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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2019 1:57:40 GMT
Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them. The UK’s hand in this was enormous, as can be seen by the size of the former British empire, and the dominance of the English language around the world. There is stark evidence that everyday racial bias continues in Britain, now, today. It’s worth naming some of these constructed delusions that have been coded into societies and institutions around the world: The delusion of white-supremacy centres whiteness and the experience of white people, constructing and perpetuating the myth that white people and their lives are somehow inherently better and more valuable than people of colour. The delusion of patriarchy centres the male experience, and excludes/hinders female-assigned people from public life (reducing them to a possession or an object for ownership or consumption). Patriarchy teaches dominating and competitive behaviours, and emphasises the idea that the world is a place of scarcity, separation and powerlessness. The delusions of Eurocentrism include the notion that Europeans know what is best for the world. The delusions of hetero-sexism/heteronormativity propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal’ and that other expressions of sexuality are deviant. The delusions of class hierarchy uphold the theory that the rich elite is better/smarter/nobler than the rest of us, and make therefore better decisions. There are other delusions. These delusions have become ingrained in all of us, taught to us from a very young age. xrblog.org/category/xr-author-list/stu-basden/
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2019 15:42:28 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2019 15:44:03 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 5, 2019 9:59:39 GMT
"The elites claimed that their promises were based on scientific economic models and “evidence-based research”. Well, after 40 years, the numbers are in: growth has slowed and the fruits of that growth went overwhelmingly to a very few at the top. As wages stagnated and the stock market soared, income and wealth flowed up, rather than trickling down. How can wage restraint – to attain or maintain competitiveness – and reduced government programmes possibly add up to higher standards of living? Ordinary citizens felt like they had been sold a bill of goods. They were right to feel conned. We are now experiencing the political consequences of this grand deception: distrust of the elites, of the economic “science” on which neoliberalism was based and of the money-corrupted political system that made it all possible. The reality is that, despite its name, the era of neoliberalism was far from liberal. It imposed an intellectual orthodoxy whose guardians were utterly intolerant of dissent. Economists with heterodox views were treated as heretics to be shunned, or at best shunted off to a few isolated institutions. Neoliberalism bore little resemblance to the “open society” that Karl Popper had advocated. As George Soros has emphasised, Popper recognised that our society is a complex, ever-evolving system in which the more we learn, the more our knowledge changes the behaviour of the system. Nowhere was this intolerance greater than in macroeconomics, where the prevailing models ruled out the possibility of a crisis like the one we experienced in 2008. When the impossible happened, it was treated as if it were a 500-year flood – a freak occurrence that no model could have predicted. Even today, advocates of these theories refuse to accept that their belief in self-regulating markets and their dismissal of externalities as either nonexistent or unimportant led to the deregulation that was pivotal in fuelling the crisis. The theory continues to survive, with Ptolemaic attempts to make it fit the facts, which attests to the reality that bad ideas, once established, often have a slow death. If the 2008 financial crisis failed to make us realise that unfettered markets don’t work, the climate crisis certainly should: neoliberalism will literally bring an end to our civilisation. But it is also clear that demagogues who would have us turn our back on science and tolerance will only make matters worse. The only way forward, the only way to save our planet and our civilisation, is a rebirth of history. We must revitalise the Enlightenment and recommit to honouring its values of freedom, respect for knowledge and democracy." www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/05/decades-of-free-market-orthodoxy-have-taken-a-toll-on-democracy
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2019 11:10:15 GMT
“ In addition to extensive and intensive growth identified by Robinson, there is another form of expansion that deserves attention, namely, capitalism’s monotonic secular increase in commodity production and consumption, for example the exponential growth in plastic production since World War II, the explosive growth in air travel, cell phone proliferation, and global energy consumption. This form of capitalist growth comes with increases in resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, habitat destruction, and more. It is this form of capitalist expansion that drives the environmental catastrophe most directly, especially the growth of weapons industries” climateandcapitalism.com/2019/10/28/into-the-tempest-essays-on-the-new-global-capitalism/
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Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2019 20:26:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 12, 2019 19:50:51 GMT
NOVEMBER 07 ,2019BY SLAVA ZILBER Chris Hedges: Princeton or Harvard Are Schools that Have Always Existed to Train the Ruling Elites to Manage the System of Corporate Capitalism "What's happened is the ideology of neoliberalism or unfettered capitalism has been exposed as a fraud, a con game. And the ruling elites don't really have a counter-argument. We saw the critique of the system embodied in 2016 in the two insurgent candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, although Donald Trump, of course, had no intention of thwarting the oligarchic rule. In fact, he has accelerated it. But he spoke to the reality that has gripped the American working class. And because the elites don't have a counter-argument anymore, they have taken critics of corporate capitalism who were already marginalized and pushed them further and further into the outer reaches of the internet by imposing algorithms – Facebook has done this and others – supposedly to combat foreign influence and specifically Russian influence which is just ridiculous. I don't think I have ever written a nice word about Putin in my life or written much about Russia at all. But you saw a campaign directed at left-wing sites, all of which have been targeted in an effort to essentially, if not silence, at least ghettoize these critics who do not appear on the mainstream. People like Noam Chomsky, for instance, who I would argue is probably America's greatest intellectual, are virtually blacklisted. And so all of us who critique imperialism and corporate capitalism have been pushed off, even on the supposedly 'liberal' networks like MSNBC because these corporate elites don't have an answer anymore." ahtribune.com/interview/3633-chris-hedges.html
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Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2019 20:46:16 GMT
Humans Aren’t Inherently Destroying the Planet — Capitalism Is "One of the biggest ironies of the right-wing trope accusing #socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that in reality, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse if it couldn’t continue to rely on free stuff. Without free or artificially cheap access to things like natural resources, care work, labor and a whole array of other elements, capitalism could not stay afloat. In fact, the only way that capitalism was ever able to even emerge was through a process of “primitive accumulation” — where things like slavery and colonialism were utilized to extract free labor and resources." truthout.org/articles/humans-arent-inherently-destroying-the-planet-capitalism-is/
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Post by Admin on Nov 19, 2019 13:46:49 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 5, 2019 21:13:39 GMT
WE DID START THE FIRE: CLIMATE CHANGE & THE CURSE OF HOPE “The word “sacrifice” comes from sacra, meaning “sacred,” and facere, meaning “to make, to do." When we sacrifice something, we make it sacred or holy. Or we restore to it that sacred or holy character which it previously had, but was somehow lost. Capitalism, as another G&R author, Kadmus, has explained, is the rejection “of any re-emergence of the sacred through an insistence that all is profane and everything has its price.” Even life has a price under capitalism: the lives of elephants, the lives of humans, even the life of the planet. So thoroughly indoctrinated are we by capitalism that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the burning of the tusks as anything but a “waste.” But, according to the Kenyans, the ivory was not valuable, it was worthless. “The only value of the ivory is tusks on a live elephant,” said the Kenyan Wildlife Service Director General in response to criticisms of the burning as “wasteful.” By burning the tusks, the Kenyans were removing them forever from the grasp of capitalism, and thereby restoring their sacred nature. I see a kind of surrender of hope in the burning of the tusks. They didn’t burn the tusks in the hope that doing so would end poaching. And it certainly wouldn’t bring back the elephants. The burning was an expression of the belief that there is no way, within a capitalist system, to redeem the deaths of those 8,000 elephants. It is only through wholesale destruction, through purifying fire, that the sacred can be restored under such a system. It was also a kind of return to the practice of “holocaust,” the sacrificial burning of the whole animal (from holos, meaning “whole," and kaustos, meaning “to burn"), before Prometheus came with his gifts and humans struck their ill-fated bargain with the gods. Human civilization is a fire. It’s been burning since we’ve been human. And the human story is not a straight line, but a circle, a great ring of fire. It began during the last Ice Age with the domestication of fire and the hunting of mammoths. It burned through the life and death of villages, cities, and empires. Slowly at first, and then rapidly as we began extracting coal, oil, and gas from the earth and burning forests to fuel what we call “progress.” It has circled back around on itself now, with global heating, the melting of the permafrost, and the marketing of mammoth tusks. And the fire won’t stop burning until it consumes the consumers, until it consumes itself.” abeautifulresistance.org/site/2019/10/16/bxqvw9zdoycegy854b1hdacy5axjeb
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Post by Admin on Dec 19, 2019 19:13:20 GMT
"A person who is unwilling to put the needs of capital first is not likely to become a major corporate executive. If the screening process fails, or if a CEO has an inconvenient attack of conscience, he or she will not last long in that position. It has been called the ecological tyranny of the bottom line. When protecting humanity and planet might reduce profits, corporations will always put profits first. Capital has only one measure of success. How much more profit was made in this quarter than in the previous quarter? How much more today than yesterday? It doesn’t matter if the sales include products spread disease, destroy forests, demolish ecosystems, and treat our water, air, and soil as sewers. It all contributes to the growth of capital, and that is what counts." climateandcapitalism.com/2019/11/19/capitalism-versus-life-on-earth/
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Post by Admin on Dec 21, 2019 17:04:22 GMT
Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out "Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive." As George Monbiot notes, recent psychological research shows that "owning more doesn't bring happiness: the material pursuit of self-esteem actually reduces self-esteem" - suggesting that when you give people "things" you actually take something away from them. This year Britons will spend £42.8 billion on this at Christmas. As Monbiot observes, it's "a system that is eating us from the inside out." Happy Christmas! www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/materialism-system-eats-us-from-inside-out
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Post by Admin on Jan 6, 2020 8:14:05 GMT
OP-ED ECONOMY & LABOR How Economists Tricked Us Into Thinking Capitalism Works truthout.org/articles/how-economists-tricked-us-into-thinking-capitalism-works/"These days, it seems like someone is always trying to privatize something. One day it’s the Trump administration contemplating the privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The next it’s the Tories looking to sell off the U.K.’s National Health Service, or economists promoting “market-based” solutions to the climate crisis. In this age of neoliberalism, the rallying cry for politicians and economists alike is always for “More privatization! More markets! Sell it all off to the private sector!”"
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Post by Admin on Jan 7, 2020 19:45:11 GMT
The latest from Umair Haque. "It strikes me that above all, we live in an age of a great dehumanization. A time of precisely the thing that great minds like Arendt, Orwell, Camus, Frankl, and many more warned us about. We seem to have lost our way--badly--as people, in society after society. It’s a time of a shattered moral compass, of an invisible and unseen rending of the soul and breaking of the mind. A strange, lethal plague of rage, cruelty, aggression, and hostility seems to have swept the globe. More and more seem to regard everything…everyone else…the planet…life on it…as nothing but worthless, meaningless commodities, to be dominated, abused, and discarded. Which, of course, is what capitalism taught them--and a key way it becomes fascism." eand.co/the-great-dehumanization-e440941c57dd
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Post by Admin on Jan 20, 2020 13:30:14 GMT
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