Activism
Outrage sugercoated with decency
Relabeling
Since it has become part of my daily life I would like to describe once again my thoughts about coping with bullshit labor. Bullshit jobs, to me, are characterized by a complete lack of meaning. No matter how hard you try, you can't discern a core of value in a bullshit job, and this is ...
In defence of the basic income
There are some very good arguments for the basic income, eloquently summed up in numerous articles such as this piece in the Guardian. Personally, I feel good about the idea of a basic income. After a decade of open-source writing, I wouldn't want to change my habit. Whatever is really meaningful, we share diligently, enthusiastically ...
Upbringing
Authoritarian upbringing: If you misbehave, you don't get any food.
Modern parenting: If you misbehave, your food won't taste good.
p2p housing experiment
We are a Dutch-Korean family; our daughter was born in 2013. We work as independent writers and we get by. We are not dependent on any specific location for our work, so when we choose where we want to live we ask ourselves “do we fit in?” or “do people like us here because of ...
Civilization is the ability to believe in a justification for our cruelty.
It doesn't matter much if we have hope now. Will we have hope when a majority of people are literally dying to improve our lot?
Trump vs. Sanders
war, must, attack, wall, close, me, us, same, leave, stop, grow, lol, run, hate, block, drill, bill, pipe, line, free, trade, love, hate
transparency, scrutiny, oxymoron, prescient, rationality, tenacity, volubility, voluptuous, xenophilia, magnanimous, neologism, unfeigned, grandiloquent, probability, serendipity, Galilei, edifice, credibility, beatification, metonymy, arduous, heterological
to defend a value that can resist those who promote it
Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
This poem by Robert Creeley perfectly fits Bernie Sander's campaign.
“I want, if older, / still to know / why, human, men / and women are / so torn, so lost / why hopes cannot / find a better world / than this.”
The most important function of the economic operating system is not to get capital together, but to get heads together
Sanders – Trump
They had mounted a television set on the wall of the restaurant - there was no avoiding it. In the international news bulletin, there was Bernie Sanders calling for nothing less than a political revolution. He was more explicit about the "powers to be overthrown" than young Obama eight years ago: The one percent, corporate ...
the nonsense of infinite growth just distracts from the fact that we will all wither and die
I admit it: I’m a fan of Yanis Varoufakis
I have watched many Youtube videos with the former Greek minister of finance, including television interviews, academic debates and a radio appearance in Australia commenting on the Greek elections as a young economics PhD. The man talks brilliantly. Because he speaks with an Oxbridge accent and adorns his well-formed sentences with tangible metaphors, he brings a ...
Virtual capitalism
Margrit Kennedy, who died two years ago today, was one of the greatest advocates of an interest and inflation free money system. She was among the first to predict that we "cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet". Of course this is true. Logically, there are two ways out. We can try to stop ...
Lifestyle Changes
Most activists are frustrated when their opponent in a debate reduces citizen influence to consumer choices. They can't stand people who still live in their liberal fairy tale world where the consumer votes with her wallet and from the sum total of consumers, in good Rousseauian fashion, emerges the volonté generale and determines the destiny ...
Short Climate Temper
During a ride share with Blablacar from Berlin to Utrecht there was a little incident. A Peruvian passenger ignited my anger when he agreed with developing country's leaders who are selling out their natural resources, such as Ecuador's president Rafael Correa does with his country's oil reserves that happens to be underneath tropical forest. "Fuck ...
The Cat Who Killed Curiosity
Imagine the following scenario. A person who has noticed that the president's hair has turned grey posts on social media that she suggests he should dye it. Having grown up in a very poor neighbourhood she had not been able to finish school, so she confused orthographical acuity with onomatopoeic precision and spelled it thus: ...
TTIP means throwing democracy overboard for the financial security of the wealthy elite
Bullshit Job Rap
We perform empty tasks to protect the status quo of the one percent Hell-bent on endless wealth multiplication and profit enlargement The fruit of our labor is trickling bottom-up on the escarpment We're the indentured workers who slave for money just to pay our rent "It's the economy, stupid" preaches Donald Trump who knows how ...
Class Society
Bring it on, I hear myself thinking. Our economic reality is called class society. The wealthy one percent accumulates more and this seems to be a law of capitalism itself - we all know how the story goes. Given my pet dogma that makes saving our planet for future generations an absolute priority, I ask ...
Will Work For The Commons
for like minded people around the world who find themselves in a similar predicament We are educated people in our thirties, some of us have families. We feel the responsibility to comply with the system for the safety of our loved ones. Every day, we reluctantly choose to work for companies that don't (and can't) ...
Revolutionary
... is not that working over the Internet allows us to survive without becoming captives of the infinite growth System. Revolutionary is that we can earn well enough online to extract resources from that System and use them to build a sustainable, resilient, steady-state economy -