Can Planet Earth Handle Seven Billion People? (25:45)
The United Nations says the world’s population will reach seven billion sometime today, although the US Census Bureau says it’ll happen sometime in March. Regardless of the date, there are some reasons for optimism as well as predictions of doom and gloom. We hear some of both — from the US, China, India and sub-Saharan Africa.
Andrew Revkin, Joel Cohen, Deborah Seligsohn, Patrick French with Warren Olney
The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.
Some days ago you emailed to me a transcript of an address that Slavoj Zizek gave to the Wall St protesters about the worth and justification for changing our social and government systems and what follows is my commentary on these protests and his viewpoint. Perhaps it is a “blog”? Whilst the protests have become world wide they are quickly running out of steam because they lack the credibility of a solution, a policy, or a goal other than the vague notion that the system has to be changed—-but for what? The rantings of Slavoj Zizek are just that, rabel rousing, when what is needed is a well thought out road map, a manifesto, for change and regulation of the imperfect system that we have. To call for a whole change of our system of government i.e. to dump our democratic capitalist system would be gross folly unless you have a workable and socially just alternative. We know that Russian and Chinese communist/socialist systems become totalitarian and repressive party dictatorships so we have yet to find a better fairer workable system—perhaps the Scandinavian countries with their blending of capitalism and socialism have something to teach us about a better system? Any way the protesters are fortunate to be living in countries that permit freedom of expression and assembly! It is to their credit that they have so far been generally peaceful. There is no doubt that there is justifiably present pent up anger and disappointment with the failings of the present system especially in relation to the failure of the banking system to kerb the greed that gave rise to malpractices and fraud and the consequent recession we continue world wide to endure. There are other contributing ingredients too like: High levels of youth unemployment that means school leavers and graduates are unable to find satisfactory work and become the restless unemployed. A growing disparity of incomes between people at the top and people at the bottom. This is common to all developed western countries so we have an excessively rich strata of a few and an impoverished many with all shades inbetween which is bound to give rise to social discontent. Government cut backs in spending especially on social services, education and health that impact on the majority of any population create anger. Everyone has forgotten that our elected governments over borrowed in times of prosperity which we enjoyed and now have to pay back the borrowings e.g. the Greeks! So the cut backs were inevitable, but the further down the economic totem pole you are the more hurt you proportionally suffer. I believe that the growing levels of social injustices will eventually culminate in major political changes to our system for the better. It is an incremental progression achieved in a democratic process which be it imperfect it is peaceful. My point here is evidenced by the social changes achieved over the past century.
End of musings—-Love DADXX
NOTES ON PRACTICE: STUBBORN STRUCTURES AND INSISTENT SEEPAGE IN A NETWORKED WORLD
In a sense this implies a three-stage encounter that we are ascribing between the practitioner and her world. First, a recognition of the fact that instances of art practices can be seen as contiguous to a ‘neighbourhood’ of marginal practices embodied by the figures of the five transgressors. Secondly, that ‘seeing’ oneself as a practitioner, and understanding the latent potentialities of one’s practice, might also involve listening to the ways in which each of the five transgressive figures encounters the world. Finally, that what one gleans from each instance of transgression can then be integrated into a practice which constitutes itself as an ensemble of attitudes, ways of thinking, doing and embodying (or recuperating) creative agency in a networked world.
Raqs Media Collective
Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
(Letter of Solidarity From Cairo)
Police Fire Tear Gas at Occupy Protesters in Oakland
John Zerzan 10-25 ,10-18, 10-11, 10-4
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Charlie Rose – A discussion about Occupy Wall Street
From Tahrir to Wall Street: Egyptian Revolutionary Asmaa Mahfouz Speaks at Occupy Wall Street
Grace Lee Boggs’ message to Occupy Wall Street
You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.
Ezra Klien with David Graeber
On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet & Guardian Post
David Graeber
Remembering Andre Gunder Frank While Thinking about the Future
Immanuel Wallerstein
Interview with Chris Hedges
If you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store (And why no one should ever listen to Naomi Wolf about “protests”)
Evan Calder Williams
OCCUPY WALL STREET: The Game of Colonialism and further nationalism to be decolonized from the “Left”
Jessica Yee
More here
For building is not merely a means and a way toward
dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell.—Martin Heidegger
previously
thanks Montse