Insomne Soñolienta

So the term g*psy is a slur against Romani people and you shouldn’t be using it unless you’re Romani yourself.

I dont know anything about the relationship between Ireland and Romani people to comment on the last bit.

A black, female, lgbt city counselor was shot dead in Rio last night.

A black, female, lgbt city counselor that came from a poor neighborhood and used her position to defend all those causes was shot dead in Rio last night.

They fired 9 times towards her car. They hit her in the head more than once. 

A city counselor was shot dead in Rio last night, with more than one gunshot to her head. Her driver too, shot in the back. 

A city counselor that had just created a way to investigate on the military intervention in Rio last week - a city counselor that had just unveiled yet more cases of police violence - was assassinated in Rio last night.

After 15 years of repudiating claims that the invasion of Iraq was only initiated to seize Iraqi resources, large oil corporations fronted by former architects of the war who vacated to the private sector are flagrantly advertising their contracts for exploration and production of Iraqi oil fields to potential investors.

The British oil and gas company BP won the contract to operate the Rumaila Oil Field back in 2009, and now proudly boast of its new drilling capabilities on Twitter. Rumaila is simply huge; by some measures it is the third largest reserve of crude oil on the planet, and is currently extracting 100 million dollars worth of oil every day – enough to cover the annual health budget of Iraq under the wartime rule of the US coalition every five days.

One of the board members of BP at present is Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6 from 2009 to 2014 who acted as UK special representative to Iraq during the occupation. He cashed in a few favours and joined BP as an Independent Non-Executive Director in 2015, one year after he departed MI6 and two years after BP had been handed a licence to exploit one of the most valuable pools of liquid gold on the planet. There was seemingly no regulatory oversight of this very British oligarchy.

In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, BP denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate” and denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

However, memos disclosed by The Independent in 2011 tell a very different story. In a series of meetings in 2003, BP revealed that they had approached Labour Peer Lady Symons to lobby the Blair government into demanding a share of spoils from the Iraq War in return for UK military support.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.” The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office also invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

Not for the first time in their history (see the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat) BP succeeded in convincing the UK government to forcibly seize the resources of a sovereign foreign nation to bolster the share prices of large corporations like themselves. Cronies who endlessly spin around the revolving door between military/government positions like Sir John Sawers no doubt made a fair few quid in dividends and obscene salaries; in fact, Sawers is now a regular feature at Bilderberg conferences, rubbing shoulders with Hillary Clinton and George Bush. I imagine they got on famously.

having to produce something and have a use is a capitalist ideal and not an intrinsic part of humanity

Guess what happened to people who didn’t do things before capitalism? They died. Cause if you weren’t hunting, gathering, or useful in some aspect of nature. You were killed, died or starvation, dehydration, or exposure. 

note: in the neolithic era, a person in their 40s or 50s would be considered elderly

12,000-year-old burial of a woman about 45 with mobility disabilities both congenital and acquired

burial of a 40-50 year old Neanderthal man who had survived to old age with a deformed right arm and a long-healed head injury that would have made him blind in one eye

neolithic burial of a man in his 50s who lost the use of his left arm in adolescence

neolithic burial of a man in his 40s with evidence of a significant mobility disability caused by an injured hip and leg, some time in adulthood but long before his death

neolithic Asian burial of a man in his 20s with a congenital disorder which would have made him a quadriplegic around age 14. He survived for 10-15 years after that.

Stop turning ancient hominids into these cruel “survival of the fittest” images. Especially cause that isn’t even what is meant by that phrase.

Nowadays, on the other hand, we have excess, and waste, and an absolute shitpot of arbitrary work that gets shoved into the “necessary and vital” pile just because somebody else can make a buck off it, made as much off of cut corners and financial shenanigans as of anybody’s honest labor. Shitty Wal-Mart plastic pitchers and crap toys that capture attention and drop it just as fast, “fast fashion” that you wear twice and it falls apart, shiny chrome washer-dryers that are going to be replaced in five or ten years because planned obsolescence meets upgrade culture, and produce that gets rejected because it doesn’t look shiny and uniform and perfect.

If you’re a cashier, you have to stand even though you could do your job just as well sitting. A fast-food place throws out pounds of fries, empties the whole assembly-line of prepared food into the dumpster at the end of the night, and if you take any of it home to eat, that’s called stealing. Grocery stores throw out entire cartons of eggs because one out of twelve is cracked and lock their dumpsters so nobody can scavenge food from the tons of what’s thrown out still edible. Tech stores demand that unsold computers be destroyed with a sledgehammer before being thrown out, and all the labor that went into making it, assembling it, forming its component parts and mining its raw materials, is all wasted.

We can see this shit going on, we encounter it and sometimes we’re ordered to carry it out, in our workplaces that pay us shit, and let me tell you, there’s a hell of a difference between “if you don’t get the wheat harvested we’ll have no bread all winter” and “you need to spend the next eight hours cooking food so we can hold a profit after throwing a quarter of it in the garbage.” A multitude of people would benefit greatly if allowed to access that waste or allowed to not produce what’s likely going to be wasted.

Now people starve because they don’t “produce” in an acceptable way for our capitalist system, which has a very narrow and limited definition of what being “useful” is, and because our corporate overlords would rather throw food away than feed someone who is starving.

We have enough food, but people are starving to death.

We have enough houses, but people are dying of exposure because they’re homeless.

We have enough medicine, but people are dying because they can’t afford to pay for it.

And we accept this as correct because we’ve been brainwashed that only “useful” i.e. “capitalist productive” people deserve to have food, shelter and healthcare.

So it should be this way now? So that’s how we should live now? People who aren’t useful should be killed, starve, or die of exposure? Is that the world you want?

Any time we have evidence of human culture we see signs of what modern folks would interpret as caring, inclusive, cooperative, and even soft. Life was absolutely hard for our ancestors, and sometimes they had to make hard decisions. Sometimes the individual culture was exclusive of specific traits, for all sorts of reasons.

But, ultimately, it is fairly well accepted that one of our best advantages is our extreme adaptability and cooperation. So what if someone cannot hunt, maybe they make the best stone tools, or just bring a smile to everyone’s face. Maybe someone cannot care for themself, but caring for them is a unifying activity. Maybe the trait that made you excel in the savanna is detrimental in the arctic but your bud that was slow on the savanna but you gave grubs to excels in the arctic can give you a fish. But we don’t know, and production isn’t ever a guarantee -especially with our ancient ancestors. So we adapt. We care, we bring everyone along that we can.  

Further, “fitness” doesn’t mean the fastest, best hunter, or any of that bullshit. “Fitness” is nothing more than a measure of passing on of genes. Evolution is an imperfect mechanism of “good enough.” In a species in which two individuals create one offspring, if they create two offspring they now have a null fitness, additional offspring means higher/positive fitness. You can be the slowest hunter and die from arterial sclerosis, but if you passed on your genes you have expressed fitness of your genes, their survival. Repeated passing of that gene is the continued “survival of the fitness.” Note that too many offspring that survive to pass genes can also be negative, because it can get to the point where there are too many mouths to assure they reach maturity to continue to pass the genes.  That’s why evolution is a weird, clunky, imperfect thing. And you can dedicate your life in study of it and still barely scratch the surface. 

Above folks have linked to some of the very obvious examples of care we have dug up in our ancestors. Why don’t we look at some of our ape cousins?

How about Bonobos caring for kin and resolving conflict without warfare and often without aggression (they are rather well known for solving issues with sex and masturbation) http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0079290

hell, even chimpanzees aren’t as aggressive as most people think, because the studies the popular notions are based on were done in artificial environments where different family groups were forced (just like the whole alpha wolf theory has been completely discredited for a similar reason) together. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10764-006-9081-9

How about the troop of matriarchal chimps that developed after the alpha males all died, and they are now into new generations of matriarchal rule and any males that want to join either chill out or go away https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387823/

Girls Of The Sun dir. Eva Husson (2018)