Month: September 2024

At what point are we permitted to…?

Five questions, and a sixth

JONATHAN COOK – SEP 9

  1. At what point does it become irresponsible not to compare Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people with the genocide westerners know best: the Nazi Holocaust?
  2. At what point does shielding Israel from the revulsion its actions naturally inspire not turn into complicity?
  3. At what point should western publics be offered proper historical context to make sense of Israel’s genocide: one that lets them understand how the Zionist movement was [ideologically shaped] by its exposure to ugly, century-old European ethnic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism, and how the Zionists chose to those supremacist ideologies rather than reject them?

https://bit.ly/3TKm7MP

A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair

Scientist James Lovelock gave humanity new ways to think about our home planet – but some of his biggest ideas were the fruit of a passionate collaboration – By Jonathan Watts


Thu 5 Sep 2024 00.00 EDT

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealised as something cold, hard, rational, neutral and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

James Lovelock (1960s)

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/05/gaia-theory-born-of-secret-love-affair-james-lovelock)