solo

Big oil, governments and one of Europe’s largest polluters are among the developers of planned projects off our coast

Link from article: This is it: The Assembly Details

I thought of sharing this not so much because I agree with everything said in it, but because I think as a topic, it could be a great conversation starter.

For example at some point he says something I don't agree with:

In 2015, when I was researching in London, we helped set up the Radical Assemblies movement. Thousands took part. Within six months, it collapsed.

Why?

No structure. No clear plan. Too much chaos.

Personally I see this very differently. Not saying that I'm right and he's wrong. Just saying.

I think many of the powerful social movements or just interesting ones actually, after the 2008 crisis and until the pandemic (including the Arab Spring of course), they were somehow connected to online communication. This article's take reminds me of the opinion of some marxists, leninists etc saying "these movements failed because there was no leaders with a clear plan". I don't agree with this kind of thinking.

I don't see them as failures. On the contrary, I see them as part of a bottom-up social process of organising, in order to reclaim our space in the social sphere and in decision making processes. They are part of an evolution, imo.

Please, read my take with a grain of salt and some good faith. I don't claim I am able to resume my limited knowledge and understanding of a decade or so of activism, in a few sentences. It's more of an attempt of mine to start a conversation by talking about some of my thoughts, hoping you will share yours.

There has been no shortage of news since our last column, giving data teams a wide variety of topics to explore. Aviation accidents and the opening salvos of President Donald Trump’s planned trade warfare made headlines globally. Meanwhile, in Gaza, the next phases of the ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, as well as the return of Palestinians to the devastated areas, have been widely covered. This edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, which considered stories between January 27 and February 14, also highlights an analysis of the ideological positions of German political parties; a cross-border investigation into the shadow fleet transporting sanctioned Russian oil; an analysis of the homes that survived the Los Angeles fires; and a special on the security of four-digit passwords.

Sustainability is sexy.

Sustainability is sexy.

Israeli soldiers storm the Far’a refugee camp, killing three, as raids and arrests continue across the West Bank.

The killings come as the Israeli military continues its weeks-long, large-scale offensive on several areas of the northern West Bank, including Jenin and its refugee camp, as well as Tulkarem and its Nur Shams refugee camp, forcing thousands to flee their homes.

The army has also deployed hundreds of soldiers and bulldozers that demolished houses and tore up vital infrastructure in the camps, cutting off water and power.

Israel launched its crackdown on refugee camps in the West Bank in January.(...) The army has since killed dozens of Palestinians and forced at least 40,000 to flee as they have demolished homes and torn up vital infrastructure in refugee camps across the West Bank, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reports.

While some attempted to frame the attackers as members of the Turkish neo-fascist Grey Wolves organization, activists on the ground identified markings linked to French far-right groups.

However, workers’ organizations have made it clear that they will not rely on mainstream politicians to resist these violent trends. Instead, they have announced more mobilizations alongside antifascist networks. “We will give them no ground—not in our cities, not in our neighborhoods, not in our workplaces, and not in our struggles,” Solidaires declared.

Abstract: Replying to criticism to the term infrastructural colonization, this commentary article discusses the colonial and how colonization is conceived. Infrastructural colonization, as opposed to colonialism, takes a literal approach to territorial control, landscape and socio-cultural change, exploring the literal colonization of habitats, people, social fabrics and more-than-human networks. Colonization—discrimination, control and extraction—operates on numerous scales and across various actors and places, accumulating into large-scale irreparable socio-ecological consequences. While it should not be conflated with (settler) colonialism, infrastructural colonization seeks to identify the roots and mechanisms of the colonial model, specifically how habitats and peoples are captured, psycho-politically captivated and together accumulated into an extractivist political economy. As an approach, infrastructural colonization implicitly recognizes state formation as colonialism, statism as (neo) colonialism and the state as colonial model(s). States, in their relative diversity, are understood as a structure of political and socioecological conquest.

Swapping QR codes in group invites and artillery targeting are latest ploys.