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Showing posts with the label "human nature"
I wonder what Klein's use of the description "deregulated capitalism" means in this context. Does she mean that "regulated capitalism" would have averted the worsening of the earth's eco-system?  Klein describes Sweden, Denmark and Uruguay as "democratic socialists." I think that is inaccurate. As a leftist she should be aware these countries are "social democracies." In Sweden, for example, approximately 90% of resources and companies are privately owned . High taxation, generous welfare state, etc does not make an economy socialist. "My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of t...
" Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded." — John Steibeck, 01 January 1941 Necessary contradictions of the human nature