Nick Drummond

He/him. Noise maker, songwriter, musician, begrudging social media user. These are my random and entirely mediocre tweets.

[Guillo @codiguillos]

Una familia estaba en una celebración cuando empiezan a caer las bombas sobre Caracas.

Sin darse cuenta filmaron un momento que quedará para la historia.

Es la primera vez que Venezuela es atacada militarmente por otro país.

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@tmorello Yo Tom! Here’s one to consider as well: https://t.co/nDbQX9Izog

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

AI is presenting a very interesting dilemma to each of us. We now each have to decide as individuals just how human we wish to keep our experience, because we’re hitting a point where we can become just about as divorced from the things that make us human as we want to be.

We can choose to let AI do our critical thinking for us if we want to. We can choose to let it do our reading and writing for us. We can choose to let it create the art we produce and consume. We can choose to let it formulate arguments for us justifying our opinions and our worldview, or to let it reshape our worldview altogether. We can even choose to anthropomorphize it and have relationships with it if we are lonely.

We all have to choose for ourselves where the line is now. What point we will not cross beyond. What parts of our humanity we are willing and unwilling to trade for convenience or cognitive ease.

Just how far into the guts and gristle of humanity do you want to be?

How deeply do you want to be immersed in the breathing, sweating, pulsing fleshiness of the human adventure?

How fully do you want to feel the erotic ticklings of creativity moving through you, and the frustration you’ll experience on the days when it doesn’t show up?

To what extent do you want to experience the highs and lows of intimate human relationships, and all the unpredictability and insecurity that comes with them?

How much cognitive discomfort are you willing to push through in order to form a new opinion, learn about a new subject, or understand an unfamiliar idea?

How separated are you ready to become from that within us which produces the perfectly imperfect art, music and literature of our species?

How much do you want to feel the earth beneath your feet, the wind in your hair, and the sacred thrum of existence in your veins?

These didn’t used to be questions we needed to answer for ourselves. If we wanted something written, we had to write it ourselves. If we didn’t know how to write, we had to learn. If we didn’t, the thing we wanted to write never got written.

Now it’s a conscious choice for us how far we’re each willing to move into this new AI thing. We all have to decide for ourselves how far is too far, with the understanding that every step we take in that direction is costing us something. Maybe something very dear to us. Maybe something we can never get back.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Thread 🧵: I'm seeing a lot of US politicians express outrage at the Iranian strike on an Israeli hospital, so I thought I'd fill you all in on the shocking history of the US purposely bombing hospitals around the world.

For more, see my investigation:

https://t.co/dy1REnENS2

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Massive explosion as the israelis continue to target Palestinian families and children in Gaza in an attempt to kill and maim as many as possible

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

.@Boeing @BoeingDefense murdered my family members.

[MC Squared @mcsquared34]

We live on a planet where food literally grows on trees, & water falls from the sky, but instead of cooperating in solidarity & mutual aid, so we can all enjoy this earthly paradise, we decided to create things like the 8 hour work day, credit scores, & school lunch debt.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The unspoken premise of capitalism is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires.

This is, of course, a fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you're going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course).

This is a religious belief. It's blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one's desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the "invisible hand of the market" that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It's something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing.

Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health.

As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet.

And proponents of capitalism might here say "Aha! That's what you are missing! We're NOT going to continue living on this planet! Daddy Elon's going to take us all to Mars!"

But that's kinda my whole point here. This is a baseless religious belief. Proponents of capitalism rely on the entirely faith-based belief that technological innovations will soon make it possible for limitless space colonization to occur, thereby enabling the infinite expansion upon which capitalism depends.

But there is no scientific evidence that humans will ever be able to live outside the biosphere from which we emerged. The closest we've ever gotten are these glorified scuba excursions wherein astronauts pack up pieces of Earth's biosphere and suck on them for a while before returning to their planet's surface. Assuming this means we can colonize space and live permanently completely independent of Earth's biosphere is the same as assuming you can one day flap your arms hard enough to fly into the clouds just because you are able to jump.

The assumption of space colonization as a reality in our future arises not from science but from the egoic delusion which pervades human consciousness that we are much more separate from our world than we actually are. The human organism is no more separate from its biosphere than a ripple in a teacup is from the tea. Assuming we can just pack up our bodies and permanently move them offworld is like assuming you can take a single ripple in a teacup and transport it into another cup of tea in a country across the ocean.

Science simply does not understand the many different ways in which the human organism is interconnected with Earth's biosphere, and isn't anywhere close to understanding it. Even if it is technically possible to someday have us survive on another planet (or in floating space cylinders as per Jeff Bezos's plan) — and again it is a complete article of faith that such a thing is even possible — we have no reason to assume that we'll be able to attain this goal fast enough to avert ecological disaster here on Earth. The technology to adequately replicate our planet's living conditions to make human life and reproduction sustainable in the long term could be many centuries off, by which time capitalism will have long ago devoured the face off of this world.

So it's the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@balkanpriestess Apparently the people are thirsty for this. (Me)

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@balkanpriestess

[Philippa Greer @philippa_bear]

Today entering Gaza City. The ruins of life. A donkey laying dead attached to a cart with someone’s possessions. Clusters of people crossing to the South, with too much to walk with under the sun and given the length of the journey. A man carrying a white flag in front of his family. Women about to collapse, dragging bags over the ground, walking backwards, stopping and closing their eyes. A man on the ground in underwear, with soldiers near the checkpoint. A woman presumably crossing with him, stalled, distraught, in desperation. They passed by these ruins. #Gaza #CeasefireNOW

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Israel bombed an orphanage in Gaza, killing and injuring dozens of Palestinian children

I guess bombing orphanage is a western value.

The silence, my god!!

[Climate Dad @ClimateDad77]

The only complex life we know to exist ANYWHERE in the universe.

Being obliterated so that shareholders can amass imaginary wealth.

It’s as heartbreaking as it is shameful.

[regular steve albini @electricalWSOP]

Baked into the discussion of student debt is the idea that the function of education is to prepare someone to work, that it is a ticket for the ride of employment. This is a dangerously toxic notion that deserves no respect. Education is learning, literally anything.

[Tom Morello @tmorello]

Honestly @macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall” is the most Rage Against The Machine song since Rage Against The Machine.

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@DanaBashCNN @InsidePolitics I’m constantly shocked that anyone ever watches this garbage.

[🥨 @marisapk]

I am watching a toddler die on a table in a field hospital in Rafah with half her face blown apart while listening to college students fight tears reporting on a police assault on their campus for protesting that, and I feel like I am losing my fucking mind.

[zoë ✨🌙 @zoenone0none]

occasionally you're faced with how deep in the fascist state we already are and it's like oh cool resisting this is actually the only thing that matters

[Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine @ColumbiaSJP]

VIDEO OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDENT WHO WAS PUSHED DOWN THE STAIRS, BECAME UNCONSCIOUS, AND WAS DENIED ACCESS TO MEDICAL CARE.

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@amphibiansCA Keep in mind, sounds guys aren’t trying to ruin your tone. They’re trying to make a mix work in the room.

[Nick Drummond @nickdrummond]

@amphibiansCA Put a baffle in front of the amp. This request is usually made because the directional beam of sound coming from the amp is piercing at the audience’s ear level making it very difficult to get the vocals loud enough to be intelligible.