"Free-market ideology, I propose, is a double lie.

First, it’s a lie in the sense that its central claim is false.[...] Second, and more subtly, free-market thinking is a lie in the sense that it does not lead to greater freedom and autonomy. Quite the opposite. The evidence suggests that free-market thinking actually leads to greater obedience and subordination. The spread of free-market thinking goes hand in hand with the growth of hierarchy.

So the free market, it appears, is not about freedom. It’s about power. Free market thinking is successful, I argue, because it uses the language of freedom to cloak the accumulation of power."

https://evonomics.com/why-free-market-ideology-is-a-double-lie/

This is a wonderful read about being transgender.

https://medium.com/@QSE/the-xx-xy-lie-our-social-construction-of-a-sex-and-gender-binary-4eed1e60e615

"If Trump makes a bid to steal the election, calling it a coup highlights that it’s an undemocratic power grab. At the same time, the term “coup” can be misleading, because it conjures images of soldiers occupying government offices and TV stations, setting up roadblocks, and arresting political opponents. Trump stealing the election would—by design—be a lot muddier than that. As Barton Gellman argues, Trump’s strategy makes use of traditional voter suppression methods—such as purging voter rolls and (probably) intimidating people at the polls—but the crux of it is not controlling the election but discrediting the electoral process itself.

For example, Trump’s efforts to disrupt mail-in voting (such as gutting the postal service) may help shift the results in his favor, but their main effect—coupled with his team’s relentless lies about the supposed danger of widespread voter fraud—is to call the validity of the results into question. Through this and other tactics, in Gellman’s words, Trump “could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold onto power.” At that point, the outcome could depend on Trump’s control over key federal agencies and support from rightist street forces (Patriot groups, Proud Boys, etc.), but only because the election itself has been discredited."

https://itsgoingdown.org/resisting-trumps-coup/

"Of all the wild speculations Elon Musk made during the Neuralink launch, the most accurate prediction was his quip that the device is “sort of like if your phone went in your brain.” “Sort of like,” indeed: Neuralink is like a phone in that it is yet another machine built for generating data. While the device does not represent a major advance in brain-machine interfaces, and the pipeline for applications beyond movement disorders is at best decades long, what Neuralink does offer is an opportunity to harvest data about the brain and couple it to the kinds of data about our choices and behaviors that are already being collected all the time. The device is best understood not as a rupture with the past, but as an intensification of the forms of surveillance and data accumulation that have come to define our everyday lives."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/shit-for-brains-carr

"We design apartments that are too small, condos that have no privacy, communities with no access to green space, schools without safe walking paths and natural playgrounds, hospitals that are completely mechanistic and inhuman, universities without daylit classrooms and adequate natural retreat spaces, and office buildings with no connection to nature at all. Our builders, developers, engineers, and architects have convinced us that we cannot afford any other option."

"Contact with nature nurtures us into a state of relaxation that supports our health and the development of our intelligence, sociability, and creativity.

When we remove contact with nature from our world, we live a circumscribed existence that increases levels of anxiety and fear and compromises creativity. Social tensions arise when we are too crowded without the relief provided by parks and waterways.

As developers, designers, and builders, we need to ensure that buildings are connected to natural light, views, and sounds. We need to build communities that are garden-based with real links to waterways and to wild nature. We need to redefine the postindustrial city; we need to rewild it."

https://independentmediainstitute.org/how-the-built-environment-is-damaging-childrens-connection-to-nature/