contingency and human agency

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

"I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds."

 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/05/10/john-muir-nature-writings/

What about elks?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/05/magazine/martha-nussbaum-interview.html?campaign_id=52&emc=edit_ma_20221209&instance_id=79671&nl=the-new-york-times-magazine&regi_id=4493560&segment_id=115460&te=1&user_id=65a9caf1add490fa2c7cae38f4ef5426

Says Nussbaum:"With the elk, there are things that have been tried: shooting them in cold blood; some kind of population control, meaning, in this case, contraception, as opposed to hunting or predation by animals. Introducing wolves to tear the elks limb from limb. People say that’s better because it’s nature. I don’t like that argument. For the elk, a bullet to the brain — if the person knew how to shoot, which a lot of hunters don’t — would be a lot better than the wolf’s tearing them apart. So I think the only reasonable long-term solution is some form of population control."

Research on population control of wild boars done in Geneva and Catalonia shows that hunting provokes anticipated gestation and more live births. But wh0 will argue with a philosopher.

Sing it together with octopuses, trees, water and sand: we are the planet.

"This is where the most concerning element of degrowthism and any other form of apocalyptic environmentalism comes in: by constantly engaging in “doomerism” — the idea that either we fix everything or we’re all screwed — they’re effectively saying that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. It’s like Zero Covid on steroids. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, rather ominously, Saito cites the pandemic as proof that “rapid change is possible” — with apparently little concern for the fact that this “change” was achieved by sweeping aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarising societies, cracking down on civil liberties, and implementing unprecedented measures of social control."

 

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/sick-with-shareholder-value-us-pharmas-financialized-business-model-during-the-pandemic

 

 

Nietzsche, help.

We will be transparent. Everybody will know everything about anybody. Problem: we're not transparent to ourselves.

"https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/ai-is-going-to-break-a-lot-of-norms-and-institutions.html

 

ndeed, within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link. Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating. Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?

Riots, protests are a democratic means.

Astra Taylor interviews William Hogeland on "The Dig" podcast about his new book, Founding Finance. How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns made the US a nation.

Here's an appetizer:

“On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings. Addressing his great fellow Virginian General George Washington, victorious hero of the War of Independence, who sat in the chair, Randolph hoped to convince delegates sent by seven, so far, of the thirteen states, with more on the way, to abandon the confederation formed by the states that had sent them—the union that had declared American independence from England and won the war—and to replace it with another form of government. “Our chief danger,” Randolph announced, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” This was in May of 1787, in Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room of the Pennsylvania State House, borrowed from the Pennsylvania assembly, where in 1776 the Continental Congress had declared independence. "

Jaspers's "Innere Umkehr" might be the only answer.

https://metacpc.org/en/tppalbert/

 

to be commented

L’ultimo ceffone alla manovra di Giorgia Meloni l’ha mollato ieri Banca d’Italia.

Stellar winds blowing outwards from the young stars have cleared their spot inside the dusty cocoon

The EU promotes censorship.

In Questions & Answers: European Media Freedom Act,  The Commission writes:"protecting society from harmful content, including disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference." In the US,  this would be considered prior restraint, a form of censorship that allows the government to review the content of printed materials and prevent their publication.

 

Wars aren't collective.

I'm through with Tolstoy's War&Peace. 

Wars can only be narrated from the angle of every single participant. Wars like the ones described in history books have never taken place, strategies were never executed. 

Mearsheimer says (interview Unherd) Russia never intended to incorporate Ukraine because for doing that you need at least 10 times the number of soldiers Russia actually deployed. These are the conventional ways of telling war stories. You can't occupy a country because you can't occupy a person.

 

That's why the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe collapsed, vanished, once it became clear to every single person in Eastern Europe that every single person in Eastern Europe knew that the dominance could be ignored, ignored not fought.

Creative Distruction destroys Creative Distruction?

Writes DeLong in Slouching: "It is normal for a plutocratic elite, once formed, to use its political power to shape the economy to its own advantages. And it is normal for this to put a drag on economic growth. Rapid growth like that which occurred between 1945 and 1973, after all, requires creative destruction; and, because it is the plutocrats’ wealth that is being destroyed, they are unlikely to encourage it."
Klein comments:
"A different version of the book would have used this to frame a long discussion of antitrust and public choice theory. More generally, I would love to know the extent to which the post-1870 boom was due to the suppression of this “normal” behavior. If so, what caused that? And how can we restore the dynamism and competition that Schumpeter recognized was so essential for progress?"