Read: San Francisco is thinking of reparations to Blacks for discrimination (not slavery). Although justice is certainly worthwhile, I think that efforts based on race (a concept lacking objective definition) are inferior compared to those aimed at poverty. I worry that SF’S politicians are pursuing an “eracist” policy of signaling virtue as a means of closing the topic (using citizen’s money) and walking away, guilt free.
Q: Is South Africa as dangerous as the media makes it out to be? A: Worse.
Read a long, interesting article on the downfall (and transformation?) of the humanities: “One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all that criticism—and art—can do.”
Read: “I was struck by how many people said that their present age was their favorite one. A reassuring number of respondents didn’t want to trade their hard-earned wisdom—or humility, or self-acceptance, whatever they had accrued along the way—for some earlier moment”
Lex Fridman’s podcasts are really long (sometimes 3-4 hours), but these are interesting:
Noam Chomsky on Putin and Ukraine. I found Chomsky’s points on invading other counties (e.g., US to Iraq, Stalin and Hitler to Poland, Putin to Ukraine) to be fair, as well as his comments on Putin wanting to make Russia great again. We shouldn’t be hypocrites when it comes to “the evil that (other) men do.”
Read: Wanna save the environment? Empower indigenous people to protect (and own) their traditional lands. (I’m seeing examples of why this is necessary in the southern African countries I am visiting, where aggressive locals displaced hunter-gatherers and colonizers destroyed everything to extract resources.
The Dutch Prime Minister’s apology for slavery is 150 years late but surprisingly interesting and useful
In 1969, the oil industry commissioned a report on the dangers of green-house-gas emissions. It warned of the dangers we are seeing today. They knew of the dangers, but they did nothing — because profits. #reparations
This article on using fish to clean sewage from the very interesting — and insightful — Low-Tech Magazine is full of amazing examples of how we worked with, rather than against, nature.
If we want a sustainable energy system, then we should focus on matching demand to supply (running machines when energy is available), not the supply to demand (e.g., battery storage)
We stayed next to “Masi,” a township of poor South Africans (mostly “Black” — a loaded term from the Apartheid era) that that has far outgrown its planned population. Right next door? A gated community of rich, mostly White, people who complain about their neighbors encroachment on a wetland.
Related: Watch why South Africa is still so segregated (economic redlining has replaced political redlining). My thought is that SA is at least 30 years — and probably 100 years — behind the US in reducing its problems of opportunity, safety and dignity.
