happybadger

Name a historical generation that didn't face existential fear. To me it's just something to accept as an absurdist. If I was a communist at any point since Marx I'd be facing near-future death. If I wasn't a communist at any point since Marx I'd be facing near-future death from the things that I'm against as a communist. Nothing about the future is guaranteed and history isn't kind to individuals.

I wonder why they even dedicated floor space to this. If I'm spending an obscene amount of money on a piano, it's a surrogate penis to wag at guests. Bosendorfer is prestigious in the piano world but I can't think of a time I've noticed it on a piano even though I've watched thousands of performances. Steinways can be bought at half this price and any random schmuck walking into your house knows the name. With this you'd have to explain that you spent $180k on a piano that isn't a Steinway for it to be impressive to a non-pianist. Otherwise a concert pianist isn't going to buy this at Costco. Music stores will at least set it up and tune it.

If democracy is social but not economic, it isn't democratic. I can vote for the guy who will tax my boss less, but I can't vote to elect a new boss or increase my pay or decrease my rent. My boss, landlord, and the political class all enshrine their own power over me the more they amass wealth. When their vote has more weight than my vote, it's the same dynamic as pretending to let your pet choose something. The illusion of control obscures a fundamentally uneven relationship.

Under socialism, my vote improves my life. It isn't a pressure valve to prevent revolution, but a means of achieving it across all the spheres of my life.

Agrivoltaics is great and should be a central feature of a lot of land. Most of my pollinator gardens would thrive if I had partial shade through the drought months, and it costs like $1000+ a month to power some of our larger parks. Watering those parks, especially near the seating areas with non-functional roofs or exposed benches, is another $1000+ a month. With these installed we could probably reduce both by a double digit percentage while creating more enriching spaces.

I vote for ballot initiatives and then use the DSA's voter guide for local elections. For president it's always PSL. Voting for a DSA member isn't getting an ML revolution, but it is sewer socialism at a local level. Sewer socialism is powerful in a country where the little infrastructure that does work still drives a 20th century society. Americans are radicalised into fascism twice a day on their commute.

Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution?

Accelerationism falls into the same wishful thinking category as adventurism. Not wanting blood on my hands is why I don't vote for democrats. If I throw a chaotic evil boomerang by voting for a fascist, that's just voting for a democrat and hoping it blows back on enough people to do something before hitting me. The closest thing I've found to a good ML path is what the Black Panthers were doing in the 1960-70s. Electoralism and existing power structures might have been cynically engaged, like funding the mutual aid initiatives or electing a politician who might give them breathing room, but power came from organising in their communities and building up dual structures that linked intersectionally with other orgs. Revolution was putting up a stop sign where the city wouldn't so that the residents watching learned that they had power. It was feeding hungry kids while their parents were engaged in discussions about their issues. Those things can't be trusted to electoralism because politicians are temporary and usually replaced by their opposite.

Fediverse courts need to convict Rimu of weird moderator actions that are not normal.

Rimu needs to be the first person since Conner O'Malley to be criminally convicted for being weird. Rimu, why do you choose to be this person?

I love watching interviews with him about this acquisition and then visiting the subreddits for his stock cultists. He's an even more transparent charlatan than Elon Musk and struggles to form a sentence. The podcast hosts and news anchors were visibly cringing. His supporters treat it like the return of Christ because it might finally trick someone else into investing in gamestop so they can sell their shares, but it only bumped the price for a single day.

I think Bryan Johnson has a valuable role in longevity research, but because of his background and vampire psychopathy I think that role is proving a head can be kept alive in a jar. Not conscious, not able to interact with the world, just physiologically alive enough to one day be restored. So many mice take his place in these studies and it isn't fair to them because they could contribute something to the world.

https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2052466542445805988

Just a magnificently long string of words arranged in that order for god knows what reason.

My picture that says "🚨 I HAVE NO MICROPLASTICS IN MY BALLS 🚨

This should not be possible.

Studies show that 100% of men have microplastics in their semen. I am the first human ever to show a complete reduction to zero.

This may be a world-first breakthrough in fertility research.

I had 165 microplastic particles in my semen just 18 months ago. Now, I have zero." has one person asking a lot of questions already answered by my picture.

I like using nature as the proof of dialectics. Nothing exists in isolation. You can't point to the individual anything that produced itself and isn't impacted by the environment it shapes. The world is ecosystems on top of ecosystems, all of them interconnected and interdependent. They're obviously part of the natural collective of the biosphere. If someone acts individually and pollutes a river, that has downstream consequences that degrade systems it only has a tertiary connection to. Waterways are the commons because they're a natural collective with individual responsibility for the health of the ecosystem supporting our health. If a world of individualists ignore the collective nature of the biosphere, we fill the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than it can dissipate. Only collectivist action can address the collective problem of climate change or its consequences.

The human ecosystems built on the natural ones aren't different. You survived childhood because a community was raised by historical communities. If an individualist went against their collective responsibility and polluted your waterways, you'd die of some illness. If that common water wasn't delivered through pipes the collective produced, you'd be dead within a few days or fighting other individualists to drain the diseased wells they shit in. If the collective bodies of science and food systems didn't align, you'd starve. The dysfunctions in those systems come from individualists rebelling against the collective responsibilities to ethics and socioecological impacts. Individualists seeking profit or glory at the expense of someone else, collective progress held behind individualistic corporate patents, grocers that punish the hungry for starving and the farmers for growing food.

What they're doing is protestant work ethic shit, moral Calvinism meant to trick them into thinking they can solve climate change by recycling by the polluting industries. A boss can use that to abuse and dehumanise their workers. The wealthy can use it to explain why they shouldn't pay taxes while stealing from the socioecological systems they degrade. It's good logic if you already have power and can afford to meet all of your own needs in a bunker you built yourself, but for anyone who lives in a society it's bad logic. I don't know my neighbours' names but if their lives get worse because I enrich myself at their expense, they will steal all of my nice things and shoot me. If climate change or a tax deficit or an economic crash collapses that society and there isn't a collectivist framework to protect me, being an individualistic prepper just makes me a target for people who don't feel obligated to support their neighbours.