User Profile

Ika Makimaki

pezmico@bookwyrm.social

Joined 11 months, 3 weeks ago

342.53 ppm Tāmaki-makau-rau, Aotearoa. Ngāti Te Ata land. Migrant, father, lover, friend. Cis straight, LatAm. Labels suck but eco-anarchist kinda fits. Work in news and hope for better. Covid hawk. Don't catch, don't spread. Mask and fight for clean air. Better transport: + bicycles, - cars Love music, film, books, games and languages.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. - D. Graeber

🚲🌱🐋 Solar punk

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Ika Makimaki's books

Currently Reading

2023 Reading Goal

30% complete! Ika Makimaki has read 7 of 23 books.

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The Palestine Laboratory (2023, Verso Books) 5 stars

How Israel makes a killing from the occupation of Palestine

Israel’s military industrial complex uses …

Israeli history can be split into two eras: before and after 1967. Before the Six-Day War, Israeli policy was not noble but at least gave the rhetorical impression of (sometimes) opposing repression. In 1963, Foreign Minister Golda Meir told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel “naturally opposes policies of apartheid, colonialism and racial or religious discrimination wherever they exist” because Jews understood what it meant to be victims. Israel bonded with newly independent African states, enjoying their postcolonial freedoms, and African nations backed Israel at the UN. Many Israelis then and now viewed their country as a liberation struggle akin to being freed from colonial bondage. They had no time for the view that Zionism was tinged with colonialism. (…) Journalist Sash Polakow-Suransky recounts in his book on Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa, The Unspoken Alliance, that 1967 saw a watershed in Israel’s defense posture. Assisted by Soviet and Arab propaganda, “Israel’s image as a state of Holocaust survivors in need of protection gradually deteriorat[ed] into that of an imperialist stooge of the West.” Thereafter, many Third World nations turned away from Israel and the “Israeli government abandoned the last vestiges of moral foreign policy in favour of hard-nosed realpolitik.” Partnering with the world’s most brutal tyrants followed. Israel’s relationship with Iran under the Shah was an early example.

The Palestine Laboratory by 

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (EBook, 2021, Tom Doherty Associates) 4 stars

It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; …

A warm cuddle in a wicked scary world

5 stars

As other reviewers have already said: it is a truly gentle, hopeful, beautiful story about connection and self discovery and communication. It's got a post capitalist, solarpunk vibe of a world I'd love to inhabit, an appreciation for little pleasures and little deals, loveable characters, and it's also insightful and wise. Plus the main character rides a bicycle as their main form of transportation!

I now want to leave it all and become a wandering tea monk with a bike. That's how perfect this book is. Loved it.

The Climate Book (Hardcover, 2022, Penguin Books, Limited) 4 stars

You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, …

When future historians ask, 'Why didn't people take action to stop the climate crisis when they had known about it for decades', a prominent part of the answer will be the history of denial and obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry, and the ways in which people in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system.

The Climate Book by , (Page 29)

From the Chapter by Naomi Oreskes - "Why didn't they act?"

The Climate Book (Hardcover, 2022, Penguin Books, Limited) 4 stars

You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, …

The rapidly escalating climate and ecological crisis is a global crisis: it affects all living plants and beings. But to say that all of humankind is responsible for it is very, very far from the truth. Most people today are living well within the planetary boundaries. It is only a minority of us who have caused this crisis and who keep driving it forward. This is why the popular argument that 'there are too many people' is a very misleading one. Population does matter, but it is not people who are causing emissions and depleting the Earth, it is what some people do - it is some people's habits and behaviour, in combination with our economic structures, that are causing the catastrophe. The Industrial Revolution, which was fueled by slavery and colonization, brought unimaginable wealth to the Global North, and in particular to a small minority of people living there. That extreme injustice is the foundation that our modern societies are built upon. This is the very heart of the problem. It is the sufferings of the many that have paid for the benefits of the few. Their fortune came at a price - namely oppression, genocide, ecological destruction and climatological instability. There is a bill for all this destruction that has not yet been paid. In fact, it hasn't even been added up; it is still waiting to be invoiced.

The Climate Book by , (Page 19)

Greta Thunberg doesn't miss.

Free to Learn (2015, Basic Books) 4 stars

A good introdution to alternative ideas about education.

4 stars

Parts of it feel already a bit dated. Specially the assumption of the jump from hunter/gatherers to agricultural societies assumed as a given and linear progression (this idea is heavily disputed in The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow).

But overall a good overview and questioning of the educational structures we have built and subject our kids to. It proposes some clear actionable strategies to reinvent education and centre the children's experience and interests. Personally I found it to be a great tool in my family's journey into unschooling.