mambabasa

A family friend who's a psychiatrist told us that tofu can worsen depression. I'm skeptical, but a web search revealed the following:

Even though soy is packed with lean protein, it's also packed with trypsin and protease inhibitors—enzymes that make the digestion of protein incredibly difficult. Soy is also high in copper, a mineral linked to anxious behavior, and loaded with oligosaccharides, which are known to cause flatulence. (Link, TW: meat)

The article also says tempeh is better than tofu in this regard, so that's good since I like tempeh more than tofu (harder to source though). I wanted to ask here who are more along in life.

My family is trying to get me to eat less lentils because they said it's full of uric acid. But they curiously don't say the same thing about eating meat everyday. How much uric acid is even in lentils compared to meat? Is meat worse on uric acid altogether or is there a nuance I'm missing?

When we pay attention to the amount of injustice in the world, we find ourselves wanting to do something about it. And we don’t want to do just anything. We want to participate in what can most strategically stop those injustices. We need to organize together to confront what is killing us and the planet.

If you go looking for others involved in this resistance work, you might stumble across some organizations that seem to have all the answers. They say they know exactly how to bring capitalism to its knees. And they’re often recruiting new members like you to take part in the Revolution.

But when organizations offer easy answers and tell you all you need to do is step in line with their orders, it should raise some red flags.

Before we get swept away by their revolutionary aesthetics, one-size-fits-all plans, and lefty lingo, we should talk about authoritarian and vanguard communist groups. They often search for young, enthusiastic people who haven’t been warned about them yet or don’t know the warning signs. All the major ones we know of have long histories of abuse. As anarchists, we understand that their embrace of authoritarianism is exactly what makes them so susceptible to being abusive.

This zine outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them.

We believe that the most strategic way to fight systems of oppression is by fighting collectively. We don’t need to recreate the very power dynamics we’re struggling against to win. But we do need you in the fight.

Reinventing politics in Israel and Palestine means laying the groundwork now for a kind of Jewish-Palestinian Zapatismo, a grassroots movement to ‘reclaim the commons’ (Klein 2001; Esteva and Prakash 1998). This would mean moving towards direct democracy, participatory economy and genuine autonomy for the people; towards Martin Buber’s vision of “an organic commonwealth ... that is a community of communities” (1958: 136). We might call it the ‘no-state solution.’

In a revolt against techno-optimism and the real-world violence it upholds, members of radical research collective Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) call for an empiricism rooted in technopolitical critique. Drawing from their own years of labor in the struggles against racial and surveillance capitalism, current work in HCI, and radical theorists like Alfredo M. Bonanano and Modibo Kadalie, LPL invites us to incorporate an ethics of rebellion and progress our tech practices into principled, anti-authoritarian praxis.

In a revolt against techno-optimism and the real-world violence it upholds, members of radical research collective Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) call for an empiricism rooted in technopolitical critique. Drawing from their own years of labor in the struggles against racial and surveillance capitalism, current work in HCI, and radical theorists like Alfredo M. Bonanano and Modibo Kadalie, LPL invites us to incorporate an ethics of rebellion and progress our tech practices into principled, anti-authoritarian praxis.

Since 2014, West Jackson has been the home of a remarkable and inspiring project to build a solidarity economy, economic democracy, and Black self-determination called “Cooperation Jackson.” Co-founded and co-directed by the brilliant and charismatic Kali Akuno—who joins us for Utopia 2/13—Cooperation Jackson is a model of an alternative way of life that has already spawned other projects coast to coast, from Cooperation Vermont to Cooperation Humboldt in California.

What makes Cooperation Jackson such an important case study of concrete utopia is that it is so richly three-dimensional—along the axes of history, theory, and practice.

I am a degrowther, but people keep telling me it's hard to create media communications campaigns for degrowth and that advocating for it is "political suicide." As if endless cancerous growth isn't political suicide already. I'm told people want growth and we should use a different name for degrowth and that we should make it palatable to the public. But degrowth is quite literally a critique of growth. Without this critique, it's just liberal wishywashing for a better future. So I'm at an impasse here. How do we talk about meaningfully talk about degrowth without watering down the message?

I've recently tried mixing the used coffee grounds in baking soda, and I'm seeing a very visible chemical reaction. I haven't tried putting it in the ground yet though.

...other users had questioned whether the term 'Free Territory' had any basis in reliable sources. I was a little surprised. This was the term that I had used for years, one that was inextricably linked in my mind with the Makhnovists. This could not just be some random neologism coined by Wikipedia… right?

At first I could not let myself believe it. I looked through Makhno’s memoirs, as well as Volin’s and Arshinov’s histories, but I could not find the term anywhere. I even checked the Russian language originals, and peered through Viktor Bilash’s memoirs, which tragically remains untranslated. Again, I found no sign of a 'Free Territory'. I could not even find it in the memoirs of Victor Serge, the Bolshevik politician who coined the term 'Black Army' to refer to the Makhnovist insurgents.

From Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg

Inklusibo’s new manual on housing rights provides an in-depth narrative of the urban poor’s right to housing and livable spaces. This is the first free publication under the Housing and Living Spaces category.