Economic Aspects of "Love"

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 11, 2018 8:40 am

The world's first humanless warehouse is run only by robots and is a model for the future

Mujin, a start-up spun out of Tokyo University, has developed robot controllers that can fully automate warehouses and fulfillment centers.

Its customer, JD.com, has what it calls the world's first fully automated e-commerce warehouse in China equipped with Mujin robots.

The Japanese start-up wants to help automate warehouses in the United States.


Guest Contributor | Tim Hornyak | @robotopia
Published 10:29 AM ET Tue, 30 Oct 2018


"In the U.S., robot technology is often undervalued and directly compared to the value of human workers," said Diankov. "If you're going to be competing with that from day one, maybe you have no room to grow quickly. In Japan they have a mindset that values robotics much more, even if it sometimes doesn't make economic sense. They're willing to jump into investments into robotics."

Diankov believes fears of robots taking jobs from people don't reflect the reality of the workplace.

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Rosen Diankov, cofounder and CTO of Mujin, sees a world where warehouses are totally automated and run by robots..


"Introducing robots creates more jobs, and history has shown that's been the case," he said. "Companies that have embraced automation, like Toyota — it's the biggest car company in the world now."


https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/30/the-wor ... obots.html
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:08 am

Transgender: a dialogue

The conversation about trans identities has been riven by bitter divisions. Two philosophers offer radically different perspectives

Sophie-Grace Chappell
is professor of philosophy at the Open University in the UK. Her latest book (under the name Timothy Chappell) is Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics (2014).

Holly Lawford-Smith
is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Her book Not in Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable for Their States' Actions? is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.




Sophie-Grace Chappell

Twenty-five years ago, the very term ‘trans woman’ was unknown to most people. Me included, and I am one. Then the internet was born, and suddenly everyone and their pet stick-insect had an authoritative view about trans women.

Usually a negative view. From what you hear, trans women are every kind of nasty. Left-wing and Right-wing critics are equally quick to insinuate, or just come out and say, that in their eyes we’re either gross or ridiculous or both. Thereafter they hate us for opposite reasons. To both we’re sinister propagandists and fifth columnists. But to the Right, that’s because we’re a vector of anti-family, child-confusing, cultural-Marxist gender ideology. To the Left, it’s because we’re spokesmen (sic) for the gender norms of the patriarchy, walking billboards promoting gender stereotypes, reinforcing the pre-fashioned cage of femininity.

On both Left and Right, trans women are also claimed to be a sexual threat. Yet being transgender isn’t directly about sexuality at all. It’s not a sexual orientation; it’s a gender identity. But the sexualising misunderstanding is distressingly pervasive and astoundingly impervious to factual evidence. On the Left, trans women are alleged to be a sexual threat to women. (I don’t want to obsess about terminology – but please: other women.) On the Right, the supposed sexual threat that trans women present is, for crying out loud, to small children. ‘Conservative’ commentators often start with the absurd claim that telling schoolchildren about transgender identity is ‘child abuse’, then swivel into insinuations of paedophilia. Above all, we’re impostors, a cheat, a ‘travesty’ (deconstruct that), a parody of womanhood, a pretend: a pretend sister to feminists, a pretend hot date to regular guys. I expect it’s this alleged deceptiveness of trans women, along with our sexualisation, that explains why so many people in so many states of America apparently think it’s OK to chase us out of women’s toilets at gunpoint, or beat us up or rape us if they see us at the drive-in.

The basis of the so-called ‘restroom controversy’ is that trans women should be banned from the Ladies’ because they might present as female to facilitate assault, or pervy voyeurism, or both. Statistically, the ‘trans threat’ is almost completely hypothetical – unlike the very real threat of male restroom violence against all women, trans included. Anyway, how is this ban supposed to be enforced? Not all trans women are obviously trans women. So you can’t just ban people who look ‘like men dressed as women’. You won’t catch all the trans women that way; also, you will catch some women who aren’t trans. I have plenty of cis friends who sometimes get mistaken for men. (The term cis refers to people whose gender identity corresponds to the one they were identified as possessing at birth.) What then? Strip-searches outside every public toilet? But some of us have had surgery, so that wouldn’t do either. DNA tests? No, I give up, you’ll have to tell me: what is being proposed, if not a lynch-mob?


Continues: https://aeon.co/essays/transgender-iden ... ilosophers
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 17, 2018 7:26 am

#CapitalismIsTheCrisis

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 20, 2018 6:40 pm

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:45 am

Your Job Has More in Common with Sex Work Than You Think

We spoke to one of the authors of 'Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights' about how to make the world of work better.

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You probably have opinions about sex work. If you are a certain sort of feminist, you might think it is disgusting, dehumanizing, and completely unacceptable—that pornography is little more than propaganda for the patriarchy, that prostitution is just "rape that's paid for." You might then think that sex work needs to be abolished—if nothing else, for the good of the millions of women who are "trafficked" by pimps from poorer to richer nations and coerced into selling their bodies.

Alternatively: You might love sex work. You might be an enthusiastic consumer of pornography and supporter of prostitution. You might think sex work offers a vital service to, for instance, disabled clients; that for the women who do it, it is a fun and empowering profession. You might then think that sex work ought to be celebrated, normalized as an integral part of any healthy, functioning society.

According to sex work activists (and sex workers) Molly Smith and Juno Mac, both of these views on sex work are basically wrong. Sex work is shit—they definitely think that—and is subject to all sorts of problems which stem from the economic context in which it takes place; the legal context in which prohibitions against it are enforced. But at heart, there is nothing special about sex work. If we dropped all the prurient proscriptions and predilections, we could see it unmasked as what it really is: a shitty job just like any other.

This is the core of the argument behind Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. Over the course of their book's 144 pages, Smith and Mac cover a lot of ground—offering detailed critiques of the various legal regimes which have evolved around sex work worldwide, as well as suggesting something like an ideal model. Along the way, though, they also offer some of the most clinically insightful theorizing about how sex, work, the law, and borders intersect that you're likely to read all year. The reader is left convinced that the sex workers' rights struggle is relevant not just for sex workers, not just for feminists, and not just for clients—it's relevant to absolutely everyone who has to work for a living under capitalism.

I called Molly Smith to ask her some questions about sex work, shitty jobs, and how we can resist a world that's gradually getting even shittier and making us do even more work to survive.

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Read more: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwjz ... -you-think
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 08, 2018 11:20 am

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Anxiety Is Our New Religion

Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster explains why everyone's on meds and no one's fucking.

In your book, you call our “collective anxiety” our “new religion.” A key word in your title, “conversion," is, after all, a religious word. Conversion implies a before and after. The patient is pre-analysis and then post-analysis; the Buddhist is the unenlightened and then the enlightened; the Christian is lost and then found. In a way, therapy, like religion, sometimes promises salvation, right?
I don't want to promise salvation. I was really interested in the fact that conversion in psychiatry meant a radical energetic change. If you read someone like William James, who got really interested in religious conversion experiences, he says that something has to turn so radically that where you were before and where you are after are markedly different.

And psychoanalysis was saying the same thing, that some kind of change has to take place that makes a structural difference for a person. Psychoanalysis means this literally. It's not just like, “Oh, now I understand.” It means, literally, something changes in your body.

William James was saying the same thing about the religious experience, that something material happened for these people. Sometimes it happens slowly. Sometimes it happens like a bolt of lightning. And he was interested in the difference between these phenomena.

Well, one difference between the gradual change and the lightning bolt is that the lightning bolt is way more fun. And easy. In a world that constantly feeds our desire for instant gratification, do you think we still have patience for gradual change?
It depends on the patient. I mean, there are patients for whom it's like lightning bolt after lightning bolt. And there are patients that you spend three years waiting for it to happen, and eventually it finally does, but you've been slogging through the mud for a long time.

I'd also say that it depends on anxiety. The patients who are the most frustrated are those whose anxiety is high. It’s very difficult to analyze anxiety. I mean, what are you analyzing?

You have to push the person to do something in their life that forces this anxiety to become something else, which is some of the hardest work that one has to do as an analyst, because it's not talking, it’s not analyzing, it’s not playing around with dreams. It's literally trying to push the person to do something other than be anxious.

When I think about that, the anxiety on the rise in the world, I get very, very nervous.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wj3p ... w-religion






American Dream » Thu Jun 19, 2014 8:30 am wrote:From We Are All Very Anxious

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When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s – a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks. Mid-century capitalism gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life; it was a system based on force-feeding survival to saturation point.

Of course, not all workers under Fordism actually had stable jobs or security – but this was the core model of work, around which the larger system was arranged. There were really three deals in this phase, with the B-worker deal – boredom for security – being the most exemplary of the Fordism-boredom conjuncture. Today, the B-worker deal has largely been eliminated, leaving a gulf between the A- and C-workers (the consumer society insiders, and the autonomy and insecurity of the most marginal).
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 31, 2018 7:39 am

Review: Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women

Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women by Silvia Federici, reviewed by Jessica White

December 31, 2018

ImageIn the West, the witch is regarded as a fictional figure of fun, the bloody reality of witch-hunting in our past and present whitewashed from the public consciousness. In a cruel twist, fancy dress shops purvey sexy witch outfits to be trotted out on Halloween. The TV show Sabrina The Teenage Witch has recently been revived on Netflix, featuring a cute young blonde with magical powers. The sexualisation of witches for commercial purposes enrages Silvia Federici, who notes that the political class and religious institutions that colluded in the witch-hunts of the early modern era have never acknowledged, or indeed apologised for, the mass murder of women that took place.

Exact numbers are vague, but it is estimated that tens of thousands of women were killed as a result of accusations of witchcraft in Western Europe and North America. As Federici states, ‘No “Day of Memory” has been introduced in any European calendar to remind us of the massacres of the witches.’ It’s a poignant introduction to the collection of essays in Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Divided into two sections, the first part of the collection sees Federici re-visit themes from her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, in which she addresses the causes and outcomes of the European witch-hunts. The central question she seeks to address is why this deeply misogynistic practice took hold at a time when modern ideas of science, economics and the bourgeois class were in the ascendency. Feminists and historians have pointed to the decline of magic, and the fear of women’s reproductive power in the Enlightenment period, as a key to the understanding the widespread persecution of women as witches – rational science bumping up with and asserting itself over the old world, by containing women’s messy, irrational bodies and destroying traditional knowledge of childbirth and healing practices.

Deviant behaviour was increasingly linked with animality in the modern period. Where once anthropomorphism played a role in folklore, the link between man and animal world was broken and animals lost their status as sentient beings, valued only for their use value to humans. The cat prevalent in imagery of witches was one of many creatures that appear in evidence at witch trials – these ‘familiars’ were deemed to be under the control of the witch, assisting her in her evil deeds.

But in analysing the break from the natural world, Federici goes further, pointing to the impact of early capitalism and the ‘enclosure’ land policies that were enforced on the English countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch-hunts peaked. The transformation of agrarian economies, notably the privatisation of lands formerly regarded as ‘common’, led to poverty and created social divisions not previously experienced by rural communities. In this environment, it is easy to imagine how neighbour could suddenly accuse neighbour of spoiling their milk, harming their livestock or cursing their crops. It was particularly women – the widowed, friendless, socially outcast, all those deemed no longer productive – who presented a potential threat to the new socio-economic order and found themselves accused of witchcraft.

The second section of the collection is more complex, addressing what Federici describes as the escalation of witch-hunting in various regions around the world, coupled with extreme violence directed at women where processes of globalisation are underway. Drawing on evidence from countries as diverse as Tanzania, where it is estimated up to five thousand women accused of witchcraft are murdered a year; areas of India that are witnessing a rise in instances of witch-hunting; and parts of Latin America experiencing frighteningly high statistics of femicide.

Federici argues that the conditions that make this possible are similar to those experienced in early modern Europe. In traditional communities subject to globalisation and the enforcement of free-market policies, local economies are undermined, creating unstable social networks that result in the position of women and the elderly becoming tenuous. The younger population in countries undergoing economic transformation find themselves competing for land and resources and see an easy scapegoat in social groups that were once revered centres of power but are now sidelined and surplus to requirements. At the same time, institutions like the World Bank pressure governments and communities to move away from subsistence farming, forcing women to become unpaid domestic helpers, subservient to the main male wage earner. The result is that women are disempowered, and capitalist modes of production and labour reinforce patriarchal structures.

Many of the assertions about the rise of witch-hunting are supported by evidence from sociologists and field workers on the ground. However, the data is somewhat sporadic, covering vast continents and affecting communities with limited access to support services. Added to this, while applying a Marxist analysis to the rise of hate crimes against women, Federici leaves little room for distinctions between the murder and torture of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and cases of witch-hunting in Tanzania, though this is more due to a lack of space and time given to each case than a failure of ideas. This is a timely collection and one that warrants greater exploration from modern feminists, and, as she admits in the introduction, from Federici herself.

We do not need to look far to find contemporary examples of witch-trials and the devastating impact to those who are accused. A recent case of apostasy in Pakistan drew international attention when religious groups took to the streets demanding the reinstatement of the death sentence handed down to Aasiya Noreen in 2009. Noreen was freed this year after the evidence from her accusers was deemed unsafe. A Christian of low caste in a predominantly Muslim country, her co-workers accused her of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad after a row ensued when they refused to share water from a cup she had drunk from while out harvesting fruit. She is currently prevented from leaving the country to seek asylum and her future is uncertain.

The low social status of the accused is a common denominator in instances of witchcraft, of which apostasy is a close relation. Currently 13 countries impose the death penalty for apostasy. It is a crime that draws on primal fears yet serves as an all too easy way for the ruling class to assert power over troublesome elements in society, or remove rivals for land or resources within communities.

In cases of witchcraft the punishment is public and frequently brutal, and are often preceded by a witch trial and public shaming. In the US, an attack on the credibility of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh this year resulted in Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her at college, providing a live testimonial of the events in a courtroom, broadcast live to a global audience. In these extraordinary scenes, an all-male panel interrogated Ford via a female adjudicator. In an extremely public arena, Kavanaugh was cast as the good patriarch, a male representing justice and the institution of the family. He was pitted against the either-lying-or-manipulated Ford, a tool of the dark forces of liberal-minded Democrat Party conspirators. Even Ford’s impeccable reputation and high social status could not prevent her being openly mocked by President Donald Trump, and following a deluge of death threats she went into hiding, fearing for her life. In modern-day America women and celebrities marched against the President and his supporters in support of Blasey, but the public vitriol levelled against a woman for speaking to power has echoes of the scold’s-bridal.

Against this backdrop, Federici’s attempt to draw together the work of feminists and activist from different parts of the world and place them in historical context is brave, thought-provoking and timely. Federici’s writing is lucid and her fury palpable. Let us hope the follow up is as good as Caliban and the Witch. It is just a shame that there is a need for books like these at all.

Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women is published by PM Press
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 24, 2019 7:39 am

ANGIE SPEAKS 18: LONELINESS & CAPITALISM
Loneliness & Capitalism is a journey into Angie Speaks' head as her emotions attempt to grapple with the reality of Isolation and Capitalism.

(18 Aug 2019 / 25 minutes)



https://youtu.be/obG7_MbrsGI



ImageAngie Speaks is an Anarchist, Leftist, video series with a creative and mystical flair! Angie blends together the historical, the artistic and the esoteric in a fun and accessible way that highlights the importance of the subjective and creative aspects within leftist thought.
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