Study: brain switches off rationality when given expert...
Rated • 12 reviews • politics • timesonline.co.uk
- Stumble >
-
b-bear/politics
Last seen: 5 months ago
b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia
Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy.
~William Blake
-
Mon auberge était ŕ la Grande Ourse.
My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud
-
-
Street life | adaptivereuse.net
Rated • 2 reviews • politics, art, arts, parasites • adaptivereuse.net
Homelessness is a global problem that has no easy solution. The social basis for this problem is found in the ownership and territorialisation of space, a process which would be better understood as the disastrous failure to provide inhabitable space for life in general.
Because homelessness has many different causes and is faced with many exacerbating responses, it may never have a complete solution. But a particularly appalling example of the 'inventive small-minded malevolence' that takes a problem like homelessness and makes it worse is what I would call the anti-sit movement. Exposed in great detail by Mike Davis in his study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, the anti-sit movement attacks the homeless, vagrants and lingerers by using malicious anti-sit devices. Anyone who is not a paying customer is for the wealthy residents and businesses the target of medieval-style torture. Some examples of anti-sit devices are below, found here. It seems that in many cities today the wealthy classes, rather than acting to end homelessness, would prefer designing uninhabitable spaces, little altars to the cruelty of the dollar.
-
Online Library of Liberty - Principles of Politics...
Rated • 0 reviews • politics, books, liberalism • libertyfund.org
-
Constant, Liberty of Ancients and Moderns, 1816
Rated • 0 reviews • history, politics, liberalism • uark.edu
-
Immanuel Wallerstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rated • 2 reviews • politics • wikipedia.org
-
-
Afghanistan quarantines its only pig | FP Passport
Rated • 74 reviews • politics • foreignpolicy.com
-
-
Producers and Parasites by John Keracher
Rated • 0 reviews • history, marxism, parasites, politics • marxists.org
-
The Art Of The Banking Controversy & Derivative Dribble
Rated • 1 review • history, news, politics, financial crisis • wordpress.com
Begin Rant. It's been said before: bashing the bankers is so hot right now. It is true that finance trashing is in, but we know that we shouldn't leave it to the fashion forecasters to do our socio-economic analysis, don't we? Or should we stop pretending and admit today that our only prophets are our stylists?
It is true that I am many beans short of being a banker, so it is strange I would now rant against oh-so-fashionable banker bashing. But such images and such sentiments piss me off no end.
For many centuries now an anti-banker ethos has been prevalent on both left and right wing politics. In the game of politics, it has always been a battle of producers versus parasites, only no one ever wants to play the parasite.
Great English conservatives, puffing up the aristocratic landlords, found a champion in the English statesman, Edmund Burke, who blamed Jews and Stock-Jobbers (which he assumed were the same thing) for all the ills of the nation, and for France's Revolution. Great left-wing radicals could also take up Karl Marx to blame all the ills of the world on the parasitical middle classes [read Producers and Parasites].
Unlike many today, however, I reject the anti-parasite mentality that worms its way into all our political discourses. Why? Because the banker merely plays relationships. That is their only object - the network. They facilitate relationships, build up possibilities, and they are necessary in any society. Moreover, they DO NOT control the means of production. Such 'parasites' do not sit on the boards of company while giving out loans - in fact, all the laws of banking prevents this from taking place.
Ignorance makes us fear bankers. But the real object of our fear should be producers. Producers have the means of production, and it is their relationship to objects that determines what happens. The factory farmer who tortures and kills animals for profit and calls it fair is a producer. The oil spilling off ships is made by producers, as is carbon dioxide. Everything bad, shitty and wrong in this world comes back to a producer. Parasites - those who play the relationships - are condemnable only where they blind us to the role of producers in our lives.
So, what am I arguing? I am arguing that the nature of this 'crisis' is located squarely in industrial production, despite what the media will tell you, incapable as they are - being parasites of finance - of turning our gaze to the objects and to the producers. All the figures will show you that this 'crisis' has joined up with a long-term downturn. Production is the real casualty here; and it is production that has been failing since WWII and that will continue to fail, across the world, because the growth and expectations for it are unsustainable. Our treatment of every thing that lives as objects for our disposal is a path to disaster.
Yet still our media and people on all sides of politics persist with bashing banks and financial systems or raging on about the salaries of executives. The narrowness of this debate is appalling, as is the fact that serious environmental and object-orientated economic analysis struggles to gain a foothold in the debate, let alone in policy.
Unless we start exposing what our producers are doing, how and why, we will be lost in a labyrinth of our own making, wondering why the walls are crashing down.
The real action is outside, and not in the office of the banker. Investigate! Look to your producers for the answers to the crisis.
