Earthling Liberation notes

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26074492

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!

Collective cognition is often mentioned as one of the advantages of group living. But which factors actually facilitate group smarts? To answer this, we compared how individuals and groups of either ants or people tackle an identical geometrical puzzle. We find that when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly. Groups of people do not show such improvement and, when their communication is restricted, even display deteriorated performances. What is the source of such differences? An ant’s simplicity prevents her from solving the puzzle on her own but facilitates effective cooperation with nest-mates. A single person is cognitively sophisticated and solves the problem efficiently but this leads to interpersonal variation that stands in the way of efficient group performance.

Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of group cognition. Testing whether collective cognition exceeds that of the individual is often impractical since different organizational scales tend to face disjoint problems. One exception is the problem of navigating large loads through complex environments and toward a given target. People and ants stand out in their ability to efficiently perform this task not just individually but also as a group. This provides a rare opportunity to empirically compare problem-solving skills and cognitive traits across species and group sizes. Here, we challenge people and ants with the same “piano-movers” load maneuvering puzzle and show that while ants perform more efficiently in larger groups, the opposite is true for humans. We find that although individual ants cannot grasp the global nature of the puzzle, their collective motion translates into emergent cognitive skills. They encode short-term memory in their internally ordered state and this allows for enhanced group performance. People comprehend the puzzle in a way that allows them to explore a reduced search space and, on average, outperform ants. However, when communication is restricted, groups of people resort to the most obvious maneuvers to facilitate consensus. This is reminiscent of ant behavior, and negatively impacts their performance. Our results exemplify how simple minds can easily enjoy scalability while complex brains require extensive communication to cooperate efficiently.

"Fifteen Minutes of Fascism"

1. Definition: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-one-what-is-ecofascism

2. The pseudo-ethics of forest protection: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-two-fascists-speak-for-the-trees-kinda

3. More overviews https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-four-ecofascism-today-and-tomorrow

4. Ecofascism & pronatalism https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-three-fascism-gender-and-the-environment-with-diana-garvin

'The Turning Point' explores climate change, the destruction of the environment and species extinction from a different perspective.

Music by Wantaways

Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists result in an autocatalytic process, which pressures both nomadic and farming polities to scale up polity size, and thus military power. The model suggests that location near a steppe frontier should correlate with the frequency of imperiogenesis. A worldwide survey supports this prediction: over 90% of mega-empires arose within or next to the Old World’s arid belt, running from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert. Specific case studies are also plausibly explained by this model. There are, however, other possible mechanisms for generating empires, of which a few are discussed at the end of the article.

No article to link, so let me explain:

Turchin, who studies history in a more data-science way, found that empires in the past 4000 years seem to pop up in pairs, likely as a result of the escalating arms race between agriculturalists and pastoralists. Pastoralists are used to mobility and trade (using animals for transport); agriculturalists use less land, but still have the tendency to expand for land and to secure trade routes. Obviously, expanding trade means more capital accumulation, and that applies to both. Pastoralists tend to rely on trade as they don't live off a "carnivore diet", but raise the "living stocks" as capital to grow wealth via trade.

The conflict is ancient and ongoing in many parts of the world, usually found as "farmer-herder conflict" in the literature.

Unrelated to the article, this is how I'm interpreting the ongoing war in Sudan, for example.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25314740

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.

• 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."