brenda birnbaum

I write things, mostly experimental, some on -- never behind a paywall.

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

@fwtimini There are ways to conserve water even in agriculture, especially in industrial and animal farming practices

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

@ChristianK83912 @fwtimini It's not cheap and the process pollutes the ocean

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

Another reason not to buy Amazon -- I just saw an Amazon driver *run* the short distance to the front door of a house and back - like he couldn't take the time to walk over the package he had to deliver.

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

NOTHING has to be the way it is. It’s ONLY that way because it’s the cheapest way. Period‼️
@itskaylajaiden “if human survival and corporate profitability ever compete for the same resource and your instinct is to protect the corporation first, you’ve been propagandized more than you realize“

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

@wideawake_media The problem is less the climate and more the global ecology, which is being destroyed by profit hungry big ag or factory farms or deforestation or emptying the oceans of life, all w/ total disregard for what ultimately sustains life. Humans are not immune to ecological collapse.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In 1987, Costa Rica was 21% forest. Today it's 57%.

In the 1990s, Costa Rica passed a law that pays landowners directly for the ecosystem services their forest provides: carbon storage, watershed protection, biodiversity, soil stability. The payments are funded by a tax on fossil fuels.

Keep your trees standing and the government cuts you a check. Clear them and you lose the income.

Nearly a million hectares have been protected or restored under the program. Species that had retreated or disappeared from large parts of the country are recovering. The forest came back because the incentive structure changed, not because people were told to care more.

But it crashed the economy, right? Not at all.

Costa Rica became the top per capita agricultural exporter in Latin America. Tourism built around its forests and biodiversity became one of its largest industries. The economy didn't absorb the cost of keeping the forest. The forest became part of what grows their economy.

This is the version of the story most people never hear, the one where protecting nature and economic growth pointed in the same direction because we humans designed it that way.

It's not forests or the economy and it never had to be.

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

@beyond_capital Good thing I read it while in Canada

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

@peculiarjulia Aw ...

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

I wonder if folks are more rude these days to corporate customer service they talk to on the phone, given the gauntlet of AI "digital assistants" they have to get through first, whose job is to prevent them from doing exactly that - talk to a human

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

Exactly.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant profit-generating machine for corporations.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.

That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.

It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.

Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.

Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.

Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.

Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.

Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.

Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.

Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.

You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.

And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.

All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.

All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.

I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.

They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is what the civilizing mission actually produced, by the numbers:

Africa in 1800: hundreds of independent kingdoms, confederacies, city-states, trade empires. Diverse, complex, self-governing political entities.

Africa in 1914: 90 percent of the continent under European colonial control, reorganized into administrative units designed for extraction, their borders cutting through ethnic and linguistic communities with the casual brutality of a pen on a map drawn in Berlin.

Africa in 2026: fifty-five nations, many of them still following the extractive economic logic installed by colonialism, still paying debt to former colonial powers and their financial institutions, still governed in many cases by elites trained to administer on behalf of external interests rather than internal populations, still watching their resources leave the continent as raw materials and return as finished goods at a markup.

The "development" that colonialism promised is now, more than six decades after formal independence, still being promised.

By the same institutions.

Using the same language.

Attaching the same conditions.

This is not a coincidence.

This is not a failure of the civilizing mission.

This is the civilizing mission, running exactly as designed, having successfully converted "we are taking your resources by force" into "we are helping you develop."

The mission was never to raise you up.

The mission was to make sure you stayed down, and believed, while staying down, that you were being helped.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The debt system is the cleanest version of the whole operation because it requires no soldiers.

A country gets a loan from the IMF or World Bank, usually in a moment of crisis, often a crisis produced or deepened by prior colonial extraction.

The loan comes with conditions.

Structural adjustment programs.

Privatize your public utilities.
Cut your social spending.
Open your markets to foreign competition.
Devalue your currency.
Remove subsidies on food and fuel.

The local economy, already fragile, is further destabilized by the conditions of its own rescue.

The country cannot repay.

The country gets more loans with more conditions.

The debt grows.

The conditions deepen.

The government, unable to deliver services to its population, faces protests.

The protests are called "instability."

The instability is cited as evidence that the country cannot "manage itself."

"External oversight" is recommended.

More conditions are attached.

The country was never in debt to the bank.

The bank was in debt to the country, for centuries of extracted resources and suppressed development, and found a mechanism to make the creditor pay the debtor.

And called it "aid."

And called it "development."

And called it, with a straight face, "civilization."

[Electronic Intifada @intifada]

In his new book, @AdamJohnsonCHI reveals explicit censorship of journalists at MSNBC after 7 October 2023, especially regarding the context in which that attack took place.

[The Empire Files @EmpireFiles]

.@AbbyMartin on why the US military is the world's largest institutional polluter and how that stat vastly understates the scale of US-led military emissions and global destruction

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

One of the most revealing moments in American political culture is watching its citizens argue about which party is responsible for foreign policy failures.

Democrats blame Republican militarism.

Republicans blame Democrat weakness.

The argument goes in circles, election cycle after election cycle, and what it never does, what it is structurally incapable of doing within its own terms, is question whether the project itself is the problem.

Not who runs the empire.

The empire.

Vietnam was escalated by Democrats and inherited by Republicans.

The Iraq War was authorized by a bipartisan Senate vote.

The drone assassination program was expanded massively under a Democratic president who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran have been maintained or tightened by administrations of both parties.

The foreign policy does not change because the foreign policy is not primarily a function of which party holds office.

It is a function of institutions: the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the defense contractors, the think tank.

Institutions that persist across administrations, with their own interests, their own momentum, and their own logic, operating largely regardless of who is nominally in charge.

But the partisan argument is useful.

Because as long as Americans are arguing about which party failed, they are not asking whether the institution should exist in its current form.

The debate is permitted.

The real question is not.

[brenda birnbaum @brbirnbaum]

so sad.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Recognising the reality that the war against Iran was a failure, that the proxy war against Russia has been lost, and that the economic war against China has backfired is smeared and censored in decadent Europe as being “pro-Iran,” “pro-Russia,” and “pro-China.” Being “pro-West” demands embracing delusion by putting on a blindfold and marching toward the cliff. It is obligatory to repeat dishonest chants about democracy and human rights as they burn down the Middle East, fight to the last Ukrainian, risk nuclear war with Russia, and make an enemy out of China. All of these states could have been key partners. Reality is believed to be a social construction, and if they only commit to narratives about the world as they wish it were, then it will come true.

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

On Anarchism.

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Julian Assange to John Pilger on the reasons behind the US’ endless wars:

‘What I see is a vast sprawling estate, what we would traditionally call the military-intelligence complex or military-industrial complex…which is becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled.

This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players all working together, and against each other to produce an end result. Which is Iraq and Afghanistan…’

[G-PA @IndianaGPA]

“Nooo it’s because that’s why” 😂 I Read books so I can tell people I Read them, because that’s why! 😂

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 AND THE LIES CONTINUE‼️