Edna

♪ you see men sailing on their ego trips...

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

Not that Brazilians need the validation from school-shooting-with-no-healthcare-Land, but is the 3rd largest aircraft maker in the world, one of the most used programming languages in game development, and one of the most successful alternatives to Visa and Mastercard enough?

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Ed Sheeran does provide a ‘safe space’ – for the billionaires who own him:

Lots of journalists do disinformation. After all, it’s often their job: to get you looking in the wrong place or viewing events through the wrong lens.

A good illustration is Tom Slater, editor of Spiked magazine. Tom isn’t dumb. But in his latest article, titled “The monstering of Ed Sheeran proves ‘Free Palestine’ has become a cult”, he does a very good job of pretending to be. Why? Because that’s the best way for him to keep his readership dumb.

He’s far from alone. Right now, there’s a whole industry of media professionals responding to the Sheeran furore by pointing in the very opposite direction to the one the public ought to be looking in.

Like Slater, these journalists and pundits understand that Sheeran isn’t in trouble because of some supposedly out-of-control “Free Palestine” cult. Like Slater, they know that the issue was never about Sheeran’s failure to speak out about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Had it been, this so-called cult – or what Slater preposterously calls the “keffiyeh classes” – would be “monstering” all of the other prominent artists who have been keeping their heads down and refusing to speak up about the genocide.

No, people are angry with Sheeran for a quite different – and very obvious – reason.

He invited fellow musician and long-standing friend Macklemore to open his tour, knowing that Macklemore would perform a song about the Gaza genocide called Hind’s Hall.

Sheeran then immediately reversed his tiny, proxy act of courage by capitulating to a threat from Robert Kraft, a billionaire stadium owner who is also a pal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and generous donor to the genocidal Israeli military.

After conspiring with other billionaire stadium owners, Kraft gave Sheeran an ultimatum: drop Macklemore or we pull the plug on your tour.

The pushback seems to have caught Sheeran by surprise. His support acts and backing band withdrew from the tour. That’s not, as Slater and the rest of the establishment media would have you believe, because they suddenly fell under the spell of some powerful cult.

The backlash is far more easily explained:

Because Sheeran has proved himself a spineless and disloyal friend.

Because he has taken a highly political stance, and an ugly one at that, in supporting the genocide apologists who dominate the billionaire class and expect obedience from their political and media flunkeys.

Because he has given his implicit consent for a billionaire with a nefarious political agenda to dictate what can be said in our cultural spaces.

Because through his cowardly capitulation, Sheeran has given his permission for the billionaire class to continue controlling those cultural spaces.

Because the all-too-predictable consequence will be that even fewer artists – certainly any who wish to be “commercial” – will dare to break from the cultural production model preferred by Kraft and the other billionaires of Sheeran-style “soppy love songs” that pose no threat to their power.

People are angry with Sheeran because he has just made it even harder to stand up to the power of the oligarchs. If a singer like Sheeran worth untold millions is too fearful, what chance the rest of us?

If those who dare to speak up are stabbed in the back even by their allies – by artists like Sheeran who have real leverage within the West’s cultural spaces – what hope is there that we can ever seize back the public realm, including the political sphere, that’s dominated not by some imaginary “keffiyeh class” but by the all-too-real super-rich.

The current furore engulfing Sheeran wasn't provoked by his silence on Gaza. But now that the furore has made it all too clear that billionaires such as Kraft dictate what artists are allowed to say in venues, Sheeran’s silence on Gaza looks a lot more malign that it did before.

His supposedly “apolitical” stance looks less like it is providing a “safe space” for his audience and more like it is providing a safe space for billionaires like Kraft that Sheeran has aligned himself with.

Sheeran’s professed political neutrality, it seems, is a cover story, one in which he continues to collude with the billionaires who allowed him get rich in return for not providing a platform to anyone who might scrutinise the super-rich and their poisonous agenda.

Sheeran is just one cog in this machine. In his first public appearance since the row, he took to the stage to demand that we focus on his supposed victimhood, not that of Gaza’s slaughtered children. He whined that his friends, far less powerful than he is, had “betrayed” him by sticking to their principles and refusing to bow to the billionaire bullies.

Alongside Sheeran, there stands a media class, courtier journalists like Tom Slater, whose job is to similarly misdirect us. They demand we focus on the chimerical threat of a “keffiyeh class” rather than the tangible threat posed by the billionaire class that pays their wages.

For good reason, many ordinary people are angry – with dutiful superstars, servile journalists, and corrupt politicians, all trained to do the bidding of a depraved billionaire class, impervious to the wider good.

Those people aren’t in a cult. And they aren’t “monstering” Sheeran. But they are gradually working out for themselves who the real monsters are.

[James Jackson @derJamesJackson]

The AfD is ten points ahead of the CDU, and everyone is talking about the danger of Die Linke (10.5%)

[Petra Guasti @PetraGuasti]

1/16 After the elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, we will hear a lot about “the extremes”: Die Linke winning in Berlin and the AfD in MV.
But the radical left and the extreme right are not mirror images. And treating them as such obscures more than it explains.

[JO @withlovejohana]

All of Ed Sheeran’s openers have now withdrawn from the Looper Tour. Please realize how big this is. This is what unity looks like. Billionaires are terrified of people realizing how strong they can be when we come together for a cause. Continue speaking out. Support the new artists that are deciding to put their careers at risk to take this stance.

[My name is M. Only M @musicandsoularg]

¿Y si el mayor peligro para nuestra sociedad no fuera la maldad, sino la estupidez?

La alarmante teoría de Dietrich Bonhoeffer que explica el mundo de hoy.

La Teoría de la Estupidez de Bonhoeffer:
El peligro silencioso
Durante los años más oscuros de la Alemania nazi, el teólogo y pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflexionó desde su celda sobre cómo una sociedad culta y moderna había caído en la barbarie colectiva.

Su conclusión fue revolucionaria y alarmante:
la estupidez es un enemigo del bien mucho más peligroso que la maldad misma.

👉 ¿Por qué es más peligrosa que la maldad?
Contra la maldad se puede luchar:
se puede denunciar, combatir e incluso legislar en su contra.
El malvado, en el fondo, suele tener conciencia de que está rompiendo las reglas.

Con la estupidez, en cambio, estamos completamente indefensos.
La persona dominada por ella es impermeable a los argumentos lógicos y a los hechos objetivos.
Si se le presentan pruebas que contradicen sus dogmas, simplemente las ignora o las tacha de irrelevantes.
Al sentirse completamente segura de sí misma, se vuelve agresiva y sumamente peligrosa al ser confrontada.

No es un defecto intelectual, sino moral
Bonhoeffer aclaró que esto no tiene nada que ver con el coeficiente intelectual o el nivel educativo. Existen mentes brillantes que operan bajo una profunda estupidez y personas sencillas que desbordan sabiduría moral.
La estupidez ocurre cuando un individuo renuncia voluntariamente a su capacidad de juicio propio.

👉 El contagio social y el rol del poder
Para el pensador, la estupidez es un fenómeno sociológico.
Observó que el ascenso de una fuerte estructura de poder (política o religiosa) infecta de estupidez a gran parte de la población.
Al integrarse a un grupo o adoptar ciegamente una ideología, el individuo sacrifica su independencia interior.

En este estado, la persona ya no piensa por sí misma:
se convierte en un repetidor de eslóganes, consignas y narrativas prefabricadas.
Al delegar su conciencia al colectivo, se transforma en una herramienta dócil capaz de cometer o justificar las mayores atrocidades sin experimentar remordimiento alguno.

👉 La conclusión de Bonhoeffer
La estupidez no se cura con más instrucción o datos, sino con un acto de liberación interna y coraje moral.
Hasta que el individuo no recupere la valentía de examinar sus ideas de forma autónoma y de tolerar la incomodidad de contradecir a su propio grupo, seguirá atrapado en este peligroso letargo.

[Ita María @itamaria83]

La gente que defiende que haya más armas en las calles lo hace porque:

A. No entiende lo que implica (la brecha es cognitiva).
B. Le da lo mismo (la brecha es ética).
C. Le alegra y lo celebra (la brecha es sociopática).

[Marshall Steinbaum 🔥 @Econ_Marshall]

Which theory of the German productivity slowdown is more plausible?

[David Harvey | @davidharvey.org on Bluesky @profdavidharvey]

Next week: Join me for a free public livestream of my new course, The Story of Capital.

The course meets on Tuesdays from 4:15 - 6:15 pm [ET] from September 8th to December 1st.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Most of what was produced in academia today is noise, some 100% (performative academia), some ~90-99% (science).

Most of what was produced by the baker today is signal.

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

Venezuelans who advocated for US military intervention for decades completely losing it because the US is doing to Venezuela exactly what it does to every country it militarily intervenes in.

[Andrés Zambrano-Curcio @az_curcio]

ADLE nunca iba a recortar el Estado, porque la gobernabilidad en Colombia depende de repartirlo entre las élites regionales. Es un equilibrio del que ha hablado el Nobel J. Robinson (ver mi tuit pineado).

El problema jamás ha sido la cantidad de Estado (poca), sino su calidad.

[Doña Ligia 🇨🇴🇻🇪🇵🇸 @ligia281243]

Los ultra procesados no son alimentos, son comestibles.

Los impuestos saludables no gravan los alimentos, gravan los comestibles.

Los comestibles son perjudiciales para la salud.

¡Ánimo! No es tan difícil de entender.

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

"Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook."

Leonard Cohen on anger and the meaning of resistance https://t.co/yWRuaDJiNC

[James Jackson @derJamesJackson]

After buying a half loaf of bread which was 10 grams too light, a customer reported this baker to the Office of Weights and Measurement, at which point he had to buy a new scale, total costs €15,000

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

So: naming the crime is the offense, the one who names it is the guilty, and the one who commits it stands above scrutiny: what a combination of stupidity and viciousness.
Victims are honored by making no more victims not by granting perpetrators impunity.
And @MarkRuffalo rocks!

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Israel has said that paper kites flown by Palestinian children will be treated as weapons of war.

Read that again.

This is the reality of genocide: the total destruction of innocence, freedom and joy.

End all military cooperation with Israel, now.

[Angélica @shaqt3]

Acabo de ver el montaje de Javier Castro "Los colores del eclipse" y me parece de una brutalidad...

[Ana BejaranoRicaurte @AnaBejaranoRG]

El país en semejante emergencia y la presidencia de la República preocupada por el montaje de estos shows. Patético es poco.