urlyman

pvonhellermannn, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

My discipline, anthropology, is not seen as a “growth" discipline, and departments are being closed down. But the world needs Anthropology and Anthropologists now more than ever!

Here are my 8 reasons for this:

1. POSSIBILITIES
   At a time of polycrisis, when the destructive fallouts of capitalist modernity are ever more apparent, anthropology highlights that there are myriad alternative ways of thinking and living; that there is so much to learn from other peoples in the world. 1/n

urlyman, 6 months ago to random

“So when we encounter a tech company boss who takes in a nationwide movement of organized protest against police brutalization and systemic racism, led by black activists, and amplifies the rare incidents of violence, much of it instigated by the police or right-wing counter protestors, using the mendacious language of extremists to refer to it as ‘riots,’ we have a good idea what we’re looking at.”

Why We're Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-dropping-basecamp/

urlyman, 3 months ago to random

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

The Nuclear Complex and ‘Crackpot Realism’ https://tomdispatch.com/full-speed-ahead-on-the-global-titanic/

ht @boud

urlyman, 1 month ago to random

“I, and other Holocaust survivor descendants, have been regularly attending these London protests with placards showing that we are ‘openly Jewish’. We have, so far, not experienced any antisemitism at all. Many others on the regular Jewish bloc have had similar experiences.”
—Mark Etkind

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/palestine-march-antisemitism-london-gideon-falter-b2532585.html

urlyman, 4 months ago to random

You’ve got a plan for 2040 or 2050? To reduce emissions by a very large percentage.

Great.

That’s going to be really, really hard. So do you have a coherent plan for 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027… ? And a plan for communicating it effectively to people who don’t realise what comes with it?

Oh, you don’t?

No plan then
#climateDiary

urlyman, 7 months ago to climate

When I’m out biking I can usually tell whether the car that’s about to overtake me is an SUV or not. It’s not the engine noise, it’s the tire noise and, sometimes, the vibrations coming up from the road.

e.g. a Range Rover weighs 2.7 times more than a Toyota Aygo.

That cars have been getting heavier is a marker of how deeply stupid and unserious we are about the #climateCrisis

urlyman, 6 months ago to random

The #COP28 Global StockTake (GST) negotiations on fossil fuel phase out, translated by Romain Ioualalen…

both heartbreakingly bleak and fantastically funny

https://nitter.net/Rlalen/status/1733170398231990292#m

The screenshot shows just 3 of 30 tweets by Romain (through the window provided by the excellent resource that is https://nitter.net)

#climateDiary

urlyman, 7 months ago to random

An excerpt from

‘Ways not to think about climate change’

…a paper presented to the 2023 Conference on Climate Change on 22 September.

ht @pluralistic – https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/ – via @breadandcircuses

urlyman, 2 months ago to random

8 years ago is not that long. Can you remember stuff you did or said in 2016? What events were happening? I can think of a couple of big ones. Not long ago, right?

In 2032, in 8 years time, or thereabouts, the extraction of oil and gas from the continental shelf that the UK and Norway share…

ceases to be net energy positive.

It’s not unreasonable to speculate that what happens as we hurtle towards that point is of a magnitude far more significant than Brexit, don’t you think?

#climateDiary

urlyman, 5 months ago to random

“The 22,835 dead represent about one in a hundred of Gaza’s total population. They have been killed at a rate of just under 250 a day.”

70% are estimated to be women and children.

So it’s possible about 8,000 Palestinian children have been killed. It’s plausible that it’s many more.

Israel’s final count for Hamas’s 7 October massacre includes 36 children

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/monday-briefing-the-numbers-that-reveal-the-extent-of-the-destruction-in-gaza

urlyman, 4 months ago to random

The BBC has many correspondents in the USA, including Sarah Smith.

And yet #r4today feels obliged to fly Justin Webb out to report on the Iowa Caucus, an event which is itself an utterly futile affair https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/iowa-caucuses-2024-results-trump-republican-election.html

#climateDiary

And after Justin adds no value at all to the topic (he’s good at that) we’re treated to a shallow foray into the role of pylons in reconfiguring the UK electricity grid. A discussion which makes sure not to examine demand at all.

Sigh

urlyman, 6 months ago to climate

#climateCrisis
There’s an envelope of temperatures in which food grows.

It will vary due to many factors such as soil health and levels of rainfall, but all other things being equal, the productivity in a given region is a function of the average temperature in that region.

The graph here is a representation of crop yields in Pakistan over time. Although productivity has increased, the parts of the country where the average temperature is about 14°C are consistently the most productive, and…

urlyman, 4 months ago to random

The best way to get to net zero is to build a pair of multi-billion £ aircraft carriers that each take 4 million litres of bunker fuel and 3 million litres of kerosene for the aircraft they’re supposed to carry.

So that, once their prop shafts are actually working, they can be sent to bomb the shit out of people about 150 times poorer than us who had the temerity to say we shouldn’t be supporting a genocide conducted by a far right government that props up fossil-fuel-geopolitics.
#climateDiary

urlyman, 2 months ago to random

“in the 4 years of the [Balkan] war, the international community stood by as Bosnian Muslims were decimated. But these were, primarily, acts of omission. The West did not arm Republika Srpska with its best bombs. Bill Clinton did not fly in to hug Milošević. The slaughter was not accompanied by the constant refrain ‘the Serbian nationalists have the right to defend themselves’.

What we are seeing now [in Palestine] might be the first advanced late capitalist genocide.”
https://birds.town/@lycophidion/112239782903252868

urlyman, 1 month ago to random

“If you take the side of the owner of a vacant home over the right of a person sleeping on its doorstep, you’re taking the side of property rights over human rights.

You value both human rights and property rights but…

you value property rights MORE than human rights”

— @pluralistic reads his @Locusmag article, Capitalists Hate Capitalism

https://overcast.fm/+C7IgtoSk/04:15

---

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

urlyman, 6 months ago to random

“…on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.

But, as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros

urlyman, 17 days ago to random

#climateDiary
#decroissance

This is a fascinating and sobering discussion
https://overcast.fm/+nh1AEbE7s

urlyman, 2 months ago to random

As a UK election nears (ish), and Tories scramble to be “on the side of drivers”, a reminder that people don’t know what’s good for them ahead of positive change, but then are convinced after the fact that they did know all along

urlyman, 5 months ago to climate

#climateCrisis
“the most important challenge for the international community is rapidly scaling up financing and deployment of renewables in most emerging and developing economies, many of which are being left behind in the new energy economy”
—Fatih Birol

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/worlds-renewable-energy-capacity-grew-at-record-pace-in-2023

No doubt https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111103740334964150

urlyman, 2 months ago to random

My wife and eldest daughter are trained as anthropologists. My younger daughter is a sociologist. My son is a historian.

They are all truly much better people than I but, because they are people, they’re bundles of contradictions just like me.

The important thing is to try to understand, and anthropology is us collectively trying to go around the crazy current instrumentalisation of education.

Treasure it.
Hold on to it
https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112144067417740154

urlyman, 5 months ago to random

Two depressing things about the Will Huttons of this world:

1. They don’t recognise the ecological future we’re hastening

2. The Guardian/Observer pays them to write such unimaginative 20th Century mired drivel dressed up as some sort of Oracle

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/31/britain-stuck-in-doom-loop-system-rigged-against-growth-that-needs-to-change

urlyman, 3 months ago to random

The act of creating a limited liability company makes it impossible to achieve #netzero

urlyman, 3 months ago to random

This is a nice Guardian long read on the work of Heather Wildman, helping UK farmers to navigate the financial challenges of the continuity and/or succession of their farms: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/09/farming-is-a-dirty-word-now-the-woman-helping-farmers-navigate-a-grim-uncertain-future

“The average age of a British farmer is 59 … but retirement is a tricky subject”

urlyman, 5 months ago to random

Reduce
reuse…
recycle one’s own tweets from Twitter:

“We have politicians for the 20th Century trying to steer us through the 21st Century.

It doesn’t work.
It’s not going to work.

But we won’t choose radicals until everything crumbles”

---

#degrowth is what we need.
#postGrowth is what we’ll choose