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    Re: Nafeez Ahmed on board for lab-grown food Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on December 14, 2022, 11:16 pm, in reply to "Re: Nafeez Ahmed on board for lab-grown food"

    Well he didn't use that specific phrase, but 'precision fermentation' in the part I quoted is the same corporate-speak that Monbiot and the reboot food people are using for bacteria-cultured 'food' grown in... labs? Factories? Either way, people in white coats and sterile environments exerting maximum control over micro-organisms, which couldn't possibly go wrong or have any unexpected consequences for society or human health...

    'There was a lot of hifalutin talk which eventually devolved into saying that the media is changing and can be changed. That part was not convincing' - agreed. He hasn't learned his lesson from getting booted out of the 'leftwing possibility space' of the graun Hearing him speak made me think of Darren Allen's description of the left as a 'management class', albeit sometimes waiting in the wings for its Big Moment:

    'they are the professionals who organise, conceptualise, administer or, in the case of the writers we are interested in here, promote and justify the system, or ‘the machine of the world’. The power of the management class comes not, as it does with the owner class, from ownership (i.e. from capital, hence ‘capitalism’), but from management (of and through society; hence ‘socialism’). This doesn’t mean that the left do not also have the same kind of power as owners, that they don’t also sometimes hold right-wing views, that the two don’t also blend into each other and are, ultimately, in their implicit acceptance of the system, indistinguishable. They do and they are. Nevertheless, when we say ‘the left’ we are referring to those people whose power comes from amassing abstract facts and controlling information and who therefore prejudice education and taste over morality and meaning, and, following this, never criticise the power of the tasteful, educated class.

    When we say the ‘left’ we are talking about those who have been appointed to manage the machine, and who therefore have a faith-based belief in the power of the machine, of technology, and, insofar as the machine is society, in collectivist, statist, democratic solutions to social problems, which they package as ‘tolerance’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘compassion’, ‘respect’, and so on, but which always contain the sneaky unspoken assumption that they, the ever-so-nice professional class, will be somehow organising (or explaining, or assessing, or fixing) this tolerant, compassionate collective mechanism.

    All this will be done with their enormous minds. The left (and here they overlap with the right) do very little with their hands, and so tend to privilege form—intellectual ideas and theories, design, structural adjustments and so on—over function, over actually engaging with the real world. In addition, they are nearly always wealthy, comfortable, propertied and raised in or habituated to a world in which uncertainty, much less the need to directly rely on other people for their survival, plays a peripheral role. All of this leads to a qualitative ‘atmosphere’ that the left partake in—a blandness, a smugness, an uptightness—even as their specific opinions vary.'     - https://expressiveegg.org/2021/07/02/pandemic_retrospective/ (warning: covid skepticism)

    Too bad, I had high hopes for him!

    cheers,
    I

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