Civilization/Politics Archives - Macska Moksha Press

The Planet Can’t Afford AI

March 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

“Artificial Intelligence” (AI) is a broad subject that can be approached from multiple directions: economic, political, cultural, creative, and environmental. Over the last couple years, I’ve read articles, listened to podcasts, watched videos, and spoken with friends about their experiences with it. Among the most helpful sources have been Robbie Martin at the Media Roots Radio podcast (which he co-hosts with his awesome sister, journalist Abby Martin), and Brian Merchant , who puts out the Blood in the Machine Substack.

Wikipedia includes the following under the heading of “Artificial Intelligence”:

advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).

The “generative and creative tools” have been getting the most attention lately because they have the most potential so far to replace human jobs en masse, including artistic work.

The Cruelty We Inflict on Ourselves & Nature is not Inevitable

February 19, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

American sailor with the skull of a Japanese soldier during World War II. Look at that leer. [Unknown photographer, Public Domain]

If I had to pick just one word to describe the culture of the United States, it would probably be “cruel.”

From my perspective, cruelty is manifest everywhere, in our institutions both governmental and private, and in our social relations, including families.

The origin of the word “cruel” traces back to the Old French cruel/crudel, to the Latin crudelis for “rude, unfeeling” or “hard-hearted” (which is related to crudus, “rough, raw, bloody”), the Greek kreas, “flesh,” and the Sanskrit kravis- “raw flesh.” The hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root word kreuə- means “raw flesh.” Related words include crude, creosote, ecru and pancreas. The word is both emotional and visceral.

Contemporary definitions of “cruel” include:

Merriam-Webster: “1. disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings; 2. causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain; 3. unrelieved by leniency.”
Cambridge Dictionary: “(of a person or action) extremely unkind and unpleasant and causing pain to people or animals intentionally.”
Wiktionary: “1. Intentionally causing or reveling in pain and suffering; merciless, heartless. 2. Harsh; severe.”

For “cruelty” we have:

The Law Dictionary: “The intentional and malicious infliction of physical suffering upon living creatures, particularly human beings; or, as applied to the latter, the wanton, malicious, and unnecessary infliction of pain upon the body, or the feelings and emotions; abusive treatment; inhumanity; outrage.”
Wikipedia: “The intentional infliction of suffering or the inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.” [my emphasis]

“Rude,” “unfeeling,” “hard-hearted,” “merciless,” “harsh.” That’s the US. Especially the “reveling in pain and suffering” part. My childhood in Catholic schools in reactionary Nebraska was full of grief and pain, intentionally inflicted by the adults in my life, as well as my peers, and the cruelty of this upbringing, though it had its own regional and religious qualities, was hardly atypical. (And now I fear the whole country is becoming Nebraskafied.) For the most part, children in the US are raised in abusive conditions. Capitalism is an abusive condition. So is techno-industrialism, with its estrangement from nature. So is Patriarchy, which poisons our family structures.

I find the bolded portion of the Wikipedia definition—“when a clear remedy is readily available”—to be the most important: the essence of cruelty is that another—not cruel—action is not taken. To be cruel is not merely to inflict suffering; it is to choose to do so when one has the opportunity to do otherwise. Cruelty is never inevitable, though many voices and forces in our society portray it that way. The most frequent justification for cruelty is probably the tiresome, “That’s just how it is.”

How is our society cruel? Here’s a few ways:

Emissions Are So Not the Only Problem with Cars …And EVs won’t solve them

January 8, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Massive cloverleaf highway interchange with surrounding car-centric landscape, aerial view

Cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) spew an array of pollutants from their tailpipes including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various volatile organic compounds and particulate matter (not a complete list). All these substances inflict many adverse health effects on humans and other living things, and environmentally they contribute to air and water pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change (also not a complete list).

As bad as all that is, emissions are only one negative aspect of many. In fact, I’m going to list twenty harms altogether. I’m spelling them out because the push to replace ICE vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) typically focuses exclusively on emissions, and if we continue to pursue this goal blindly, we and the planet will still be stuck with all the other downsides, a few of which will actually worsen.

Because it’s not just about the car as technology, it’s about the car as culture-shaper. Car-centric values and policy have manufactured physical landscapes designed first and foremost for driving and storing cars. These places are hostile to anyone or anything not inside a car, whether that’s pedestrians, cyclists, animals or other more-than-human life. Such places make up most places in the contemporary urbanized environment, from downtowns to suburbs to exurbs to small towns. It’s a tyrannical infrastructure and the only reason most people don’t think about it that way is because they don’t know anything else, which totally isn’t their fault. As I’ll lay out here, so much of what’s wrong about cars has nothing to do with their mode of propulsion.

“Invasive Plants”: Immigrants Who Nice People are Allowed to Hate

November 11, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A Salt Cedar / Tamarisk tree (genus Tamarix, species unknown) at an undisclosed location in southern California. (Photo by the author)

When I first started hearing the rhetoric of the “invasive plant” narrative in the early 2000s, I was living in the progressive bastion of Portland, Oregon. I was taken aback by the vitriol being dished out by people who were otherwise prided themselves on being accepting and nonjudgmental. I concluded that many secularists, lacking a religious dogma, needed a Devil to hate, and “invasive plants” fit the bill.

I find that conclusion overly simplistic now, but it certainly contained a big nugget of truth. Through my research into the topic of “invasive plants” over the last few years—which has included a deep dive into the scientific literature, my own field observations, and many discussions with other people with varying views on the subject—I’ve come to see that the “invasive plant” narrative is more a product of culture than it is of science.

Patriarchy is an Environmental Issue

October 22, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

March in Portland, Oregon, 2017. Photo by Karney Hatch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Patriarchy” isn’t a very common word in mainstream US American discourse. When it does come up, it usually refers to the inequities of power between women and men in terms of rights, opportunities and outcomes within our socio-economic system. Such inequities are very real, and issues like access to safe abortion are vitally important.

However, Patriarchy goes deeper than the particular struggles of our time and place. Patriarchy is not only the oppression of women as a class by men as a class—and the resulting abuse of individual women by individual men—but also the suppression of that which is considered feminine by that which is considered masculine. Patriarchy is a framework of values. Everything is gendered—qualities, ideas, objects, living things and even colors—and anything feminine is relegated to secondary status. Competition is elevated over cooperation; authoritarianism over agreement; muscle over emotion.

So, Nature itself—because we perceive it as herself—is debased.

The Environment & the Election

October 7, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Photo by Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via WikiCommons

[Important autobiographical note: I’ve never voted for a Republican for any office, but I haven’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1992. Which is to say, I’ve been an outside observer for three decades, and that’s the perspective I’m drawing from for this piece.]

No matter whether Trump or Harris wins the White House, those of us who oppose ecocide will face daunting challenges during the next presidential administration. There’s no “lesser evil” between these two; just different evils.

Okay, some folks just clicked away and that’s fine. For those who stayed, I’ll spell it out.

How Will Communities Handle Troublemakers? [part 3 of a 3-part series]

August 6, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

“?” courtesy Khaydock, CC BY-SA 3.0. Landscape: the Coast Range in Sonoma County at sunset.

Part 3 of a 3 part series. In part 1 of this series, “Farewell to a Garden,” I shared photos of my veggie growing this year at a farm in Sonoma County that I just left. In part 2, “Why I Hate Market Farming,” I explained my departure. In this final part, I discuss some big picture reflections highlighted by the experience.

An increasing number of people are collapse-aware. They see that the United States is in decline, economically, politically, socially and otherwise. The systems that provide for our needs are at once decreasing in quality and increasing in price. The status quo serves fewer and fewer people even as its ecological footprint metastasizes beyond the finite limits of our planet. Sooner or later, something will give way that reveals our system as the house of cards that it is. Whether this is gradual or quick is unknown, but regardless of the timeline, the collapse aware know that the time to prepare for other ways to live is now. This is why I got into farming in 2005. The disaster that struck New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed me that we cannot count on big institutions to take care of us; my anarchist friends who traveled there to help out reported that the localized, community-based efforts were much more effective than FEMA or the Red Cross. Hurricane Katrina was but a small taste of the wider-spread challenges we will face as the big institutions either fail or turn openly authoritarian (perhaps simultaneously) and as climate chaos becomes more intense, so we need to build alternative means of support based on mutual aid now. Metaphorically, the time to plant a vegetable garden is not when the grocery shelves have just been emptied. You want that food in the ground already, and if this season is just a drill, you’ll have some nice meals anyway.

Margaret Killjoy talks about the triangle of prepping: gear, skills and relationships. Gear includes physical resources like tools, blankets, camping supplies, first aid kits, plus food stashes like buckets of rice and beans,or boxes of canned goods (and a can opener!). Skills include knowledge and experience in how to do practical things, including how to use the gear. Relationships are about people to cooperate with when times get hard (and to learn from and have fun with in the meantime!). I’d say that, in the end, having trusted, reliable people around would be better than going it alone with a cache of firearms and ammo, though I know folks who are prioritizing both friends and guns, and I don’t have an argument with them.

The first two, skills and gear, get the most attention, and there’s plenty of resources out there about those topics, so I won’t be addressing them here.

Relationships/Community are my focus today, and specifically the question of “How do we deal with assholes?” (I put “troublemakers” in the headline in case people share this post on social media.)

Why I Hate Market Farming [part 2 of a 3-part series]

August 4, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Part 2 of a 3 part series [Read part 1 here]

“Zeus” cherry tomatoes

Agriculture as currently practiced in the United States is, by and large, quite harmful to both the environment and to human health. Yes, there are a handful of people who are trying to be respectful of the greater-than-human world and beneficial to their fellow Homo sapiens, but they are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, much of what is labeled “organic” is part of the problem, with the industry’s mechanized practices, utilization of plastic, depleting of soils, killing of wildlife, profligate use of water, and labor abuses, among other issues. As I’ve mentioned before, the single greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide is habitat destruction, and its single biggest driver is agriculture. Further, toxins routinely applied in agriculture have deleterious effects on local and far-flung ecologies and on workers and consumers alike. Agricultural labor is some of the most dangerous in the United States (ranking far ahead of policing; maybe we need one of those black and white American flags with a green stripe in it to show solidarity for those suffering far more than the members of the “thin blue line” for their service to the populace).

All this is without even getting into how agriculture changed human cultures for the worse. We broke our ties of reciprocity with our home ecologies, and became dominators, leading us directly to the multiple environmental crises we are facing today. As well, agricultural society spawned patriarchy, slavery, private property, debt and elevated war to new levels of violence.

In sum, it’s a big mess.

So, in terms of environmental and social collapse, if we are to have a livable planet and healthy societies, one of our central efforts must be to radically change agriculture. For some starting points, see my “Six Things We Must Do So That Farming Is No Longer Massive Ecocide,” in which I spell out that agriculture must be de-monetized, de-corporatized, de-mechanized, re-localized, re-seasonalized, and re-naturalized.

People may be surprised to hear me say this, but, in service of these goals, farmers markets and the market farming that support them are not, in my opinion, all that helpful. Yes, they are local and seasonal by definition. However, many if not most are mechanized, few are naturalized, and all of them are dependent on monetization, which leads to corporatization for the larger operations. Farmers markets are all about income generation, which means bowing to market pressures that are driven by customer expectations, or at least the market farmer’s perception thereof. Which can end up resulting in a heavy focus on crops that are resource-intensive to grow or serve only a minor role in providing calories. Think heirloom tomatoes and fancy salad greens.

Agriculture Was a Dick Move

June 18, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

An irrigated field of Alfalfa in the desert of the Imperial Valley in southern California

Given the state of the US these days, it can be easy for people to be cynical. Our culture is driven by greed and domination, resulting in profound economic inequality and horrific environmental destruction. The lives of most of us citizens are defined by struggle and anxiety when it comes to providing necessities for ourselves. In the natural world, wildlife habitat is shrinking and species are going extinct. Our politics are corrupt, our media is vapid, and social polarization is seemingly widening. An increasingly chaotic climate is stressing our systems and pushing the limits of adaptability for many plants and animals.

Some people assume that it’s “human nature” to be destructive, both to ourselves and others. Some welcome the prospect of human extinction or even wish for it. “Humans suck,” they conclude.

I am not so cynical, which in the eyes of some might make me “naive” or a partaker of “hopium.” These folks can believe what they want and give me any name they’d like. If they are so convinced that we as a species are nothing more than a blight on the planet, then I leave them to it. I know there’s no point in arguing with beliefs.

Yes, “beliefs” is what I would call them: ideas that are held not because they are unequivocally provable—they are not—but because, for whatever reason, they provide comfort, even though they are so despairing. And here I must quote Gandalf, who (in the books) said: “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”

Where I Stand in the Discourse on Gender, Sexuality and Identity

April 30, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The first time I met an openly trans person was at a party in the early ‘90s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I lived at the time. An old friend was hosting the get-together and his social circle drew from unconventional strata of society, including artists, the theater crowd, the SCA, pagans, poly folks, kinksters and gender-benders. The sort of crowd where nearly everyone could recite dialogue from the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Being an outsider myself (I had moved to Minneapolis with the explicit goal of finding my place in gay culture there), I was delighted.

The trans person was a trans woman and we conversed for quite awhile. She was interested to talk about herself and her experiences and I was interested to listen and ask questions. I can’t remember many details now (this was over thirty years ago!) but at one point she emphasized how important it was to her to be able to use the women’s room in public places. This was a point of curiosity for me, as I had never given the subject any thought before, but I accepted her concern at face value.

Over the years that followed I met other openly trans women, though no trans men. I’m sure I also met trans people who were not openly expressing themselves, and just didn’t know. Ten years after that Minneapolis party, now living in Portland, Oregon, in the early 2000s, my opinion of openly trans women was simple: I considered them to be some of the bravest people I knew. After all, they were going public in expressing their sense of identity even though it exposed them to serious risks ranging from social ostracism (with consequences for employment and housing) to verbal harassment to violence. How ironic, I thought, that “courage” was considered to be such a macho trait, but that the people showing the most of it were those who were most outwardly breaking with male norms. I admired them very much for their strength, and also appreciated how their choices challenged a system of roles that I personally found (and still find) stifling and oppressive.

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