Tiresia

What do you plan to do with a hoard of guns and ammo? Get yourself killed so people can loot your bunker?

You're reading my comment backwards. I'm not saying it's okay to exile someone just because you have 20 people, I'm saying it's absurd to consider it a problem that you can't exile someone when you can't even get 20 people together to do it.

You were the one complaining about not getting to exile them. You were the one wanting to use a power structure to commit violence. I'm just saying you can't cheat by using cops as a force multiplier.

If you want a power structure to commit violence you're going to have to convince people that its existence is just. You can't just say that the people doing it are cops and therefore shouldn't be stopped.

And I disagree that the Mafia arose in southern Italy due to things going on in the USA. I hope that helps. (Though to throw you a bone - people want justice and safety, and without anarchist principles there are many unjust ways to provide a shitty version of the two).

I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.

Those anarchists aren't telling you to be violent over a disagreement, they're telling you that if you aren't willing to be violent over something you shouldn't be able to send a cop to be violent for you.

When a law requires constant violence to be upheld, that doesn't mean you should personally be violent, it means your law sucks. Cops are a crutch that allows unjust laws to be enforced.

Because if we are too optimistic and prepare for the wrong future, hundreds of millions of people will die that didn't need to.

Climate adaptation is necessary to prevent people 50 years from now from resorting to fossil fuels, war, or ecosystem destruction to try to avoid starvation.

I'm optimistic about our ability to affect change. The difference between 2.5K warming and 4.5K warming is hard to comprehend, and we still have that to play for. How soon will New Orleans or Miami or Amsterdam be surrendered to the sea? What refugee infrastructure awaits their inhabitants? How much has the world economy prepared for the loss of these cities and the surrounding regions? It depends on us. There is so much we can still do that matters.

Through it runs my AC ducts which are insulated pretty poorly from what I can tell

If that includes the warm duct, that's an electric space heater with extra steps. So not surprising it would get hot in there.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that permanently shading the roof and leaving an air gap above it would not improve things in addition to the presence of insulation and the attic itself

The question is whether it would improve the situation more or less than spending an equal amount of value on building houses with taller roofs and thicker insulation, or insulating the AC ducts, or allowing the hot air to cycle out at night, or something else. If you only compare it to not having it, of course it will have some benefit.

but principle is a luxury of the wealthy

This is the opposite of true. When you're poor you can't afford to take a chance on people, so you have to rely on people whose principles guide them to doing things that help you. So when someone with these principles is suffering, it's in your self interest to help them out so they can help you when you're in trouble.

Poor communities run on principles. Hospitality, loving your neighbor, forgiving your enemies, treating others as you treat yourself, trusting each other with your life, utterly ostracizing those that break the principles, etc.

This is also why religion is so big in many poor communities. It's a set of principles for that community to rely on that is predictable even if it isn't perfect. You don't know which principles will only have you to work for others and which ones will have others work for you, but in total you will all work for each other when you most need it, and that helps you through the worst of poverty.

And principles work. They're massively profitable for every society that has them. Socialist healthcare is the principle that we all pay for everyone's health care no matter what, and it extends people's lives by 5 years while costing 70% less compared to capitalist healthcare.

Between people who have fewer principles, trust is expensive or even impossible. Every piece of nuance opens up risk that you have to mitigate with labor or reserves.

Principles are so massively beneficial that we are immediately suspicious when someone with both power and principles doesn't make our lives better. Are we really in that unlucky small percentage of people that pay more into it than we get out, or do their principles not care about us as much as we thought?

The DNC has principles, but caring about the working class is pretty far down the list. Mamdani ran on principles that put the working class much higher, so he could be honest about the policies that result from them and just win.

Trump ran on fostering that suspicion into complete disbelief. The DNC won't help you, nor will establishment republicans, nor even religion and its commandments ("Love thy neighbor"? No, "the sin of empathy").

When nothing means anything and you can't trust anyone, how can you keep yourself relatively safe? Well, you try to be the most like the most powerful people that will accept you (for now) and bundle together with those that are most like them to fight those who are less like them.

And because you can't trust anything, the best way to determine who is like them is things that are relatively visible that can not be changed or are difficult to change - race, religious rituals and paraphenalia, culture, nationality, wealth and power, cultish devotion to the great leader, etc.

This is fascism, and there is no exit clause. They'll fight until they lose, and if they ever run out of enemies they shrink the circle and fight everyone outside that.

So let's honor our principles. And if we find that our principles keep hurting those around us, just get better principles.

So I went into a bit of a deep dive.

Observatory.wiki is curated by members of the Independent Media Institute. The Independent Media Institute has, as one of its major donors the New World Foundation.

The New World Foundation was founded by a billionaire heiress, had Hillary Clinton as one of its board members in the 80s, is New Left (rejecting ties with labor to focus on personal liberties), and has investments in tobacco companies, fast fashion companies, and logging companies. Joan Roelofs, a professor in political science, used it as a case study of how donations (and the threat of withholding them) are used to push left-wing charities towards compliance with neoliberal ideas in her book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.

It is unsurprising, then, that this story credits neoliberal globalists initiatives without skepticism or broader contextualization. Maybe it really is that simple and the US helped Kazachstan out of the goodness of its heart. Wouldn't that be nice?

Though... why does it credit Kazachstan for preserving 'their part' of the Aral Sea by creating a massive dam? Don't dams keep water out of places? Why is Uzbekistan given the blame here, when the article says that the US helped Kazachstan first and Uzbekistan second? Did the US just work together with Kazachstan to monopolize the Kazach part of the water flowing into the Aral sea and then blame Uzbekistan for the shared lake continuing to dry up?

Is the US holding the Aral Sea hostage to pressure Uzbekistan into compliance?

(disclaimer: this is less than an hour's work. I could truly be mistaken. Please do more thorough research before using this as evidence).

Most people don't work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.

Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn't need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn't buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.

Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.

That's called an attic. And yes, attics do help the floors below get less warm.

When you have an attic, you can go further by insulating the roof - this keeps the warm day air out, and during the night you can open windows to let the cool night air in. Historically roof insulation was done with thick layers of thatch, though light-weight synthetic alternatives are more common in modern construction. A well-insulated roof won't let through any appreciable amount of heat.

Then as things get hotter, build the roof taller, allow for natural air flow to dissipate the heat, and finally put the building on stilts so air can flow under it.

Retrofitting existing buildings to have space for good insulation is expensive, especially with the atrocities the US has been building in suburbs for the past 80 years.

Completely different world, yes. Preventing irreversible climate impacts, no.

Of course the most important thing we can do from now on is always action now rather than looking back on what could have been, but IMO it's critical to the credibility of climate scientists to be honest about the damage that has already been done. Articles like these make it sound like it's all made up because the window has been "rapidly closing" since 1960.

The average life expectancy will drop by a decade compared to where it is now in 2025. It is too late to prevent that. Over a billion people will die from famine, climate disaster, or the disease and war that result from people trying to escape hunger and climate disaster. We have to make peace with that and make clear that these deaths are the result of people's inaction.

If we continue the current course for even just the next decade, life expectancy will drop by another two decades. Billions more will die. That is worth fighting to prevent with every fiber of our being.

Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don't try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there's so much money going into AI? They can't wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won't affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won't find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, "pessimism" is an odd phrase, but they'll be glad to hear you're warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, "abandon" is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Right now we're clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.

With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I'm pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.