Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

We had a purple and grey plastic dinosaur that would arise from the garden beds year after year for many years, long after the kids had outgrown such things - your post made me smile.

It’s not a distraction it’s a fractal

A hand holds an art print with a gray background. In black and pink letters, it says "resistance to state repression, colonial violence, and imperial deathmaking is an ultimate form of love." It has illustrations of flowers, mushrooms, and other plants growing out of, and breaking apart, guns, bombs, and grenades.

🧵 of anti-imperialist art I'm finding particularly meaningful today.

This one is by @ollycostello.bsky.social:
ollycostelloshop.com/products/ult...

I'm ordering a few copies for the young people and the graphic novel lovers in my life because YES DAMN IT a Better World is Definitely Possible ❤️ 💚 💔

Same

Start working somewhere, anywhere, as the threads all connect and no part of the vision of justice and a life-affirming society can be fully realized without all the other parts.

It is people who have captured power at the center of empires who profit most from both.

It is children and workers and people far from the centers of empire who suffer most both from war and fossil fuel use.

Peace is a climate solution. Energy efficiency, renewables & walkability are peace building in that they weaken one excuse for war.

When people respond to a crisis from a different world view than the one that created it I consider it a Seed for the Future. Here's one: "Organized through Signal, rag-tag groups of residents are clearing essential city infrastructure like sidewalks and bus stops"

Thank yoe; very interesting!

If easy for you to recommend, I would appreciate a short lay-person level article about open source ecosystems for AI. I'd like to understand that better.

There are little pockets in my life for regenerative agriculture or more holistic health care. I think I'm interested in finding the pockets of ethical just and sustainable AI. I'd find that very interesting and instructive.

What I am realizing is that I am no more anti-AI than I am anti-Agriculture or anti-healthcare. ALL I want to see are methods that are transparent, just, and centered around long-term collective well-being, where collective spans to encompass other species and future generations.

An internationalist worker owned AI trained on the works of women, scholars in the Global South, Indigenous people, artists, wisdom keepers, with every bit of training material offered with consent and accepted with reciprocity. That's an AI that might get us somewhere.

"In each of the Peace Games the AI recommended deep listening for unmet needs, respite in nature and meditation for all parties, and reckoning with and making amends for historical injustice."

Dare to imagine and demand a peace-promoting life-sustaining AI just as much as a peace promoting life sustaining agriculture system or education system or healthcare system....

As with all things fractal, the delusions are located both in the underlying system and in its latest shiny new inventions.

Mercy on the human and on all life on earth in this moment.

Those headlines about how AI war games often lead to recommending nuclear weapons are scary to me.

Even more scary is that a society with nuclear weapons in hand thinks it's obvious and logical to use AI in war games but not peace games.

‘The river won’: how campaigners in Brazilian Amazon stopped privatisation of waterway Local river defenders force U-turn by occupying grain terminal operated by one of US powerhouses of world trade

‘The river won’: how campaigners in Brazilian Amazon stopped privatisation of waterway

Despite the troubles and horrors, we're also living in the most meet-cute buddy movie ever.

I want us to keep talking about living through this

About locating our freedom and integrity however constricted

The challenges we face are a constant barrage

I want us to keep thinking out loud about what love calls us to do, and be through crisis and collapse

It is hard (for me) to say what can be redeemed, but it feels like less than I once thought. And impossible without work and honest reckoning.

An exhausting feeling is realizing how many of those times I felt like men in high places didn't see me as fully human was I likely correct. Not imagination. Just probability as we get these ugly little windows into emails and locker rooms.

Who'd sign up for my "leadership development for the lost and despairing" cohort? Tag line - no tools, no frameworks, just questions and experiments.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

-- Wendell Berry

It's ok to feel sad and bewildered. In fact I'm coming to think that letting go of the easy paths and pat answers is part of the work of now.

Protect people and nature not wealth and institutions.

today we had a class of young students (12-14 yr old) came to visit the @aial.ie on campus. they were so keen to learn about AI and most importantly I was blown away by the type of questions they asked us: water consumption of data centers, how openai makes money, why RAM prices keep going up, ...

Or is it climate policy that improves housing? Or housing affordability policy that....? Doesn't matter because the Climate Cabinet is multisolving!