Cooperation and Compassion
March 31, 2023 1:23 PM   Subscribe

"Yet here I am, at my 75th birthday, still believing with all my heart, soul and mind that the moral arc of the Universe bends towards justice, towards reconciliation with nature, towards kindness with our fellow humans, and yes, towards wisdom." -->

--> "The creativity of compassionate agency can be very powerful. The people of Finland, when they faced being swallowed by Russia in 1899, formed the Pellervo Society, dedicated to spreading cooperative enterprise. By 1909 they had formed 1,800 cooperatives, and Finland today is the most cooperative economy in the world."
--> The ILO has a detailed plan for setting up a worker co-op.
--> Very recent previously on the world's biggest co-op, Mondragon.
posted by Meatbomb (11 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 


I wonder if cooperatives can thrive here in the US. I see them as the next logical step in conscious consumption.
posted by leotrotsky at 2:51 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


The Maximum Fun podcast network recently converted to a worker-owned co-op. (Triple Click, my favorite video game podcast, is part of the network.) This is an idea I've been seeing more and more of in recent years.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:37 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Worker co-ops are a growing sector in the US. I served on the board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives for a number of years. It was perhaps the most rewarding work I've done. I encourage you to fall down that rabbit hole and discover the great organizing that happens and the many partners that are involved.
posted by criticalyeast at 5:46 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Finland, Finland, Finland…

The country where I quite want to be…
posted by Windopaene at 5:47 PM on March 31, 2023 [6 favorites]


Why on earth would you choose to believe the "moral arc of the universe bends toward justice?" That just ignores most of history.
posted by metametamind at 8:11 PM on March 31, 2023




This guy talks about climate collapse and unironically says this:

By discarding superstitions and throwing wide open the doors of science they have enabled us to begin learning the secrets of the Universe. If you doubt this, then give up your cellphone, your TV, your car, your washing machine, your antibiotics, your anaesthetics, your overseas holidays, your freedom from oppression by nonsense and superstition.

Why does he think the climate is collapsing? He decries colonialism and then repeats the colonial trope of marking the more adaptive civilizations they destroyed as 'superstitious' and 'backwards'. And the perennial argument for accepting the decripit society we live in 'don't you like you washing machine'?
posted by indica at 10:52 PM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


In Civilization by Kenneth Clark he begins his book by saying that the level of confidence is a good measure of how strong a culture is.
I’m 76 years old. My advice is to RUN !!
posted by JohnR at 6:13 AM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]


"The moral arc of the universe" is in fact a syntactically correct English language noun phrase.

It is mostly useful as an illustration of how easy it is to construct a syntactically correct English language noun phrase that conveys no meaning. It's up there with "suicidal prime numbers" and "monochromatically green objects that are orange all over."
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:46 AM on April 2, 2023


Co-ops in Quebec.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:40 AM on April 26, 2023


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