Here's an idea Dan: try paying a visit to your local food bank and explaining to the people in the queue that they're not in the middle of a crisis. You might get some informative responses.
A few times over the past year, I've been talking to people at the local foodbank and hearing their stories. They are devastating. While prosperous people can ask, "crisis? what crisis?", the costs of austerity and chaos being felt by people at the sharp end are off the scale.
But we are now so economically divided that people like Dan, and me, are scarcely affected by what the Tories have done to this country, and can't see it unless we cross the chasm.
It's all too easy to wave it away, in total ignorance of what other people are facing.
There's a point at which this ceases to be mere ignorance, and becomes wilful blindness.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

10 Oct
Solidarity with @ChrisGPackham, unbowed despite yet another disgraceful attack.
Intimidation is rife in the countryside, especially against those who oppose hunting and environmental destruction. It's far from the domain of innocence we like to imagine. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/o…
All too often, the police turn a blind eye not only to illegal hunting but also to attacks on those who oppose it. Around the country, they need to step up.
Something we urgently need to get past is the idea of "real" country people vs "interlopers" (ie those who weren't born locally). It's often associated with xenophobia and a closed and extreme mindset. Everywhere, new people bring new ideas, and should be welcomed.
Read 10 tweets
9 Oct
The terrible situation STILL faced by victims of the #cladding scandal demonstrates the outrageous nature of limited liability. Limited liability is a free gift to corporations. It allows them to walk away, leaving others to pick up the bill.
Here's what to do about it.
Thread
Limited liability should be a commercial product, purchased by limited companies from insurers, who can assess the nature and scale of the risk, and charge accordingly.
This would elimate at a stroke a large part of the externality problem.
More here:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Why is this subject so seldom raised? One scandal after another reveals the cost that the current nature of limited liability transfers either to victims of corporate corner-cutting, or to taxpayers, who have to pick up the pieces.
It's time to start talking about it.
Read 4 tweets
7 Oct
1. This is really presumptuous of me, and I’m an amateur in the field, but reading through the most popular definitions of capitalism, it seems that almost all them airbrush its true nature to some degree. Could we, together, develop a better one, in one sentence?
Thread/
2. I’m probably deceiving myself, but this feels to me like a tight definition. Unfortunately it’s likely to be incomprehensible to almost everyone:

“Capitalism is an economic system that constantly creates and ruptures its own hypervolume.”
3. This draws on a crucial ecological concept, developed by GE Hutchinson in 1957: the n-dimensional hypervolume. Here’s the presentation in which he explains it: www2.unil.ch/biomapper/Down…
Read 5 tweets
6 Oct
Only when we look at the deep history of capitalism do we see it for what it really is: a fire front, raging across the planet, ignited by people who operate offshore.
My column.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Those who say they want to “reform” capitalism or “tame” capitalism appear to suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of what capitalism is. They believe the story it tells about itself: that it’s a matter of buying and selling, hard work and enterprise. It really isn’t.
Capitalism is a specific and novel system, that arose in the mid-15th Century as a response to the opportunities created by colonisation. It involves not only the commodification of land, labour and money, but also the consumption of natural wealth and abandonment of the residue.
Read 12 tweets
6 Oct
As journalists, we all make mistakes. God knows I’ve made a few. But we should try to minimise them, by checking claims and confirming sources. This is especially important when an issue is highly contentious. And few are more contentious than this. Thread/
When I asked Dawn for confirmation of this story, she kindly sent this reply.
Then someone pointed me to this:
Read 4 tweets
5 Oct
Is the @NobelPrize for sciences outdated?
Science is like this.
Everyone here plays a crucial role in creating the pyramid. The person at the top is often arbitrary and perceptual. You can turn the pyramid on its side, and see a similar picture.
Our obsession with winners and our exaggerated perception of individual success might have made sense in an age of lonely pioneers. It makes no sense an age of massive, multinational collaborations.
I think we need new ways of recognising scientific progress and success.
There's also a long history of overlooking the contributions of women. Which often goes with the territory of treating collaboration as if it were rugged individualism.
Read 6 tweets

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