Austerity Ecology
2017-01-15
Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical
The left — especially Marxist left — has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity’s woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.
[…]
The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
Almost didn’t renew hosting this time, but it seems i can justify it for self-employment purposes (and it qualifies for the Great Canadian Writeoff). So i had a bunch of draft posts that i wasn’t quite motivated to finish.
Scrawl
2017-01-10
Scrawl–Punk Rock for Grown-Ups: A Retrospective
So what does it mean to make rock music that speaks for the responsible older sibling; for the friend who cleans up after the party; for the people who won’t leave work early for the party, because they need the extra hours; for Mom? How would that sound? It might sound like Scrawl.
ended up screwed by the record industry. of course! but what a great band.
Rooting
2017-01-10
‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain
In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: “So is this what the rich west is really like?” If that was the case, I wanted to cry. Cry for my own stupid illusions. What an idiot I was. Now I realised there had been some truth to my own country’s communist education: the west was not milk and honey.
David Foster Wallace
2017-01-10
The David Foster Wallace Disease
Partly, I’m writing about Wallace’s high-powered self-hatred machine because it’s a way of making his disappearance from the earth seem like an inevitability—a curse he was born with. Although there’s some validity to the view that he’s a kind of martyr, he was really just an animal in an environment, with unfortunate inputs that produced unfortunate outputs.
(via Metafilter)
seals
2017-01-10
Atlantic cod study renews debate over grey seal cull
The failure of the cod to rebound even without an active fishery has only bolstered that theory. Yet, all official research seemed to disprove it, with field studies pointing to other unexplained causes of cod mortality, and the limited influence of seals.
But now, a study has found that grey seals — top predators that can weigh as much as a bear — do in fact eat a lot of cod, and are largely responsible for the fish’s decline. The finding, published in the journal Fisheries Research, is sure to stoke the controversy over a proposed government cull of a quarter million grey seals for the benefit of cod.
Keep in mind, though: these were the good old days. This was a time when politicians were merely indifferent to science, not actively hostile to it.
(post draft from five years ago? blah)
Russia
2017-01-10
Rethinking the Big Russian Revolution
What would Zygar like people to conclude after their fifteen-month journey, through Russia’s hundred-year-ago history?
All he will say is that: “Everything that happened to us, in the 20th century, and is happening now is a consequence of the events of 1917.”
The future of performance art
2017-01-10
This Is Not an Interview with Poppy
What do you think people will think of social media in the future?
People aren’t going to think in the future. We will become one knowing consciousness.What drove you to YouTube as a medium for your work?
I like YouTube because it is owned by Google. Google is the biggest which means it is the best.
completely taking the piss.
Almost all true
2016-12-07
To create software, you need programmers. Unfortunately. They are expensive, lazy, and almost impossible to control. The software they create either works or doesn’t, but you still have to pay them, every month. Of course, it’s always better to pay less. However, sometimes they may figure out they are being underpaid and quit. How do you prevent that? Unfortunately, we can’t use violence any more, but there are some other mechanisms. Let me share.
The Mekons
2016-10-17
A Skeptic’s Guide To The Mekons
If the Mekons were what you claim they are, in other words, everyone would already know and acknowledge it. That they don’t is proof you’re wrong.
The irony here is that this line of reasoning is precisely what has always obsessed the Mekons, the very thing that a lot and maybe most of their best work is about: Does it matter what you say if no one really cares about it?
