openDemocracy: George Monbiot on the unholy trinity of ideologies trashing our planet

Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. And, unusually, that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies as much as neoliberalism is. “Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim - the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere. They affect our decision making every day, they affect the way we see ourselves. They are difficult to see not because they are so small but because they are so big. The most powerful ideologies never announce themselves as ideologies. That is where their power lies. Our first step is to recognise them as ideologies.” [...]

“We cannot go back to [Keynes],” Monbiot responds. “It is growth based. The whole point of Keynesian economics is to maintain the rate of growth - not too fast, not too slow - and we know that even a steady rate of growth is progress towards disaster. But also, in its first iteration in the years after the Second World War it was very effectively destroyed, principally by finance capital working out ways to destroy capital controls, foreign exchange controls. The idea that we can relaunch a Keynesian capitalism and not have it destroyed by people who have already destroyed it once, who have not forgotten those lessons, and who are in a much more powerful position to destroy it today….that’s just dreaming. That is magical thinking. You cannot go back in politics, you have constantly to devise new models.” [...]

“I don’t think you can be [ideologically free]. We’re so governed by our social environment, and our social environment will always be saturated by ideology. To be ideology free would be to become an island, you would have to be completely isolated from all other human beings - and even then you would probably create your own ideology. You often hear people stand up and say, ‘I have no ideology’. And that is just self-deception.”

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SciShow: What We Know About the New Coronavirus

The WHO has declared the new coronavirus a global public health emergency—but that doesn't mean you should panic.

openDemocracy: Iran’s protests: misrepresentation and the silence of western allies

The main misrepresented fact is that the current protests are not just about the public outrage over the downing of the Ukrainian plane, nor are they distinguishable from the protests of November 2019 or December 2017. [...]

On the contrary, the image of Iranians mourning for the death of IRGC top commander, Soleimani, was on the front page of almost every one of them. It is not a hard guess to figure out that under a totalitarian regime such a funeral is nothing but a display of power and therefore, participation is mandatory at least for civil servants, students, and soldiers. Yet it would be surprising to know that even children in primary schools and pre-schoolers had to participate in this “national mourning”. [...]

As in Europe, the left is largely losing the support of the working class and slightly gaining the support of the upper middle class, in the Middle East it has let the people down and sided with the regional dictatorship in the name of anti-imperialism or peace. The white western left tells the people of the MENA to choose the “lesser evil” in order to prevent war, yet it calls upon the people in the West to support them as the most progressive forces. [...]

This clear message of the Iranian students has been echoed in the demands of the Iraqi and Lebanese revolutionaries yet has not been heard by the western elite. The progressive forces in the MENA have proved many times that they are committed to the most essential principle of the left, i.e. internationalism. Despite the neo-orientalist view of many in the western left that, this time, exotifies suppressive regimes in the Global South as anti-imperialists, the progressive forces in the MENA still draw a clear line between themselves and the reactionary forces. But there is a limit to their influence on the society especially when they are betrayed, silenced and left alone by the western intelligentsia who could've been their natural allies.

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CityLab: The Spine of San Francisco Is Now Car-Free

But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles—meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft—may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city’s central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers. [...]

After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City’s long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million “Better Market Street” capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021. [...]

San Francisco’s car-free move is part of a wave of cities around the globe pedestrianizing their downtown cores and corridors, from New York City to Madrid to Birmingham. And there are signs that SF’s effort will not end at Market Street: Local officials in the city are calling to remove cars from other sections of the city.

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Aeon:The mask falls (17 January, 2013)

Subsequently, however, these claims came in for a great deal of criticism, especially from sociologists on the libertarian end of the political spectrum. Whether right or wrong, however, the original book has raised a deeper question, and one that is still wide open. By framing the debate about inequality in a biological context, The Spirit Level harked back to an older philosophical conundrum about human nature. Are we, fundamentally, an egalitarian species or a fiercely competitive one? Or are we perhaps so flexible that we can be equally at home in either kind of society? [...]

According to the social competition hypothesis of depression, humans are exquisitely sensitive to small differences in social status. Such sensitivity was vital when our ancestors lived in smaller bands of hunter-gatherers, where status differences were relatively slight. But in today’s world, where the global elite earn thousands of times more than those at the bottom of the economic heap and have completely different lifestyles, our status detectors go into overdrive. Hence a sensitivity that evolved to help low-status individuals signal obedience would, in today’s world, produce pathological results. [...]

Inequality is not a negative-sum game — in which everybody ends up worse off — but a zero-sum game, in which the poorer health of those at the bottom of the pile is offset by the health gains of those at the top. There is nothing like the sight of a beggar to make one feel rich. It is not enough to succeed, as Gore Vidal said; others must fail. [...]

Such findings have been interpreted as evidence that people naturally dislike inequality and will sacrifice some personal gains to avoid it. However, when the experiment has been carried out with indigenous people with a low degree of market integration, the results are very different. Machiguenga farmers in Peru, for example, offer very little, and accept almost every offer, no matter how derisory. In the cultures least exposed to the influence of capitalism, people behave almost as greedily as game theory suggests they should. This does not bode well for the idea that inequality aversion is part of our DNA.

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