• 141 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2023

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  • Here’s the beginning of the “fascist sounding video” you mention:

    The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.

    Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral degeneracy it’s some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about real things here.

    The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world’s most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.

    The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.

    Sounds just like Hitler, don’t it?










  • A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer’s fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.

    Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.

    Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves “what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive”? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.

    It’s a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.

    I was ranting in a different thread about the “discourses of delay” that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.

    We can do both. We have to do both.






  • In an anarchistic society the serial killer could be sent to the psych ward and dealt with humanely.

    I suspect, in an anarchistic society, serial killers would be killed in turn by the victims’ friends and relatives, and the rest of society would shrug and say “murdering people is wrong but in this case we can’t really blame them”.

    Anarchists aren’t necessarily pacifists, after all.

    Really, if you ask yourself “what would happen to someone in an anarchist society who killed a serial killer/rapist/molester/etc etc in revenge” and the answer is “little or nothing” you probably have your answer to how that society would handle serial killers, rapists, molesters, etc.





  • There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

    It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

    What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.

    Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world’s resources.

    A sustainable comfortable future doesn’t just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world’s wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.
















  • There’s always the “cool aunt/uncle/friend with no children who’s always available to babysit” option. Communal child rearing generally starts with extended family - those without minor children pitch in to help the adults with minor children - and you don’t need kids of your own to help out that way.

    But you do kind of need a trusting relationship with those adults first, so they’ll be willing to trust you with their kids, and it’s hard to build those relationships from scratch, or rebuild them with family members if you’ve lost that trust already.





  • But if you’re selling energy bsck to the grid, you’re using the infrastructure and they have to pay you for running your meter backwards. Even paying you a reduced rate for the energy you produce is a losing proposition for them.

    It’s a bit worse than that, even. If there are too many people sending too much energy back to the grid, the grid can get overcharged and blow up. So energy companies have to dump the excess power somewhere to keep the grid stable.

    There are a lot of potential solutions to this problem. (Before anyone says Bitcoin fixes this, no it doesn’t.) unfortunately, energy companies are currently taking the laziest and least efficient solution - pay business owners to run their factories uselessly in order to drain excess power from the grid, and pass the cost on to consumers.