openDemocracy: Who’s afraid of Greta Thunberg?

The climate activist does not relate well to the irony of American television programs. When asked for her impression of New York when she arrived on the Malizia yacht, she replied that it smelled bad. Her lack of understanding of irony and her seriousness are probably related to her Asperger’s syndrome (a condition she speaks openly about) and dose of Nordic frankness. All of these qualities have influenced the new environmental movement. It is a group that speaks very seriously and uses scientific research to support their arguments. It is, in fact, the antithesis of the ironic language used by generation X or millennials. [...]

The activist triggered not only a political movement, but also fury from powerful media outlets. The media and commentators have become obsessed with her. According to some observers, the adoration towards Greta Thunberg is similar to a religious awakening. But this is not her problem. It is, on the contrary, a problem of the people and the media that react to her actions and her words. Within the political spectrum, environmentalism is found mostly on the left and in the academic world. The right and many liberals deny Greta Thunberg and her colleagues the right to formulate their own political ideas and goals, instead treating them as immature and spoilt. The Argentine journalist Sandra Russo calls this the first case of “global bullying”, an idea which she discussed long before September 23rd when Donald Trump, the president of the United States, sent out a tweet which made fun of the 16 year old.[...]

Everything seems to suggest that the more popular and disruptive the climate movement become, the more virulent the rejection from those who consider climate change as a conspiracy and the protection of the climate as pure nonsense becomes. The severity of reactions to a 16 year old teenager should make us reflect. Some psychologists try to explain it by saying the ‘old’ white men won’t change their attitudes towards the environment, so instead attack Greta for her illness, for her age or because of the apparent manipulation of her activism. But behind these criticisms there is much more than the intransigence of a whole male generation. The attacks may be a sign that she, alongside the youth involved in the movement, have managed to hit a sensitive nerve. Is Greta Thunberg questioning the system?

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Aeon: It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist

Many scientists believe that natural selection brought our perception of reality into clearer and deeper focus, reasoning that growing more attuned to the outside world gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that just the opposite is true. Because evolution selects for survival, not accuracy, he proposes that our conscious experience masks reality behind millennia of adaptions for ‘fitness payoffs’ – an argument supported by his work running evolutionary game-theory simulations. In this interview recorded at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival from the Institute of Arts and Ideas in 2019, Hoffman explains why he believes that perception must necessarily hide reality for conscious agents to survive and reproduce. With that view serving as a springboard, the wide-ranging discussion also touches on Hoffman’s consciousness-centric framework for reality, and its potential implications for our everyday lives.

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Aeon: We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?

Let’s consider the way in which my inevitable death is old news. It stems from the uniquely human capacity to disengage from our actions and commitments, so that each of us can consider him or herself as an inhabitant of the mind-independent world, one human being among billions. When I regard myself ‘from the outside’ in this manner, I have no trouble in affirming that I will die. I understand that I exist because of innumerable contingencies, and that the world will go on without me just as it did before my coming to be. These reflections do not disturb me. My equanimity is due to the fact that, even though I am reflecting on my inevitable annihilation, it is almost as if I am thinking about someone else. That is, the outside view places a cognitive distance between myself as the thinker of these thoughts and myself as their subject. [...]

In order to fully digest the fact of my mortality, I would need to realise, not just intellectually, that my everyday experience is misleading, not in the details, but as a whole. Buddhism can help identify another source of radical distortion. As Jay L Garfield puts it in Engaging Buddhism (2015), we suffer from the ‘primal confusion’ of seeing the world, and ourselves, through the lens of a substance-based metaphysics. For example, I take myself as a self-contained individual with a permanent essence that makes me who I am. This core ‘me-ness’ underpins the constant changes in my physical and mental properties. Garfield is not saying that we all explicitly endorse this position. In fact, speaking for myself, I reject it. Rather, the primal confusion is the product of a non-rational reflex, and typically operates well below the level of conscious awareness. [...]

The Buddhist alternative to a substance-based view of persons is the ‘no-self’ account, which was independently discovered by David Hume. Hume introspected only a constantly shifting array of thoughts, feelings and sensations. He took the absence of evidence of a substantial self to be evidence of its absence, and concluded in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that the notion of a ‘self’ is merely a convenient device for referring to a causally linked network of mental states, rather than something distinct from them.

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ChickenWire: UK Election 2019 - The Polls are Right!

So the UK Election 2019 is going on and guess what? ChickenWire is back and Ill be going deep into the election with my research designed for you the voter to make up your mind about who your going to vote for and more importantly who will win. The UK general election 2019 looks set to be a tight race polls are showing Boris Johnsons and the Conservative party are on course to win a small majority or hung parliament. With Jeremy Corbyn in 2nd place the SNP taking Scotland and the Lib dems eating into Labour seats while the Brexit party will eat into Tory seats. But will these third and fourth parties be enough to defeat the two main parties. Well watch the video to find out.

Rare Earth: The Nazi Pedophile Apocalypse Cult

openDemocracy: What we talk about when we talk about trafficking

Both evangelical organisations and some self-proclaimed feminist groups regard every form of sex work as exploitation, and therefore as the main cause of human trafficking. They seek an end to the entire sex industry, and their method of choice at the moment is the so-called Nordic model, or the criminalisation of buying sex. The association Terre des Femmes has split over this dispute.

Individual situations are frequently more complicated. Many women decide to work as sex workers, but are later on deceived regarding the actual working conditions and find themselves in situations that meet the legal criteria of trafficking. Legally speaking this initial consent does not erase the responsibility of the perpetrators, but it does make the question of desired remedies less clear than abolitionist organisations would like.[...]

The problem with conflating sex work and trafficking in human beings is that women are made to be victims even when they have consciously decided to work as sex workers. The ‘rescue industry’, as the scholar Laura María Agustín calls it, attributes victim status to persons, mostly women, who have rationally and consciously decided to engage in sex work and who, at least in the moment of making their decision, do not see themselves as victims.[...]

According to Luca Stevenson, the coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, this position reflects a very white middle class approach. "Very few people are free to choose their jobs and many factors contribute to someone working in informal, precarious or even dangerous industries such as sex work. The criminalisation of sex work does not create economic options, but makes sex workers more vulnerable, more precarious."

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