Tiresia

Yeah, destroying the planet to exacerbate wealth inequality really is a distraction from the scapegoat figurehead that has survived a hundred scandals being a child rapist. Surely this time if we focus all of our attention on the scandalproof figurehead's scandals rather than any of the issues, we're going to win. I know it sank two elections, but this time it's different. Because that's what's really wrong with the current US administration: Not imprisoning people without trial or destroying libraries of scientific knowledge, but the figurehead having some something wrong personally.

I guess Trump was right - when you're a star, you can grab them by the pussy and you can do anything.

Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.

You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.

People that vote right wing aren't better off just because they voted that way. They're not tyrants oppressing the left, they're fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn't win them anything.

The solution to right-wing banding isn't left wing banding, it's disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they're being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.

Leftist "infighting" is healthy. It's a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.

Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.

To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).

Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn't mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we're black bagged one by one.

Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.

If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it's the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they've diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It's not collusion; it's covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other's hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won't accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

Need more lithium and also have a growing junk stash of tons of lithium batteries full of … lithium? Take a minute … see if you can get there.

Why do you complain about needing food? There's a pile of excrement right there. It's the same elemental composition as what you normally eat.

So sad that this genocide isn't ecologically friendly...

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.