I may post on some of this stuff at some point, but today I'll provide some links with short comments. This is an open thread.
1. Capitalists Without Borders
Should the Middle Class Fear the World’s Poor? (Marshall Steinbaum, Boston Review, May 11, 2016)
And I quote— "Capital mobility—not competition with the world’s poor—is the greatest threat to the working class in rich countries." Right. Capitalist Elites Want Cheap Labor. Now they can play off the workers of any nation (including the U.S.) against the workers of all the others.
2. "Again and again, faster and faster"
AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian (The Guardian, May 20, 2016). An advance review of Yuval Noah Harari's new book. Lots of Flatland bullshit. And I quote--
AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. “Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50.
If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.”
Does anybody still wonder why I think Homo sapiens is an utterly failed evolutionary experiment?
3. Comforting fantasies
Dual Process: The Only Game in Town (Morris Berman lecture, May 13, 2016)
Morris speculates on what comes after neoliberalism and capitalism are no longer with us. So, what comes next? Morris doesn't know, but it may or may not look like Kunstler's "world made by hand." Morris thinks Japan is leading the way. He would think that because he recently wrote a book about Japan, and Morris thinks nothing which doesn't help book sales to his target audience, however small it is.
I myself don't think capitalism is going anywhere. It will be there right 'til the bitter end. And what about global warming, the current mass extinction and severe degradation of marine ecosystems? The human assault on the biosphere is not mentioned by Morris. That wouldn't help book sales. Apparently he is unaware of these trends, or has filtered them (which amounts to the same thing.) And he's talking about a centuries-long transition!
4. Worse than we think
The college debt crisis is even worse than you think (Boston Globe, May 18, 2016)
Of course it is! Human "bad news" filtering means that just about everything we hear about is worse than we know. Think about it.
That's enough for now.
Are you familiar with the work of John Michael Greer? I would be curious as to your take on his thinking if you have read him. I do read him, Kunstler, George Mobus over at Question Everything, and you of course, among other writers on these topics. I have read Berman but he seems pretty limited in his thinking about most subjects.
It's interesting to try and put together the information that each of you writes about to try and get some sense as to what is going on and what to expect.
Posted by: Dan | 05/23/2016 at 05:31 PM