The behaviour of the British and wider European elite towards migrants is not simple inhumanity. It is strategic inhumanity. It is weaponised inhumanity designed to convince populations fracturing under hammer-blows of austerity and economic chaos that the enemy is out there, that there is an “us” that must be protected from “them”.

Mob justice, meanwhile, is derived from the collective feelings of whoever happens to be participating. The mob's case law is limited to whatever its participants happen to remember and care about in that moment. Its rules of evidence privilege anything that shares easily on social media and that confirms the preexisting belief system of the mob participants. That is a way of administering justice that is just as likely to target innocent people as guilty ones — especially because there's no definition of what "guilty" and "innocent" mean in the first place.

Avant j'avais deux problèmes : c'était, faire comprendre aux gens ce que c’était que la société de surveillance, sans être traité de parano ; et ce n'était pas facile.

Avec les révélations Snowden, mon problème a un petit peu changé : c'est arriver à faire comprendre ce que c'est que la société de surveillance à des paranos. C'est-à-dire que le problème auquel je suis confronté c'est qu'avant, les gens comme moi, qui s’intéressaient à ces histoires-là, était facilement brocardées comme paranos. Le problème, aujourd'hui, c'est que tout le monde est devenu parano. C'est ce que je vais essayer de vous montrer et ce pourquoi ça me semble dangereux, ou problématique en tout cas, de passer de la société de la surveillance à la société de paranoïa.

En devenant l’artiste de notre propre vie, on l’assimile à une œuvre et “on veut que cette dernière trouve son public, et la valeur quantitative de l’audimat finit par primer sur toutes les autres”. Autrement dit, peu importe ce qu’on fait du moment qu’on le fait avec style et qu’on récolte du “j’aime” à gogo. Et, sans surprise, le consensualisme remporte la mise: “Il y a une sorte d’effet d’appauvrissement puisqu’on choisit des images consensuelles du bonheur et du plaisir.” Exit donc certaines émotions peu glorieuses à l’image de la tristesse ou du coup de blues, place aux masques de joie et aux expressions convenues du nirvana.

Très bonne série de vidéo qui détaillent (du moins partiellement) les mécanismes à l’œuvre derrière le mouvement GamerGate.

First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.

But the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong, most typically in ways that enable effective responses to the current situation. For example, studies find that when we are angry we are acutely attuned to what is unfair, which helps animate actions that remedy injustice.

The reason you should boycott bottled water is because it enables a bullshit, backwards vision for society.

Boycotting bottled water means you support the idea that public access to clean, safe water is not only a basic human right, but that it’s a goddamn technological triumph worth protecting. It means you believe that ensuring public access to this resource is the only way to guarantee it will be around in a few more years.

Clean, safe drinking water that flows freely out of our faucets is a feat of engineering that humans have been been perfecting for two millennia. It is a cornerstone of civilization. It is what our cities are built upon. And over the years the scientists and hydrologists and technicians who help get water to our houses have also become our environmental stewards, our infrastructural watchdogs, our urban visionaries. Drinking the water these people supply to our homes is the best possible way to protect future access to water worldwide.

[...]

Giving up bottled water also means thinking long-term about preserving water security. You may have reservoirs near you brimming over with fresh rainfall right now, but the truth is that the amount of potable water on this planet is growing more scarce every year. The bottled water industry is one of the fastest-growing on the planet. Last year it made $100 billion, an amount that is expected to double within five years. Now consider the fact that it actually takes the equivalent of three bottles of water to make a single water bottle. Every swig from a plastic blob in the name of convenience moves us closer to a world without any clean water at all.

Because like I said before, it’s not about this drought—it’s about every future drought.

I find this sort of thinking to be dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself.

Though Dune won the Nebula and Hugo awards, the two most prestigious science fiction prizes, it was not an overnight commercial success. Its fanbase built through the 60s and 70s, circulating in squats, communes, labs and studios, anywhere where the idea of global transformation seemed attractive. Fifty years later it is considered by many to be the greatest novel in the SF canon, and has sold in millions around the world.

La problématique économique et sociale liée à Uber brillamment expliquée.

La réalité est hélas toute autre, car le seul but de ces comptes est d’engranger un maximum de followers, avant d’être revendus au plus offrant et de changer de nom. Un compte « clé en main » avec des centaines de milliers de followers légitimes, (des humains et non des bots) et un bon ratio follower/followé peut rapporter gros. Des tweets de spams peuvent également être glissés dans le contenu contre des dollars sonnants et trébuchants.

Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, said: “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidies for fossil fuels, which distort markets and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries.”

Les sceptiques ont raison: collectivement, les médias d’actualité seraient fous de remettre leur sort entre les mains de Facebook. Individuellement en revanche, ils seraient fous de ne pas le faire.

A kneejerk response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre would be familiar: crackdowns, monitoring and curbs on Muslim communities, including racial profiling; wild promises of “punishing” the attackers and taking decisive action to root out terrorists once and for all; ramping up military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or elsewhere to increase the heat on the terrorists at source, and teach them a lesson.

The problem is that these are tried, tested, and failed strategies that serve largely as useful recruiting sergeants for terrorist networks like IS and al-Qaeda. We are so obsessed with these strategies, despite their abject failure, that while getting rightly worked up at the horrifying atrocities against the West like that just committed in Paris, we are incapable of mustering a similar emotional response to the reports of dozens of civilian casualties due to US-led airstrikes.

Such so-called collateral damage, which includes the “mass destruction of civilian homes” by western bombs according to rebel eyewitnesses on the ground, is not even an accident, but a result of Obama’s deliberate loosening of "near certainty" standards previously adopted to minimise civilian deaths: and is already driving locals into the arms of IS.

We must not fall into the trap of the terrorists themselves – the inability to recognize the suffering of the Other, their wholesale demonization, the acceptance of their indiscriminate destruction as a necessary means to a "greater good." The only way forward is for people of all faith and none to stand together in rejecting the violence perpetrated in our name, whether by state or insurgent.

Personne ne veut voir que la plus grosse fabrique à soldats d'Al Qaeda sur notre territoire, c'est la PRISON. Personne n'a compris que la France n'a pas basculé en 2015, mais il y a dix ans déjà, lors des émeutes. Personne ne veut voir que nous vivons encore les conséquences lointaines de l'immense humiliation coloniale et post-coloniale, et que vos leçons de "civilisation" et de "liberté d'expression" sont de ce fait inaudibles pour certains de ceux qui l'ont subie et la subissent ENCORE.

Here's a theory. Terrorists aren't offended by cartoons. Not even cartoons that satirise the Prophet Muhammad. They don't care about satire. For all I know they may not even care about the Prophet Muhammad.

Instead, they merely pretend to be offended by cartoons, in order to give themselves a pretext to commit murder. Murder so horrifying, on a pretext so unWestern, that non-Muslims – blinded by grief and rage – turn on Muslims. Blame them. Persecute them. Burn their book, attack their mosques, threaten them in the street, demand their expulsion from Western societies. Actions that, in turn, scare Western Muslims, isolate them, alienate them. And thus drive some of them to support – and even become – terrorists.

Result: terrorists swell their ranks for a civil war they long to provoke non-Muslims into starting.