Filed under: climate change, futurism, nonviolence, Speculation, sustainability, The Internet | Tags: disasters, Internet
I’ve been a bit busy with environmental stuff, including the climate strike on 9/20. In honor of that, of the MCAS Miramar Air show that’s rattling my windows this weekend, and this little article from June about how the US military is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, I figured I’d add in one of my normally bleak predictions about the future.
Since spring has Sprung with a vengeance around here (See this, for example), I’m wearing my botanist duds and getting away from the computer quite a lot. Which is a good thing.
In the meantime, here are a couple of articles on the actions of the current Republican Administration. Someone said that was the calm way to have a discourse without empowering you-know-who, and I’m beginning to believe that True Names are those where ad companies send you revenue and eyeballs when your name is used. But I digress too much.
The title’s in reference to the Reichstag Fire. Hopefully it will make sense by the end. Continue reading
No, I’m not an expert on the subject, and I probably never will be. Right now, I feel like I was a TA again, barely a week ahead of the students. Still, it’s important to get this information out.
There are a lot of reasons to do so. If you’re anything like me, your notion of how non-violent conflict works is that it’s firmly in the Gandhi/Batman/Aikido/Star Trek phaser complex of things that would be nice to do, but which require such supernormal morality/skill/special conditions/technology that it won’t work for us mere mortals. If we want things to change, ultimately we might believe that change requires either huge amounts of wealth and/or violence, and we feel angry and powerless as a result. This view happens to be false. It’s probably a symptom of how our culture deals with violence, but it’s profoundly disempowering in that it stops us from realizing that there are other ways to achieve the same goals.
Again, there are a bunch of reasons why this matters, but I’ll start with the one that shocked me: so far as researchers can tell, since 1900, non-violent campaigns have been roughly twice as successful at achieving their goals (fall of the USSR, anyone?) as have violent campaigns (the sample size was over 100). This is even when people didn’t know what they were doing at first. Even back in 1973, there were almost 200 known and used “weapons” in the non-violent arsenal, and quite a few have been created since then. And some of them have been used against you. Recently. If you’re interested in learning more, read on.
Putting the life back in science fiction 