Dit is het Sargasso-café van vrijdag 24-07-2015. Hier kan onder het genot van een virtueel drankje, nootje en/of kaasplankje alles besproken worden wat elders off topic is.
Dit is het Sargasso-café van vrijdag 24-07-2015. Hier kan onder het genot van een virtueel drankje, nootje en/of kaasplankje alles besproken worden wat elders off topic is.
Reacties (3)
Een journalist van Wired gaf 2 hackers toestemming om zijn auto aan te vallen. Iets soortgelijks deden ze ook al in 2013, maar toen zaten de hackers op de achterbank en was hun laptop via een kabel verbonden met de auto. Nu is het ze dus ook draadloos gelukt. Dat belooft wat voor de toekomst, als steeds meer auto’s een boordcomputer hebben.
Boa constrictors verstikken hun prooi niet, ze stoppen de bloed circulatie.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150722-boa-constrictors-snakes-animals-science-kill/
Rob Urie:
[…] Current IMF tactics are being placed in a neo-Cold War frame with the U.S. trying to maintain European political stability on the side of the U.S. against Russia and China. But the broader tendency is toward collective suicide through imperialist revival economics, a global race to replicate Western consumption through increasingly ‘managed’ capitalism and through renewed competition for resources that led to the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century. The geopolitical frame understates the crudeness of the economic logic that gives banker / creditor ‘workouts’ the appearance of geopolitical machinations. The economic relations in play are ‘political,’ but they derive from economic ideology that preceded the Cold War by a half-century or more.
The practical problem with the neo-Cold War frame is that it takes the underlying economic relations as given when they are in fact causal. The euphemistically-called ‘trade’ agreements being pushed by the ‘developed’ West grant broad authority over civil governance to multi-national corporations, the point being that the ideology that drives corporate actions is economic, not ‘political’ in the Western liberal sense of the term. If one wishes to grant a Marxian notion of economics as politics by other means, the new central players have a trans-national, neo-imperialist frame of reference and ‘competition’ is between economic powers, and not ideologies per se. Angela Merkel’s sense of authoritative entitlement over the Greek people appears to emerge from a prism of bankers ‘rights,’ not bi-lateral political gamesmanship. […]
[…] Assuming for the moment a theoretical deepness, Syriza in Greece can be as ‘socialist’ as it wishes to be as long as the broad reorganization of society that the term implies ends at the foot of an armchair. The Troika, piling on to historical IMF structural adjustment policies, is fine with economic democracy as long as markets are open, public resources and processes are for sale to politically approved bidders, a capitalist banking system has free-rein over the creation and allocation of financial capital, labor is unorganized, desperate and pliable and public policies are dictated by external creditors. Capitalist social engineering, the ‘integration’ of existing social relations into a ‘global’ architecture, increases social complexity by reducing it, by replacing local institutions with those that are externally controlled.
How precisely would the Eurozone, or any other capitalist agglomeration, accommodate a member state that proceeded from fundamentally different principles of social organization, the social purpose and democratic conceptions of economic life? In fact, ‘the rules’ of economic configuration required to join the European Monetary Union are based on an early twentieth century worldview of national accounts management. This was / is the broad frame of European imperial rule before tensions over national debts and colonial resource claims blew Europe apart in the up-to-then most murderous wars in human history. Convergence toward a set of externally determined economic ‘rules’ precludes the capacity for effective civil governance through establishing a preeminence of economic over civil power. […]
[…] The paradox of Syriza’s ascent as a Party of the left to a leadership position in Greece with a mandate to remain within the European Monetary Union brings the political content of engineered economic dependencies to the fore. Parsing the ‘good’ of broader economic belonging through the union from the ‘bad’ of externally imposed austerity assumes that they are divisible when the prior century of history suggests otherwise. The capitalist dogma that supports the monetary union also supports austerity. In addition to being banker / creditor boilerplate to assure debt repayment, austerity ties to the capitalist division of a ‘productive’ private sector from a reliant and unproductive public sector. Austerity is ‘starve the beast’ dogma of private virtue and public vice. The desire to craft a ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalism, as Syriza apparently thought it could do, fundamentally misread / misunderstood the opposition. […]
Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/24/capitalism-engineered-dependencies-and-the-eurozone/