"This vague and platitudinous carousel is reminiscent of what writer Alex V. Green has called the “Having Conversations Industrial Complex” in which what should be the first step toward achieving justice is instead stretched out into an infinite loop in which the perpetuation of this cycle becomes its own end goal"

https://newrepublic.com/article/158972/instagram-black-lives-matter-posts

Joint statement from It's Going Down and Crimethinc:

"Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the state and especially the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue. This is the same operation that William Barr performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on “anti-government extremists” of all stripes. In the case of the Department of Justice, it enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks. They are attempting to do the same thing to Black Lives Matter activists, associating them together with neo-Nazis and white nationalists as “racially motivated extremists.” "

"Make no mistake, if this goes unchallenged, it will not stop here. The more it becomes normalized for governments to be able to determine which voices social media platforms permit to be heard, the further such censorship will penetrate into every sector of society, and the more it will shape what it is possible to think, what it is possible to imagine."

Full statement:
https://itsgoingdown.org/on-facebook-banning-anarchist-and-antifascist-pages-the-digital-censorship-to-come/

Written by @keno_kanl

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/man-his-own-master-kant-lonothew-1

A remarkable campaign. Take notes!

"Unlike Democratic political clubs or nonprofit organizations, NYC-DSA endorsed in races early, kicking off field operations in November for the late-June primary. This gave organizers the time to build a base of support within the districts, and to connect the state races to a national platform: Bernie Sanders was still in the race for president, advocating for the same issues the DSA for the Many slate was fighting for.

As DSA members campaigned nationally for Bernie through an independent expenditure, NYC-DSA connected local issues to the Sanders platform. When knocking on doors in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, volunteers talked about both Mitaynes’s and Sanders’s fight for universal rent control. Not only did linking our slate to Bernie grow in-district support and volunteer energy, but the national scope of the Democratic Primary and the scale of Sanders’s second presidential campaign lent credibility to our local socialist movement."

"Throughout the election cycle, the “DSA for the Many” slate made it clear that volunteers and supporters were growing a movement, not just supporting a few candidates. Even when deployed through electoral campaigns, our organizing was not just about winning elections; we are focused on broader goals."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/nyc-dsa-slate-democratic-socialists-america/

"In one experiment, researcher Paul Piff rigged a game of Monopoly so that some randomly determined players started the game with more money. When the privileged players inevitably won, Piff asked them why they believed they had been successful. The winners answered with descriptions of their clever property purchases, completely forgetting the initial random coin toss that determined who began the game with an advantage. This phenomenon—believing that those on top deserve to be there, and those on the bottom likewise deserve their place—is called Just-World Fallacy. The conclusions we draw about the world around us are intrinsically flawed by our silent biases, always ready to shield us from the truth that we, too, might be subject to forces outside our control. "

currentaffairs.org/2020/08/work-hard-and-get-rich-or-more-likely-die-trying/

"It’s not just human services that are worse off through privatization. When basic needs and infrastructure like water, roads, and public transport are handed to private firms, services decline while prices rise and administration becomes more complex.

By enriching business, privatization creates a feedback loop: attracted by the guaranteed profit of natural monopolies, the investment and superannuation funds that own these assets are then empowered to lobby for more “investible products,” in order to secure further low-risk, reliable income.

The result is extravagant waste.

[...] Privatization and austerity are “zombie economics” — dead ideas that still walk among us. Far from being disruptive, innovative, and efficient, neoliberalism handed commonly owned social services over to a private bureaucracy of managers, duly protected by commercial-in-confidence laws, national security laws, and intellectual property."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/australia-victoria-coronavirus-privatization/

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
Appropriate technology
Art Nouveau
Hayao Miyazaki
Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
Solarpunk:
is diverse
has room for spirituality and science to coexist
is beautiful
can happen. Now

The Solarpunk Community