A few links I've been meaning to post:

- French interview with José Bové "L'écologie n'est pas compatible avec le capitalisme".

- Still in French, on dubbing and fan subtitling: L'aversion originale des studios.

- Hamlet: Facebook edition

- Dr. Horrible: Facebook edition

- An update on Dollhouse Season 2, what we know at the moment.


Day is not starting out too well. Hopefully it will get better.

I was wandering at Safeway and I sort of realized/decided that this year I was going to try and consider organic food not only as a desirable option but as my default option unless it's really much more expensive. ( Small rant about consumption and organic food. )


Since I'm in that sort of reflective mood, have a short excerpt of Black Identities (by Mary C. Waters), a book I've just started for my methodology class. This is at the very beginning and I found this passage very insightful on the legacy of racial discrimination (in the context of the United States here but I think the insight goes beyond that):

While many white conservatives blame the culture of African Amercans for their failures in the economy, the experiences of the West Indians show that even "good culture" is no match for racial discrimination. Over the course of one generation the structural realities of American race relations and the American economy undermine the cultures of the West Indian immigrants and create responses among the immigrants, and especially their children, that resemble the cultural responses of African Americans to long histories of exclusion and discrimination.

I highly, highly recommend everyone watch The Corporation if they ever have the chance. The movie is chilling, but we need to be aware of the path we're taking as a society, even though most of these steps are being taken without anyone of us being aware of it.

I need to get that movie myself.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, worldwide leader in carpet manufacture:

Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, and he just doesn't know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash. That's the way our civilization is, the very high cliff represents the virtually unlimited resources we seem to have when we began this journey. The craft isn't flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics and it's subject to the law of gravity. Our civilization is not flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics for civilizations that would fly. And, of course, the ground is still a long way away, but some people have seen that ground rushing up sooner than the rest of us have. The visionaries have seen it and have told us it's coming. There's not a single scientific, peer-reviewed paper published in the last 25 years that would contradict this scenario: every living system of earth is in decline, every life support system of earth is in decline, and these together constitute the biosphere, the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life, and not just our life but perhaps 30 million other species that share this planet with us. The typical company of the 20th century: extractive, wasteful, abusive, linear in all of its processes, taking from the earth, making, wasting, sending its products back to the biosphere, waste to a landfill. I, myself, was amazed to learn just how much stuff the earth has to produce through our extraction process to produce a dollar of revenue for our company. When I learned, I was flabbergasted. We are leaving a terrible legacy of poison and diminishment of the environment for our grandchildren's grandchildren, generations not yet born. Some people have called that intergeneration tyranny, a form of taxation without representation, levied by us on generations yet to be. It's the wrong thing to do.

Yves Cochet showed up at our General Assembly this morning, which was sorta funny and unexpected. I think now he's gonna remember me. That guy has amazing blue eyes, by the way, as much as I'm not attracted to him physically. He spoke up for a bit and of course stirred up the whole debate about politics and political parties taking over "our fight", which still annoys me. I understand that we don't want to be taken over - but to reject the idea that we share that battle with non-communist political parties is ridiculous. You can reproach any party that gets involved in government with many things (good thing about the small communist parties is that you can't reproach much to them, seeing they don't get involved in governing - always easier to complain than to try and actively change anything) but you can't deny some fights are general. Tsk. It "amuses" me we can warn people about being "taken over" by the "gauche plurielle" and then we start talking about a general strike. He.

Quelques citations qui m'ont fait réfléchir ce matin, en lisant l'article du dernier Monde 2 sur la décroissance.

"Pourquoi la notion de richesse est-elle d'abord monétaire?" (Pierre Rabhi)

"Peu importe qu'on dégraisse, qu'on élimine des gens, pourvu que le PNB continue d'augmenter. L'homme est devenu un contingent." (Pierre Rabhi)

The whole topic of "décroissance" (akwardly translated into "ungrowth", but most of what I've read in English actually refers to "zero growth" or "steady-state economics" which is slightly different but stems from the same arguments) I find really appealing. I first remember hearing about the concept in Dr Moore's class, "In Search of Justice", when she had us read a text by Herman Daly entitled "Steady-state economics" and actually, I recommend reading it to anyone who's interested by the concept and/or studying economics (twixou, I know you probably have other things on your plate right now, but I'd love to hear your opinion on that text). It's a challenging article but overall an easy read (there are so pretty tough parts though), and Daly even managed to use humor from time to time :

"The American people have been told by no less an authority than the President's Council of Economic Advisors that, 'If it is agreed that economic output is a good thing it follows by definition that there is not enough of it' (Economic Reportof the President, 1971, p. 92). It is evidently impossible to have too much of a good thing. If rain is a good thing, a torrential downpour is, by definition, better!"

No matter what you think about zero growth, the article makes a lot of good points. (There are also some points I don't really agree with, but that's what debate and questioning is about.)

"As Wallich so bluntly put it in defending growth, 'Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable' (1972). We are addicted to growth because we are addicted to large inequalities in income and wealth. What about the poor? Let them eat growth! Better yet, let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the future!"

Interestingly enough, Daly actually counter-points arguments made by economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, often recognized as the founding father of the zero growth theory. I've also reached sections of Singer's book that talk of free trade, which is obviously linked to economic growth, so it's fascinating to get different perspectives on what is, ultimately, the same issue.

This reminds me of how much I dislike the French system - I would have loved to keep studying philosophy (though not in that terribly forbidding French style) and I'd also be very interested in studying economics, just to understand the whole system better (because, unlike what that girl said at the GA earlier, I don't think captitalism can quite be summarized in two minutes, and simply demonized). But I couldn't actually get a degree in either majors. I just wish we could pick a few classes, actually open our minds instead of getting stuck in one single topic. It seems so out of touch with our times, where everything is intertwined, economics, lifestyles, ecology, poverty, violence. Anyway.


Totally unrelated, but let me squee : Dr Moore is on the picture illustrating Phillips' RelPhil department!!!



Et un peu d'humour pour finir...
"Pour ce qu'on nous a dit, on aurait pu nous envoyer un fax." (Membre d'un syndicat étudiant, à la sortie de Matignon samedi)

"And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason." (Terry Pratchett)