european capitalism

#extract

"Given the operations of monopoly capitalism and its technological apparatus, the largely uncontrolled development of synthetic materials results in a particularly dangerous situation, often referred to as “the risk society.”45 In the words of Peter Haff, a professor of environmental engineering at Duke University, a capitalist technostructure “has emerged possessing no global mechanism of metabolic regulation. Regulation of metabolism introduces the possibility of a new timescale into system dynamics—a lifetime—the time over which the system exists in a stable metabolic state. But without an intrinsic lifetime, i.e., lacking enforced setpoint values for energy use,” this system “acts only in the moment, without regard to the more distant future, necessarily biased towards increasing consumption of energy and materials,” racing ahead “without much concern for its own longevity,” much less the continuance of what is external to it."

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/09/01/the-capitalinian/

#extract intermittent energy, eco-socialist planning

We must do the difficult work of reaching out to and reconciling with people who aren’t like us — the slow, painful work of reconciling within the brutality of capitalist alienation. On the left, there’s a common, facile framing that treats people “unlike us” as committed and socially engaged conservatives; the truth is that people unlike us are the vast sea of people so alienated they have no connections and no activist sentiments whatsoever. These are the people we need to reach, and we can’t do that until we wrap our heads around how profoundly capitalism has destroyed our communities’ social bonds in order to monetize the wreckage. Knowing and loving our neighbors isn’t ancillary to communism. It may actually be the whole point.

christiansocialism.com/social-bonds-christianity-marxism-organizing/

"The city is divided into four quarters, which together make up 31 communes. Each commune includes about 100 to 250 households. One to four communes each share a komîngeh (neighbourhood office), a public space that anyone can visit during opening hours – even just to drink tea. The process of local self-government in these neighbourhoods can be divided between two main areas: administration (the basic supply and distribution of resources) and politics (law, culture, education and health).

These two areas are organised by specific commissions at all political levels, from the communes up. Typical commissions include health, economy, defence, education, art and culture. In addition to linking horizontally, these commissions also link and communicate with each other vertically. For example, the defence commission of a commune organises the HPC (civil defence forces) at the local level. At the same time, it meets with the defence commissions of the next higher unit of the district defence commission, while the district defence commission exchanges information with the cantonal defence commission, and so on. Written reports thus reach the top from below, while at the same time coordinative top-down processes take place.

In elections for the co-chairs of commissions, only residents of the respective commune are eligible for election. Before the revolution, the national state appointed administrators who not only did not speak Kurdish but an elitist bureaucratic Arabic. Today, the neighbourhood offices are run by people from the neighbourhood who share the same everyday language and life with the residents."

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/rojavas-everyday-democracy/

"Google (GOOG) has been a partner with the CIA since 2004 when the company bought Keyhole, a mapping technology business that eventually became Google Earth. In 2010, Google and In-Q-Tel made a joint investment on a company called Recorded Future, which has the Minority Report-style goal of creating a "temporal analytics engine" that scours the web and creates curves that predict where events may head.

Google is already helping the government write, and rewrite, history. Here, from its transparency report, are some stats on the amount of information it has either given to the government or wiped from the web based on requests by U.S. agencies:

-4,601 requests from U.S. government agencies for "user data"
- Google complied with government requests for user data 94% of the time
- 1,421 requests for "content removal"
- Google complied with content removal requests 87% of the time.
- 15 requests were from "executive, police etc."
- 1 was a national security request."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/

"Pfizer’s private funding narrative depends on an extraordinarily narrow interpretation of state investment in national and global public health. One prominent counter to their claims is the simple fact that Pfizer’s vaccine overwhelmingly relies on decades of publicly funded research. This extends beyond the individual developments that make the mRNA vaccine platform viable, to the very genesis of the design: the development speed Pfizer takes such pride in was made possible by the release of the full genetic sequence for COVID-19 by a team of researchers out of a public university in China."

https://thenewinquiry.com/pfizer-walk-with-me/

"Peterson manages to mangle intellectual history so badly that it’s almost surreal. The claim that it took “thousands of years” for humans to develop a concept of “individual sovereignty and worth” and that this is a concept that is primarily associated with “the west” is entirely false.

The idea that all human beings have inherent value is widespread throughout human cultures and is attested remarkably early in human history. For instance, even if we set aside the appearance of this idea in the Book of Jonah, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (lived c. 470 – c. 391 BCE), who lived around the same time that Socrates was alive in Athens, espoused a philosophy that was founded on the idea of 兼愛 (jiān’ài). This word is usually translated as “universal love,” but is perhaps more accurately translated as “impartial caring for all people.”

Mozi believed that every person should not only respect and care for those whom they were obligated to respect and care for, but respect and care for every other person equally."

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/04/05/jordan-peterson-does-not-understand-mythology/