#FollowTheMoney 🧵 22/n Last point and then I will stop for today: saw #Hamilton a few weeks ago and was really struck by how then it was possible to start a revolution, raise an army and WIN! Like, that would just be totally impossible now. The imbalance in military power, just as in wealth (and control over media etc etc) is just so VAST now. It’s impossible to beat. That’s why noone really even tries anymore.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 23/n. Sorry- one more! Just to end on a less bleak note: seeing this toot reminded me that, of course, that billionaire military might AI bleak dystopia is real,IS our world, but there is actually an even bigger reality here every day, in all of us, since forever. Which is that the vast majority of us humans basically just want a simple life, with family, friends, barbecues (ok maybe not perfect example but since it’s here). #FrugalAbundance
#FollowTheMoney 🧵27/n The piece btw contains a necessary critique of my sci-fi “money rules” take a few posts above. Although i still like the idea of all this being a kind of superorganism. But yes, it is about power - political economy, not just economy.
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 28/n But honestly, just read this piece - everything in this 🧵 in one brilliant analysis. And, crucially, using to explain lack of climate action. This is what everyone, each one of us, needs to think about! “Ecologically speaking, neoliberalism couldn’t have come at a worse time.”
Here Christopher’s book itself: The Price is Wrong. Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet.
BREAKING: super proud and excited to share that our formidable students were not only amongst the very first (the first?) to start a #Palestine#Gaza occupation back in February - the occupation has now been resolved in the following agreement! There will be Palestine scholarships, a review of investments, and more!
Meanwhile things continue to get worse and worse in #Gaza
Water is in desperately short supply, not just for drinking but sanitation. In Rafah there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people. The situation is four times worse for showers. That is, around one shower for every 3,500 people.
A military offensive in Rafah will be catastrophic because it is a city of children – some 600,000 of them.
More and more people who have been quiet so far are speaking out now. Every one of these declarations, like Sam’s here, takes courage.
But the more people who do this, - who say: Israel’s bombing of #Gaza, its total destruction, the killing of thousands of innocent people (50 plus more every single day!) is deeply wrong: I oppose this; I am with the student protesters - the more it it will swings things. I hope. Or at least you are not on the wrong side of history.
Wow, reading all these letters by NYU faculty to the office of the president is quite something. Do read them all. Highlighting one by History Professor Steven Hahn, as it encapsulates everything (in one screenshot). #Gaza#campusprotests
“We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer.”
It is unbearable to think what the remaining hostages and their families have been going through all this time. Netanyahu does not care about the hostages. Just as he does not care about people in #Gaza.
Holocaust Survivor Stephen Kapos’ Message to US Campus Protesters:
“This survivor of the Holocaust is against Genocide in Gaza & conflating Jewishness with Zionism, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.
Your protests are so persistent, large and global that eventually the Western leadership, which are trying to deny what’s going on, will be forced to face up to it.
Thank you for being brave and on the right side of history.”
#ClimateDiary more on #UK harvest disaster this year. Particularly heartbreaking to read about struggles of an #agroecology farmer, who fears her veg box business might go bust. These are people who are trying to provide alternatives, pathways to transition - it worries me deeply that climate change is making this impossible.
Reminded again of Roger Hallam’s trajectory (founder of XR): it was his struggles as a #permaculture farmer that brought him to protest.
What’s with all this ditching of climate targets at the moment? It’s positively trendy! Meanwhile Dubai flooding, Arctic permafrost officially becoming a source of greenhouse gases, etc etc etc
Germany’s out of hand, crazy version of anti-antisemitism continues in full swing. Last week cancellation of Nancy Fraser, this week that of the rector of Glasgow University.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian medic, has claimed he was invited to give a conference in Berlin about his work as a surgeon in Gaza but was denied entry to the country. #Gaza
#ClimateDiary Just came across this. Quite major flooding in Kazakhstan and Russia at the moment. It is frightening in itself how with more and more climate disasters everywhere, they may well cease to be news; nobody in other areas will know or care.
Somehow news of Israel’s AI use shifted me - now feel it may all *really* be dystopian quite soon, in many related ways at once (climate,economy, democracy, AI, military, human relations). Cheery Sunday morning thoughts!
How can it be that the killing of white aid workers is now seen as a “turning point”? That newspapers are NOW saying “Enough” ? Like, it was all ok up to now - killing 40,000 people, systematic starvation, destroying virtually the whole of Gaza - but now it’s “Enough”? All of this so problematic.
But yes, of course I too hope that this is a turning point; that Western support for Israel’s war is waning. #Gaza
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 9/n So far the has been more about who the money flows towards, but now also some posts about who it flows away from. Again, random collection, no comprensive analysis - just snippets of what’s going on!
Yesterday I listened to this really heartbreaking and deeply worrying programme about the rapid rise in bankruptcies in the UK. Of course we see this all around us - all those closing restaurants, Debenhams etc. the #DeathOfTheHighStreet speeding up
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 10/n But note the title ⬆️ - what is going on here? Turns out quite a bit of of the program was about how “Zombie firms”were kept alive artificially for years by low interest rates; that it’s good if they die and others take over. Really struck and appalled by utter coldness, distance and dehumanisation by people who say this - as @PippiPunkstrumpf just said, they really think of others just as numbers (see also our “Understanding Growth” piece above 5/n).
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
Regenerative Anthropology and/as Climate Action #ClimateDiary; writing book about palm oil; political and historical ecology, climate justice, commoning Avatar: a small person in a raincoat in a mirror with metal loops with LED lights swirling in front. This is the artwork “Sedibeng, It Comes with Rain” by Dineo Seshee Bopape, in Towner Gallery in EastbourneBackground: a palm oil mill in North Sumatra, in a luscious green landscape.