This is the only war in my life that I fully support. Ukraine needs full support and the consequences of losing are extremely costly to all who hate fascism.
Small farmer here. Devoid the soil of nutrients by tilling. Kill all the soil biology by spraying chemicals. Grow only fast yield cash crops. Grow the same crop year after year for decades or more. Breed crops for appearance and yield over nutrition. What the fuck do you expect?
I’m not a farmer but I’ve been reading about the history of industrial farming lately and I’ve become convinced that we’re approaching agriculture completely wrong. We’re planting massive monocultures in soil that’s been wrecked for decades (via the things you’ve mentioned), surely that would have something to do with it?
If we completely flipped everything we’ve been doing for agriculture we’d be better off in the long run. Small farms have better yeilds, polycropping is better for the environment and modern pesticides create an evolutionary arms race that we will never win. We’ve got it all wrong and we’ve known it since (at least) the 70s. These outdated, expensive, impractical agricultural practices are only making things worse
Longer than the 70s, the fucking Dust Bowl was all about this. We’ve known better for almost an entire century and we’re STILL fucking the soil with mono-crops
Monocropping is vastly more efficient on a number of counts, especially labour input. I can’t emphasise enough what a big deal that is, it’s really the only reason anyone is getting fed.
Yes, there’s a lot of problems with agriculture - predominantly its scale and extent, but eight billion mouths take a lot of feeding. Topsoil loss should be our main concern, together with biogeochemical flows/losses. Every other issue is fairly minor in comparison, really.
Again, that’s not really how food production works - although it is a problem. Production surpluses are an essential buffer to deal with both supply and demand shocks, the elasticity this provides is (and I’m repeating myself) the only reason anyone is getting fed.
Capturing that food waste so it can at least end up back in the soil, yes, that’s something that needs improving.
When news sources start saying shit like, “The economy is great, you kids just need to stop buying stuff and save for a house!” “The war in Gaza…” (seems pretty damn one sided to be a war.) “Biden is trying his best to protect women’s rights!” (We can tell by the lack of action on the various tracking and criminalization of women’s choices in deep red states) People start looking elsewhere for news that reflects the world we live in vs the obvious propaganda we are seeing from major news sources.
Personally, I’m more interested in this from a legal perspective than I am from a moral one. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, morally, but I’m fascinated to see if the case gets up, what other implications it could have.
But also:
The opportunity to extend the performance aspect of Ladies Lounge was embraced by the artist and 25 female supporters, who entered Tuesday’s tribunal hearing wearing a uniform of navy business attire. Throughout the day’s proceedings, they engaged in discreet synchronised choreographed movements, including leg crossing, leaning forward together and peering over the top of their spectacles. Apart from the gentle swish of 25 pairs of nylon clad legs crossing in unison, the support party remained silent. When the proceedings concluded, the troupe exited the tribunal to the Robert Palmer song Simply Irresistible.
The legal aspect is crystal clear. It’s blatantly illegal to ban entry based on gender with very few exceptions (such as toilets or domestic violence shelters). I expect the court will be angry that it even went to court at all.
The purpose of a judge is to settle disagreements. When both sides of a court case agree with the facts, then there is nothing for the judge to do, and it should not go to court at all. It should be settled out of court.
It’s likely to be a really short case “did you have a policy to ban men?” “yes”. “case closed; moving on to damages”… but the thing is, even though the meat of the case will be over almost instantly… there will still be weeks of work done in the lead up to the case, by both legal teams, but the court, by the judge, preparing the jury if it’s a jury trial, etc (imagine how angry your boss would be if they had to give you paid time off work, delaying project schedules, over this case).
If you want to make a political statement, the court room is not the place to be doing that. At a minimum I’d expect the court to force one side to pay all of the legal fees of the other side, and on top of that the court might charge them with abuse of the court process which could result in punitive fines and also discipline against the lawyers involved (they could even be banned from practicing their craft). Judges don’t have a sense of humour and they are not interested in political debates.
Are you a legal expert? Is the fact that this is “art” not a more complex legal issue?
edit: Quote from the article: “Mona’s legal team will be relying on the tribunal’s interpretation of section 26 of Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act, under which a person is permitted to discriminate against another person in a situation designed to promote equal opportunity for a group of people who are disadvantaged or have a special need because of a prescribed attribute – in this case gender. It is under clauses like this in most of Australia’s anti-discrimination legislation that organisations such as male-only clubs and women-only gyms are able to operate.”
Art is entitled to profit. Museums, cinema, theater, music concerts, all of those are art and are business. They aren’t mutually exclusive categories. Artists are humans that need a livelihood as well and are also entitled to the revenue of their art to afford their continued creation of art.
Mona’s legal team will be relying on the tribunal’s interpretation of section 26 of Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act, under which a person is permitted to discriminate against another person in a situation designed to promote equal opportunity for a group of people who are disadvantaged or have a special need because of a prescribed attribute – in this case gender.
It is under clauses like this in most of Australia’s anti-discrimination legislation that organisations such as male-only clubs and women-only gyms are able to operate.
We have clubs that are open to men only, as well as clubs open to women only.
I’m not sure whether this person is genuinely unaware of this, or whether he’s making a lot of noise explicitly to draw attention to the art exhibit as some form of marketing. Neither would surprise me.
Kushner and his rich friends want to pillage Gaza for its oil, after an ethnic cleansing forcing out all the native Palestinians into the desert. Most normal Israelis would never see a dime from this operation, it’s just a land and money grab by the elites. Truly disgusting, and he’s rubbing it in our faces in broad daylight, platformed by the university to which his daddy bought him admittance. Gross.
Geographically, the highest profits from forced labour were in Europe and central Asia, followed by Asia and the Pacific, and then the Americas, the ILO said.
This isnt truly correct and it should be called more urban American vernacular, as this is just as prolific as rural American vernacular, which are both part of the poor American subset.
I noticed since at least a couple of years a pervasive and ever more widespread campaign against representation and lgbtq rights, and the early phase passed through apparently meaningless but popular thing like pop culture and gaming, including the social media sphere at large.
But this time, they’re aiming for a much larger political action, and their tools aren’t the ones of entertainment media but those of traditional values. They appeal to things they know for being popular and still largely followed, like religions and whatever moves around it.
The trend is clearly there, before our very eyes, and yet we still don’t take action. I don’t know if I have such a strong identity, you know, and for this exact reason I don’t want to see this much people suffer. On top of a political crisis this is an empathy one too, IMHO.
On top of a political crisis this is an empathy one too, IMHO.
Very much so. And maybe the crisis of empathy is the deeper, more critical problem.
I have noticed that, right alongside the attacks against LGBTQIA+ folks, there has been an overt effort to normalize both apathy AND the “disorders of conscience” (sociopathy, narcissism, etc) to try to repaint those lacking conscience and guilt as just “different” instead of the amoral predators among prey, who believe conscience is for the weak, that they are.
There was an article in the NY Times just a couple weeks ago doing that, and it wasn’t the first. “Oh, sociopaths aren’t that terrible, just different,” that kind of shit, addressing the actual damage they do and the lives they leave wrecked in language more suited to a statistics report.
The first paragraph:
Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her buzzy forthcoming memoir, to try to correct some of those misunderstandings and provide a fuller picture of sociopathy, which is now more frequently referred to as antisocial personality disorder. As a child, Gagne found herself compelled toward violent outbursts in an effort to try to compensate for the emotional apathy that was her default. As she got older, those compulsive behaviors turned into criminal ones like trespassing and theft.
Thank you for being part of the team! I just want to live a normal life (marry and have kids, decent living situation, some fun stuff occasionally) and it’s exhausting when a potion of the population gets so worked up about something so minor.
If they could just experience it for a day, they’d realize how…banal it is. I’ve dated a little bit of everyone, and it might make some people crestfallen to learn how similar everything is, lol.
Dating a guy is pretty much like just being best friends with a guy: the same gym days, cooking, range days, videogames, movie nights, sleepy afternoons, camping trips, etc. Sometimes, you hold hands. That’s about it xD
Agreed. My support for gay rights has gone from “it’s just right that they should be able to marry and live how they please” to “if you touch them I swear to fucking god I will stop at nothing until you’re a destitute nobody”.
Meanwhile, there are shortages of common cancer-fighting drugs due to under-investment in their production because they are not super profitable for the pharmaceutical companies.
We need to nationalize production of important medications.
What I love about this is the canceling out of the unholy intersection of ideas in the Republican Party of forced birth and environmental deregulation.
All the evil billionaires need a plethora of desperate people so the veil of the Christian sanctity of life thing gets trotted out and behind the scenes they want maximum profit so they tear down any limit or mitigation of the collateral damage their industries cause, and wouldn’t you know it: turns out you can’t have both things. Poetic justice, really. Almost a valid argument for the existence of an Illuvitar like being.
theguardian.com
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