HeavenlyPossum

HeavenlyPossum, 5 months ago to random

This Christmas, let’s all dedicate ourselves to Jesus’ example of:

• beating up finance bros

• shaming bigots and moralizing scolds

• having at least twelve friends as an adult

• feeding hungry people

• demanding the abolition of debts and redistribution of wealth to the poor

HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

45,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man experienced a crushing blow to the head that left him partially paralyzed for life, but his bones healed and he lived into his 30s or 40s, something only conceivably possible with the help of his community.

45,000 years ago.

But let’s pretend that 45,000 years later, we “can’t afford” universal healthcare.

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils/shanidar-1

HeavenlyPossum, 8 months ago to random

ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products.

Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users.

Philips knew about this right away. It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a decade to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica:

https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-about-dangerous-cpaps-secret-profits-soared

1/ #thread

HeavenlyPossum, 11 months ago to random

The United Kingdom is crisscrossed with public footpaths where the public holds a legal right to traverse.

Many of these paths are centuries old. Many of them are probably even older, dating back thousands of years to the Neolithic or older.

They predate virtually every extant property claim that could be leveraged against them. They have belonged in common to the community that uses them since before there was a British state.

And yet, the British state is in the process of handing over thousands of miles of public footpaths to private owners because these paths—older than the state—have not been registered with the state. In James Scott’s terms, they are not legible to the state.

But carefully surveyed, delineated, discrete parcels of private property linked to individual owners—the state’s favorite—are legible to the state. So over they go.

Enclosure never really stopped.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/public-access-paths-lost-landowners-lobby-government-therese-coffey-england/

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

I was thinking to myself, “when will the effects of climate change get so bad that they provoke revolution” but then it occurred to me: they already did. Just in the wrong direction.

Syrians fled a civil war driven by the worst drought in a thousand years and Europe responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.

Central Americans fled rising temperatures that are killing agricultural workers and the U.S. responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.

Russia just happens to be in a war for control of some of the world’s best farmland.

Sudan is in the middle of a civil war and Niger just had its umpteenth coup.

Reactionaries are already at war with us over climate change. It’s only going to get worse as the world gets hotter.

HeavenlyPossum, 11 months ago to random

There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.”

A Veblen good is something for which demand increases as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price.

Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars.

The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous.

1/8

HeavenlyPossum, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. I soaked up the vibes of a high-tech, utopian future. I internalized the trajectory we were on was good, that we had reached the End of History. There might be a few bumps on the road, but the direction was inevitable and the destination was inexorable.

It turns out that the fastest a human being has ever traveled was 39,897 kilometers per hour. That was the crew of the Apollo 10 mission returning to earth. That happened on 26 May, 1969.

Fifty-four years ago. We peaked more than half a century ago.

1/of several

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

“People can’t cooperate because we’re so tribal.”

People in actual tribal societies:

Cosmopolitan and diverse, with elaborate mechanisms for adopting people into their communities and sacred obligations to host strangers, able to cooperate with other communities to achieve shared goals with few resources or conveniences at their disposal.

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

In their book “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow provide multiple accounts by early European settler colonists of the indigenous societies they encountered in the woodlands of northeastern North America.

Over and over, these Europeans noted that these societies were well and truly stateless, lacking rulers, laws, courts, police, prisons, or anything like what they were used to in Europe.

They quote one Jesuit, writing in 1644 about the Wendat:

“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

1/ #thread

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

The Luddites were not anti-technology and their permanent cultural association with a reactionary anti-technological ideal is one of the great propaganda victories of the capital class.

HeavenlyPossum, 4 months ago to random

Made a trip back to the US for the first time in a couple of years. A few things that stand out:

• there are so many fucking ads everywhere

• infrastructure is crumbling everywhere I look

• cops cops cops cops cops. I saw more cops within a few hours of getting back to the states than I’ve seen in a few years of living abroad. Americans generally have no idea how hyper-policed they are.

HeavenlyPossum, 2 months ago to random

I remember being pretty young and asking my parents—is this it? We go to school every day and then we get a job and go to work every day and this is our lives, forever? Just living each day according to someone else’s schedule, at someone else’s command? This is life?

And they were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, they said, this is life. What did you expect? This is what you do and then you die.

These are the same people who showed my Koyaanisqatsi when I was like six and encouraged me to internalize its message that capitalist modernity is catastrophically, irrevocably broken and unsustainable.

And I just think…a lot of people hold pretty good beliefs in the abstract but it doesn’t occur to them to live as if they were actually true.

HeavenlyPossum, 1 month ago to random

So the World Central Kitchen convoy a) cleared its route with the IDF beforehand, b) traveled on an approved route, and c) departed at an approved time, so d) the IDF knew exactly who it was killing when it struck the convoy three (3) times.

It was so obviously deliberate, and so deliberately cruel—not just to murder these people, but to terrorize other aid workers into abandoning the Palestinians to be starved to death. To prove the IDF’s impunity and reach, and to compel the IDF’s defenders into apologizing for yet another unforgivable atrocity.

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

I came across a first-hand account of somehow who escaped the fire in #Lahaina and she noted that many roads out of town were privately owned by sugar plantations and were chained shut.

She says people died in their cars trying to escape.

These people were murdered by #PrivateProperty.

All of those sugar plantations were enclosed by the Hawaiian monarchy and sold off to American colonists, who in turn overthrew the monarchy and cemented their control of the islands and their lands.

Dying because of a chained gate on land that was stolen from the Hawaiian people is as surely murder as if they’d been pushed into the flames.

HeavenlyPossum, 3 months ago to random

“The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge…clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings.”

We have more than enough clothes for anyone who wants them; there is no material reason for people unclothed or without shoes to remain so.

People go without because of capitalism: because capitalists profit by interfering with our access to the stuff we make together. It’s more profitable for them to dump mountains of clothes in the desert than it is to let people have those items.

https://grist.org/international/burn-after-wearing-fashion-waste-chile/

HeavenlyPossum, 5 months ago to random

A sad fact of the world is that the rise of fascism—in the US, in Israel, in India, in Russia, in a host of European countries—is a predictable response by global elites to the challenges to their wealth and privilege posed by the climate catastrophe.

This isn’t to say that things are hopeless, but rather that things will get worse before they can get better, and that defeating any particular instance of that fascism doesn’t make that threat go away.

HeavenlyPossum, 10 months ago to random

A journalist recently noticed something strange about the New York City housing market. During the peak of the COVID crisis in NYC, the city lost close to seven percent of its population as people either died or moved away.

The real estate vacancy rate was close to twenty-five percent.

Since then, according to an array of parties with considerable interest in rents, the population of NYC has rebounded. As a result, housing is once again scarce and rents have soared.

Except…there’s no actual indication that the city’s population has actually rebounded, and certainly not by enough to explain soaring rental prices. After all, the city’s population had already started to decline before 2020.

1/7

https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

HeavenlyPossum, 9 months ago to random

Three things jump out at me from news stories like this:

• The US government has been involved in providing children as essentially slave labor.

• No amount of “we’ve conquered poverty!” cheerleading from outlets like Our World in Data can paper over the catastrophic failure of “capitalist progress” that child labor represents.

• Capitalists would absolutely enslave you and your children if they could, and we know this because they literally enslave children when they can get away with it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna96480

HeavenlyPossum, 8 months ago to random

In 1381, King Richard II said these words to the defeated leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt:

“You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: slaves you were, and slaves you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.”

I appreciate it when elites are honest and straightforward about their intent, their contempt, and the system of privilege they fight to preserve.

1/2

HeavenlyPossum, 8 months ago to random

Watching Greenland burn and Libya flood and France turn to desert, some in the last few years and some in the last few days, reinforces the lesson: there is no precedent for the climate catastrophe in any meaningful human memory. The last time the global average temperature was as different as we’re about to face was 12,000 years ago, before the state and before the city and before writing.

There’s nowhere that will be predictably stable or safe. There’s no preparation that can address the flux. I am unmoored and bereft in a way I can’t articulate.

HeavenlyPossum, 11 months ago to random

Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from a speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1859 in which he critically compared wage labor—especially life-long wage labor with no hope of ever graduating to independent production—to chattel slavery.

As hard as it is to imagine today, there was once a robust public debate in the US in which words like “capital” and “labor” and “wage slavery” were explicitly used. Today, the slightest whiff of these would have you accused of communism and brayed off the public stage. Our discourse has gotten more restricted over time.

1/10

HeavenlyPossum, 7 months ago to random

“Scientists warn society could collapse this century.”

If modern, global society were in the midst of a drawn out but accelerating process of collapse, what might it look like?

Could it look like exponentially growing war dead around the world, from Ukraine to Gaza to Tigray? Could it look like entire cities destroyed by hurricanes, like Acapulco, or entire countries flooded, like Pakistan last year? Might it look like mass migration from south to north, with fascist reactionaries seizing power in response? Could it look like the chaotic nihilism of an epidemic of mass shootings?

Maybe?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxdxa/1500-scientists-warn-society-could-collapse-this-century-in-dire-climate-report

HeavenlyPossum, 6 months ago to random

The Israeli state is starving the people of Gaza and I don’t know how to wrap my head around the horror of this.

I watched Asad do this to Syrians for years and it is a horrific way to die. People with diabetes will die first, in agony, and then children and the elderly.

https://www.wfp.org/news/gaza-faces-widespread-hunger-food-systems-collapse-warns-wfp

HeavenlyPossum, 5 months ago to random

Israeli forces killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza on Friday.

The hostages were apparently trying to surrender while displaying a white flag. The IDF shot and killed two immediately, then hunted down and killed the third while he begged for his life in Hebrew.

Now, we could imagine that this was a singular and unique tragedy. Maybe these soldiers were particularly murderous.

But it seems more likely that this incident offers a window into a more general approach by the IDF to killing men in Gaza, including men who are surrendering, and that we only found out about this instance because the victims in this case happened to be Israeli hostages, prompting a public investigation.

https://news.sky.com/story/three-israeli-hostages-killed-by-idf-were-holding-white-flag-says-military-official-13031567