for - Geography as a driver for civilisation - cultural evolution - impact of geographic obstacles - article - The Economist - Of all the geological periods, the Triassic was the most fabulous - 2024, Dec. 19

"Biology, though, is not the Triassic’s only legacy to the modern world. For, with the breakup of Pangaea came the period’s final, Parthian shot. The mountainous region which stretches from Anatolia to Afghanistan, Parthia (as Iran, or Persia, was once known) included, began to rise in the late Triassic when a small continent now dubbed Cimmeria collided with the disintegrating supercontinent, squeezing up the seabed sediments between them.

The Cimmerian orogeny, as this mountain-building moment is called, has created a natural barrier fortress along the southern margin of what is now Earth’s largest continent, Eurasia, dividing Asia’s heartlands from Africa and Europe. This barrier—which includes the Anatolian plateau, the Iranian plateau and the mountains of Afghanistan—is difficult to pass and difficult to conquer. Together with its more recent, eastward, extension, the plateau of Tibet, it has proved to be history’s puppet-master. It has kept humanity’s three great civilisations—China, India and the Mediterranean-focused world of the Middle East, north Africa and Europe—apart, and allowed them, for good or ill, to develop separately, with (until recently) little intercourse between them."

source - shared with me via LinkedIn contact

// commennt - If humans did indeed begin in Africa and radiated out to the rest of the world over the course of time, - then once arrived in these far flung places, the travelers became isolated from the original African tribe by geological obstacles and losing any trace of their origin through vast spans of time. - It's ironic then that losing trace caused our ancestors to culturally evolve in isolation from each other - And when modern technology allowed humans to rediscover each other, the differences were so great that with cultural memory erased by time, it enabled the technologically advanced modern humans to perform extreme levels of other, exploiting and colonizing our fellow humans. - Imagine how different our world would be if we hadn't lost track of each other! What a different world we would be living in today! //

• for: key insight - anti-vaxxers, key insight - conspiracy theories, key insight - maga, key insight - neoliberalism and failure at collective action

• key insight: neoliberalism and failure of collective action

  • neoliberalism's continuous assault on society has striped use off any support system, leaving us to fend for ourselves
  • when polycrisis events occur, it provokes a distrust of any attempt at government intervention
  • this is a sign of things to come when climate chaos will accelerate social breakdown

Three obstacles to policies limiting elite carbon emissions - First is the realization of connection between wealth and carbon emissions - Second is polarized politics making it difficult to pass or implement policies to limit dangerous consumption - Third is focused policy on the oversized contributions of elites

• two major social drivers prevent achieving 1.5 C.
  • corporate responses
  • global consumption patterns

Bromwich, Kathryn. ‘How Long Covid Forced Me to Confront My Past and My Identity’. The Observer, 8 November 2020, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/08/how-long-covid-forced-me-to-confront-my-past-and-my-identity.

there is an ongoing struggle in many areas of society, in schools, workplaces, religious organisations. the second paradigm doesn't seem to win over the first on a large scale, since significant change in any domain is a frustrating and never-ending process.

who decided this? who decides which measures of success are appropriate?

taking away from the very purpose of the practice

The competition of capitalism leaves behind issues like resource waste, unemployment, inflation, but through urbanization, society is able to take these left over pieces and produce growth from them