Our patriarchal culture animalizes women and sexualizes animals, and without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, joins us. Highlights include:

• How Carol got started on her personal journey to veganism;

• Why patriarchal cultures associate masculinity with meat-eating and how women and animals become ‘absent referents’;

• Why feminism and veganism have a long history of deep interconnection;

• How sexism persists in the animals rights movement;

• Why a vegan diet is a daily act of anti-oppressive resistance.

Sonia Ivanoff, a lawyer who has represented Indigenous communities in Chubut for decades, says the conflicts stem from the “state’s failure to grapple with the colonial legacy of territorial dispossession”, which translates into a failure to grant community land titles.

She says the provincial executive also “criminalises leaders, portraying them as internal enemies” and “circulates the discourse of the good versus bad Indian”. Ivanoff says provinces use this tactic when Indigenous rights to free and prior consultation are viewed as obstacles, as in the case of extractive projects.

Although the country’s laws and constitution enshrine Indigenous rights, these are rarely implemented. Under Milei, key protections such as the national registry of Indigenous communities and the Indigenous Territory Emergency Law have been scrapped.

Campaigners also say legal and extrajudicial persecution of the Mapuche has intensified. Ignacio Torres, the governor of Chubut province, and the national minister of security, Patricia Bullrich, have spearheaded the campaign against the Mapuche, for example referring to local activists as “terrorists”. Bullrich has been to Patagonia several times recently, leading media tours of evicted Mapuche communities. In late December, the National Fire Management System was brought under her ministry’s remit.

Everybody and their grandpa is fascinated by fascism- how it takes root, builds to power, and causes so much damage along the way. But we so rarely talk about the uncomfortable connection it has with beloved European pastime colonialism. Let’s get into it!

by Wisecrack

Are Family Values Fascist?

Recently a number of right-wing figures have become obsessed with children, whether it's having lots of them on their own, or creating a moral imperative for the rest of us to reproduce. So are they just really into the idea of spreading their own genetic code, or is there something more insidious going on? We'll explain in this video on the right-wing obsession with having children.

Anthropogenic change is contributing to the rise in emerging infectious diseases, which are significantly correlated with socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors1. Studies have shown that infectious disease risk is modified by changes to biodiversity, climate change, chemical pollution, landscape transformations and species introductions. However, it remains unclear which global change drivers most increase disease and under what contexts. Here we amassed a dataset from the literature that contains 2,938 observations of infectious disease responses to global change drivers across 1,497 host–parasite combinations, including plant, animal and human hosts. We found that biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, climate change and introduced species are associated with increases in disease-related end points or harm, whereas urbanization is associated with decreases in disease end points. Natural biodiversity gradients, deforestation and forest fragmentation are comparatively unimportant or idiosyncratic as drivers of disease. Overall, these results are consistent across human and non-human diseases. Nevertheless, context-dependent effects of the global change drivers on disease were found to be common. The findings uncovered by this meta-analysis should help target disease management and surveillance efforts towards global change drivers that increase disease. Specifically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health, and preventing biological invasions and biodiversity loss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal and human diseases, especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants of health.

In 1990, a US Naval War College report found that “nearly all areas of operational effectiveness are threatened” by climate change. That was 35 years, around 70 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, and six presidential administrations ago. On Wednesday, a statement from the Department of Defense attributed to acting deputy Defense Secretary Robert Salesses said climate change is “woke.”

“Through our budgets, the Department of Defense will once again resource warfighting and cease unnecessary spending that set our military back under the previous administration, including through so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs, [emphasis mine] as well as excessive bureaucracy,” the statement read, apparently upending three-plus decades of military policy. The most embarrassing coup in world history continues apace.

There are widespread concerns that current trends in resource-use are unsustainable, but possibilities of overshoot/collapse remain controversial. Collapses have occurred frequently in history, often followed by centuries of economic, intellectual, and population decline. Many different natural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain specific collapses, but a general explanation remains elusive.

In this paper, we build a human population dynamics model by adding accumulated wealth and economic inequality to a predator–prey model of humans and nature. The model structure, and simulated scenarios that offer significant implications, are explained. Four equations describe the evolution of Elites, Commoners, Nature, and Wealth. The model shows Economic Stratification or Ecological Strain can independently lead to collapse, in agreement with the historical record.

The measure “Carrying Capacity” is developed and its estimation is shown to be a practical means for early detection of a collapse. Mechanisms leading to two types of collapses are discussed. The new dynamics of this model can also reproduce the irreversible collapses found in history. Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably.

.

Wetiko

https://www.ft.com/content/e61e1348-9ee7-4dd9-b2a8-8d262e26d3e9

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08057 Abstract: SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities. However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI's impact on environmental humanities, this paper introduces Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history, and especially the "Sustainability Solution" proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum. This solution suggests that sustainable coupling between extraterrestrial intelligences and their planetary environments is the major factor in the possibility of their successful detection by remote observation. By positing that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern, this solution rules out space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or galaxies. This paper elaborates on Haqq-Misra's and Baum's arguments, and discusses speculative implications of the Sustainability Solution, thus rethinking three concepts in environmental humanities: technosphere, planetary history, and sustainability. The paper advocates that (1) technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into biosphere; (2) planetary history must be understood in a generic perspective that abstracts from terrestrial particularities; and (3) sustainability is not sufficient vector of viable human inhabitation of the Earth, suggesting instead habitability and genesity as better candidates.

While the billionaires of Silicon Valley might seem like they're pushing capitalism into a brave new world, they're actually trying to move beyond it all together. It's called technofeudalism, and it imagines a world in which powerful corporations and oligarchs replace governments. While it might sound like something out of a dystopian film, we're already living in it. We'll explain in this video on how the tech bros want to re-shape politics.

THE INTERSECTING TIES BETWEEN TRUMP AND PUTIN have not developed in a vacuum. They are the result of concerted Russian state efforts to accelerate the collapse of Western societies, while working to restore and revitalise a new Russian imperial order. Stoking division, fighting culture wars, spreading disinformation, and sowing confusion through the weaponisation of the far-right are all part of this strategy.

• Brazilian Amazon states are leading an offensive against environmental regulations in the Amazon and beyond. 
• The movement gained momentum in October when Brazil’s granary, Mato Grosso state, approved a bill undermining a voluntary agreement to protect the Amazon from soy expansion. 
• Before Mato Grosso, other Amazon states like Acre and Rondônia had already approved bills reducing protected areas and weakening the fight against illegal mining. 
• With its economy highly reliant on agribusiness, Mato Grosso is considered a successful model for other parts of the Amazon.

The elite assholes of the world are united by disinformation meant to keep lubricating the destruction of the world (for capital accumulation).

How Hawk Tuah Explains Parasociality

The phrase “Hawk Tuah” was briefly inescapable in 2024. And the woman behind the meme, Hailey Welch, rocketed to mainstream popularity before introducing a crypto coin that may have been a straight-up scam. So why would people invest their hard-earned money in a not-so-inside joke? Let’s talk about parasocial relationships, and whether they’re good, bad or just plain complicated.

How capitalism solves its alienation problem: parasocial relationships, a commodified simulacrum of actual relationships.

Fewer things strike fear in the heart of right wingers than wokeness. It's no secret that their relationship with progressive ideas has been complicated over the years, but how and why did the word "woke" become something that causes them to become so angry... or afraid.

In this video, I look at how we've reached this point. How online discourse, media and politics have reinforced the fear of wokeness, and how agitators on the right have intentionally encouraged their followers to fear something that they don't understand.

Ban links to X-Twitter (at the very least)