Spyke

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memes

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the less we do, the better off everyone is

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Right?

Learning how to leave things alone, in our ecosystems as well as our built and social systems, is invaluable. Being able to just be with such things, observe, see how things develop on their own, how some wounds heal naturally and others do not. And, the results of that kind of learning in my experience include plenty of callings, ways we can and do participate actively to make life more wonderful.

In general, so much human activity is so frenzied and disconnected, that "Just do less" seems like generally applicable advice but it's more like one-sided advice which is good on average given our current society, but obviously is not on point 100% of the time.

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Do I belong in tech anymore? - On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.

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Yes. Every manager has responsibilities, because when shit goes south the meeting in the corner office wants to know who to blame, or even in less punitive cultures, where mistakes were made — where the opportunities to learn are. Corporations mask people from most personal criminal liability, but not all of it.

Allowing people to avoid responsibility by pinning it on a machine would be a big mistake.

Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is still a solid read on this stuff.

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What are your favorite nature documentaries that DO talk about human beings, but NOT in a way that sounds like humans just suck?

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Yup. And it's not just white people! In a very international course I took with Bija Vidyapeeth about 20 years ago, at least one of the non-white participants shared the view that any human engagement with the rest of the natural world was going to be a negative. I knew less then, but did recall and share about research in the Amazon which documented an increase in local biodiversity where humans were, over ecologically similar areas which were left alone.

The elites of many countries have absorbed the same Western-dominated views that those of us living in the West are bombarded with.

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What are your favorite nature documentaries that DO talk about human beings, but NOT in a way that sounds like humans just suck?

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any large group we make is deadly

This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.

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Abdullah Öcalan (1947 - ) Abdullah Öcalan, born on this day in 1947, is a socialist theorist, feminist, political prisoner, and one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). His...

And he's in the news again lately, as it looks like Turkey may finally be ready to make a vaguely acceptable deal with Kurds in Turkey. https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/834470

https://theconversation.com/the-pkk-says-it-will-lay-down-its-arms-what-are-the-chances-of-lasting-peace-between-turkey-and-the-kurds-podcast-252646

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Solarpunk: The Genre That Dares to Dream the World Repaired

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If you think of solarpunk as a future utopia that could (or could have) existed, that sounds about right.

If you think of it as attitudes/ways of life people can and do hold and act on, right now and whenever, whether we are pre-, post-, or during apocalypse, then its heft becomes clearer. For me the centers are the centering of and working cooperatively with life (including us human beans), the kind of social awareness and care that tends to go along with that, and appropriate tech (generally seeking/preferencing simplest thing that could work, most local, understandable & repairable. but not to the point of shooting ourselves in the foot).