• 127 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: April 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • Love to hear how you think digital currencies aren’t digital currencies.

    Not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are digital implementations of government-backed fiat currencies. If you don’t understand the difference I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.

    by your flawed metrics, solar power is “hype”.

    Solar power produces energy. Cryptocurrency produces nothing and wastes energy doing it.











  • Yep. I think it’s Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

    Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that’s immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

    Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

    And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

    We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It’s species wide insanity.

    And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.




  • Preach.

    Housing is a human right.

    Private land ownership violates that human right.

    All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

    We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

    But we are a long way from implementing that.



  • Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

    It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

    I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.




  • Sure. The Google term you’re looking for is called “discourses of delay”.

    Tldr: The propagandists recognize the global consensus, that climate change is real and must be addressed, is too strong to attack directly. Instead, they work to discredit potential solutions and discourage people from acting. The hope is to delay action on climate change until fossil fuel companies run out of oil to sell.

    The four ways corporate propaganda encourages climate delay are by redirecting responsibility (“someone else should act on climate change before or instead of you”), pushing non-transformative solutions (“fossil fuels are part of the solution”), emphasizing the downsides (“requiring electric vehicles will hurt the poor worst”), and promoting doomerism (“climate change is inevitable so we may as well accept it instead of trying to fight it”).

    And here’s the thing. We need both individual and collective action to mitigate climate change.

    Arguing that only individual action can stop climate change is delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.

    Arguing that only collective action can stop climate change and individual action is useless is also delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.

    The propaganda takes an extreme position on both sides and encourages people to fight with another instead of unifying and acting - much like how foreign propagandists in the United States take aggressive, controversial positions on the far left and far right to worsen dissent and discourage unity.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/08/05/scientists-dissect-the-tactics-of-climate-delayers/

    European scientists last month catalogued what they call the “Four Discourses of Climate Delay”—arguments that facilitate continued inaction.

    1 Redirecting Responsibility

    U.S. politicians blaming India and China, Irish farmers blaming motorists, organizations blaming individuals—these common techniques evade responsibility and delay action.

    “Policy statements can become discourses of delay if they purposefully evade responsibility for mitigating climate change,” the scientists say.

    The scientists label as “individualism” the claim that individuals should take responsibility through personal action. I asked if it weren’t also a discourse of delay when activists insist that individual climate action is pointless, that only systemic action can address the problem.

    That too is a discourse of delay, replied Giulio Mattioli, a professor of transport at Dortmund University. The team considered including it under the label “structuralism,” but decided it’s not common enough to include.

    (Depends on where you are. I’d argue that’s very, very common among high consumption American activists.)

    A fascinating study about how much people have internalized these discourses of delay is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000797#:~:text=Consisting of four overarching narratives,with its own emotional resonance)%2C