Jessamine Fraser she/her

Architect, PhD candidate at AUT School of Future Environments

[Jean Jacques Dessalines 🇭🇹🇵🇸🇳🇪🇲🇱🇧🇫🇨🇺 @JeanJacquesDes7]

Clara Mattei demonstrates how Marxist critique can calmly dismantle liberal/capitalist assumptions with intellectual rigor, responding not with anger but with patience and clarity that exposes the limits of a narrowly formed worldview.

Radical_ideas_

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Israel’s murder of journalists continues. The details of what happened to Amal Khalil are horrific. The Red Cross tried to rescue her but were themselves fired on.

How is Israel allowed such total impunity? Why is the international press not in uproar?

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

As the pause in Israel-US military aggression on Iran takes effect, Israel escalates its war crimes in Lebanon with the same vindictiveness used for decades against Palestinians. Israeli crimes remain a threat to peace in the region and beyond. They must be stopped and punished.

[Jessamine Fraser she/her @jes_af]

@philipsophy Are you the anti-Chris then?

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

"Our job, as Western lLeftists, is to act upon our governments to stop the bombing. To end the sanctions that starve the poor and enrich the regime’s smugglers. To dismantle the propaganda machine that tells us war is peace and occupation is freedom. Then, and only then, can the Iranian people, exercising their own immense power, reclaim their future from both the theocrats and their imperial enablers." https://t.co/nYh2xnpVek

[K.Diallo ☭ @nyeusi_waasi]

"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world."

- james Baldwin, The Devil Finds His Work.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

We warned you: the wholesale destruction of Gaza was not an exception, it was a blueprint to crush anyone who opposes the plutocratic imperialism embodied by US/Israel and their global allies.
Act now: defend int'l law from lawlessness, before the rupture becomes irreversible.

[Jessamine Fraser she/her @jes_af]

@architext14 Once picked up a project for detailed docs that had been drafted in AutoLT by someone else. Not a single dimension was a round number. I couldn’t correct it without starting over so ended up manually entering the dimensions & leaving a giant “not to scale” note in the file…

[Kyle Church @KyleDChurch]

there actually needs to be a corruption investigation into government MPs, particularly ACT & NZF, that includes the possibility of foreign interference in return for kickbacks - the resource extraction alignment between the US and NZF *in particular* seems egregious & dangerous

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

I came across this "critique" of degrowth today in Catalyst magazine, by two prominent writers. I was struck by how wildly incorrect it is.

Degrowth does *not* proceed from the position that there is "already more than enough wealth in the world"... which here seems to mean "the stuff we need to live good lives is already produced and just needs to be distributed better." Totally wrong. Everyone with any sense can see there are critical shortages of basic things like housing, sanitation systems, healthcare, public transit, etc.

In reality, degrowth proceeds from the position that there is already more than enough *productive capacity*. The problem is that capital controls that productive capacity (the labour, resources, factories, etc), and therefore produces what is profitable to capital... so we get massive overproduction of SUVs, weapons, mansions, etc, with devastating ecological consequences... and we get chronic shortages of obviously necessary things because they are less profitable or not profitable at all.

The solution is to reclaim democratic control over the means of production, overcome the capitalist law of value, and organize production around social and ecological goals (in other words, socialism). This must include, and indeed is enabled by, degrowing damaging and unnecessary production.

With this approach, we know it is possible to ensure good lives for all 8 billion people on this planet (including supplying all the "core goods" these authors call for) with *less* total resource use and energy use, and less total output, than the world economy presently produces.

This is clearly *not* just about "moving numbers around" (what a bizarre claim!). It's about transforming the ownership and direction of production.

[Jessamine Fraser she/her @jes_af]

The difference between density and intensity… when planning rules are designed to enable intensity you get the Perth example SustainableTall is responding to, when the goal is liveable density you get terraces and perimeter blocks.

[Philip Oldfield @SustainableTall]

When detached houses are built this ridiculously close, why not just build terraces?

[Jessamine Fraser she/her @jes_af]

@salty_kiwi @SteveGuest It also shouldn’t matter if someone is a tire-kicking rioter smashing windscreens with baseball bats—they still shouldn’t get shot. That he was shot in the back while being held down by multiple ICE officers after being disarmed of a gun he didn’t reach for, just makes it worse.

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

'What finance really is, is playing around with other peoples' debts.'

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

During times like this, the wisdom of John Pilger is very much needed.

[Liquid Times @Liquid_Times]

Kainga Ora bought this land 8 years ago for close to $3m & planned to build a 10-storey social housing block on it.
Now they're flogging it off cheaply for less than $1m.
That homelessness issue in central Auckland isn't getting fixed anytime soon.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

"The good news is that these policies are highly popular and can form the basis of a winning political platform. Democratic socialism is a viable path — indeed, the only path — to a safe and just future." https://t.co/Dnj9I4FvpD

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

Is this new system we are moving to even Capitalism,

or is just Feudalism with modern technology?

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

We were told the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic disaster, but modern capitalism is just as bad - if not worse - with all its useless bureaucratic bs jobs.

[Jessamine Fraser she/her @jes_af]

@KyleDChurch Oh no! Scruffy people! The horror!

Could we maybe provide liveable benefits, no-strings emergency and affordable housing?
What’s further anger inducing is that it’s not even a cost thing, because studies show that policing homelessness is more expensive than housing & support.