veganpizza69

"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

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.

• 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.

This study aims to expand the understanding of public acceptance of carbon taxes by exploring the role of habits. Habits play a pivotal role in guiding our behaviors and reasoning and can even influence our self perception and identity but remain an underexplored variable in relation to public policy acceptance. We employed a large scale (N > 5200) national survey to measure public acceptance of higher carbon taxation in Sweden, also capturing car driving habits, car usage, and other relevant variables. The findings show that habit strength is negatively correlated with policy acceptance, regardless of self reported driving distance, while also appearing to moderate the relationship between policy acceptance and environmental concern and political leaning, variables previously shown to be of relevance. The study suggests that the influence of habits needs to be recognized to better understand the formation of climate policy acceptance, and exploring this perspective paves the way for future research.

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.

[...] 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.