understand and speak up

Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” —Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)

The empty brain

We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP [information processing] metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.

“The biggest lesson conservatives-fascists learned about media is that it’s not necessary to have total censorship level control, at least in the run-up to a fascist takeover. They just have to flood the zone with shit. Make truth and expertise irrelevant and people will give up trying to tell the difference and believe whatever they want to believe. You eventually exhaust not only people’s critical faculties but their empathy, too.

When nobody trusts media and government — and when media and government keep proving themselves untrustworthy — people will retreat into localized subcultural bubbles, relying on the people around them as a reference point. That means there will still be, e.g. anti-fascist and anti-capitalist groups online and in person but they will be more isolated and ignored and have a harder time organizing a mass movement beyond themselves, especially if prevailing norms work against them.” —Nowhere Girl

Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data

Back in 1998, “The Simpsons” joked about the Canyonero, an SUV so big that they were obviously kidding. At that time, it was preposterous to think anyone would drive something that was “12 yards long, two lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride.”

In 2024, that joke isn’t far from reality.

And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone.

Vehicle size is a big part of this problem. A recent paper by urban economist Justin Tyndall found that increasing the front-end height of a vehicle by roughly 4 inches (10 centimeters) increases the chance of a pedestrian fatality by 22%. The risk increases by 31% for female pedestrians or those over 65 years, and by 81% for children.

Rojava Revolution: Women’s Liberation, Democracy and Ecology in North-East Syria

Over the past decade, the most far-reaching social revolution of the 21st century has taken place in Syria’s Kurdish-majority Northeast, commonly referred to as Rojava. Though still largely unknown, today roughly a third of Syrian territory is governed not by a nation-state but through a federation of participatory local councils known officially as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Despite conditions of constant war and isolation, the people of Rojava are building and defending a society rooted in principles of direct democracy, women’s autonomy, cultural diversity, cooperative economics, and social ecology.

Scientific American: We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality

Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachel Carson and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being accurate.

These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.

So what can we do about our “Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

Stop Thief, by Peter Linebaugh

On this day, 16 June 1531, English king Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed. This and similar laws enacted across Europe, backed up by intense state violence, created a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive: the working class.

Karl Marx described these legal mechanisms in volume 1 of his work, Capital: “Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.” This expropriation was extended across the globe by violent colonialism.

Rather than being a natural state of affairs as it is often portrayed, the creation of the working class was fiercely resisted for hundreds of years, and indeed still is to this day in some areas.

Augie Ray on From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About

Great interview:

I should point out that there are, in fact, places that have installed all of these: fresh air, filtering, and germicidal UV lights. Do you know where they are?

Where?

PA: The White House, Congress, Number 10 Downing, Parliament, the Reichstag, and WHO. All of our leaders have these protections and procedures in place.

But not our schoolchildren.

The school where former CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s children go, they have these upgrades.

Helen Mirren via @RustyBertrand