This remind me a little about a discussion in the aquarium hobby about where to ethically get fish, from breeders or from catching them in the wild. Breeding fish means you aren’t disrupting the environment. However, catching them means giving economic value to the environment they are from…so often it can be a local alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture or setting up hydro dams or so on, which would not be any better for it.
The problem of course is we are operating in a framework where the whole world is there to be exploited as thoroughly as possible, and unless something can be monetized then it has no reason to exist. It’s important to figure out how to act within that. It’s also important to remember what the real enemy is.
Hear me out, this might sound whackadoodle, but what if the enemy is even bigger than capitalism? The separation of humans from the natural world was going on before the current dominant paradigm took hold. Look to the Fertile Crescent…
118 years old today…Bon anniversaire, Soeur André (Happy Birthday, Sister André):
Last year, she survived COVID-19:
Her birthday wish makes me think about all the time and money spent on longevity research. The wealthy are probably betting on robot bodies and uploading consciousness.
It’s not like the world would wake up one day and say “no meat from this moment forward”, so what would happen is attrition over time. Fewer and fewer animals would be sold for meat, and thus fewer would be inseminated to create more. Because that’s one of the factors that a lot of people forget: humans have so altered domestic farm animals that they need human help to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and make it through labor and delivery. If we stop breeding them for food, they’ll (mostly) stop reproducing. The wild versions of all the species will continue, of course, unless climate change kills them off.
Critical race theory is both an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism and a catchall term that many GOP politicians have embraced to describe various kinds of lessons about race and racism they find objectionable
(Italics mine)
Interesting phraseology.
Here’s another way to say that:
Critical race theory is both an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism. In the past 18 month many GOP politicians have used the phrase inaccurately as a catchall term to describe various kinds of lessons about race and racism they find objectionable
The first presents the term as having reasonable differences in definition, lending credence to what the GOP is doing. The second, I think, is much more clear.
Yeah… I’m keen for everyone to read about this! I think that for all it’s flaws, academia is an institution that does matter and we should be concerned about the ongoing, sustained attacks that’s been happening for a while. I think this might seem to be out of left field for most people, but I think this is just another, more public front on the larger right wing attacks that have been ongoing for years and have contributed to the neo-liberal corporatization of academia. It seems like just as academia was truly becoming more democratic and equitable, there has been a backlash that attacked the humanities, which have become much more diverse in the past few decades. I don’t think these specific laws are disconnected from the proletarianization of the academy but are merely the next logical step in the neo-liberal/right wing gutting of academia…
