What I've Been Reading, February 2021

Links

• Bypass paywalls on popular online publications for free, by 7 Labs.
  There is a lot of important information out there that is behind paywalls, many requiring expensive subscription to overcome.

Above the Fold

Usually I reserve this section for late breaking news. But this month I discovered a whole bunch of YouTube videos featuring David Gaeber, a notable anarchist scholar who passed away this past September. This isn't all of the videos I found, or even the best of them, it's just what I found time to watch.

• Extinction and rebellion: the late David Graeber, by Peter Batt, YouTube
  "David argues that the political elite is 'useless', and could be easily dislodged by a rebellion with even vague aims."
• David Graeber - The Bully's Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination, by David Graeber, YouTube—AudibleAnarchist
  "In this essay, Graeber links the psychological impulses of bullying—both of bullies and of passive observers of bullying—to structures of power inherent within hierarchical authority. He contends that from a young age, we are socialized to side with bullies and against victims, and we are socialized to see victims as either deserving their punishment or of having the same moral worth as the bullies themselves."
• Where Did Money REALLY Come From? by David Graeber, YouTube—Deficit Owls
  "Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years,' discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this. "
• Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, YouTube
• Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage, by David Graeber, Jourtnal du Mauss
  "What if the kind of people we like to imagine so simple and innocent because they are free from rulers, governments, bureaucracies and ruling classes, were free not because they lack imagination, but because they are in fact more imaginative than us. We find it hard to imagine what a truly free society would look like; perhaps they do not have as much difficulty imagining what would be an arbitrary power and domination. Maybe they can not only imagine it, but also consciously organize their society in such a way that such things never happen."

Miscellaneous

• Why Electric Bikes are More Dangerous than Motorcycles, by FortNine, YouTube
  
• How to Defeat a Boston Dynamics Robot in How to Defeat a Boston Dynamics Robot in, by Samantha Cole, Vice—Motherboard
  "It turns out that a flip through Spot's user manual reveals its weaknesses."
  This may be a bit ahead of its time, but if police forces start using more robots, then all you revolutionaries out there will need to be aware of how to disable them.
• Friends by Robin Dunbar review – how important are your pals? by Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
• Jigsaw Puzzle Tips & Tricks , from the people at Puzzle Warehouse
  We've been doing some jigsaw puzzle lately, and while I had reached most of these conclusion of jigsaw strategy myself, it's nice to see the experts agree.
• What Meghan and Harry’s Oprah Interview Clarifies for Americans—and Maybe the British, Too, by Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker
  "What happens inside the Royal Family—to hear Harry and Meghan tell it, in a conversation with Oprah—is brutal."
• Why can't we dig deeper than 12.2 km into the Earth?, by Chris Seymour, Quora—Science Space
• Goodbye Capitalism? How Collaboration Outperforms Competition, by Floris Koot, Collective Evolution
  Collective Evolution seems to be selling quite a bit of "woo", but this article is worth a read, just it is putting across some different ideas.
• Switchball I—How to Play!, by Floris Koot, Medium—Revolution
  Again, interesting because it is genuinely different. It (and the previous arfticle) reads like the English is not the author's first language. But easy enough to understand, I think.

The Lights Went Out in Texas

• The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold, by JEFFREY BALL, Texas Monthly
  "In 1989, in 2003, and in 2011, the state experienced, to varying degrees, simultaneous shutdowns of power plants and parts of its natural gas–producing infrastructure, as significant swaths of both of those critical systems were incapacitated by arctic temperatures, triggering blackouts."
  "Those in charge of Texas’s deregulated power sector were warned again and again that the electric grid was vulnerable."
• Why wind turbines in New York keep working in bitter cold weather unlike the ones in Texas, by Rick Moriarty, syracuse.com
• One of Texas' most prominent left-leaning economists knows exactly why its power grid failed, by Ayelet Sheffey, Business Insider
• A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies, by Rachel Adams-Heard, Javier Blas, and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg—Markets
  "Power plants needed natural gas, but natural gas needed power. A vicious cycle left producers unable to supply gas in crisis."
• The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster: the entire nation’s energy delivery system needs an overhaul, by The Editorial Board, The New York Times
  
• The Texas catastrophe and the case for socialism, by Tom Carter, World Socialist Website
  ""It is high time for the working class to say to the capitalist oligarchy:
  Enough! Every time that we left you and your political accomplices in charge, the result was a total catastrophe. Every time we entrusted a social problem to you—like fighting the pandemic, maintaining the infrastructure in Texas, addressing climate change, or trying to make progress towards social equality—in every case, you failed to do anything but enrich yourselves. Your time is up! Now it is time for a different class to take the wheel.
• Texas Freeze Illustrates a Failed Economic System, by Robert Freeman, Common Dreams
  "A final flaw in conservative economic thinking is that adaptation to change is resisted unless the benefits can be captured by those who already hold power and wealth."

Structural Violence

• Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up, by GEMMA HARTLEY, Harpers Bazaar
  "Emotional labor is the unpaid job men still don't understand."
  I found this on Facebook, read it, shared it and thought, yep, that's an example of structural violence against women. I was amazed that the men who commented were mainly apologists for the guy in the article. A guy who clearly didn't want to do his share of the relationship building work in his marriage.
• Structural Violence, Wikipedia
• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber,
  In this book, David Graeber introduced me to this idea of structural violence in relationships between the oppressed and their oppressors. The following quote is to be found on pages 72 and 73 of the book:

"Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force.

Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it that the folks on the bottom (the victims of structural violence) are always imagining what it must be like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of structural violence), but it almost never occurs to the folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures that they are this tends to become one of the main bastions of any system of inequality—the downtrodden actually care about their oppressors, at least, far more than their oppressors care about them—but this seems itself to be an effect of structural violence. "

Somewhere else (I haven't been about to find the quote), Graeber explains that a certain amount work is involved in any relationship that doesn't involve oppression, as those involved strive to understand each other. If you hear someone on one side of a relationship talking about how it is impossible to understand the other, it is a sure sign that they are "on top" and don't have to do the work because they can simply tell those on the other side to shut up and do what they are told. Those who are "on the bottom" develop, as a defense mechanism, a highly refined understanding on those who are above them. You see this between men and women, bosses and workers, masters and slaves, and so on.

Coronavirus

• We Hate You Now—The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes, by Quinn Norton, Medium—Surviving COVID-19
• The Differences Between the Vaccines Matter, by Hilda Bastian, The Atlantic
  "Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same."
  "'The idea that people can’t handle nuance,' Jha tweeted at the end of February, 'it’s paternalistic. And untrue.' I couldn’t agree more. The principle of treating people like adults is fundamental. We don’t need to exaggerate. Talking about the trade-offs between different medicines and vaccines is often complicated, but we do it all the time—and we can do it with COVID-19 vaccines too."

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

• Anarchism in Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy, by David Flood, Medium—Sapiens
  "Anarchists have been an easy scapegoat for violent events in recent months. But anarchism, as a political philosophy, is fundamentally about collective deliberation and responsibility."

The New Fascism, the Far-Right and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades (maybe just a few years) from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

• The Economy of Evil, by Esha, historic.ly
  "The Political Economy under Fascism should scare us. It is all too familiar."
• The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists, by Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby, The Atlantic
  "We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 riot—and found a new kind of American radicalism."
• Antifa—The Anti-Fascist Handbook, by Mark Bray, MHP Books

Collapse

• Overconsumption, Wikipedia
  "Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases."
• Human Overpopulation, Wikipedia
  "Human overpopulation (or particularly human population overshoot) refers to a human population being too large in a way that their society or environment cannot readily sustain them. It can be identified with regional human populations, but is generally discussed as an issue of world population. Overpopulation is caused by human population growth. In recent centuries, human population growth has become exponential, due to the green revolution and other changes in technology that reduce mortality. Experts concerned by overpopulation argue that overpopulation causes overconsumption and subsequently overshoot of natural resources. This leads to exceeding the carrying capacity of a geographical area (or Earth as a whole) and damages to the environment. Human overpopulation is often discussed as part of other population concerns such as demographic push, depopulation, or even ecological or societal collapse and human extinction."

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

• Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
  "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
  A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
• Golden apple or forbidden fruit? Following the money on GMOs, by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Dancing on Graves

• Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse, by Alex Shephard, The New Republic
  "The racist, sexist radio host played a pivotal role in injecting cruelty and conspiracy into conservative mass media."
  "He thrived on making people angrier and more alienated, on obscuring the truth, and rewarding meanness at every turn."

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

• Debunking, Wikipedia
• Pseudoscience, Wikipedia
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience, Wikipedia
• Rational Wiki
• Science Based Medecine
• Quackwatch
• Snopes, debunks or validates urban legends
• Bad Astronomy
• The Skeptics Society
• The 8 Best Fact-Checking Sites for Finding Unbiased Truth, by Megan Ellis, MUO—Make Use Of
• Pain Science, by Paul Ingraham
• Techniques of Science Denial

Science

• Do you find it implausible that Apollo 11 traveled over 250,000 miles through space and landed precisely in the right part of the moon's gravity well to achieve a stable orbit? (see linked video), by Viktor T. Toth, Quora—Science Space

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body"/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

Is the Western way of raising kids weird? by Kelly Oake, BBC—Weird West | Parenting
From sleeping in separate beds to their children to transporting them in prams, Western parents have some unusual ideas about how to raise them.
The key to thinking outside the Western box might be to remember that babies are not out to manipulate us, no matter how tempting it might be to see it that way at 3am. "What we really need with babies is to stop thinking about them as hard-to-please bosses," says Dutta. "They're helpless little beings that have come into this world, and we must look at them with empathy and compassion."

15 Mini Things That Can Instantly Make You Less Likable, by John Roe, medium—Mind Cafe

Refugees and Migration

• Denmark’s “Zero Asylum” Plan Means Psychological Torture for Refugees, byCECÍLIA TÜMLER ANTON ÖSGÅRD, Jacobin Magazine
  

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

• Monmouth Co. Girl, 9, Confesses To Virtual Class She's Starving, by Carly Baldwin, Patch
  "Fulfill, the food bank of Monmouth and Ocean counties, stepped in after a third-grader started crying in the middle of a virtual class."

Education

• Measuring in Education is a War Crime., by Floris Koot, Medium—Revolution
  5 reasons why we need to measure way less, not more.

Humour

• Mahna Mahna at 50: fascinating facts about the unforgettable Muppets song, by Jennifer Van Evra, CBC Radio
  "The Muppets made it famous, but where did the song come from? Who performed it? And who is that fuzzy fella?"

Books

Fiction

I finally finished the Emberverse series this month, a total of 15 novels.

• The Sea Peoples, by S. M. Stirling
• The Sky Blue Wolves, by S. M. Stirling
• Dark Knight Station: Origins, by Nathan Lowell
• Winter of the Wolf, by Martha Hunt Handle
• The Galaxy, and the Ground Within: Wayfarers 4, by Becky Chambers

Non-Fiction

Still reading A People's History of the United States. Still highly recommended.