Shopping at the end of the world — Going through England I get a distinct feeling of dystopia. Everything looks nominally fine buy both scrawled in graffiti and in advertising are signs of the apocalypse. I understand the graffiti, THE END IS NIGH, EAT THE RICH, but what I find most jarring is the advertising. In 2009 Mark…

We try to teach them, but what do we know? — My kids fight—to the point of tears—about dumb shit. Who saw a bird first, who got to eat breakfast early, just annoying each other. They seem (and are) juvenile, but in many ways, the way they deal with conflict is more mature than us adults. Or at least more effective…

The age of discovery was destruction, and the Cold War ended with the worst people on top — When you learn history—and by ‘you’, I mean ‘me’—you learn an arc. This arc of course bends towards justice, later. The arc starts with an age of discovery followed by enlightenment, then an age of information, leading all, quite perplexingly to total systems collapse. Where did we go wrong? The…

And its continuing zombie existence, eating brains — Isabella Weber writes “The neoliberal state is neither small nor weak, but strong (e.g., Bonefeld, 2013, 2017; Chang, 2002; Davies, 2018). Its purpose is to fortify the market.” Freedom is narrowly constrained as the freedom of the richest person to do what they want, even if the poorest cannot get…

We still have servants, we just don’t look at them — The streets of Oxford are full of vans doing plumbing, roofing, gardening—all jobs that would have been done by the downstairs servants of yore. Men in vests unload commodities from wage-slaves even further off-shore. We think the days of slavery and servitude have passed, but they haven’t. They’ve just stepped…

On great evil, our dharma to fight that evil, and also the deep hopelessness of it all — The actual western development model is to steal from the rest of the world, which obviously isn’t going to work for the rest of the world. So they made some shit up about a development model which they never followed and used it to gaslight us into another few decades…

And how ‘The Economy’ lives and dies — As my homie B writes, energy is the economy. As Vaclav Smil says in Energy And Civilization, “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done.” …

For the second time in geological history, we have flown too close to the sun — When lifeforms discovered solar energy, they went crazy. Photosynthetic algae bloomed all over the ocean. They spread and spread until their emissions turned the Earth into a giant snowball. In that sense, what’s happening to life on Earth is nothing new. In fact, the climate collapse today is an almost…

Modern buildings are so shit compared to cathedrals and climates — I was walking up the stairs at the St. Something train station and I saw a mural. It was so garish and cheap. So temporary. You can dig up someone’s bathroom from centuries ago and it’s art. This was just advertising. Such is the nature of everything under capitalism. Everything…