I'm finding Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse" very uneven. He's really good on an anarchist perspective on the rise of inequality side by side with farming and state formation, using recent archaeological research, but he seems to have lapped up the AI doomer narrative, treating "non-aligned AGI" as a credible risk. In reality, doomerism is a calculated distraction from the real harms being caused today by currently existing AI - and he's weak on this.

He also doesn't do his own credibility any good by namechecking "effective altruism" charlatan Toby Ord and racist AI doomer Nick Bostrom, both of University of Oxford's discredited "Future of Humanity" institute.

Kemp himself is affiliated with the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. https://www.cser.ac.uk/people/team/. I see Yuval Noah Harari is involved, and he's another doomer I can no longer take seriously.

#collapse #anarchism

It's easy to think this thick fossil-fuel-powered hypercapitalist consumerist culture we live in is the only way to be. For most of humanity over many millennia, things were very different.

These artifacts are our past and our future.

#transience

After forty minutes I'd reached my old workplace (Hi Niamh, Sabena, Tom, Rasha and Niha! Hope you're enjoying the long weekend! Thank you for the good wishes!) then under the M50, Dublin's motorway collar, an hour in, and then through the huge new suburb of Adams town, and on to Celbridge, where I bought a handful of items of food for tomorrow. I got there just before they closed, at six.

A friendly lad working at Lidl asked me what I was up to. I told him I'm walking to Mayo. He loved the idea, and suggested places to camp surreptitiously on the grounds of the nearby Castletown Estate. I'd have taken him up on it, but I wanted to crack on a bit further.

I've found a place to camp for the night and I'm set up for a warm and cosy night. I haven't been snared so far. I'll share snaps in the morning. Goodnight!

I got on the road finally at 12:20 today when the rain finally let up. I felt better under the bag than I'd hoped, and I've cracked out a good 25km today.

These snaps are the first few minutes of the walk; out of my street, over the Luas tram tracks and onto the Grand Canal, heading west.

I'll be taking off on a walk across Ireland in the next few days.

I'm out of practice, and I'll be carrying a sizeable bag, so this walk will involve a bit of suffering until I get back into my stride. The route in the screenshot is roughly the path I'll be taking.

My thing is to start from my front door in suburban Dublin. Ireland has 78,972 kilometres of local roads. As much as possible, these are the roads I'll be taking, so I won't be showing you any spectacular sights, but rather Ireland very much off the beaten track. I'll be wild camping mostly. Leave no trace.

When I'm in shape I can crack out 30km per day. Let's see how this goes!