Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.
That’s not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don’t really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it’s going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That’s looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don’t think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren’t we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of “natural” things. Or, isn’t reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It’s all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.
I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don’t really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there’s even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we’ll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.
Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that’s a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with “the revolution”, evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.
Yeah see, that’s what I’m talking about. Like what the fuck would the water wars even be? That shit don’t make no sense, it’s not like water is a non-renewable resource. Freshwater is maybe a larger concern, right, but climate change means more solar heat which means more water evaporation which means more fresh rainwater and not less. Maybe in combination with increased acidification because of emissions and related things, maybe in combination with a decreased capacity to absorb that rainwater because of desertification and much increased rainwater runoff due to too large a volume of water for a dried out landscape. No part of that really involves a water war, though. That’s just some pop culture shit.
Semi-serious question, what made you want to engage with this guy in like, some kind of debate? It’s pretty obvious he’s just like, a basic bitch bad faith neolib poster that’s going around and inciting pre-election division, probably get suppress voting or some shit, idk. But like, why engage with him? What’s the point, really?
At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator....
One of the biggest things that the president, and really anyone in a high or noteworthy level of office can wield, is the bully pulpit. Their ability to speak to people and basically be guaranteed that people will listen to what they’re saying, even if they get clip-chimped by fox news or the nyt or cnn or whatever. “Inspiration” is something that can drive people to the polls, too. Having a candidate that the majority of the population trusts and can believe in, i.e. is inspiring, is better than having a candidate that isn’t those things, broadly. Well, if you agree with their goals, anyways.
I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I’d probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I’d imagine.
In totality though I’m not really sure to what extent it’s in the US’s best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.
I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn’t really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it’s not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.
South korea, though, even though I don’t know as much, I’m pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that’s pretty US-adjacent.
So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.
The automotive lobby is pretty intense as they shape the regulatory framework applied to all modern cars, and I don’t see it happening from a conventional carmaker, really, but I do wonder if, say, something like aptera, which can kind of attempt to skirt those regulations, will be able to breach the mass, undeserved market in the same way the gen 1 prius was maybe able to. Or, something like the toyota echo, you know, that class of new cars that we used to have 20 years ago which was supposed to appeal to younger people who weren’t as financially well off. Or, is it just the case that the middle class has totally evaporated, and so the vast majority of americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and straight up just can’t afford a car even with increasingly predatory auto loans?
If I’ve learned anything about political discourse it’s that you have to assume that some level of mutual understanding is possible for communication to be worthwhile, and for everything to not devolve into back and forth trolling. So, while you can’t assume intelligence, sure, you also kind of have to.
I mean Team America was a pretty lowkey pro military intervention and pro america movie, to be honest. He’d probably have the opinion he would have if he had watched that movie and especially if he’d listened to the classic longwinded matt and trey speech that they throw in at the end to kind of spell out the message, it’s just that nobody really watches or remembers anything other than the like, first 20 minutes of that movie, where the protagonists get hit with kind of a low point and “america” kind of looks bad, because those first twenty minutes make the most memorable use of the gag.
“Dicks fuck pussies, and Dicks also fuck assholes”. Greatest speech ever
Yeah, that’s what I was referring to. The movie came out in 2004, you know, the year after we invaded Iraq, as was the context of the movie. If you pay attention to that speech, it’s basically just saying that US hegemony is good and US exceptionalism is real, and that our actions are a net positive for the international community. That the international community needs us. That we need to “fuck this asshole”. In combination with the movie making fun of celebrities that had non-interventionist views, and calling them a homosexual slur that will probably get flagged on lemmy, saying that they suck up to dictators. It being satire doesn’t suddenly make the movie mean the opposite of what it meant, that’s just classic irony-poisoning.
There are alternatives. Bad body odor is generally produced by the bacteria on your body which thrives and emits odor in the moisture of your sweat, so legitimately taking a shower or applying hand sanitizer to your armpits will help. Though, I dunno if applying like, a rubbing alcohol mixture to your pits would be a wise decision to do frequently since that’s are pretty sensitive body part.
They need like, armpit probiotics, or something. Some sort of stick full of bacteria that smells like lemons or strawberries or something, and then just outbreeds the other bacteria. Somebody should do that, sounds awesome.
So, say you were in a swing state, right? Then it might make sense to vote for biden. Or, a state where your votes are tallied earlier in the process, since a larger victory earlier in the process has an effect on those votes later on. Or, a state where your votes are disproportionately of more weight, maybe so long as you also live in a swing state. Those are the contexts in which it might actually make sense to vote for biden, because those are the contexts more broadly in which voting actually matters.
But, say you don’t conform to those criteria, say you live in a highly populous state, like, say, california, new york, maybe texas. These are states where they’ve already pre-committed themselves to one candidate over the other, and regardless of like, screeching about like, “oh well all votes count everything has an impact”, nothing’s realistically gonna change in those states unless some major cultural shifts and maybe even demographic shifts took place. You’d pretty much be an idiot to believe otherwise, right, to believe, oh, well, this time, this time california’s gonna vote red. Especially with a candidate like trump. Maybe if somebody like bernie suddenly became a republican or something, that might cause a decent amount of upset, but without a larger shift taking place there basically beyond your control, not much is gonna happen. The race has already been called for you, and been called for those states ahead of time. Maybe egg will be on my face if california votes red this election, but somehow I just don’t think that’s gonna happen.
In those cases, in those particular contexts, where your vote matters doesn’t really matter, it actually makes more sense, in my mind, to vote for the candidate you actually believe in. Even if that ends up being no candidate at all, which, admittedly, I do find pretty unlikely. Like, you have nothing to lose or gain really either way, so the best thing you can do in my mind is just clearly signal what your actual priorities are, and then hopefully someone looks at the poles and changes tactics because of it. To either appeal to your bloc more, or say, the DSA gets more funding because of increased voter turnout, or whatever.
I have never heard anyone really provide a legitimate counterargument to this set of tactics, because I don’t think you really can. It’s just an elaboration on strategic voting with more specifics than “vote blue no matter who” as sort of a blanket, contextually devoid statement that doesn’t make sense for a bunch of different scenarios. And strategic voting is what people are already doing when they’re trying to do a compromise vote for one of the two main parties in a FPTP two party system. That’s already a form of strategic voting, I’m just elaborating on it, instead of making a generalized party line heuristic that doesn’t make sense inm frankly, most cases, for most people that you’re gonna be talking to.
I can see your point, I just don’t agree with your expectation that the slow crumble will be a less painfull way overall to get people to do what it takes to recover than the crash-n-burn - yeah, it’s less painful immediatelly, but the pain lasts longer and the depths reached are probably much worse since human perception of how bad a crisis is, is based on where they were before not on absolute terms, so a crash-n-burn (i.e. a crisis, unlike the slow crumble) needs not collapse things quite as badly as the slow crumble to induce a general feeling that “this is unnacceptable”.
Two points, I think.
The first is that, honestly, if this is the like, assessment we’re making, we’re totally fucked. Not in the sense that we’re totally fucked, but in that we’re totally fucked if we’re making that assessment, ja feel? It shouldn’t really matter too much one way or the other what the outcome is, there, obviously the strategies for real change are the same in either case. We’re also more broadly fucked if we’re having this conversation of like, oh well which one is the damage control, there, because it takes a conversation away from what those strategies for change might be, and puts the perspective more towards like, okay, the supermassive meteor is hitting, do we have an orgy or do we get in the bunker? No conception of how to stop it, just sort of like, a doomer sense of resignation, a doomer smokescreen. Maybe this is like the fabled “accelerationist perspective”, right, but I don’t think so. That’s a political movement, it still does things, and the people who are in it still end up doing things even if they think like, collapse of either the political system or just generalized ecological collapse and the holocene extinction are inevitable. In no case, really, can we come to a conclusion about it that kind of, forgoes the idea that we still end up doing general strikes, protests, and [redacted]. This isn’t really a criticism of you, but of this conversation more broadly, because I’ve seen it happen like a million times every time election season rolls around.
I dunno, I guess I’m just saying that I don’t think this meta-level, abstract conversation is very useful. It’s sort of like when people talk about freedom or efficiency. I’ve been obsessing a little bit, it’s surfaced once again in my mind, how those values are such core values to people’s worldviews, right. They’re core to people’s decision making. And yet, they’re totally meaningless, they’re proxy values that indicate nothing on their own. One man’s freedom to own guns infringes on another’s freedom to live in a gun free society. One definition of efficiency says it’s better to diversify and decentralize the methods of production, to better insulate against external forces which might collapse a system and make it less brittle, collapses which lead to increasingly larger losses as time goes on. The other definition of efficiency says that it’s better to engage in mass production and centralized production, because the margins are better, and you can specialize more. This whole conversation is sort of, it strikes me as similar to when people argue about freedom or efficiency. We’re arguing over an abstraction, here, we’re implicitly accepting a framing in which we’ve already kind of lost.
The second point is that I don’t know if we really have enough data to go with either perspective. The “slower and less painful” decision isn’t always obvious electorally, even though we might make it out to be so in hindsight. It just seems more like either position is a gut feeling, to me. Against the cries of the history nerds, we can’t much use historical precedent for these sorts of decisions. Anyone that’s not a hack imposing a grand narrative on history knows that basically everything in history is just a hurricane that forms because a butterfly beats its wings, it’s all an insane set of chances and probabilities.
So I don’t know if we can come to a conclusion in which is better, and I don’t really know if we even need to in order to still know where we should go and what we should do.
There’s a guy under the boat pumping the water in, obviously, the boat is obviously in the middle of a huge wave pool and a “volume”, or a big screen dome, similar to what they use on the set of the mandolorian. This, obviously, creates the appearance that they are actually trapped in the middle of the ocean, even though they aren’t.
We can therefore see that the meme is obviously representative of a kind of insane abstract illusion, much like the allegory of the cave. But, this cave has no surface. For the people within the simulation, what is the purpose of it? Perpetual torture? Which of them, can we assume, are in on it, are actors, are plants? All of them, perhaps? Does the illustration’s highly arbitrary nature create a kind of representation of the nonsense that is political propaganda, and is this elaborate illusion of suffering constructed solely for our observation, or is it just that the people within the painting are trapped in a kind of perpetual toil by virtue of having known nothing different, given that we know nothing of their broader context or past?
Who could say. Truly, this is great art, high art, a high art meme.
I dunno. The collapse of the US is sort of, interesting, right. I think there are a lot more people reaping the gains of imperial america than you might think. I mean, that’s basically all of what american industry is at this point, and maybe all it ever has been. If you think about like, first industrial revolutions, those came about not contrary to, but in combination with slavery. You can’t much have a loom without cotton being picked somewhere, and you can’t much have a grainery or industrialized mill without someone out working in the wheat fields, you know? And then you have the sort of colonial period in which that slavery was outsourced, and then you have a post WW2 period of rapid military expansionism and then now you have an interconnected global system in which larger colonial states rely on what are basically smaller states where everyone inside of them is a slave. Not only larger colonial states in the west, but states abroad which benefit from both US and domestic military imperialism. Nobody’s talking about what’s happening in the congo right now, but all those lithium batteries, that are used basically everywhere, they all have a set of common origin points.
I find it distressing that, you know, it can be within everyone’s mutual interest, internal to a democracy, even a real democracy, it can be in their internal mutual interest to be extremely xenophobic and exploitative of another culture or nation, especially if they can do so at arm’s length.
So I dunno, I think with the collapse of that global hegemony, I would like to think that it’s only a more minor kind of thing, right, but at the same time, I think maybe it’s not, and maybe the common narrative about BRICS being the big grand replacement on the world stage, and hopefully, being the better replacement, I dunno if that’s gonna come to pass, and I dunno if they’re really gonna be better so much as they might just be different. I might be wrong, you know, but china flirts with a danger, when they open up to a larger market and populate the higher parts of their government with billionaires, when they decide to fuse a presumably socialist project with a neoliberal economic system that inherently concentrates power.
I mean and that’s all considering the idea that the elites don’t just wanna fucking burn everything down at the point at which they figure out that it’s not really tenable any longer, or like, just want to burn it all down for another fifteen minutes of power, which might very well be the case.
The efficiency point is something I find kind of interesting because. Say you have a short-term efficiency, right, you get much larger gains in the short term, much more rapidly. In a competitive field, you will be able to crush your competitors more easily, if you can grow faster in the short term of this time frame. This applies to the free market, but also applies to nations at the broadest level. You can’t really reliably create a strategy that has long term efficiency and stability, because the short term strategies still win in the short term, and a “win” is quantified as the extinction of competition. So, I dunno, I don’t have a solution to that problem. Might be like, we’re just fucked longer than long term, just, fucked in the sense that human psychology is fucked, I dunno. I also don’t really like the idea that the only “winning” is basically that, after some short term power becomes the dominant force, exterminates all competition, then they can start leaning into long term efficiency strategies. It’s not as though it’s like, a static process, right, where you only have to win once to keep going, you have to keep winning against all possible and future competition. There are also obviously problems with a structure that wins it’s battles along the short-term and then becomes a sort of monopolized power, right, because it’s by nature brittle and resistant to that change into a long-term strategy. And then I also just don’t know if the cost of “winning” in that context, maybe that does enough damage by itself that you’re just fucked. Holocene extinction style.
Maybe there’s something I’m missing there, or like, I’m thinking in too absolutist and grandiose of terms in a place where the context really actually matters much more, I dunno. Probably that’s the case, if I had to guess.
No no, see, it’s gotta uhh, be ironic. It’s ironic, they’re ironically calling all the other pedo artists out, see. It’s, no, see, it’s because they’re just being ironic and edgy as a tasteless kind of joke, see.
I dunno man. The point at which it becomes totally indefensible is the point at which the 30 or late 20’s artist is sleeping or having romantic relationships with like, kids, basically. I dunno. I respect the right of artists to write songs about shitty or super insanely weird subject matter but goddamn these guys are just confessing that they’re pedophiles straight up huh
This is the case for basically every issue, yeah, this is generally why telling people to start with politics at the local level isn’t really a great suggestion for most people.
You can’t fund inter-city trains at the local level, really, that has to be done at the state level at the very least, usually in a state like california, only, and usually it has to be done with federal funding. If you don’t have inter-city trains or public transit, then it’s hard to make a walkable city. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s not atomizable, it has to be integrated with the rest of the network, which is why even the best US cities are pretty car-centric.
This is true for a litany of other political issues besides just public transit.
Mother Gaia and Humans (geekxgirls.com)
Direct Link: www.geekxgirls.com/article.php?ID=12040...
Liberals are not 'the Left'... (lemmy.world)
Reminder... (lemmy.world)
Victim reports his father missing. Police instead interrogated him for 17 hours, said they killed his dog, and withheld his meds from the victim. Victim tried to commit suicide in the room. (lemmy.world)
At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator....
The most well-funded campaign in US history (midwest.social)
New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity (www.theatlantic.com)
Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. archive
California Passes Bill Requiring New Cars To Beep At You When You're Speeding (jalopnik.com)
Average U.S. vehicle age hits record 12.6 years as high prices force people to keep them longer (www.nbcnews.com)
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
The richest Dutch pay 28% tax while the rest pay 40% or more (www.dutchnews.nl)
I thought we should bring some attention to this.
More true words have never been spoken (shota.nu)
Unless you've got a better plan in the next 6 months, grab a fucking bucket (lemmy.world)
Oh no. (lemmy.world)
California is about to tax guns more like alcohol and tobacco − and that could put a dent in gun violence (theconversation.com)