adamgreenfield

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Burying the lede, quite literally in this case: “The inquiry saw internal documents that revealed how in 2019, 16 separate pandemic preparation projects were ‘stopped’ or reduced as a result of planning for a no-deal Brexit.” This needs to be in the headline, at the beginning of the headline, all of the headline. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/20/covid-inquiry-britain-remains-wildly-under-resilient

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Do you have any real sense of how recently chattel slavery was (formally) outlawed in the United States? Two not-overlong human lives ago, stacked end to end. That’s it. It’s not at all inconceivable that someone now in their eighties knew, in their childhood, someone that had been born into slavery. I often sit with this fact. I recommend the practice – it’s sobering.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

This isn’t grrrrreat, either as game or rigorous simulation – you’ll notice that it hand-waves away any really committed opposition right at the outset – but as a primer in the complexity of balancing the massively convoluted multivariate decision space we call Planet Earth, even under the most felicitous circumstances, it’s not too shabby. I’d be curious to hear your reactions to it. #solarpunk #ecosocialism https://play.half.earth/

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

One feature here that I do wish more people would avail themselves of is the ability to make followed/follower counts invisible. This, quite simply, is invidious information – in the majority of circumstances, I can’t see it being useful for anything but implicit social ranking of a sort I believe we should be trying to move away from. We have other and better ways of formulating our estimates of the worth of someone’s contributions.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

A friend spotted this in Hackney this morning. Just putting folks on notice that if I encounter one of these, I will take preemptive countermeasures, believe it.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to random

I’ve tried to say this a couple of different ways over the past few weeks, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the emerging line of rhetoric on the climate left that casts strategies of adaptation to the circumstances of heating as somehow acquiescing to the extractive industries and/or their enablers in rightwing politics and the mainstream media. Adaptation really is all we have now. It’s up to us to ensure that it’s liberatory in conception and practice.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I do still feel ambivalent when blocking people, because I suffer from a vestigial little liberal voice inside my head, pointing out that every person I block is a person with whom I’ve foreclosed any possibility for dialogue, reconciliation or future collaboration on unrelated matters. OTOH, hoooooly fuck does it feel great to block some of these egregious bozos.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but entire stretches of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for “Dune: Part Two” could slide seamlessly between, say, Phurpa, Hildur Guðnadóttir and SUNN O))) in a Real Heavy playlist. In fact I wish more movies sounded like this. https://open.spotify.com/album/1PeYjDmxcRNvxLd5mGHuCC?si=E7f9X_QsTXKnb-xfQfJZ2g

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

We’re moving house, which has meant turning up all kinds of stuff I squirreled away and haven’t laid eyes on in a good long while. This is the iPhone I bought at the Apple Store in San Francisco on launch day, June 29th, 2007. It’s not often you get to be present at the actual hinge of an epoch in human history.

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Beloved! Aiyeeee! How, how has it come to pass that Osmium (Hildur Guðnadóttir, Rully Shabara et al.) played the Barbican (!) last night, and I remained unaware until just now? https://www.unsound.pl/en/archive/en/bubbles-2022/artists/osmium-hildur-gudnadottirsam-slaterjames-ginzbergrully-shabara.html

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Rewatching Villeneuve’s “Dune.” It’s got the grandeur down, I’ll give it that much.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

I had never heard of the Noahopinion blog until a friend sent me a link to it the other day, specifically to a post about this book, “Emergent Tokyo.” Noahpinion characterized it, glowingly, as an empirical defense of market YIMBYism, and it very nearly put me off ordering the book despite its being highly relevant to my interests. That guy’s dumber than a bag of rocks! This book is nothing of the sort! It’s wonderful!

adamgreenfield, 7 months ago to random

I'm sorry to have to circle back around to this again, but if you don't have the moral clarity to name what Israel is doing in Gaza for what it is — in plain words, attempted genocide — then I simply cannot take anything else you have to say seriously.

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to food

I wish I knew how to quit you, Mastodon! Anyway, this is me popping up again, when I should be working, to share this, because I think a bunch of you heads would find it interesting. It’s essentially Smaje’s book-length refutation of George Monbiot’s credulous #ecomodernism & advocacy for the application of SV techniques/mindset to mass food production, and a call for “agrarian localism" instead. Anyone concerned with where we’re going to get our #food in the Long Emergency should read it.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Feeling like trash garbage today, psychophysically and emotionally. Throw some horns for me, utter arcane formulae of benediction, send cat pictures. 👊

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

I can’t promise you this book is actually going to be any good. I can promise you it will be the only one on your shelf that has citations regarding solar radiation management, borderwork, the effects of heat on various rice cultivars, the Young Lords, the roots of Kurdish feminism and the FGC-9.

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Maybe things would’ve turned out better if we’d reposed MASSIVE SOCIETAL POWER in the hands of nurses or teachers rather than, y’know, software engineers.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

What’s vexing me in my PhD at the moment is that the department wants to see a complete introduction and substantive chapter at this checkpoint, and that’s…just not the way I write? How I write is much more like the inkspot theory of counterinsurgency: I start with little sentence- or at most paragraph-length chunks of ideation, and suture them together until they form arguments, then hopefully a fabric. The coherence remains low for most of the way, before going asymptotic toward the very end.

adamgreenfield, 5 months ago to random

Glenn Wallis's book "A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real" is available free here, in a variety of formats. (Glenn is an accomplished scholarly interlocutor of the Buddhist canon, but I knew him first as guitarist for legendary 1980s Philly hardcore band RUIN.) https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/45850

adamgreenfield, 4 months ago to random

I’m genuinely disturbed that the Guardian/Observer is platforming Hannah Ritchie’s irresponsible, tone-deaf platitudes. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-ritchie-not-the-end-of-the-world-extract-climate-crisis

adamgreenfield, 6 months ago to random

Somewhere beneath all the other, rawer heartbreaks of Gaza, or coiled around them, is the specific grief I feel as a Jew that all of this is being inflicted under a flag bearing the star of my people — that wherever it appears, this symbol will only ever again remind people of this theft, anguish and suffering. It will be cursed by history, and it's hard to argue anything but that this is rightly so.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

“He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been 'reinforced' in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the Al then decided that 'no-go' decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission - killing SAMs - and then attacked the operator in the simulation.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Oh! Dudes. Last week I had to write to SPIN to demand attribution for my 1988 William Gibson interview, which they’d credited to “SPIN Staff.” I’ve always been proud of the piece, despite its manifest amateurism, because I pitched it to my editors & believe it is the first-ever interview with Gibson in a mainstream, national outlet. (Quotes from it have been used as blurbs!) Credit where due: SPIN got back to me within minutes, and actually fixed the attribution! https://www.spin.com/2019/08/william-gibson-mona-lisa-overdrive-neuromancer-december-1988-interview-new-romancer/