issue from a decontextualized, abstract standpoint. What I propose is to look at things as an always changing process. When we tackle AI from a longterm-oriented framework, this technology tends to eventually become totalitarian and dystopian. It always starts with small, innocent steps.
Unlike many others, I haven’t been following the news of AI development. I didn’t even experiment with the technology, knowing that if I did I will become dependent on it. “But it will make your life easier!” But what for? What’s a life without hardships and effort? Why is technological development and efficiency deemed to be an intrinsic good?
This technology will eventually kill the human in us, because it is the activities we do that makes us and so abdication is suicide.
I understand your concerns.
What I would like to convey is that a vegan lifestyle can be just as easily commercialized by big agro-industrial corporations, and subsequently equally harm the environment of humans and other organisms alike. We should look beyond the debate on veganism and realize that it is the consumerist practices that are the main issue at hand.
I’m not simply saying that consumption of meat with moderation is the way to go. No, my argument goes further. Mass-produced meat is inherently harmful and no moderation can ever fix that. I propose instead buying smaller quantities of meat from local butcheries whose practices conform to good ethics and practices.
Meat consumption isn’t as damaging to the environment as what certain people perceive it to be. The problem lies in the unethical, capitalist practices of the meatpacking industry and its derivatives. We’re overproducing meat.
So no, a vegan diet isn’t an obligation but what is is reducing our meat consumption and stop feeding the animal-industrial complex.
Idk if it helps, but there used to be a person here who’d mess with CSS.
Check @ier’s community.
Paradoxically, the phenomenon of piracy (but also theft and similar crimes) is an integral feature of the capitalist system, even though such an act is deemed illegal and damaging to the values of free market.
Now the act itself does not intrinsically possess a revolutionary character. When browsing r/piracy, for example, one can notice that users who partake in piracy rarely have emancipatory sentiments in their philosophy. They operate from within the capitalist system and genuinely believe in the values maintained by capitalism. Their identity as pirates depends on its existence. Video games and movies today are the product of the capitalist system and, I suspect, they are the biggest source of ideological diffusion. Book piracy is a bit different, because pirates relate the activity to a noble idea or cause which is the openness of knowledge and the means to accumulate it, a sentiment that gives way to social consciousness.
It would be an overgeneralization to say that systemic “barter economies” never existed, they would probably emerge at certain instances like the case you’ve mentioned, though this article focuses on pre-tokenized economies. Still, the premise of this “gift economy” seemed shallow as described by the article. In a survivalist community, free and equitable distribution would be essential for the survival of said community; I’d assume each member had a certain task to accomplish (e.g. carpenter, food gatherer, fisher… etc.) in a way that makes them dependent on each other. So it’s not in the proper sense bartering, since one isn’t exchanging his services for another fixed commodity but is instead continuously and indefinitely providing; but nor is it a simple gift because of the interdependence of the members.
Create a github account and post an issue here https://github.com/uuttff8/Lemmy-iOS
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They’re only useful when paired with other majors, for example law. And by “useful” I mean profitable to your career.