where do we draw the line — sanctions, economies of scale, banking high jinx, non-profit industrial complex, just being an American is, well, terror befalling the world!
Timothy: For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
Lack of money is the root of all evil. – George Bernard Shaw
I was hit with an email from an acquaintence who sent me a Daniel Schmachtenberger interview held last month in Sweden on the metacrisis and plycrisis. See my last post = What is an Economy For? People? Planet? Profits? The Machine? Endless (sic) Valuation (sic) Until All Gaskets Burst?
I’m on the same sheet, more or less, with Daniel for the larger issues. Yep, I was an eco-warrior, whale protector, ended up fighting developers in Arizona, and then, I stayed hard with that around scuba diving and Sea of Cortez, and the systems there collapsing quickly — tourism, big appetite for shrimp, fins from sharks, and so much more in the sea which Cousteau called the aquarium of the world.
I also got into learning about Chile, had a friend’s husband who was a refugee from Chiles under Pinochet, and then, I was invovled in the underground railroad and liberation theology and folks from Salvador and Guatemala coming into Tucson, sometime smuggled by amazing workers, to seek asylum from death squads.
I was also a journalist, worked in the trenches with cops and city councils, and then moved into a larger context working with migrant students in El Paso, teaching college as an underpaid adjunct, got nto organizing, writing novels, doing book reviews, freelancing.
I ended up in Mexico and Central America, and again, seeing what the environment is, how we are not connected to it holistically, and alas, I ended up doing more around border rights, fighting against militarization of the border, fighting for the rights of undocumented humans.
It gets complicated because I was putting my toes and feet up to my hips into many deep pools, i.e. arenas and kicking down silos. Poetry, literature, magazine writing, teaching writing, fighting against Reagan and his Contras, against Bush and those invasions and illegal terrorist campaigns, and then his son’s bullshit, and then the Billy Boy’s illegal warring, and then on and on.
I got wonky after one graduate degree, ended up in Vietnam working on a biodiversity project run by Brits in Hanoi and along Laos, and alas, got mired in that aspect of my father’s war, our war, the beginning of the great slide into American ecocide, viralcide and set down terrorism by-for-with-because of the CIA, NSA, DoD, DARPA, and all the other alphabet soup agencies and then the Fortune 10,000 corporations stiched together as the Military EVERYTHING Complex.
I got into sustainability, studied in Vancouver, BC, did the three e’s == environment, economy, equity. I got into cool building designs, worked around sustainable agriculture, and of course, I learned about the UN, Limits to Growth, the Tragedy of the Commons, the lies of Malthus and Ehrlich, and moved into Ismael and Daniel Quinn, and again, stayed true to literature, both literary/poetry and environmental.
I’m concerned in that one interview from Sweden in the blog post I listed yesterday, Daniel mentioned how that most people are good, that most Germans did not like or want what the genocide of Hitler and Nazis brought to humankind.
I digress and disagree, not because I am trying to rant against Daniel, but I am concerned that he believes that people in Germany, post World War, or, now, that you can’t find a Nazi under the skin.
It gets to what is evil and wrong and misanthropic. Germans, like Americans, like others, while pumped up with fake history, no history, propaganda, spin, PR, all of that, tied to say Ukraine and Russia, those people, far and wide (not just the powerful ones, the ones at the so-called top), support war against Russia. Support bombing the Nordstream. Are for more tanks to Ukraine, more money to Ukraine, more shells to Ukraine. Britain, France, USA, Canada, Germany, well, you have people there — yes, the common people are all stoked up with hate and such, sure — who do not advocate for diplomacy, for actual history of what the fuck is going on in Ukraine.
Where Zelensky is shooting for more weapons, no-fly zone, cluster bombs, F-16’s, and nuclear war heads.
In any part of this chain of hate, from small family gathering yammering about the evil Russia, to the Poison Ivy League non-diplomats, to the politicians, all of the CEOs of offensive weapons cartels, the media, so many more, THEY ARE FOR MORE DEAD UKRAINIANS and Russians.
Is that evil, a sort of ignorance that produces an evil outcome, and what is pure evil versus other stages or spectrums of evil?
This is not difficult to understand: In a nutshell, Ritter covers the history of Ukraine, Nazi’s, genocidal Bandera fasdcists, and the work of the OSS/CIA/OUN in murdering people in Ukraine, both Russian and Ukrainians. He touches on the evil of Americans.
0:00 – Intro
1:55 – Welcome Scott Ritter
2:15 – Why the War Didn’t Start in 2022
3:25 – US Ambassador Warns of Russian War
4:12 – How the Conflict Began in 1942
7:26 – If Putin Withdraws Will This Conflict End?
9:00 – Putin’s Controversial Speech
13:55 – The Minsk Accords
15:00 – Did Russia Try to End the War?
18:10 – Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
21:05 – Why a Neutral Ukraine is Key to Peace
24:46 – Will there be a DMZ in Ukraine?
29:40 – Is America’s Investment in Ukraine a Good Thing?
31:50 – Is America Only Spending 5% of Military Budget?
35:05 – Is America Ukraine’s Friend?
38:02 – When will the Ukraine War End?
40:32 – Problems with Ukrainian Refugees
A video Pompeo pushes, from some evil group, GOP for Ukraine.
Evil, man = The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown.
“For years, Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Holocaust denial would be allowed on the virtual version of the public square. And then from one day to the next, he reversed this call. Why should a young gazillionaire be deciding on what kind of opinions are acceptable in public? In order to shuck his responsibilities, Zuck has said that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of arbitrating truth. And in a sense, we agree with him here: Facebook needs to be in the public domain.
In other words, we need to nationalize the social media companies, and put them under the control of not only their workers, but the entire working population.
Will this stop “polarization” and “radicalization”? Well, the organic crisis that is engulfing bourgeois society is not some “technical” issue that can be solved by altering a few lines of code. Yes, social media companies are doubtlessly accelerating the spread of morbid symptoms of capitalism’s decline. But the crisis is ultimately a result of the ruling class’s inability to address the most urgent problems facing humanity. This is why they escape to ever-more-distant fantasies — as far as Mars! — as the planet burns and their “democracy” becomes increasingly clownish.
The demand to nationalize Facebook and the rest of Big Tech is not just a reform program. Rather, it is a step toward putting all of society’s wealth under the control of working people. This would not only give humanity control over the means of production — it would, as a pleasant side effect, also remove the social basis for the terrible ideas that spread across social media.” (source)
Is the entire project of the Conquest evil, from Bishops and Generals all the way down to sailors and monks?
This is evil writ large = In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. “I sailed to the Indies with the fleet that the illustrious King and Queen, our sovereigns, gave me, where I discovered a great many islands, inhabited by numberless people,” he wrote after his return to Europe to royal treasurer Luis de Santángel. “Of all, I have taken possession for their Highnesses.”
The events relayed in the letter were “the first report of a voyage that really did change the world”, says Columbus biographer Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate/Research finds killing of native people indirectly contributed to a colder period by causing deaths of around 56 million by 1600. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492
Evil, these hucksters, these people who pray on the almighty dollar or British pound = Now a rare 1493 Latin translation of this letter, printed on an early printing press to swiftly convey news of Columbus’s “discoveries” to elite Europeans, is expected to fetch up to £1.2m ($1.5m) at a Christie’s auction this month.
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How much evil is behind privatized, for profit, predatory, designed to kill medicine? A contract for workers, and those in charge of stalling it, they of course are evil on that “spectrum.”
“Healthcare workers want to be in facilities with the patients they care about,” said Renee Saldana of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW).
SEIU-UHW is the largest union in the coalition, representing 58,000 Kaiser Permanente workers. “Given the urgency of this staffing crisis, frontline healthcare workers are ready to sit down with Kaiser executives whenever they are ready to bargain in good faith over lasting solutions so patients can be safe and get the care they deserve.”
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How much evil is here, and how many thousands will be participants in nuclear power plants for AI?
Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint. Keeping data centers running requires a ludicrous amount of electricity that could generate substantial amounts of greenhouse emissions — depending, of course, on the energy’s source.
Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors. Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)[source]
ChatGPT’s immense popularity and power make it eye-wateringly expensive to maintain, The Information reports, with OpenAI paying up to $700,000 a day to keep its beefy infrastructure running, based on figures from the research firm SemiAnalysis.
“Most of this cost is based around the expensive servers they require,” Dylan Patel, chief analyst at the firm, told the publication.
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Of course, Zuckerberg and his ilk and his Eichmann’s are evil = Meta recently threatened to fire employees who did not obey to its strict return-to-office mandate. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still enthusiastic about the potential of remote work—just not with the technology commonly used today.
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Then think of evil on a cultural or nationwide level. Imagine, the money, time, research wasted, energy wasted, pollution expended and created by war, by GPT Chat, by economics, and, here, then, attempt to get your head around this, and how evil are you and I when we do not stand up and stop this terrorism against ourselves, our people?
Hurricanes, heat and humidity have always been looming threats on the Gulf Coast. But as drought grows in the Central US and sea level rises, residents in southern Louisiana are finding a formerly unusual emergency is becoming more frequent: saltwater is infecting drinking water city by city up the Mississippi River.
Ocean water has already polluted the drinking water for thousands of residents in Plaquemines Parish. The Army Corps of Engineers predicts it will contaminate the water systems that serve tens of thousands more residents, including those in New Orleans, in the coming weeks.
When will saltwater arrive in New Orleans? Here’s what to know
Extreme drought and sea level rise are colliding in Louisiana, and John Callahan, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s center for operational oceanographic products and services, said it will only become a bigger problem in a future made hotter and drier by planet-warming pollution.
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Again, Evil! Back to millions of people working this scam, under the thumb of oligarchs, but again, complicite.
Canadian Oligarchy: How the Super-Rich Rule “Socialized” Healthcare
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The past century, dubbed the ‘Age of Genocide saw more than 60 million people murdered to meet the needs of the state. One unassailable fact behind this litany of human conflict and suffering is that political, social, or religious groups wanting to commit mass murder are never hindered by a lack of willing executioners. How is it that ordinary people like you and me, commit such extraordinary evil?
So, if I go to Israel, and scratch a Zionist or just scratch a plain old Jew (they are all Zionists there, though), will I find a fascist? Racist? Anti-human? Anti-Palestinian? Will I find people — a lot of them — who will tell me Arabs and Palestinians are nothing more than animals?
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Techno-fascist EVIL. By the millions of individuals. This huge issue of blockchain, social impact, all those controlled social dashboards, here, Alison McDowell:
These are the two main ideas I wanted to convey. I’m not saying they are right, but only that it’s worth looking at them hypothetically as thought experiments to see how they hold up in the context of cybernetic impact finance, bio-digital convergence, radiation hormesis, and collective consciousness management.
Thought experiment one:
Consider the internet (and soon extended reality) as a portal into the equivalent of Battle School in Ender’s Game where cooperative infinite games are substituted for finite competitive games. Nested brackets of teams engage in problem solving under conditions of real time sensing, programmed stress, and dynamic constraints. Gameplay is situated in live action role play to tap into the collective subconscious. Picture participants compensated with UBI or crypto play to earn micropayments for their in-game contributions tracked on blockchain mindfile ledgers. The interspecies / inter-intelligence communication medium in this problem-solving space could be Web3 tokens with embedded, nested narratives (think Chinese characters ala Leibniz’s aspirations for the Characteristic Universalis or sigils). Perhaps aspects of the digital stories would be unlocked and presented via holograms (think Princess Leia’s distress message for Obi Wan Kenobi). Exchange of tokens through the ritual game play of votes, trades, media engagement, and biometric and cognitive data could result in computational solutions grounded in real truths of human emotion, culture, and soulful imagination. Could Web3 tokens be a long-sought computational language bringing together the social and physical sciences?
Thought experiment two:
Could this collective cooperative “Battle School” problem space be a digital petri dish for a mass anthropological experiment where ubiquitous sensing charts lived behaviors on planet Earth in order to develop a new interspecies language? Perhaps there is something beyond this dimension, time scale, or sensing framework that really wants to communicate with life here, but it hasn’t yet found the key. What if Fourth Industrial Revolution mass surveillance, natural language processing, the shift to platform life, digital therapeutics, and human weather forecasting are being used to build mental models for linguistic analysis? As we perform our humanity in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, is there a biofilm colony keeping track and working to devleop a computational system of sociology that can bridge across our mental models of the cosmos? If so, I wonder to what end? If Barbara Dewey is correct about mind creating matter from the endosphere, installing a coordinating infrastructure (decentralized ledgers and tokens) for mass mind coordination could be leveraged to manifest unimagined realities. I don’t think we are prepared for what the chaos magician posse has in store for us with their foxy Ethereum Consensys program.
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I’ll leave it here, but I challenge people like Daniel to understand how deeply epigenetic and deeply embedded evil is. Hitler and stormtroopers, or men who rape and men who abuse their wives and spouses? The numbers are HUGE for DV and rape and sexual assault, and that is evil, no, beating a child or a spouse, phsyically and mentally?
Female genital mutilation, honor killings, acid attacks? Men who rape children and “father” children? Is that evil, on a scale of what evil a Soros does? That is the question. Billionaires are sociopaths, so, is that enough for an evil definition? But then, PayDay loans, and then just scale that up and across all sectors and we shall see there are literally millions in this country who are evil, think and speak and believe and act upon evil. Snake oil and a sucker born every minute is grandma’s retirement stolen right from under her. Is boasting an epipen up to $600 or $1000 a dose evil?
Oh, so many parsings of what evil is:
Nietzsche’s skeptical attack on the concept of evil has encouraged philosophers to ignore the nature and moral significance of evil and instead focus on the motives people might have for using the term ‘evil’ (Card 2002, 28; Cole 2019, 178).
In the Atrocity Paradigm, Claudia Card defends the concept of evil from Nietzsche’s skeptical attack (Card 2002, 27–49). Card rejects Nietzsche’s view that ascriptions of evil merely demonize enemies and indicate a negative life-denying perspective. Instead, she argues that judgments of evil often indicate a healthy recognition that one has been treated unjustly. Eve Garrard and David McNaughton go even further in their rejection of Nietzsche’s form of evil-skepticism, arguing that it is morally objectionable to question ascriptions of evil by victims of atrocious crimes (Garrard and McNaughton 2012, 11–14).
Card also argues that we have just as much reason to question the motives of people who believe we should abandon the concept of evil as we do to question the motives of people who use the concept. She suggests that people who want to abandon the concept of evil may be overwhelmed by the task of understanding and preventing evil and would rather focus on the less daunting task of questioning the motives of people who use the term (Card 2002, 29).
Kant makes several other controversial claims about the nature of evil in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. One of these claims is that there is a radical evil in human nature. By this he means that all human beings have a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-interest and that this propensity is radical, or rooted, in human nature in the sense that it is inextirpable. Kant also believes that we are imputable for this propensity to evil (Kant 1793, Bk I). Richard Bernstein argues that Kant cannot coherently hold both of these theses since we could not be responsible for a propensity that is in us originally and that we cannot be rid of (Bernstein 2002, 11–35). Notwithstanding this important criticism, several philosophers have argued that Kant’s thoughts on radical evil offer important insights into the nature of evil. For example, Paul Formosa argues that Kant’s reflections on radical evil draw our attention to the fact that even the best of us can revert to evil, and thus, that we must be constantly vigilant against the radical evil of our natures (Formosa 2007. See also, Bernstein 2002 and Goldberg 2017).
According to Card, marriage and motherhood are evil institutions because it is reasonably foreseeable that their normal, or correct, operation will lead to intolerable harm in the form of domestic abuse without justification or excuse (Card 2002, 139–165). For instance, Card argues that the normal, or correct, operation of marriage leads to spousal abuse “because it provides incentives for partners to stay in broken relationships, places obstacles in the way of escaping from broken relationships, gives perpetrators of abuse virtually unlimited rights of access to their victims, and makes some forms of abuse difficult or impossible to detect or prove” (Calder 2009, 28). Card argues that there is no moral justification for the intolerable harm that results from the institution of marriage since nothing prevents us from abolishing marriage in favour of other less dangerous institutions.
The concept of engaging in trades or bargains with demonic figures has been a common motif in folklore around the world for centuries, but this particular iteration—the Faustian bargain—derives its name from the Germanic folk legend of Doctor Faust. These legends spring from a real historical figure, a sixteenth-century itinerant alchemist and astrologer named Johann Faust, whose larger-than-life reputation led to rumors that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for great knowledge and magical abilities. The legend of Doctor Faust has been directly adapted into works of literature many times.
7 Techniques Of The Faustian Story
Paul Haeder, Author 