Saturday 30 June 2012

a major rethink of human culture

I'm not a big fan of philosophising, prefering to think and act,
and think again.

However, Chris Hedges gives me a lot to think about,
and allows thinkers to think outside the gilded cage
that has been set up around our political leaders.

Some ideas:
- Indians in America were killed as much for their  
egalitarian political economics of subsistence
as they were for the land they were sitting on.


IshitUnot: Truthdig

By Chris Hedges  
Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
... The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
... The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
... The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
... “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”

Monday 4 June 2012

short-sighted architectural waste

Why is it that humans waste the most resources building houses or factories,
and then when they're done, they just leave a shell there? I think it's horrible.
There are homeless people and lots of empty buildings.
Homeless? meet your new home. Or just squat [did  a story on that, once]

Now there are entire streets in neighbourhoods that are empty because of the
mortgage debacle in the US. The banks keep foreclosing, illegally, and then
they can't take care of the houses, or sell them. What a waste of resources,
not just money.

This is like a story in Spiegel about ghost towns, that came to be because
industry moved on.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/berlin-exhibition-explores-modern-ghost-towns-a-835282.html

Japanese coal island of Hashima [may be needed again, since nukes switched off]
Varosha, Norther Cyprus. victim of war

see also: Detroit train station


What a grand beast of a building.


see also

Foreclosure Ghost Towns Likely?


Foreclosure Ghost Towns Likely?

By: Kirk Haverkamp
January 07, 2011

Although many housing markets are expected to fully recover from the impacts of the economic downturn within a decade, others may remain mired in decline for years to come, perhaps even coming to resemble Old West ghost towns.

That’s among the conclusions of a new study from the Mortgage Bankers Association, looking at the long-term impact of what it terms the “Great Recession” on metropolitan areas that are in the midst of a severe decline due to job losses and a shrinking population.

In addition to industrial cities like Detroit, which fell on hard times due to declines in the auto and steel industry, the report identifies a new type of declining city that experienced strong growth during the housing boom and now is seeing unprecedented declines in housing values and rising foreclosures, such as the Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami markets.

"The future viability of these areas may be threatened by recent economic events," said Jame Follain, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute and the report’s author. "This is a critical point that should be well understood by potential home buyers and lenders who want to avoid places plagued by high foreclosures, vacancies and a deteriorating housing stock due to deferred maintenance.” [why not try RITUAL BURNING of "underwater" or substandard houses, just to KEEP WARM- Cosine67]

The report suggests that choosing the right neighborhood will be critical for homebuyers in the years ahead, especially in metropolitan areas that were hard-hit by the recession, as neighborhoods with elevated vacancies and foreclosures are expected to continue to struggle for an extended time to come. Even previously stable neighborhoods or communities within such regions could find their viability threatened, according to report.

Indeed, even in metropolitan areas where economic prospects are relatively good, some neighborhoods or submarkets may remain in decline for an extended period to come, the report says.

The basic problem, according to the report, is that people tend to leave an area as jobs decline, creating more vacant housing stock, which drives down property values, further weakening the local economy. The problem is likely to be particularly acute in regions where a growing housing market was a big driver of the economy prior to the recession, such as parts of Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California.

The report compares the situation to that of Old West ghost towns, communities that lost their reason for existing, and so the people went away, leaving empty buildings behind, although it says modern communities are not likely to reach so extreme a stage.

Indeed, the foreclosure and vacant housing stock has gotten so severe that some are urging that surplus and decaying housing stock and commercial buildings be demolished to boost surrounding property values and open up green space. A public-private venture, Red Fields to Green Fields, is already seeking to do that in 12 U.S. cities, examining how unused or underutilized property could be acquired by parks agencies or public-private partnerships for demolition and conversion to parkland or to be held in land banks until the economy recovers.