"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.”

— Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King

(via [[id:bd45deac-0c9e-4360-acf1-904ad61031c7][Time for Action]] http://thebookshelf.org.uk/zine/ h/t @dazinism@social.coop)

I’ve come across quite a few books recently that make a connection between leftist politics, climate change and one or multiple of complexity science, complex systems, cybernetics, and systems thinking.

+ Doughnut Economics
+ Free, Fair and Alive
+ Anarchist Cybernetics
+ Emergent Strategy
+ Cybernetic Revolutionaries

And @lollonero@antinetzwerk.de just shared “Komplexität «Chaostheorie» und die Linke.”

I’d like to have a bit of a hobbyist play around with agent-based modelling. I did it a long time ago with object-oriented languages, but a language with strong actor model creds seems like a good place to look nowadays. I’d like something where visualisation of the world and its agents is fairly simple. I’m up for learning something new. Any thoughts / advice? Two possible things that seem pretty relevant are Elixir or Spritely Goblins.
Listened: GO BIG #2: A Big Idea to Rethink the Economy

Some good stuff on the paucity of GDP as a metric. Also a chat with Kate Raworth on how Doughnut Economics is becoming quite well known lately.
And they speak to Rokhsana Fiaz about what is happening in Newham in London, which sounds pretty rad – community wealth building, citizens’ assembly, and participatory budgeting.

https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/go-big-rethink-the-economy

Whenever I get that stab of feeling like there’s too many ideas to explore, too many books to read, too little time to do it in, I remind myself not to turn to productivity systems, efficiency improvements and the like, but to knowledge sharing and communities of practice, and remind myself that you don’t need to know it all, knowing things is not just an individual pursuit but a collective endeavour.
Perhaps obvious but a nice little lightbulb flash for me, was that systems thinking appears to generally be a recent incarnation / labelling of (a particular part of?) cybernetics. Makes reading on cybernetics feel less like learning a dead language, and makes systems thinking feel a bit more weighty.