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makingotherplans · 5 months

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Globalisation & Hybridity

To say that the world is constantly evolving might just be the most cliche thing that you can say nowadays. Some of you among hearing this statement might say, "duh, ofcourse", but I'm going to go out on a limb and go the total opposite direction. I am more inclined to think that those living on the benign side of globalisation) (Gómez-Pena, 2001), are in a constant, slow burn type state of intellectual devolution, while giving the illusion of constant evolution. More than ever, people have a (mis)conception of the world at their fingertips (Gómez-Pena, 2001). The sheer amount of information, entertainment, access to celebrities, porn, minority artwork, poetry, cultural capital, car crashes, footage of terrorist attacks, pictures of dead babies, sex trafficking, drug use, murder etc is overwhelming. I am not arguing anything new or original by writing about how every time we turn a corner we are bombarded by savage capitalism or a new found fascist style of libertarianism (Gómez-Pena, 2001). I am adding nothing of use to said argument by talking about how our excessive overexposure to violence in the media has caused worldwide compassion fatigue (Gómez-Pena, 2001), and I won't tell you that I have any idea what the hell is going on and how any of it can be fixed. For now what I'm mad about is the platforms, or the lack thereof that we are given to do anything about anything.

Growing up, I was always aware that our world was full of social, political, economic and environmental injustice. It was surrounding me. Adults at restaurants would talk about the latest article's at the dinner table. I would catch glimpses on peoples phones of violent videos. The older, cooler kids would be playing COD while the news flashed scenes from multiple wars currently happening around the world. Hell I couldn't open tumblr without seeing some kind of disturbing pornographic content (PTSD to a glimpse of a violent sex crime). There was no getting around it, the world isn't, and would never be in my lifetime the way that it ought to be. This affected me and my growing up. I was a sad teenager, I couldn't ignore what was happening around me like everyone else seemingly could. It drove me into a pit of despair, anger and confusion. If I was being forced to the exposure of these heinous things, what was i then to do about it? If I am trained to feel enormous amounts of guilt and pressure to act upon these issues, why am I not being provided the tools to do so?

After reading Guillermo Gómez-Pena's "The New Global Culture: Somewhere between Corporate Multiculturalism and the Mainstream Bizarre", I have been reminded of this lingering culpability that is always in the back of my mind. To answer the prompt, no I don't think that in this capitalist society, where we are forced to exploit ourselves and others in the name of a paycheck, that there is a global media practice that allows for cultural difference. Not to mention voicing the concern in a way that is deliberate and useful in any decision making processes.

My lingering guilt that's been newly reawakened has forced me to consider my habitus, my way of viewing the world. Through my lens, everything that is around is a tool to make money, especially off of the Other that is talked about a lot in Gomez-Pena's article. I feel as if my generation has been pulled into a trap of ravage consumerism, a market that promises results to fix your deeply rooted childhood trauma if you buy a subscription or a new diet pill, or get a nose job. Unfortunately this consumerism is fueled and sustained by "entire "third world" countries that have been turned into sweatshops." (Gómez-Pena, 2001). Everyone knows this, it's no secret, and no one is trying to hide this fact, yet we still actively and directly support it everyday. News coverage or any information about what's happening in these countries are quick to be covered up, and even when they do make the rounds, they are forgotten about overnight. Our ever growing compassion fatigue and humanitarian impotence has forced us to discard any information of the sort as a way of protecting itself from the violence that it unleashes (Gómez-Pena, 2001). If the people in these countries don't get a say, or any basic human rights, then what kind of global cultural media practise is going to make up for that? Why is it that I can travel to "third world" countries and experience the "wonders of the world", completely ignorant of the worldviews of others without suffering any consequences?

Globalisation has given privileged people the space to pick and choose what they like from each culture, and add it to their personality like a trophy on a shelf ("Look at me! Im cultured!") without having to do the work behind understanding what it is they're taking on. Hybridity, while positive in many aspects, holds western culture in the centre of what is acceptable. Only when aspects of the Other are reflected from a western point of view, and integrated into popular culture, often by influencers and celebrities, will the general public consider it as a legitimate intercultural revelation. I admit that I'm guilty of this, as I think we all are. However I must note that I am speaking in a generalised sense, through my habitus and lens of the world. This is what I am surrounded by and what is affecting my decision to write in this particular fashion about this particular topic. Even the platform I am using to write this is a product of the globalisation that I am trying to debunk an dbe angry about. Im being simultaneously pulled from every direction. To rebel and speak against certain topics requires a level of sacrifice (my sacrifice being using an illegitimate social media platform to write a journal prompt that no one with any power to fix the problems will see in order to submit an assignment).

I feel like I've gone on a bit of a rant, however everything relates to one another, and the way in which I've learned to filter, and pay closer attention to certain things. Through reading, and exposing myself to different worldviews I have gained a more well rounded view of the world. I have a long way to go, and will never completely know what it's like to live in poverty, have a minority voice, work in a sweatshop, or anything of the sort. I'm doing my best with what I have. These readings particularly have made me think about my own projects and how limited my view was up until now. By pursuing these projects, how can I make them more mindful and less "globalised"? Why is my point of view important?

Gómez-Peña, G. (2001). The new global culture: Somewhere between corporate multiculturalism and the mainstream bizarre (A border perspective). TDR: The Drama Review 45(1). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Masafumi, M. (2008). Transcultural flow of demure aesthetics: Examining cultural globalisation through gothic & Lolita fashion. New Voices 2, 21–40. https:// doi.org/10.21159/nv.02.02

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pale-silver-comb · 4 years

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So I know absolutely nothing about Leverage except what I've been seeing you post lately and I have to admit you're making it look tempting to watch! Can I ask what are some of your favorite things about the show/reasons you would suggest people watch it? And is there really a poly relationship that is canon?

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I am going to do my best not to just “asdfghkjl” at you and answer coherently.

In a nutshell, Leverage is about 5 people. 4 are criminals (Parker, Hardison, Eliot and Sophie) with different and unique skill-sets and 1 is an ex-insurance investigator (Nate) who, at one point or another in his career, has tracked down (or at least attempted to) the other 4. The whole show is essentially: man reluctantly reforms 4 criminals to use their criminal powers for good and 4 criminals move into man’s life and stubbornly refuse to leave because, goddammit, now they have morals.

I’ve got a lot of favourite things about the show but the main ones are as follows:

1. Found family. And I’m not talking about loners who come together to fight crime and happen to co-exist to the point where they realise they happen to have found themselves a family. I mean, Nate and Sophie are the Drunk Uncle and Wine Aunt who somehow become Mom and Dad to 3 beautiful criminal children. Mom and Dad love their criminal babies and the kids love them (as well as each other, but we’ll come to that in a moment). You get amazing family moments such as: Mom and Dad packing the kids lunch before sending them out to kick corporate greed’s ass; Mom and Dad giving the kids ridiculously expensive and personal Christmas presents causing their most Grumpy Kid to go very very quiet and soft as he runs off to gleefully play with his new murder toy; the kids interrupting Mom and Dad’s big Movie Style Kiss to ask if they can please keep their new underground layer and huffing and puffing when Dad tells them no.

2. Found family: the OT3 edition. To answer your question, the OT3 is indeed canon, confirmed by the creator. Now, usually, “confirmed by the creator” infuriates me because most of the time it’s a way for a creator to be seen as “progressive” without doing anything to actually be progressive. That isn’t the case here. The OT3 are built up carefully and while it is obvious the creators didn’t originally intend for all 3 of them to become a relationship in the romantic sense, by mid-season 5 we are given a very clear picture of where Parker, Hardison and Eliot are heading in their relationship. There aren’t any kisses at the end to signal this but there are solid marriage vows in not only one but two episodes. (And by marriage vows I mean literal equivalents of marriage vows: “for better or worse” and “’til death do us part”. I’m not even exaggerating). The OT3 also doesn’t need explicit romantic narratives to convey how much they love each other. Their love is laced through the whole show, from the way they teach each other things to the way they respond to each other and work as a unit. The way they fiercely protect and admire each other. Like someone once said, if you need characters to kiss or say I love you to let the audience know they love each other, you are writing them wrong.

Aside from that, each of the parings in the OT3 are just. Gah. They are so well done, with friendship being the solid basis for them all. The creators never expect the audience to assume anything about them or fill in the gaps. They give us their relationships on screen and reference many things off-screen to show us how these relationships continue to build in between episodes.

Hardison and Parker are a canon couple and date in the show: it’s approached slowly and they are so goddamned sweet. They are basically every fluffy slow-burn trope with a healthy dash of mutual pining in the mix. They are basically that quote “love is patient, love is kind”. (I would like to add their romance never becomes the focus of the show or overrides the importance of any other relationship they have with the other characters, especially Eliot.)

Hardison and Eliot are the Old Married Couple and from day one are already bickering and looking at each other/making comments that are found in every UST fic ever (not to mention Hardison has a very good knack for making Eliot grin like a little kid, when usually he’s basically an Angry Little Chef Man). They argue, they play, and love each other plain as day.

Parker and Eliot are more subtle but every bit as wonderful. They have an unspoken connection and understand each other on a level no-one else can. Parker and Eliot are not good with giving themselves over to affection for different reasons (and Hardison plays a central role in helping them realise it’s okay to want it and have it- that boy has endless patience) but there is something so beautiful in the way the two of them come together on their own and develop their own special bond that works for them. Parker and Eliot are that trope where the characters don’t need to speak to understand each other perfectly. They just do. Their love language is a lot of the time non-verbal but speaks volumes. (Parker also likes to annoy the hell out of Eliot and Eliot....just.....lets...her. Because he’s soft. The softest, grumpiest boy.)

I could go into so much depth for each pairing and their dynamics as a 3 but that's for another post.

3. Subverting stereotypes. There is the occasional hiccup in the show regarding stereotypes but ultimately, Leverage gets an A+ when it comes to writing characters and making them 3 dimensional people who are not defined by certain characteristics or events. Nate could so easily fall into the White Man Pain trope where he uses the trauma of losing his kid as a reason as to why he is entitled to act like a dick. Nate is a dick but he doesn’t use his pain to excuse it and I appreciate that. Hardison is a black man who is soft and nurturing. Easily the most empathetic and patient of the group. He’s nerdy, an actual genius, and has the biggest heart of all the characters. Nate is maybe the glue but Hardison is definitely the heart. Media’s usual aggressive, amongst other, racist stereotypes can fuck right off. Parker is canonically autistic (I am sure this was confirmed by one of the creators) and she is not defined by it. It’s not written as some kind of singular personality trait. It’s part of what makes up Parker but it’s only one facet of who she is and not once is her actions, thoughts or feelings treated like a joke. Sometimes people don’t understand why she does and says the things she does but it’s met with patience and fondness over the course of the show. Equally, it’s not met with over-caution. Parker is just Parker. No-one tries to change her. The other nice thing is Hardison, who always makes sure Parker knows she’s amazing because of who she is and not in spite of it. Finally, Sophie is in her 40s. She’s not treated like she’s past her prime. Ever. She’s sexy, smart and never is she pitted against or compared to Parker (who is younger) for anything. Sophie is amazing and there’s never even a conversation of “I may be older but I am still *insert adjective typically associated with younger women here*”. Sophie is possibly the first female character I’ve ever seen who isn’t just unapologetic about her age but has never had to apologise for her age. It’s a non-issue and that’s that. The women on the show are written so well, right down to secondary characters and it’s beyond refreshing.

4.) It’s just fun. The show has a “monster of the week” type format. Except instead of a ghoul or a ghost, the monster is some corrupt wealthy and powerful individual or organisation. The show draws on real-life individuals to do this and therefore closely parallels real-life people and events. It addresses important political, economical, social and environmental issues while at the same time remaining fun and light-hearted. The characters constantly get the chance to play dress up and by GOD do they have fun with it. You get to watch Eliot beat up bad guys in the most delightful of ways, usually after a witty non-sequitur and with a weapon you’d never think could be a weapon. The dialogue and back and forth between the characters is everything. And finally - my favourite thing- the team can never resist striking a dramatic pose after they’ve taken down the bad guy, making sure the bad guy sees them. I mean, they COULD just walk away, satisfied they’ve taken the person down, but nope. They gotta be dramatic bitches 24/7 and pose like they are models for every single month of this year’s Criminal Calendar.

5.) Competence Porn. So. Much. Competence Porn.

Honestly, I could list a thousand reasons for why Leverage is amazing but to list them would to be spoiling so many amazing moments you’d get to discover for the first time on your own if you do choose to watch it. It’s the kind of show you can watch with an eagle-eye and sink your teeth into. But it’s also the kind of show if, you would prefer, put on in the background for something entertaining while you do something else. Each episode is about the job at hand but it’s made up of so many moments between the characters that show how much the creators and writers care about them. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll do whatever it is you do when something Soft and Wonderful happens that makes your heart melt. I am so beyond grateful for Leverage. It’s everything I always wanted in a show. Nearly every show I’ve watched in the past 10 years has disappointed me in some way, usually either because the writers run out of steam or characters who I love are treated poorly or given some kind of unnecessary “shock value” arc. Leverage doesn’t do that. Leverage is what it says on the bottle. Fandom isn’t something I joined because I needed canon fix-its. Fandom only enhances and celebrates an already excellent canon.

#leverage #leverage ot3 #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #sophie devereaux #nate ford #talk leverage to me

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Political economy vs inflation

As Biden lays out ambitious plans to stimulate the US economy and fight inequality with new money creation (spending) and money destruction (higher taxes on corporations, capital gains and the right), a firing squad of economists assembled to issue dire inflation warnings.

They're repeating the economic doctrine of the pasty 40 years, an austerity doctrine that focuses on the inflationary risks of "deficit spending" (when governments don't tax as much money out of the economy as they inject in the same year).

It's a doctrine that made a pretense to being a science, going to far as to create a fake "Nobel Prize" in economics in a bid for scientific credibility (the Nobel administrators eventually folded the economics prize into its administrative remit).

The "neoclassicals" used abstract equations to "prove" a bunch of economic truths that - purely coincidentally - made rich people much, much richer and poor people much, much poorer.

Tellingly, the most exciting development in economics of the past 50 years is "behavioral economics" - a subdiscipline whose (excellent) innovation was to check to see whether people actually act the way that economists' models predict they will.

(they don't)

It's this vain, discredited and shambolic group who have assembled behind leaders like Larry Summers to decry Biden's stimulus spending plans, insisting that we are flirting with hyperinflation and the collapse of the USD as a global reserve currency.

But economists aren't the last word in understanding stimulus and inflation. If you're trying to figure out whether Summers is right and inequality, poverty and crumbling infrastructure are the price of American stability, it's worth checking out the *political* economists.

Here's a great place to start: Brown University economist Mark Blyth's interview with The Analysis, available in audio, video, and as a transcript:

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/mark-blyth-the-inflated-fear-of-inflation/

Blyth doesn't dismiss Summers' inflationary fears out of hand, but he does say that Summers is vastly overestimating the likelihood that stimulus spending will trigger inflation - Summers says there's a 1-in-3 chance of inflation, while Blyth says it's more like 1-in-10.

To understand the difference, it's useful to first understand what we mean by inflation: "a general, sustained rise in the level of all prices."

It's not a short-term spike (like we saw with GPUs when everyone upgraded their gaming rigs at the start of the pandemic).

It's also not an asset-bubble. House prices in Toronto are high, but that's not inflation. They're high because "Canada stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into an asset class and let the 10 percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other."

For inflation to happen in the wake of the stimulus, the spending would have to lead to too much money chasing not enough goods. Blyth gives some pretty good reasons to be skeptical that this will happen.

Start with the wealthy: they don't spend much, relative to their income. Their consumption needs are already met (that's what it means to be rich). You can only own so many Sub-Zero fridges, and even after you fill them with kobe beef and Veuve Cliquot, you're still rich.

What rich people do with extra money is *speculate*. That's why top-level giveaways generate socially useless, destructive asset bubbles. Remember, these aren't inflation, which is good, because everyone agrees that inflation is hard to stop once it gets going.

They're speculative bubbles. We have a much better idea of how to prevent bubbles: transaction taxes, hikes to the capital gains tax, and high marginal tax rates at the top bracket.

Okay, fine, so the rich won't be able to spend us into inflation after a broad stimulus, but what about poor people? Well, the bottom 60% of the US is grossly indebted, suffocating under medical debt, student debt and housing debt. A *lot* of that will disappear.

That will transfer a lot of stimulus money from poor people to rich people (who own the debt), which is why we need high capital gains and top-bracket taxation. But it will also sweep away a vast swathe of the financialized economy.

The point of long-term debt isn't to get paid off - it's to generate ongoing cash-flows that can be securitized and turned into bonds. Securitization converted "advanced" economies into shambling, undead debt-zombies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

It's securitization that led to the 2008 financial crisis, and it's securitization that sustains Wall Street's speculative acquisition of every single-family dwelling for sale in America as part of a bid to turn every home into an extractive slum.

Blythe explains that if the rich have nothing to buy and the poor use most of their stimulus to get out of debt, it will likely reorient the US economy to useful things: creating jobs to make stuff that people want to buy.

But what about the dollar's status as a global reserve currency? Won't all that stimulus send other countries scurrying around for another form of national savings? Blyth's answer is pretty convincing.

First, because there aren't any great alternatives: the European economy is growing at half the rate of the US. The Chinese economy is booming, but if you buy Chinese assets, there's a good chance you'll never be able to get them out of China.

Gold? Bitcoin? Leave aside the deflationary risk of pegging your currency to an inelastic metal or virtual token, leave aside the environmentally devastating effect of cryptocurrency (cryptos consume enough energy to offset the entire planetary solar capacity!).

Instead, think of the volatility of these assets, with their drunken, wild swings - countries that dump USD due to inflationary fears are hardly likely to switch to a crypto that can lose 20% of its value in a day.

And remember how much of that volatility is driven by out-and-out fraud, with major crypto exchanges and gold schemes imploding without warning, taking hundreds of millions of dollars with them. This is not a stable alternative to the dollar!

Beyond the lack of an alternative, there's another reason to believe that the USD will remain a global reserve, as Blyth elegantly explains.

Think of a Chinese company supplying the US market. Chances are, that's actually US company's subcontractor, getting paid in USD.

These end up swapped with the Chinese central bank for Chinese money, because Chinese companies need to pay salaries, rent, and other expenses in Renminbi, not dollars. The Chinese central bank holds onto the USDs, using them as a national savings, a reserve currency.

If China were to dump all its USD holdings into the world economy, it would tank the US dollar - which is to say, it burn China's own national savings. China's central bank needs to do something with those dollar savings, so they buy 10-year US T-bills.

Same goes for Germany - net exporters depend on a net importer to buy their stuff, and primarily that's the USA. They are stuck in a form of "monetarily assured destruction," and a crisis of confidence is unlikely "because you’ve got nowhere else to take your confidence."

Next, Blyth takes up is the proposed increase in the corporate tax rate, and he says that investors are actually surprisingly okay with this - he reminds us of Buffett's maxim, "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

A hike in the corporate tax rate has the potential to reveal which of the "great" firms "are just really good at tax optimization" rather than efficient production. It'll smash those unproductive firms to pieces that can be bought by good firms for pennies on the dollar.

The final issue that Blyth takes up is an excellent one for this May Day: the relationship of higher wages to inflation. When the US had large, centrally managed industries with large, centralized unions, there was the risk that higher prices would trigger higher wages.

But the US doesn't have a unionized workforce with guaranteed COLA inflationary rises - there's no "wage-price spiral" risk of higher prices leading to higher wages and then higher prices.

The neoclassical theory of wages is based on the "marginal productivity" and "higher than outside option" theories: wage-levels are the product of how much money they stand to make from your work, and how much someone else is willing to pay you to work for them.

But economists like Suresh Naidu describe how high-tech surveillance can disrupt this equilibrium: you can spy on workers instead of paying them more, can impose onerous conditions on them that wring them of everything they can produce.

This kind of bossware was once the exclusive burden of low-waged, precarious workers, but thanks to the shitty technology adoption curve, it is working its way up the privilege gradient to increasingly elite workforce segments.

Digital micromanagement went from the factory floor to remote customer-support reps to office workers who are minutely surveilled by Office 365, all the way up to MDs and other elite professionals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

This has led to increased profits for firms - firms now take a larger share of their productivity gains, and workers see stagnant or declining wages. That excess profit represents slack in the system.

It means that even if companies' costs go up, they can hold prices steady - all they need to do is reduce their retained profits.

We've had 40 years of price stability at the expense of a living wage for working people.

Higher wages are only inflationary if we assume that the 1% will continue to extract vast sums from their investments and use them to kick off destructive asset bubbles.

Image: badsci https://www.flickr.com/photos/7941730@N06/8625213990/

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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The University of California system is getting rid of its SAT/ACT requirement. More will follow.

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments of public K-12 schools, of aggregates and averages of students. The SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and similar tests are oriented towards individual ability or aptitude; they exist to show prerequisite skills to admissions officers. (And, in one of the most essential purposes of college admissions, to employers, who are restricted in the types of testing they can perform thanks to Griggs v Duke Power Co.) Sure, sometimes researchers will use SAT data to reflect on, for example, the fact that there’s no underlying educational justification for higher graduation rates1, but SATs are really about the individual. State K-12 testing is about cities and districts, and exists to provide (typically dubious) justification for changes to education policy2. SATs and similar help admissions officers sort students for spots in undergraduate and graduate programs. This post is about those predictive entrance tests like the SAT.

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are.

1. SATs/ACTs don’t predict college success. They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true.

…

2. The SATs only tell you how well a student takes the SAT. This is perhaps a corollary to 1., and is equally wrong. They tell us what they were designed to tell us: how well students are likely to perform in college. But the SATs tell us about much more than college success. Let me run this graphic again.

…

3. SATs just replicate the income distribution. No. Again, asserted with utter confidence by liberals despite overwhelming evidence that this is not true. I believe that this research represents the largest publicly-available sample of SAT scores and income information, with an n of almost 150,000, and the observed correlation between family income and SAT score is .25. This is not nothing. It is a meaningful predictor. But it means that the large majority of the variance in SAT scores is not explainable by income information. A correlation of .25 means that there are vast numbers of lower-income students outperforming higher-income students. Other analyses find similar correlations. If SAT critics wanted to say that “there is a relatively small but meaningful correlation between family income and SAT scores and we should talk about that,” fair game. But that’s not how they talk. The routinely make far stronger claims than that in an effort to dismiss these tests all together, such as here by Yale’s Paul Bloom. (Whose work I generally like.) It’s just not that hard to correlate two variables together, guys. I don’t know why you wouldn’t ever ask yourselves “is this thing I constantly assert as absolute fact actually true?” Well, maybe I do.

In general, progressive and left types routinely overstate the power of the relationship between family wealth and academic performance on all manner of educational outcomes. The political logic is obvious: if you generally want to redistribute money (as I do) then the claim that educational problems are really economic problems provides ammo for your position. But the fact that there is a generic socioeconomic effect does not mean that giving people money will improve their educational outcomes very much, particularly if richer people are actually mildly but consistently better at school than poorer for sorting reasons that are not the direct product of differences in income. That is, what correlation does exist between SES and academic indicators might simply be the metrics accurately measuring the constructs they were designed to measure.

And throwing money at our educational problems, while noble in intent, hasn’t worked. (People react violently to this, but for example poorer and Blacker public schools receive significantly higher per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools, which should not be a surprise given that the policy apparatus has been shoveling money at the racial performance gap for 40 years.) All manner of major interventions in student socioeconomic status, including adoption into dramatically different home and family conditions, have failed to produce the benefits you’d expect if academic outcomes were a simple function of money. I believe in redistribution as a way to ameliorate the consequences of poor academic performance. There is no reason to think that redistribution will ameliorate poor academic performance itself.

5. SATs are easily gamed with expensive tutoring. They are not. This one is perhaps less empirically certain than the prior two and on which I’m most amenable to counterargument, but the preponderance of the evidence seems clear to me in saying that the benefits of tutoring/coaching for these tests are vastly overstated. Again, a simplistic proffered explanation for a troublesome set of facts that then implies simplistic solutions that would not work.

6. Going test optional increases racial diversity. This one, I think, must be called scientifically unsettled. However both Sweitzer, Blalock, and Sharma and Belasco, Rosinger, and Hearn find no appreciable increase in racial diversity after universities go test-optional. “Holistic” application criteria like admissions essays almost certainly benefit richer students anyway. What’s more, we have to ask ourselves what “diversity” really means in this context. Private colleges and universities keep the relevant data close to the vest, for obvious reasons, but it’s widely believed that many elite schools satisfy their internal diversity goals for Black students by aggressively pursuing wealthy Kenyan and Nigerian international students, whose parents have the means to be the kind of reliable donors that such schools rely on so heavily. I’m not aware of a really comprehensive study that examines this issue, and it would be hard to pull off, but the relevant question is “do various policies intended to improve diversity on campus actually increase the enrollment of American-born descendants of African slaves?” I can’t say, but you can guess where my suspicions lie.

…

All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

…

The racial achievement/performance gap is a curious thing even in the context of an American political discourse that seems to get more bizarre by the day. That the gap exists is, on balance, not controversial. Gaps in performance are observed on essentially every measured academic metric, though the size of the effects vary from context to context, and the general distribution is Asian American students at the top, white students next, then Hispanic, then Black. The Black-white gap in particular has shrunk from the era of (explicitly) segregated schools but progress has not been consistent or linear. Most people in academia and politics admit it exists: prominent Black politicians like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris reference it, every major think tank and foundation operating in the educational space identifies it as a major priority, and the NAACP used to address if often, though their Education and Education Strategy pages have recently disappeared so it’s hard to know where they stand now. These things are faddish but once upon a time every other dissertation written by someone getting a PhD in Education was about the gap. We can observe it even outside of reference to controversial tests, such as noting that the white high school graduation rate is 10% higher than that for Black students. The achievement gap is a thing.

And yet I also find a rapidly-congealing social prohibition against talking about these gaps in progressive spaces. If you refer to a racial achievement gap in a lot of liberal or left contexts now, you’ll find that people clam up fast and get visibly uncomfortable, even if you take pains to point out that an academic achievement gap does not imply an academic potential gap. People just don’t want to acknowledge that gaps exist at all; our racial discourse appears to have become such a blunt instrument that the acknowledgement of racial difference is controversial even when you preface discussion with the belief (that I hold) that the gap is the product of innumerable environmental and sociocultural factors rather than genetics or other inherent differences. Simply saying “Black students consistently score lower on tests like the SATs, have lower average GPAs, and have worse metrics on ancillary concerns like truancy” - again, Barack Obama’s position, Kamala Harris’s position, Cory Booker’s position - is enough for people to start launching into harangues about the inherent violence of those comparisons. People just do not want to talk about this stuff.

…

Those concerns with group differences, at least, have some sort of basic political logic and are amenable to complaints that they are the product of systemic inequality. (They are, but not the inequalities that people think, and again the SAT gap is a result of systemic inequality, not a cause of systemic inequality.) More disturbing to me is the rise of resistance within academia to the notion of inequalities between individuals. When I was in grad school more than a half-decade ago, I observed with some considerable unhappiness that it had become increasingly socially unacceptable to speak of some students as simply better students than others, as being more talented, harder working, or more prepared. All of this was seen as inegalitarian and, eventually, as “white supremacist” even if every student being compared in a given context was white. There were many instructors back then who bragged about giving all students As, etc., and I must assume this practice has only grown over time. In the humanities and social sciences especially there is a growing movement to reject assessment, including grading - the means through which we sort better students from worse - as the hand of illegitimate power that “does violence” to the students who voluntarily attend college.

…

Of course, that complicity in the neoliberal machine is not some recent injustice; it is the very reason that colleges and universities are funded by our society at all. If this trend continues, not just eliminating SAT requirements or increasingly refusing to hierarchize students with grades but in rejecting the entire sorting function of the university, academia will collapse. Wealthy parents aren’t paying Harvard to enrich their children in the humanistic sense. They’re paying Harvard to act as a marker of their child’s superiority in the labor market and the social hierarchy. Employers value college because it provides at least some meaningful information about who will succeed as a worker; remove that function and the financial justification for a hideously expensive system dies. I would love if education dropped its association with meritocracy, but that cannot occur within our current system. The professors who self-aggrandize through their rejection of their hierarchizing function, if successful, would cause the doom of the modern university. (These tenured radicals, of course, never are so moved by the inherent inequities of academia that they quit the profession.)

Today, it is somehow controversial to say “some people are smarter than others,” a reflection of one of the simple brute realities of human life and something that has been accepted as true for thousands of years.

Here is the essence of it: hierarchies of relative academic performance are remarkably stable throughout life, due to differences in inherent or intrinsic academic ability of whatever origin, and the SATs and similar mechanisms reveal those differences in a way that liberal America is increasingly unable to accept. This is the source of all of this angst, not the technical details of whether a test is fair or valid or just, but a liberal intelligentsia that is incapable of honestly confronting the fact that different human beings have fundamentally different intrinsic abilities. I believe in political equality, social equality, equality of rights, equality of dignity, equality of protection under the law. But the notion that all people are equally talented, in academics or anything else, is an absurdity, and as much as people will rush to deny intrinsic difference, I suspect that pretty much everybody knows that they are real. When you were a child you casually assumed that some of your classmates were naturally better at school than others, and you did because it was true.

This is the conversation that I tried, and failed, to force with my book: left-of-center political movements, from center-left to radically socialist, cannot achieve the goal of the greater good for everyone, including greater political and economic equality, while pretending that we believe in equality of human ability. The only way to intelligently address various social, economic, and political equalities related to differences in human potential is to acknowledge that those differences exist. The current rending of garments regarding inequalities within our education system has led to certifiably bizarre situations like the movement, currently gathering steam, to teach math as if it is as subjective as literature or art. But this won’t make Black kids or poor kids or girls or anyone else actually better at math. And if the universities really give up their function of creating an academic hierarchy for political reasons, employers will find new systems that do that, or a lot of people will get hired and quickly fired for not being competent. This is not an intelligent policy approach. Getting rid of the SATs won’t make unprepared kids prepared. It won’t make naturally untalented students naturally talented. It won’t make kids who aren’t smart into smart kids. All it will do is hide the reality of those unpleasant inequalities.

#freddie deboer #read the whole thing #substack

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aowski · 3 years

Text

Changing the Narrative

It seems that death is coming at us from all sides these days. Police shootings, mass shootings, road-rage shootings, COVID deaths, and the execution spree of the last administration.

What most of us know about the death penalty in America, we probably gleaned from movies like “The Green Mile”. In our minds, we confine it geographically and historically to the old South. I propose that it encompasses more of our lives than we care to admit. We just don’t see it and recognize it as such. The sentence of death hangs over all of us. We’ve become numb to all the ways this is true, especially if it doesn’t directly affect us or our demographic today. But executions are happening daily in this country. It might help if these executions were categorized:

Judicial Execution - Death administered by the State, as a punishment for a capitol crime, usually for being too poor to afford a proper defense.

Civil Execution - Death administered by law enforcement as punishment for no reason at all except being a poor person of color.

Stochastic Execution - Death administered randomly in a public place by another person by reason of their own uncontrolled rage and easy access to military-grade firearms.

Domestic Execution - Death administered by a significant other, usually an aggrieved spouse or lover. Again rage combined with easy access to firearms. May result in stochastic execution of others.

Policy Execution - Death administered by state austerity that neglects human well-being. Reverend Barber’s “Policy Violence”.

Economic Execution - Death administered by poverty. Holes in the social safety net coupled with grievous inequality depriving people of access to food, water, shelter, and healthcare.

Environmental Execution - Death by industrial pollution, its toxic effects on food, water, or air, and climate change.

Epidemiological Execution - Death by a communicable virus that spreads like wildfire because of government negligence, politicization, assertion of personal freedom, and utter disregard for the well-being of others.

Self Execution - Death caused by our own hand. More than the act itself. The culmination of untreated depression, bi-polar illness, or hopelessness, i.e. the psychic death that precedes it.

Taken together, the result is...

Actuarial Execution - The reduced lifespan resulting from living in the United States. With a life expectancy of 78.5 years (per a WHO 2019 report), we have fallen to 40th among the world's nations in life expectancy! These are Life-years stolen! How did we get here? What is it about America that has made 39 others countries a better place, a place to live longer?

We have accepted a "culture of death", a phrase coined by Pope John Paul II. The Psalmist called it “the Shadow of Death”. In this country, the culture of death began with genocide of the indigenous, but gained an enduring foothold with slavery.

Slavery was the foundation of the economy at our country’s inception and was well-represented at the Constitutional Convention:

Let us consider the first fifty years of our national history. There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.— John Jay Chapman

Much of our Constitution was an agreement made by compromising with slave-holding states and interests. The most notorious artifact was the “three-fifths” clause which counted slaves as 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of apportionment, thus giving the slave-holding states disproportionate representation. The Second Amendment is another concession to the interests of slavery. By the time of the Convention, “Slave Patrols” were well established in the South. There was concern that Article 1, Section 8, giving Congress the power to form and finance armies could gain control of state militias. Virginia would not ratify the Constitution unless the Second Amendment was included.

The cohesion (and fragmentation) within our society is based on identity. Too often this identity is not based so much on common interests, but on caste.

Identity is not who we define ourselves to be, but who we define ourselves to not be. More to the point, we understand ourselves to be in a hierarchy, so we define ourselves by who we are above.

They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.—James Baldwin

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." —Lyndon B. Johnson

It is a human failing that we need a scapegoat to blame others for our shortcomings and vulnerabilities. White people impugn our shadow on Black people and other minority groups. Everything White America refuses to believe about itself, hates about itself, is projected onto people of color.

The white man's unadmitted and apparently, to him, unspeakable-private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. —James Baldwin

Of all the things we want to push away from ourselves, the certainty of our death is chief among them. Yet...

Mortality the reality that we are most adept at denying.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

—James Baldwin

And, again, White America, finds it convenient to avoid the reality of death by projecting it on others:

White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.

—James Baldwin

Is this is why White America has been so indifferent to the suffering and death of Black Americans? Per CDC data, life expectancy for Black Americans is approximately five years less than the population as a whole. Indifference may not be imputation, but it does translate into the lack of political will to change things.

Racism is the Poison. Although inequality disproportionately affects people of color, all working and middle-class people are struggling to survive. Compared against other wealthy Western nations, America’s systemic ills are dragging us all down into the shadows of death.

...racism is a poison first consumed by its concocters. What's clearer now in our time of growing inequality is that the economic benefit of the racial bargain is shrinking for all but the richest. The logic that launched the zero-sum paradigm-I will profit at your expense-is no longer sparing millions of white Americans from the degradations of American economic life as people of color have always known it.

—Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us)

Solidarity is the alternative and people are waking up to it:

Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a "Solidarity Dividend," from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action. And the benefits weren't only external. I didn't set out to write about the moral costs of racism, but they kept showing themselves. There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don't know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but I met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial healing in their communities.

—Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us)

A New Way, a way of life, a way of economic security is possible, but only if we seize the moment we are in. A moment of crisis is also a moment of opportunity. As we come out of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, more people are facing the bankruptcy of 40 years of trickle-down Reaganomics.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced —James Baldwin

The politics and messaging of racial scapegoating is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Race-baiting and fear are the tools used against solidarity. The answer is a new story, a race-class narrative.

If we lead with a shared value, that means race and class, for example, ‘Whatever your race, gender, or religion, most of us work hard for our families. Every child, regardless of where they come from, deserves a chance to pursue their dreams.’ Reminding us of our common humanity (that’s a good place to start) and then saying that racial scapegoating is a weapon that economically harms all of us. You’re actually putting a shot in your listeners’ arm, inoculating them, so the next time they hear that racial scapegoating, they have antibodies for it. —Heather McGhee

This is the pivotal moment we find ourselves in. Our choices are to continue with the old story of racism, division, and death or to embrace a new story, a story of solidarity and an abundance. This can happen when we realize we are more than "The Sum of Us" (McGhee).

#death #execution #police brutality #COVID #white #black #life expectancy #zero sum #inequality #political #solidarity #baldwin #heather mcghee #identity #racism #trickle down economics #resentment #race-class #the sum of us

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evilelitest2 · 4 years

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Why do fascists hate capitalism?

Good question. About half the reasons they hate capitalism are the same reason most leftist do, bad people are still likely to be annoyed at a bad thing that hurts them. Here are the other reasons

1) Fascists don’t believe in social mobility. Capitalism core tenant is “social mobility’, that somebody can work hard and become a billionaire, blah blah blah. Now this focus on social mobility is and always has been mostly a lie, but even rhetorically capitalism values the notion of social advancement. fascists do not, in fascist ideology, your birth determines your place in the world, and is part of a “natural order”. The only way to improve yourself is through war, and even that is more fulfilling your existing destiny rather than creating your own. Thus Fascists despises any form of social advancement outside military leadership, which is a major reason why they hate liberalism, socialism and communism, but its also a reason why they hate capitalism (though they usually prioritize the left wing ideologies first). This is even more true for them when somebody they think is “inferior” advances ‘above their station. Fascists aren’t aristocratic, but they hate capitalism for much of the same reason that the feudal aristocrats and monarchs hated it. It brings change and challenges the caste system

(Speaking of which)

2) On that note, capitalism is rarely…ideologically racist. Now capitalism is racist, it promotes and enforces existing racial hierarchies, and much of the damage of colonialism can be laid at the feet of capitalism. However capitalist ideology rarely buys directly into blood purity or “The Volk” style race theory that fascists so love. Capitalism in the US makes it super difficult for a black man to advance compared to his white counterpart, but if a black man does manage to become a billionaire, capitalism is basically cool with it. If you look at a demographic breakdown of the 1%, it is mostly old white men (and almost all people who at least partially inherited their wealth) but it also includes a lot of non white people and women. its a minority and many of them come from dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, China ect) but the ‘richest people in the world club isn’t entirely monochromatic. To leftists, this doesn’t seem especially impressive, but to fascists it is way too much diversity. Because capitalism is at its heart…amoral, the system will keep going even if the 1% are majority non white, gay or women, but to fascists that is terrifying. they barely tolerate capitalism because the ruling class are mostly straight white dudes, but the thought of the ruling class not overlapping with their belief in racial science to them is terrifying

3) Capitalism is ultimately an amoral system. It doesn’t really believe in a larger ideology beyond “make a fuck ton of money” and “innovate…somehow.” It does evil things because it believes that doing so will make them money, if doing the right thing will make them more money, they will. Capitalism is just an utterly mercenary ideology, and will gladly pretend to support progressive causes if it turns a profit. Again, leftists (rightly) aren’t big fans of this, but fascists hate it for the same reason we do honestly.

Like you know the whole “Woke capitalism” thing that gets leftists worked up. its doing something good but you know they don’t care and so they will abandon us the moment they feel like they can get away with it and all that. That is how fascists feel about the racism in capitalism, they like it but because it is not ideological, they don’t trust it.

Again this seems weird to leftists, but yes, fascists don’t like capitalism because it isn’t racist enough. We tend to interact with capitalism more than fascism, so people often don’t realize how much worse it can get

4) Capitalism doesn’t care about the spiritual, except as something to sell. ironically for all the hatred capitalism and communism have for each other, the two ideologies actually share a lot in common, they are super secular, materialist, and basically assume that everything in the world is nothing more than simply products. Communists and capitalists disagree on what should be done with these goods, but neither of them believe there is anything beyond this world.

Fascists utterly reject this world view, they hate it, they hate it with a thousand suns. I know that there current image is a sort of ironic racism chanboard nonsense, but in terms of their actual beliefs, Fascists take everything super seriously. The entire argument of Nazism is that they value symbols more than actual human life, and they are fiercely attached to various “spiritual” political issues even if they are officially atheists. I mean capitalism doesn’t give a damn about “degeneracy” because it isn’t actually a material thing, its just an aesthetic preference, there is no like “measurement” of degeneracy. same goes for honor, the family, purity, and their approach to art, fascism is in many ways about finding meaning in otherwise mundane things. So at fascist rally to them is this transcendental almost religious experience, while a capitalist would be more It interested in trying to find a way to make money off it. Fascism is a highly Romantic movement, which doesn’t play well with the cynical wordy perspective of capitalists, who believe in nothing.

Fascists also dislike aristocracy, but they love the myth and romance that is necessary for aristocracy and monarchy. They basically want aristocracy of the skin.

5) Fascists kinda…hate the idea of money. Like Capitalism emerged from the merchant classes and is basically came about with the argument “all of your aristocratic concerns over honor, titles, and god are stupid, what matters is who has the money and how you use it” And Fascists just hate that worldview, one of their defining traits is their love of war and conflict, in fact fascists prioritize war over almost everything else. It has been noted by smarter men than I (I recommend Ur Fascism) that Fascism is basically a death cult, they want effectively an endless war that they can die gloriously in destroying their enemies.

Consistently by the way, fascists will prioritize destroying the people they see as inferior over securing their own material best interest. Hitler probably could have run his dictatorship in Germany on his own for quite a long time and lived in luxury, but he wanted a giant war because that is what they care about.

in fact actively seem to indulge in self destructive short term ideologies. The Nazi economic policy was an absolute joke, with the economy serving as nothing more than something to keep the war effort going. Stephen Miller, the most fascist like person in trump’s administration, is hyper fixated on a brutal immigration policy, even though it actually hurts the economy. Fascists oppose freedom of movement and free trade, even though those are policies neoliberal capitalism supports. The reason is that Fascists value the preservation of “The Volk” over profits, and would rather their people suffer than have to live alongside other races (these people are deeply stupid)

6) Fascism doesn’t enjoy having fun. I know for most of, our experience of capitalism is misery as we work, to earn the right to work, to earn the right to give, ourselves the right to buy, ourselves the right to live, to earn the right to die. However the way that capitalism sells itself is basically “buy lots of shit and that will make yourself happy”.

Fascism doesn’t really…like being happy. As i said before, they like war, they like conflict, they like having an enemy who they can destroy. To fascists, what matters most is how you kill and how you die, rather than enjoying life. Fascism is about fetishistic death. Pink Floyd was right that Fascism is almost a form of intellectual suicide.

If you look at Japanese fascism, there is big fixation on aesthetic purity focus, with the only thing mattering being conflict

7) Capitalism tends to value the urban, the industrial, and the technology, while fascists, like the Confederates before them, are enamored with the rural and the pre-industrial. This might seem surprising, but there are a lot of fascists who are into environmentalism, Nazis Germany was one of the first states to pass laws banning animal cruelty and limiting smoking. Fascists are really into this sort of “Clean earth, clean people’ aesthetic which always serves as the breeding ground for cruelty.

8) Capitalism tends to be leery of state control and fascists are all about that shit

9)Finally….we need to be frank. A lot of the ways we talk about anti capitalism actually can fit really nicely into the antisemitic narratives that so dominated fascist thinking.

so the Marxist says

“Hey the entire world is controlled by a tiny elite of rich greedy parasites who are making us fight each other in order to benefit themselves”

And the Fascist says

“Yeah….they are Jewish”

its actually really hard to depict the rich as a class without accidentally wandering into anti Jewish sentiments, because the last 2,000 years of anti Jewish racism has been about creating conspiracy theories where they secretly control the entire world. A lot of what fascism does is taking existing issues of capitalism and being like “oh yeah…that is the fault of the Jews. Or migrants/African Americans/Muslims/feminists ect. Gamergate is a good example of this, they are pissed at corporations, but they blame feminists rather than you know…the inherently predatory nature of capitalism. Many of the things we don’t like about capitalism are things they also don’t like about capitalism. This is a major thing they do in terms of recruiting, they focus on getting people pissed at capitalism but then make it be secretly run by Jews rather than you know..Jeff Bezos.

(nazi properganda and below are soviet Images of capitalism )

(and sometimes both)

This is why btw, I am less anti capitalist than most leftists, because talking to fascists makes you appreciate things about them. Hitler was destroyed by both a communist dictatorship and a capitalist democracy working together.

Its worth noting that while fascists do hate capitalism, they hate socialism a lot more, and tend to ally with capitalist to kill leftists, as we see from the Weimar Republic. Fascist are often ok with certain types of corporate authoritarianism, but in the same way the left can be ok with somebody like Obama.

(Frank Miller’s Batman is if Libertarian and Fascism had a baby)

The lesson I would take from this is that just because somebody hates the thing you hate, doesn’t mean they are necessarily your ally, they might in fact be even worse. Yet another reason to distrust the dirtbag left

#ask EvilElitest #Fascism #capitalism #adam Smith #Communism #Marxism #Nazism #Political theory #Liberalism #Imperial Japan #Nazi Germany #Fascist Italy #Alt Right #Gamergate #Dirtbag left

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comrade-meow · 3 years

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Dawn had only just broken over the mountains. While most of the women and children on the camping grounds were still asleep, others were already wide awake, huddling together in the first rays of sunlight and drinking coffee.

To a casual observer, this place might have seemed similar to any mainstream festival campsite. A distinguishing factor, however, was that there wasn’t a single man in sight. The sign on the main entrance left no one in doubt that only women and children were welcome at this event: “Men not permitted to enter.”

Women’s participation in Mexico’s 25-year-old Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN movement, has represented an incredible organizational achievement since its original uprising in 1994. On International Women’s Day, the female militants of the EZLN did not fail to meet expectations when welcoming 7,000 people to the “First International Political, Artistic, Sports, and Cultural Encounter for Women who Struggle.”

Two thousand indigenous Zapatista women from various parts of Chiapas state and 5,000 visitors from all over the world came to Caracol Morelia, near the northeastern town of Altamirano, to hear what they had to say.

Uniting women

The event was entirely initiated by women of the EZLN. They planned it from beginning to end, and made sure everyone who attended was allocated a sleeping place, had access to drinking water and was cared for in the case they fell sick during the three days the event took place. Zapatista events such as these have commonly been accessible via invitation only. This event differed from most of the EZLN’s previous “Escuelitas,” or “Little Schools,” summoning all women and children who were interested in the struggle to overcome misogynistic culture.

“What we wanted was to meet many women,” said Commander Jenny, who coordinated the event. “We thought that only a few women were going to come, so we are very happy to see how many of you have joined us here.” Although only her eyes were visible, a smile was detectable behind her black balaclava. “It has been hard work, but we are very pleased to see that there are many other women who are fighting patriarchy.”

The event was not only an opportunity to create educational or professional networks, but also a space to consider one’s health and well-being as a woman in the fight for justice. There were activities ranging from workshops, discussion panels and movie screenings to theater performances, art exhibitions and sports events, including basketball and soccer matches. Themes included gender violence, self-defense, self-care, sexism in the media, sexual rights, health and education, misogyny and childhood, discrimination against indigenous LGBTQ communities, women environmental rights defenders, and decolonization. All of the activities were led and held by women, and all of them were aimed at generating consciousness of gender inequality or the restoration of women’s self-confidence and autonomy.

“Capitalism is not only colonial, it is also patriarchal and racist,” said Fernanda Esquivel, a 20-year-old student from Guadalajara. “To come here and see that the Zapatistas are still resisting and have resisted for so many years is a huge inspiration for me. Being with so many women and feeling united also makes me feel hopeful about really creating a change. In academia there is nothing that can show you what it is like to come here, and to feel and share these experiences in practice.”

Young women like Esquivel have grown up watching the Zapatistas evolve and followed their fight through media reports, the Zapatista’s own communication channel, “Zapatista Connection,” and more recently a Facebook page and YouTube account. Women from a total of 42 different countries, some of whom were already familiar with women’s movements or other social, political or environmental activism, attended the event in hopes that they would gain skills and inspiration from the women’s Zapatista struggle.

“Apart from wanting to amplify my vision of how different fights against the extractive industries are developing,” said Katherin Cruz from the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras, which accompanies women human rights defenders involved in territorial conflicts. “I came here so I could recharge my batteries and take home experiences that strengthen me individually and prepare me for the work that I do, and for my political activism within the feminist movement in Honduras.”

The birth of the EZLN

In 1983, a group of indigenous peasants in Chiapas organized in secret, educating themselves politically and creating an entirely unique philosophy that insisted that “another world is possible,” one that focuses on collectivity, serving the Zapatista community and creating an autonomous social and economical environment for themselves within neoliberal and capitalist Mexico. Finally on January 1, 1994 the group went public, calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, named after the hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata. That day, the EZLN launched an armed uprising, occupied seven towns in Chiapas, including San Cristóbal, and declared war on the Mexican government.

During their brief occupation, followed by a 12-day battle, the EZLN criticized the effects of global capitalism on local farmers and indigenous land. They drew attention in particular to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, calling it a death sentence for the indigenous peasants of Mexico. NAFTA would be responsible for dismantling collective land rights secured by the Mexican constitution and prioritizing export manufacturing. The Zapatistas fought for a fairer distribution of wealth, as well as the right to political participation for indigenous people in Mexico.

After their initial uprising, in 1996 the Zapatista organization gained constitutional recognition from the state through the San Andres Accords and formed the National Indigenous Council. The Mexican government did not comply with the agreements and the Zapatistas continued to suffer from violent attacks, such as the Acteal Massacre in 1997, where 45 Zapatista sympathizers were killed in Chiapas. Since then, they have peacefully organized mass marches and protests, created their “caracoles,” or administrative headquarters, formed autonomous governance, justice, health and education systems and launched public campaigns drawing attention to continued racism and discrimination in Mexico. According to the Mexican newspaper El Universal, the EZLN now governs over 250,000 indigenous people living in the Autonomous Rebellious Zapatista Municipalities in Chiapas.

Today, the image of the Zapatista soldiers, clad in red scarves and balaclavas, has reached some of the most remote corners of the world. Their movement is now well known for its transition from armed struggle to nonviolent resistance to advance their demands for indigenous land rights and autonomy, which has triggered tremendous support and solidarity from anti-capitalist activists globally. However, many of the major issues for indigenous communities addressed by the Zapatistas, such as abandonment and marginalization, continue to exist in Chiapas and other parts of impoverished Mexico.

Women’s involvement and participation

During the gathering, Commander Marina took the stage to tell the story of the first female Zapatistas, their struggle for recognition in a male-dominated space and their experience of clandestine meetings prior to their public appearance in 1994. “We took our safety very seriously so that no one would realize where we were going. We had meetings in the mountains, these were very important. We had talks on politics, read books and watched films. We studied the situation of poverty our community was submerged in,” she said. “There was nothing to gain trying to demand things from our bad government.”

The backdrop of the women’s movement within the Zapatista struggle reveals extreme levels of violence against women, poverty and abandonment from any sort of federal health or educational institutions. Intersectional discrimination for being poor, indigenous and women was commonplace, and girls were often forced into marriages or sold by their fathers or families. During the opening ceremony of the encounter, the Zapatistas made it clear that women were sidelined and perceived by the community as second-class citizens. According to Commander Flor, even “midwives would charge less when girls were born.”

Their struggle has led the women in the ranks of the EZLN — which comprise about a third of the organization’s participants — to see themselves from a different perspective and shed light on the problematic behaviour caused by gender inequality. “At the beginning, we were not used to saying our opinions, or having discussions. We would all agree to everything and nod our heads,” Marina said. “We had to fight among our own compañeros, since it took a lot for them to understand the rights we have as women. There is a lot left to achieve but we are convinced that we will accomplish our ideals because we are organized, and we are strong as a collective. We have put fear and doubt aside.”

Many followers of the Zapatista revolution were not aware of the key elements that formed the movement before going public in 1994. Undeniably, one of the key characteristics that shaped the movement was the “Women’s Revolutionary Law,” passed by the Zapatista committees in 1992.

For Sylvia Marcos, a sociologist and expert on indigenous movements across the Americas, the emphasis on women’s rights is a defining factor for the organization. Furthermore, she indicates that these rights were claimed not solely for women as individuals, but were “fully linked and interwoven with collective rights.”

The unique transformations achieved by the Zapatista indigenous movement are manifest in its attempt to re-imagine gender and decolonize oppressive discourse for the sake of personal empowerment.

Enduring inspiration

Over the last three decades, the revolution continues to abide by laws made by the autonomous Zapatista government. With military strategist and spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos “resigning” from his activities, the Zapatistas have moved out of the media spotlight. However, the successful turnouts for their events prove that the Zapatistas are still an important source of inspiration for social mobilizations and women’s movements today.

Not simply an iconic reminder of what indigenous communities were up against in the past, the Zapatistas are engaging in great efforts to revise their strategies and continue to create networks of people who resist, especially among women. Though alternative visions of gender relations have flourished among the Zapatistas, women in the movement continue to suffer gender violence and are battling other issues not uncommon in Chiapas, such as malnutrition, and lack of access to health care and education.

The Zapatistas are addressing some of these issues through their own internal initiatives. Part of their collective work towards independence and sustainability relies on their agroecological farming projects, coffee sales, cooperative shops, community kitchens, traditional medicine and tortilla businesses. However, the fundamental purpose of the Zapatista movement is to promote their way of life and organize collective resistance to resource appropriation, historically-determined economic and social disadvantages and institutional neglect, which exacerbate poverty, sustain the governmental elite and destroy local traditions. Much of their work revolves around inspiring new generations to begin their own journey towards deconstructing norms in their respective societies.

The Zapatista movement currently functions like an organization that promotes constructive dialogue, communication and continued reflection on problems that affect their communities, as well as a support network for other national movements, including the water conflict affecting the indigenous Yaqui community, the 43 Ayotzinapa students missing since 2014 and the recent presidential campaign by the indigenous activist Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez.

Women’s participation within the EZLN has played a key role in their success and ideology. They have made it clear that there will be no democracy without them. What the event last month demonstrated to many of those who were present, was the need to create safe spaces for all women, which allow them to heal and inspire them to continue fighting their own battles in their own ways. “We made an agreement, and that agreement was to live!” Commander Marina said. “And since, for us, living is fighting, we agreed to fight — each of us according to our means, our place and our time.”

#Anglo.txt

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random-notes-and-jottings · 3 years

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Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city.” I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in a while, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well-being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

This blog was written ahead of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils.

Ida Auken is a Young Global Leader and Member of the Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization of the World Economic Forum,

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chiseler · 4 years

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The Violence of Demanding “Peaceful” Protest

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, dozens of U.S. cities have be rocked with unrest, ranging from small protests to open rebellion and riots. In watching coverage of the protests over the last week, several predictable issues and themes have emerged in how these protests are being framed by city and state leaders, police, and mainstream media outlets. I think that those of us who are committed to anti-racist politics need to directly grapple with some of these frames if we are going to shift how our collective efforts to challenge racism and injustice are understood going forward, for the wider public and for ourselves:

1.) “Outside agitators” Both the governments and the media are going all in on dividing the good vs bad, legitimate vs illegitimate protesters, in order to control the unrest by turning people’s sympathies against it. They will say they support the cause but not the methods, but these are crocodile tears. They will cite MLK as a weapon against black protest, but it was MLK who said that his biggest enemy was the white moderate who valued order over the struggle for justice. It is these same moderates who condemn rioters rather than blame those in power who make riots inevitable.

The city government leaders are just lying, point blank, saying that the people who are doing anything other than quietly praying in their Sunday best are outside agitators. They have no evidence of this at all, and there is actual evidence from arrest records that most people vigorously protesting enough to be arrested are locals. This is an old tactic, and is used around the world by those in power seeking to discredit energetic social and political movements.

MLK felt compelled to condemn this rhetorical tactic, since it is the same one that was used by Jim Crow mayors and sheriffs against him and other civil rights protesters. The most important of his numerous criticisms here is that *it does not matter* if someone comes from elsewhere to stand with those protesting injustice. Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere: the logic of domination and oppression breeds and spreads, and produces further domination and oppression, while insensitivity to injustice anywhere breeds insensitivity to other injustices. We are all woven into a single garment of destiny, and cannot pretend that any injustice could (or should) stay parochially contained.

2.) Violent vs peaceful protests Those who condemn property damage during protests should reflect on a few specific points:

First, tactically, riots and the damage they cause raise the economic and political cost of continuing with the everyday violence of business as usual, and have been an integral part of successful struggles for democracy and equality throughout history. This increase in cost can force elites to make concessions, and shift what counts as an acceptable policy bargain to buy peace again. Polite tactics have not worked whatsoever to ease the systemic racial and class inequalities and violence of places like Minneapolis. What else is left, besides people of color opting to die without a fuss?

Second, the human costs of continuing business as usual, from the early deaths and sicknesses imposed by police violence, racism, poverty, lack of healthcare, environmental racism, stress, etc, are incomprehensibly massive. They are far higher than any costs from these riots, at a minimum producing hundreds of thousands of early deaths in the U.S. a year.

This means that if you are opposed to “violence”, then you must prioritize ending these systemic conditions over the flash in the pan of any riot damage. It also means that if you truly oppose violence, then you must consider what given tactics *do* about this systemic and state-enforced violence. If your “peaceful” tactics don’t pose a threat to the continuation of a violent status quo, and even help sustain it by institutionally channeling, containing, and de-fanging challenges to it, then those measures are *more violent* in what they produce than riotous street clashes or mass strikes that compel actual concessions and change.

3.) Property damage as “violence” Conceptually, calling broken windows, burnt cars and looting “violence” is extremely dubious in it’s implications. It puts unexpected forms of damage to or destruction of things as such in the same moral continuum as human suffering, and conveniently only those things that pose a direct threat to the people who own the world. Legal material destruction, of course — such as through a manufacturer shuttering and offshoring a factory (and with it a community’s ability to thrive), or a developer destroying poor people’s housing to put up empty luxury condos for investment, or a company spilling pollutants into the environment and our bodies — is never really framed as “violent”, even though it is more widespread and destructive.

Calling property damage violence also ignores the violence entailed simply by the state-backed imposition of particular rules and distributions of property. Property isn’t just stuff, it is also the rules for deciding who will be denied the right to use that stuff, and how that denial will be legitimized. If you’re concerned about looting, consider it in light of this.

The current distribution of resources is the result of racist state violence, centuries of openly white supremacist policies, imperialism, and exploitation. No honest person can disagree. It cannot be considered just or moral. Even in market terms, it cannot be considered a result of consent or fair competition. The pitifully low wage exploitation perpetuated by retail outlets in these areas are a product of these violently imposed unjust conditions and systems, and is itself a looting of the time, sweat, and well-being of people who are not truly free to do otherwise.

What, then, justifies condemnation of people’s attempts to grab goods that alleviate conditions of violently imposed and flatly unjust conditions of inequality and poverty? If just distributions are blocked politically, then how can we condemn what essentially amounts to material self defense against illegitimately imposed conditions?

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4.) On looting during protests Charges that people looting are acting opportunistically, or without pure enough motives make the mistake of thinking that pursuing material enhancement amidst unjust conditions is at odds with, rather than a central component of the demand for dismantling systemic racism. This isn’t separate from the fight against police brutality, since policing as such, as well as police brutality in particular are historically and tightly connected to state efforts to maintain racial and class inequalities and property rules under American capitalism. Demanding saintly selflessness from rioters is a dehumanizing double standard, and itself undercuts the legitimacy of demands for material justice and restitution.

Insofar as looting contributes to raising the cost for elites to ignore an unjust status quo, we can consider looting to be a useful element in producing an actually status quo-threatening pressure for concessions and change. Depending on the target (or Target), we may even say that it is ethically obligatory, if we take the struggle against violence seriously.

*** Ultimately, whenever those in power attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate protesters during times of social unrest, this should be interpreted as nothing more than a classic divide and conquer tool designed to make the unrest more manageable and to divert a fraction of the less demanding participants towards the least costly (to those in power) concessions. It means they are scared. It also means we should investigate what it is that they are truly scared of losing — and what we stand to gain.

The world.

by Justin Mueller

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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The Insanity of Sustainability “Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato. This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. They may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans. Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years. All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet. In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words. Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t. We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory. As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.” Sustainability. What does it mean? It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both. Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide. In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992. The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”. In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This is precisely what Bill Gates needs to introduce digital IDs – most likely injected via vaccines, beginning with children from developing countries – i.e. the poor and defenseless are time and again used as guinea pigs. They won’t know what happens to them. First trials are underway in one or several rural schools in Bangladesh – see this and this. These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world. Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies. The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”. See also Michael Moore’s film“Planet of the Humans”. Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity. As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology. To enhance your belief their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed along with their “sustainable” buzz-words. *** The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (take a look at this). *** Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not. Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability. Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018). Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here. These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations. Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights. The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie. Petrol industry - BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable. Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. Yet at least 60% of oil and tar along the sea shore and beaches have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie. BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability. In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced. Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another. Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. Its simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate. Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it. In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6. “Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow. The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility. So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

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architectuul · 4 years

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Studio Visit: KWY.studio

The visit to KWY.studio was the first one from our series to happen in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We sat outside a café in Alfama, near the office which the KWY team may soon be leaving. “We’ve outgrown the premises”, says Ricardo Gomes, one of the founders and current principal, noting that the team has doubled in size since the end of 2019. After a period of slowing down brought about by the coronavirus, things are moving forward again.

KWY.studio in Alfama, Lisbon. | Photo © Sonja Dragović KWY.studio was founded in 2009 in Berlin by architects Ben Allen and Ricardo Gomes, and curator and editor James Bae from Los Angeles. Named after a magazine published in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s by an international group of artists-collaborators, KWY.studio was focused on creative collaboration from the outset. “The idea for this collaborative practice was to work with someone else on every single project we do”, Ricardo says, joking how the array of things they have done over the last decade might bring about a certain sense of cacophony. The list of collaborators is indeed long and varied; it includes artists, writers, curators, educators, designers, and other architects. Collaborations result in the body of work now scattered all over the world: at any given moment, the practice is involved in about 10 different projects in different places. Rather than trying to break onto the international scene, this studio seems to have always been there. Ricardo explains KWY’s international position as an organic one, tied to the studio’s beginnings in the creative scene of Berlin, and grown from the professional and personal ties and networks of its founders and partners. The current crisis brought about by the coronavirus highlights some of the challenges of such interconnectedness by making international travel more difficult. Still, as Ricardo puts it, “this is the only way to work”.

KWY.studio considers collaboration to be the central part of their creative process. Although collaborations differ and change depending on the project, which makes them challenging to typify or map their exact flow, the process always stays the same: the original idea is tested and rigorously debated until it becomes the best possible solution within the given constraints. “It's a good thing, to not have this preconceived idea of the result”, Ricardo says, pointing out that the practice tries to keep the design processes relatively open and non-hierarchical as well: “The collaborative component is important, also within our studio: I try to give the guidance and steer the process a little bit, without necessarily being the one who approves or disapproves of the solution.”

One of the numerous collaborations with SUPERFLEX, produced at Tate Modern in 2017; “One Two Three Swing! challenges society’s apathy towards the political, environmental and economic crises of our age”. The installation has since been presented in Bonn, Copenhagen, Dora, and AlUla. | Photo © James Morris

Walk&Talk: Public Art Circuit curated by KWY.studio in São Miguel, Azores, Portugal, in the summer of 2017. Eleven artists and art collectives were involved, creating “interventions in space which call for a sense of a total work of art”. | Photo © Antonio Araujo

To be good collaborators, young architects need to know that, as architects, they can cover an array of different positions within the process – that they can do many different things, not all of which is architecture. As an educator who used to occupy teaching positions at UDK in Berlin and at DIS Copenhagen, this is what Ricardo sees as important for the new generation, along with the understanding of the necessity to take the time to learn, to adapt, to overcome the problem. In his own words: “Many architecture students, or people just out of university, have very transient work experience; they want to be in one place for six months and then move on. We always tell them that we would rather have a minimum of one year engagement… We get hundreds of applications, and that’s truly a gift. But it seems that many young people today don't see the fact that for you to learn something, you actually need to be in a place for some time, and it takes more than a few months. There is this belief that if you are unhappy, you must move. Well, sometimes it's OK to be unhappy for some time, to use that time to learn, to understand, to resolve a problem instead of just leaving.”

Donald Judd cubes in Marfa, Texas. Thinking about students today and remembering what architectural education and research were like before the Internet became ubiquitous, Ricardo tells a story of how important European exhibitions of Donal Judd were to him personally, and how different the experience of tracking down important works, artists and places was in the not-so-distant world of the year 2001, in the era before Google Maps and smartphones. | Photo via artists-network

Après Vous, Le Déluge, collaboration with SUPERFLEX. The installation shows the projected water level rise by 2050. “By physically showing the likely adverse consequences of our collective conduct, the artwork emphasises that we have no choice but to radically transform the way we live together.” | Photo © Marco Cappelletti

The stance of KWY.studio towards the issues society is facing today is reflected in their work. The practice doesn’t focus on activism but sees political and social considerations as vital to any decision that the architect makes - as inherent to architecture. One of their recent works responding to the issue of climate change is Après Vous, Le Déluge - another collaboration with SUPERFLEX, whose art often deals with this topic. This installation in Galeries Lafayette in Paris shows what the water levels will be in 2050 if nothing is done to stop the climate disaster. According to Ricardo, in addition to collaborating in such conceptual works, KWY.studio is interested in coming up with long-term architectural response to the rising sea levels: “We have been working, also in collaboration with SUPERFLEX, on projects with the idea of potential structures built above ground now, which will eventually be submerged. How do you deal with such a request today? How do you build something today that you know will be submerged, or at least under pressure because of climate change?”

Planning for Protest, September - December 2013, Lisbon Architecture Triennale | Photo via KWY.studio

Today it seems particularly relevant to mention that I first got to know KWY.studio through their work on Planning for Protest, an exhibition and a publication presented at Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2013. As a project which examined the role of architecture in shaping, defining, or limiting the flow of protest within urban space, it seems to be another work of KWY.studio resonating with the current crisis. Ricardo points out how Planning for Protest was inspired by a wave of unrest at the time of a deep economic crisis, whereas the issues we’re experiencing today are different, more complex, just as their underlying causes. Although the Planning for Protest publication has been in exhibitions over the last couple of years, the popular interest for the project grew noticeably over the last couple of months. As Ricardo explains the sudden surge in popularity of the project’s old Facebook page: “I guess there are more people searching for protest and space and architecture and coming across this, which is quite interesting.”

It’s evident that the repercussions of the multifaceted contemporary crisis affect everything, from how we work and what we read, to how we protest and where we go. As our conversation draws to an end, the unexpected quietness of summertime in Alfama tells plenty about how the city of Lisbon has changed, how tailored to the masses of tourists it became, how empty without them. “There’s a certain uncertainty,” Ricardo concludes, as we leave the terrace in Campo de Santa Clara.

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KWY.studio Travessa do Conde de Avintes 1, 1100-155 Lisboa Web | Email

by Sonja Dragović

#studio visit #lisbon

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feelingbluepolitics · 5 years

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"Nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, Pepsi and Walmart, tried on Monday to redefine the role of business in society — and how companies are perceived by an increasingly skeptical public.

"Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on 'the purpose of a corporation,' arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

"'While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,' the group, a lobbying organization that represents many of America’s largest companies, said in a statement. 'We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.'

"The shift comes at a moment of increasing distress in corporate America, as big companies face mounting global discontent over income inequality, harmful products and poor working conditions.

"On the Democratic presidential campaign trail, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been vocal about the role of big business in perpetuating problems with economic mobility and climate change. Lawmakers are looking into the dominance of technology companies like Amazon and Facebook.

"There was no mention at the Roundtable of curbing executive compensation, a lightning-rod topic when the highest-paid 100 chief executives make 254 times the salary of an employee receiving the median pay at their company. And hardly a week goes by without a major company getting drawn into a contentious political debate. As consumers and employees hold companies to higher ethical standards, big brands increasingly have to defend their positions on worker pay, guns, immigration, [t]rump and more.

..."[T]he Business Roundtable did not provide specifics on how it would carry out its newly stated ideals, offering more of a mission statement than a plan of action. But the companies pledged to compensate employees fairly and provide 'important benefits,' as well as training and education. They also vowed to 'protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses' and 'foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.'

"It was an explicit rebuke of the notion that the role of the corporation is to maximize profits at all costs — the philosophy that has held sway on Wall Street and in the boardroom for 50 years.

..."[W]hile the group cast the change in language as an embrace of new corporate ideals, it was also a tacit acknowledgment of the heightened pressures facing companies across the country — including many that signed the document.

"In 2017, after [trump’s...] tepid response to the violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va., the chief executives of several major companies disbanded White House business advisory groups in protest. Walmart, the nation’s largest gun seller, is under pressure after a series of mass shootings, including the recent massacre at its store in El Paso. Amazon, the giant online retailer, is facing scrutiny from lawmakers who say it avoids paying taxes and uses its dominance to hurt competitors.

"And protesters have mobilized across the country to call for a higher minimum wage.

"For companies to truly make good on their lofty promises, they will need Wall Street to embrace their idealism, too. Until investors start measuring companies by their social impact instead of their quarterly returns, systemic change may prove elusive."

No one believes them, of course. But that's just the opening premise for analysis.

Admitting that you have a world-destroying, nation-collapsing, sociopathic problem with evil greed is the first step.

From there, these corporations have a range of options, which all happen to lead to the same place.

Having admitted the destructive impact of their practices, they can try to bask in noble intentions but do nothing more.

Except the same conditions which forced this recognition upon them won't allow inaction.

Right now, the presumption is that they are playing the Facebook game, putting on a concerned and responsive mask over underlying runaway lawlessness, for the purpose of patting away inclinations toward ruthlessly regulating the stuffing out of them.

The drawback of this approach has become obvious. Having acknowledged a burden of responsibility, even when they didn't really mean it, highlights the utter emptiness of their assurances and self-policing actions. "We can, and will, do better" is not an infinitely useful decoy.

So whether this Business Roundtable meant it or not, corporations are now on a path toward change.

With trump, it's a case of being careful with what they wished for, but too late. They got their massive tax windfalls. They got their grossly permissive deregulation. The American auto industry was one of the first to recognize, recently, that trump's willingness to do away with improved mileage goals completely would actually lead to ruin.

In the public's solid assessment, the corporate world is tied closely to trump and Republicons. It is profoundly interesting that the corporate world has discovered that's not a good place to be.

Just look at the fallout generated against SoulCycle and Equinox because their self-proclaimed socially conscious billionaire Stephen Ross hosted a fat fundraiser for trump.

If they continue with trump and Republicons, the country will collapse socially and economically, and the world market will gutter. Furthermore, a fascist government actually is not conducive for autonomous businesses.

If they step back from trump and Republicons, and withhold much of the business contributions to Republicon political donations, Democrats will win. (They will, anyway, in part because of the heightened understanding of the damage Republicons and the business world have done.)

Depending on which Democrat becomes the Party nominee, the corporate world will no longer be left to it's own pretenses toward improving. Biden becomes less likely as he gets hammered more and more for assuring the corporate world that, with him, "nothing will change."

A Biden presidency will set off the same social upheaval as another trump term, just somewhat delayed. Warren's ruthless policy corrections affecting the business world reflect much of what has already been admitted as necessary at this Roundtable.

At this point, if the business world tries to use pretense to stave off real change, real change will be forced. If they try to do a little bit of change but not "too much," real change will be forced.

They know. They are trying to get out in front of it. That's what this Business Roundtable fundamental philosophical change shows: the acknowledgement that real changes are coming. Profit sharing and social and environmental responsibility are better than political, economic, environmental, and social convulsion and chaos.

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missolivialouise · 5 years

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St. Paul-based cartoonist Andy Singer has never owned a car, even though he's lived, over the last 47 years, in places as diverse as New York City, Ithaca, Oakland, Boston, and now the Twin Cities. He's clearly a minority among Americans, but he's made a career out of using art to convince others to rethink their romance with the automobile.

His latest is Why We Drive, a book released late this summer that uses political cartoons and historical photos to make the case. Many of his main arguments are familiar: he's anti-sprawl, pro-public transportation, pro-biking, and against the types of hidden government incentives that make these policies difficult to put in place.

But Singer takes a more visual approach to advocate for sustainable living. He chatted with Cities about his new book and how he's used his work as a cartoonist to make arresting visual arguments in favor of alternative transportation.

How did you become interested in issues of sustainability, transportation, and auto culture?

I had a moment in high school, going to a concert in Nassau County, Long Island. I bought tickets off a scalper, which turned out to be bogus, but the people whom we had driven there with got into the concert. So we spent three hours just trying to amuse ourselves walking around the parking lot [at the Nassau Coliseum]. And it was just this moment of realizing that everywhere you looked there was nothing but concrete and cars. And I think that was the first moment where I realized, wow, there are too many dang cars.

How were you inspired by some of the urban and suburban forms you see around you in St. Paul, where you live now, and other places you’ve made home, including New York and Boston?

I’ve just noticed in different places that I’ve lived that people like to visit old places. When you go to New Orleans, for example, people want to see the French Quarter, the older parts of it. Or when people are in Boston they want to walk the Freedom Trail and see Paul Revere's House and Beacon Hill and the old parts of Boston. There are historical reasons for that because they want to see the history behind something. But I think that people also like those spaces, and they like those spaces in part because they're walkable.

The first cartoon in the book — across from the title page — shows the 'Goldilocks' version of mixed use development. How did you come up with this idea, and how does it map onto how you view the discussions about density and urban development?

Another peeve I have is that there is pretty much a common awareness among people in New Urbanist circles that low-density sprawl, car-oriented sprawl is a bad thing — environmentally, socially, economically, etc. But there's also this non-agreement as far as how much density is too dense.

And there's this idea that we can have hyper-density that is somehow much more environmentally efficient than this low-density sprawl. I think that it could well be more efficient than low-density sprawl, but is it the most efficient level of density?

And you see when there’s a power blackout, in a lot of these hyper-dense cities, a lot of these buildings become uninhabitable because they require electric elevators and water pumps and all sorts of mechanical stuff to make them usable. You're not going to be able to get up to the 25th floor of your building and back down on a regular basis. And they require much more energy-intensive materials to build and to take down than, say, a three or four-story walk-up.

You write that you are "an advocate of car-free cities, car-free city sections and car-free living." How do your drawings try to illustrate how people should think about these possibilities?

I’m trying to encourage people to look at the pre-automotive sections of their own cities as a guide or an envisioning of what their city, or sections of their city, could look like without cars, at what life would be like without cars. I think a lot of times when you see something or you envision something, you understand it more. A lot of people see a freeway, for example, in the Twin Cities, and they think that that freeway has always been here. And maybe for their entire lifetime it's always been there. But they don’t realize that, wow, there used to be townhouses and apartment buildings and homes on that land before that freeway was put in, and people lived in a very different way 100 years ago.

Any last words?

If there’s a takeaway that I want people to have, for lay people or people who are not steeped in all this, it is to appreciate some of the ways that automobiles impact our landscape and impact our lives and our environment and economy.

But I think for people who are more into these issues, I want people to think about the tax structures, the way that in almost every state we have all of our motor vehicle fees and gas taxes being dedicated to highways. This tends to cause states to choose highway solutions to transportation problems, even when another solution using transit or better land use would be more appropriate. There are systemic forces that tend to drive highway building.

These "before and after drawings" represent Singer's visions of the different kinds of land development and sprawl that accompany rail vs. highway infrastructure.

Cars revolutionized transportation, but when we started to design cities first-and-foremost for cars, we put other travelers’ safety at risk, and even made it impossible or impractical to get around any other way. There are people who can’t easily travel except by car, so I’m not all about eliminating cars, but rather dramatically reducing their use.

Some of the ways we can do that is by eliminating government-mandating parking minimums, and legalizing “mixed-use” zoning, and “missing-middle” density. The most comfortable, livable, pedestrian-friendly cities in the world are mostly mid-rise.

#city planning #zoning #car culture #tranportation

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dscgshauntingground · 5 years

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I’ve been holding this in for a couple of days until I could think clearly post-election and I’m going to say it now. I’m devastated about the election result too but we in the southern cities (i.e., Sydney and Melbourne) have GOT to stop with the “cut QLD off the map” and “fuck QLD” reactions. If that’s your primary takeaway from the election result, then you really need to start thinking and reading and listening to what people outside the major cities have to say because you truly sound like Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election calling Trump voters “the deplorables”. (And you know what? The Democrats/American opposition in general has learned nothing from the 2016 election and I can see Trump winning a second term.) Make no mistake - the racism, Islamophobia, climate-change denialism, white Australian nationalism, social conservatism, etc. of the minor parties such as One Nation and United Australia (as well as the Liberal/Nationals, of course) ARE deplorable. That’s also not the whole story. These populist politicians - who are also from QLD, which does mean something to some Queenslanders, rightly or wrongly - have been very successful in convincing rural and regional Queenslanders that they will solve their economic problems. Have you even read United Australia’s policies? We privileged people in the cities may find Clive Palmer’s social and environmental policies and racism too abhorrent to ever contemplate voting for him, but there’s a lot in there that is designed to directly appeal to the poor and working class in the regions. Populism is very successful at making voters believe that it can solve all of their problems. And you cannot counter populism by ignoring it.

You have to try to understand what it means to live in a small rural town in QLD that’s dominated by mining, where people are terrified that losing coal and other resource mining will mean they have no job opportunities. You have to understand that a convoy of southern environmentalists riding into town to tell Queenslanders who depend on mining and agriculture for their livelihood what to do is damaging their cause. For people in rural and regional QLD, even Brisbane can feel like another country. If you come from the southern cities, go to university, have a range of employment possibilities, are able to use public transport, have parents who are middle or upper class, etc. - you do not know the unique concerns of regional and rural poverty. I know that many of us young people in the cities personally have little money and are deeply worried about rent prices, job insecurity, racism, and the environment, among other issues, but we need to realise our economic privilege relative to people living in rural areas who have no public infrastructure and very few opportunities.

We also have to accept that Labor has long been anathema in many parts of rural and regional QLD (some regional cities have strong Labor votes but they’re in the minority) because people feel that Labor does nothing but ignore their concerns and condescend to them. For exmaple, my Nana - who lived in rural QLD for decades - won an award for her service to the community and refused to travel to Brisbane to accept it because she hated the Labor government that much. This was in the early 2000s, when the drought was ravaging agriculture in western QLD and the Labor Party’s water and agricultural policies were seen as woefully inadequate. The Greens are another story altogether, and again, the fact that they have a significant vote in the regional north coast of NSW (i.e., Byron Bay) means nothing for regional and rural Queenslanders. We - and I’m including the Labor and the Greens here - cannot solve this problem by continuing to alienate and ignore Queensland voters. We have to meet people where they’re at and take them with us. PLEASE consider reading up on politics and issues of concern outside the cities, educating yourself on populism, and trying to at least understand where regional and rural people are coming from, even if you (like me) personally deplore the parties and candidates for whom many of them voted. We just cannot afford to continue to reinforce the divide between city and country, north and south.

#auspol #australian politics

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baileye · 5 years

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Thirty-five percent of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely. Only eight percent of Americans report having meaningful conversation with their neighbors. Only 32 percent of Americans say they trust their neighbors, and only 18 percent of millennials. The fastest-growing political party is unaffiliated. The fastest-growing religious movement is unaffiliated. Depression rates are rising, mental health problems are rising. The suicide rate has risen 30 percent since 1999. For teen suicides over the last several years, the suicide rate has risen by 70 percent. Forty-five thousand Americans kill themselves every year; 72,000 die from opioid addictions; life expectancy is falling, not rising.

...

so I've spent the last five years -- how do you get out of a valley? The Greeks used to say, "You suffer your way to wisdom." And from that dark period where I started, I've had a few realizations. The first is, freedom sucks. Economic freedom is OK, political freedom is great, social freedom sucks. The unrooted man is the adrift man. The unrooted man is the unremembered man, because he's uncommitted to things. Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in, it's a river you want to get across, so you can commit and plant yourself on the other side.

...

what we really yearn for is longing and love for another, the kind of thing that Louis de Bernières described in his book, "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." He had an old guy talking to his daughter about his relationship with his late wife, and the old guy says, "Love itself is whatever is leftover when being in love is burned away. And this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we discovered that we are one tree and not two." That's what the heart yearns for.

The second thing you discover is your soul. Now, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God, but I do ask you to believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape, size, color or weight, but that gives you infinite dignity and value. Rich and successful people don't have more of this than less successful people. Slavery is wrong because it's an obliteration of another soul. Rape is not just an attack on a bunch of physical molecules, it's an attempt to insult another person's soul. And what the soul does is it yearns for righteousness. The heart yearns for fusion with another, the soul yearns for righteousness.

And that led to my third realization, which I borrowed from Einstein: "The problem you have is not going to be solved at the level of consciousness on which you created it. You have to expand to a different level of consciousness."

So what do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you throw yourself on your friends and you have deeper conversations that you ever had before. But the second thing you do, you have to go out alone into the wilderness. You go out into that place where there's nobody there to perform, and the ego has nothing to do, and it crumbles, and only then are you capable of being loved. I have a friend who said that when her daughter was born, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required.

And I've always loved that. Because it talks about the peace that's at the deep of ourself, our inexplicable care for one another. And when you touch that spot, you're ready to be rescued. The hard thing about when you're in the valley is that you can't climb out; somebody has to reach in and pull you out. It happened to me. I got, luckily, invited over to a house by a couple named Kathy and David, and they were -- They had a kid in the DC public school, his name's Santi. Santi had a friend who needed a place to stay because his mom had some health issues. And then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend. When I went to their house six years ago, I walk in the door, there's like 25 around the kitchen table, a whole bunch sleeping downstairs in the basement. I reach out to introduce myself to a kid, and he says, "We don't really shake hands here. We just hug here." And I'm not the huggiest guy on the face of the earth, but I've been going back to that home every Thursday night when I'm in town, and just hugging all those kids. They demand intimacy. They demand that you behave in a way where you're showing all the way up. And they teach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culture which is a way of direct -- really putting relationship first, not just as a word, but as a reality.

what I'm trying to describe is two different life mindsets. The first mountain mindset, which is about individual happiness and career success. And it's a good mindset, I have nothing against it. But we're in a national valley, because we don't have the other mindset to balance it. We no longer feel good about ourselves as a people, we've lost our defining faith in our future, we don't see each other deeply, we don't treat each other as well. And we need a lot of changes. We need an economic change and environmental change. But we also need a cultural and relational revolution. We need to name the language of a recovered society.

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