Earthling Liberation notes

• 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.

#Chapters:

0:01 Introduction

2:12 Why did Stirner Critique the Left?

5:14 Leftism

7:48 Leftist Anarchism

10:32 Post-Left Anarchism

16:18 Stirner Through Lacan

The study sheds light on the links between modern social conditions and religiosity. However, it should be noted that the results are based on self-reports, which may have been influenced by reporting bias.

and

The results at the individual level revealed weak associations between modern social conditions and religiosity. However, the direction of these associations varied between world regions, suggesting that these conditions alone are unlikely to affect religiosity. Instead, other factors may influence both religiosity and these conditions.

Paper:

Do the Three Modern Social Conditions—High Existential Security, Education, and Urbanicity—Really Make People Less Religious? A Worldwide Analysis, 1989–2020 - Roberts - 2024 - Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Some versions of secularization theory propose that existential security, education, and urbanicity exert directly measurable negative effects on religiosity cross-culturally. However, few studies have tested this using longitudinal data. Nor have researchers adequately examined how much the relationship between these modern social conditions (MSCs) and religiosity varies society-to-society. This study addresses these limitations in a series of new analyses, using 1989–2020 World/European Values Survey data from approximately 100 countries. Results suggest that the three MSCs do not exert independent, negative effects on religiosity in general, at least not in the short or medium term. Indeed, national-average increases in these MSCs were not found to predict decreased religiosity. And, interestingly and unexpectedly, the direction of individual-level relationships between each MSC and religiosity varied greatly between countries and world regions. These findings suggest scholars should probably look elsewhere to explain why average religiosity has decreased in some world locations over recent decades.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23905823

by @VladBunea

References and notes: https://vladbunea.substack.com/p/how-degrowth-can-defeat-fascism

Source: "Philosophy in 5000 B.C." https://existentialcomics.com/comic/577

Transcript:

A multi-panel comic strip with a bunch of men in robes standing outside in a grassland. Two of them are famous philosophers.

Nietzsche:

Have you ever, in a moment of solitude, gazed into the stars and wondered why we exist?

We are given no guidance, no plan, no structure, we merely find ourselves existing.

We find ourselves born into a society, and take the world presented to us as a given. Is Humanity great enough to overcome this?

Do we have it within ourselves to create our own truth, or are we forever chained to the ideals of the society we find ourselves in?

Unidentifiable man:

Fred, god damnit not again! You let the deer run right past you. You find yourself in a hunter gatherer society, so hunt!

Nietzsche:

I was doing something more important.

Unidentifiable man:

What could be more important than survival?

Nietzsche:

Doing a transvaluation of all values, obviously!

Descartes:

Besides, that might have not been a real deer. It was probably an illusion created by an evil demon.

Unidentifiable man:

Guys! You guys! Can you just do some hunting? Or at least some gathering? Please. God damnit, why did I get born into the one hunter gatherer group filled with philosophers.

Pastoralism is incompatible with a warming and changing climate. More evidence.

[...] This is why, to return to Esposito, Nazi bio-thanatopolitics and the personalist biopolitics of liberal individualism are the mere reversal of one another; both remain bound to the same imperative: “to manage life productively: in the first case, to benefit the racial body of the chosen people; and in the second, to benefit the body of the individual subject who becomes its master.” (E3 91) If the metaphysics and biologization of life, personalism and Nazism, sovereignty and biopower all come down to the same logic, how is anything like an affirmative biopolitics possible or desirable?

PDF of a thesis: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/981834/1/Lynes_PhD_F2016.pdf

Too many media outlets rush to condemn those campaigning against fossil fuel chaos as “middle class”. Bizarrely, they do not say the same of millionaire land-owners.

The Taste of War is the first book to tell the intertwined stories of some 20 nations battling for food. This is a story of individual governments struggling to feed civilians and troops with limited resources. Britain and Germany introduced rationing. Japan allowed civilians and soldiers to starve, on the grounds that lives were expendable and the fighting spirit should be sustaining enough. Meanwhile America began to cultivate its image as a land of plenty by giving each soldier a staggering 4,757 calories a day in rations.

...

One fascinating chapter reveals Hitler's entire battle for supremacy to be a quest for food. In 1942 he described the war itself as "a battle for food, a battle for the basis of life, for the raw materials the earth offers". He invaded Russia with the intention of creating a "European California" as abundant as the American west.

According to the euphemistically named "Hunger Plan", developed by German minister Herbert Backe, the conquest of Russia would render Germany self-sufficient. The Germans would starve millions of Russians to death and turn large parts of the country into a giant farm. Backe's plan was partly successful, in that millions of Russians starved. However, as the battle dragged on, the German soldiers could barely feed themselves, let alone send enough home to feed Germany. Hitler was faced with a food crisis, and it was partly as a solution to this strategic problem that he decided to exterminate the Jews. "The Holocaust," Collingham writes, "was not just the product of an irrational ideology but the conclusion of a series of crises in the German conduct of the war."

Just imagine "carnism" instead of "capitalism". The fantasy of the "master of nature, the beasts' lord".

CW: images from fur farms

Put simply, if SARS-CoV-2 came about by frequent recombination through contact with common virus-carrying animals in the wild, we would expect it to display a mix of genome segments shared between it and several of their close cousins. However, if SARS-CoV-2 came about through manipulation in a lab, such as through gain-of-function research, we would expect a close match to one and only one “initial” strain, with the remainder of the genome failing to match any other wild strains. The discovery that SARS-CoV-2 does indeed have what biologists call a mosaic genome makes it abundantly clear that it could not have arisen through laboratory manipulation of an initial, single strain, through gain-of-function research or otherwise.

(video from 2018)

There are references in the video description.

The most evil character in the Abrahamic holy books is...

Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period

There is great uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of the termination of the African Humid Period (AHP). Spanning from the early to middle Holocene, the AHP was a period of enhanced moisture over most of northern and eastern Africa. However, beginning 8000 years ago the moisture balance shifted due to changing orbital precession and vegetation feedbacks. Some proxy records indicate a rapid transition from wet to dry conditions, while others indicate a more gradual changeover. Heretofore, humans have been viewed as passive agents in the termination of the AHP, responding to changing climatic conditions by adopting animal husbandry and spreading an agricultural lifestyle across the African continent. This paper explores scenarios whereby humans could be viewed as active agents in landscape denudation. During the period when agriculture was adopted in northern Africa, the regions where it was occurring were at the precipice of ecological regime shifts. Pastoralism, in particular, is argued to enhance devegetation and regime shifts in unbalanced ecosystems. Threshold crossing events were documented in the historical records of New Zealand and western North America due to the introduction of livestock. In looking at temporally correlated archeological and paleoenvironmental records of northern Africa, similar landscape dynamics from the historical precedents are observed: reduction in net primary productivity, homogenization of the flora, transformation of the landscape into a shrub-dominated biozone, and increasing xerophylic vegetation overall. Although human agents are not seen as the only forces inducing regime change during the termination of the AHP, their potential role in inducing large-scale landscape change must be properly contextualized against other global occurrences of neolithization.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2017.00004/full