PumpkinSkink

@PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world
0 Post – 61 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

So if throwing paint at a entierly replaceable cover for a dusty old painting is too far gone to be acceptable, what action can we take to stop oil production? Like. It needs to stop. To continue producing fossil fuels is a death cult. It needs to stop, like, a decade ago. I ask genuinely, how is this too far, and what is an acceptable response to an existential threat?

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That wasn't my question. But if you must know, if the choice is between "maintaining the current standard of living" and "stop risking the habitability of the one place known that can support life", I choose the latter. Everytime. And it's crazy to choose the former.

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I really wish people would look at it in this lens more. I think this is a big part of why we're see this same issue in many developed countries. Like, yes. Xenophobia and racism is a part of it, but the other, more actionable part of it is that all of our viable political options have turned into technocrats who have used their political and economic expertise to fatten the richest people, and largest, most profitable industries at the expense of the poor for decades. This reality has bred resentment, distrust, and disinterest in politics, especially of political moderates and "status quo" politicians. All major left-wing opposition has been suppressed, or neutered, and as a result the only truly "oppositional" seeming politics come from far right nut jobs and they end up being the release valve for the political frustration. People can only hear "the economy is doing great", while watching their children struggle to afford even a modest standard of living (by the standards we've come to expect) for so long before they become desperate for a significant change.

But he... wasn't. He lost the presidency in 1932 to Paul Von Hindenburg (53% to 37%. not even particularly close) who later appointed Hitler under pressure to the channclorship (which was an appointed role) in 1933. Hindenburg died in January of 1934 and Hitler de facto merged the presidency and chancelorship into one office (Fuhrer). The story isn't "regular people put Hitler in power", it's "broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists".

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When toxic "econimistism" comes home to roost. A "strong economy" as measured by stock markets and company profits, both owned primarily by the extremely wealthy is not the same as "working class people are doing well economically", which is what should be meant by "a strong economy" if it were not for the neoliberal brain rot.

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Hey! It's the part where the "centrists" betray the left and cede power to the facists! Damn. You'd think someone would write a new script or something.

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Well, y'know, we were an explicit apartheid state for 80% of our history, and were founded on the back of slavery and genocide so brutal it served as the blueprint for Nazi Germany... The more alarming part is that anyone is proud of our nation.

Nominally pretty far from it. She's part of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's (the current president of Mexico) Morena party.

I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements... but it's a stretch to say that suggests "alien life might not be carbon-based". Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it's poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as "life" beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.

I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.

Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who's inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.

tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you're at it.

George Bush Jr. has the most impressive ability to sound like the dumbest motherfucker in the room always. He should also be tried as a war criminal.

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Even if they're right, that just means I won't be able to afford those "Miracle Medications" anyway...

There's good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.

The most important features to carbon in this context are:

  1. Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.

  2. Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren't just wiggly noodles of atoms.

  3. Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of "goldilocks zone" where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.

  4. Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.

No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it's very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.

Fascists fundamentally support political violence as a method for "solving division". Anyone who is not a fascist and supports such violence at this moment needs to understand that political violence is going to backfire and play into the fascist's hands unless you can first build alternative systems of power and support outside of the government.

If you start violence without that network of support in place, you will disrupt people's lives, and the only support structure that can help will be the current Government. The military will be the ones providing food, medicine, and shelter. If you don't have a strategy to get regular people affected by the disruption food, water, healthcare and shelter, you're going to make the government the hero.

If you're not a fascist, and believe political violence is necessary, your first step isn't violence, your first step is to take a page from The Black Panthers and starting a community breakfast program.

While everyone is right about the reasoning, no one brought up the relevant historical example: Eugene Debs in the 1920 Election... which is unfortunate because it's a good one.

Euegen Debs was a socialist candidate who ran in the 1920 elections after being jailed by Wilson's Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing the US joining WW1 and the accompanying draft.

National Conservatives... hmmm Nat Cons... Nat Cs

"No matter the odds, or personal cost, we did the right thing... in this spirit that I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year"

Never thought we'd agree. Hope more people decide to make the right choice.

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I mean realistically the most obvious thing to me is that something has to be done to make the prospect of having children less daunting. I can't speak to Japan, but for my friends here, in our early 30s, we're only just now getting to a place where moving out of our parents/a 5 person roommate situation is feasible. Many of us don't have long-term romantic prospects, and work all the fucking time. Ok top of that, having a kid just sounds terrifying. The cost, and amount of effort needed to see a kid not have a terrible life is daunting (I'm a teacher. Just imaging the amount of effort I, as a parent, would need to put in to have a average kid succeed in a school environment is horrifying)

I imagine a real intervention for this sort of thing looks like less work; good, free child care; our cities building culturally relevant community spaces that people actually want to go to outside of the internet; and creating a culture of community-oriented sharing of the responsibilities of caring for children. In short, we'd need to make our society one that's less hostile to having kids. That seems pretty obvious, and from my understanding, a lot of these factors are worse in Japan than in the US.

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Mike Johnson all but said he has the Democratic votes to avoid the fate of his predesessor. This might be the "Sedition Caucus"'s death knell if he's right. This is basically all their leverage.

Not a historian, nor Italian, so double check me on this, but a big part of the "why" is that the facists were never removed from Italy. They've just been kind of allowed to fester since 1946. I mean, Germany didn't really get rid of their facists either, but the Italian facist movement was basically unscathed. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) was founded in 1946 by Facists literally from Mussolini's party, and maintained relevance by making political alliances with other, more moderate conservative parties.

Some facists just straight up joined the Liberal parties. Fernando Tambroni, Christian Democratic Prime Minister of Italy for 116 days in 1960, for instance, was a Facist Party member during the war, and was quite the fan of Mussolini. The subsequent Prime Minister, Christian Democrat Party leader, Amintore Fanfani, who served five non-consecutive terms as PM, was also a member of the Facist Party.

In the 90s other facist parties, particularly Forza Italia, and Alleanza Nazionale were spun off from MSI and basically wore a better better mask, and managed to get Berlusconi, also a Mussolini Stan, in as PM.

We could continue doing pointing out facists in powerful positions in Italian politics, and we skipped the whole "decades of facist terrorism" thing, but really the reason Italy jumped to fascism is because it has been there the whole time, and has had power semi-regularly.

who's gonna ask her?

A US citizen who immigrated to Israel. Israel allows (nearly) anyone of Jewish heritage to immigrate (Link) , and so a lot of Israelis are of another nationality as well.

This reminds me of that time. England and Iceland went to "war" over fishing rights in the 70s and just, like, cut fishing nets and rammed each other's boats

it'd be a great place to grow some weed.

I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked "AI" product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can't not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone's screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I've had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that's "AI" it's no fucking wonder people avoid it.

Noone is saying that. The argument is pretty much that people want more scrutiny applied to other companies beyond tiktok, and ideally not be under constant surveillance by any of them, not that people want to be monitored by all police states equally.

I notice a fair number of people suggesting that it might give incentive to corrupt the public media outlet, or that it may be biased toward the government funding it... and yeah... that's probably true to one degree or another. But, that said, I think we all should take a moment and think honestly about bias in media. All media is biased, especially the ones that claim they're unbiased. Just because it's privately funded doesn't make it any less succeptible to corruption or bias. Indeed one of the biggest complains about our news is that the majority of media companies are owned and operated by, what is it, six(?) companies, and we know they all mislead people regularly on issues that affect them. Instead of focusing on removing bias from media, we should all be more diligent about being skeptical of the author's presentation of the media we consume regardless of funding source, and particularly when it is selling is info that we agree with and that angers us.

Says the guy who literally built a fucking pier to delivery food because Israel won't let trucks go through on the road.

If i chop up a cucumber and throw it in a bowl with some vinegarette, I call it a cucumber salad.

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Careful. You're saying the quiet part outloud.

Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.

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Liberals should be careful with this. Y'all want them to feel like Trump did alright. We can't have him being switched out at the 11th hour for a more competent candidate

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They got part of one demand (4 days of sick leave for some workers, iirc) out of 5 or 6 demands ( more pay, 15 days sick leave leave than they got, different scheduling that would allow for more time to inspect trains to prevent shit like East Palestine, Ohio, amongst other things). Absolutely not everything. He took away their right to strike and gave them the tiniest possible consession so that people would go and defend him by saying "ok. He crushed the strike, but he actually turned around and helped them get what they wanted after". Purely doing whatever is politically convient, just like him standing on the picket line with the auto workers only a few months later. Disgusting. Thank for reminding me why he sucks.

No OP, but I've been using it for a bit now, and while it's not perfect, it does make it really easy to read news from other parts of the world and to look into the background of various outlets. It makes it easy to get around pay walls and article limits and It's also, like, $10 a year... and it's pretty easy to get a "1 dollar for a year sub" promo code from any random politics YouTuber. It's been a decent way to keep me from just defaulting to Reuters and AP instead of reading other outlets, which I would say is it's best feature for me.

I have similar suspicions, but my great concern is that, at that point, the solution that many countries will come to will be to start shoot migrants at the border rather than to actually do anything to mitigate the root cause of the migrations.

No the part where he's leaving.

Uhh there's a paywall, but I'm gonna presume they said something to the effect of: "Pweze Impwemewnt IMF style-SAPs and privatize Petrobras. Pweze".

Their solution will be "shoot migrants" not "solve climate change".

I'm kinda surprised how few people have mentioned Chrono Cross. It's not the same game, but it has a lot of cross over, and might help scratch that itch for "more chronotrigger".

The fact is, however, that they impinge— as they always have— on the Arab residents of the territories, and then they have a distinct cutting edge to them. Both in theory and in practice their effectiveness lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it.     There is privileged evidence of this fact, I think, in what Joseph Weitz had to say. From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel. On December 19, 1940, he wrote:

_". . . after the Second World War the question of the land of Israel and the question of the Jews would be raised beyond the framework of “ development"; amongst ourselves. !t must be clear that there is no room for hoth peoples in this country. No 'development' will bring us closer to our aim. To be an independent people in this small country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.

When the War is over and the English have won, and when the judges sit on the throne of Law, our people must bring theirpetitions and their claim before them; and the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point! The Zionist enterprise so far, in terms of preparing the ground and paving the way for the creation of the Hebrew State in the land of Israel, has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘‘land-buying ’— but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all: except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a singlevillage, not a single tribe. And the transfer must be directed to Iraq, to Syria, and even to Transjordan. For that purpose we’ll find money, and a lot of money. And only with such a transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers, and the Jewish question shall be solved, once and for all. There is no other way out."_

    These are not only prophetic remarks about what was going to happen; they are also policy statements, in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus. There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists, beginning with Herzl. and when ‘salvation' came it was with those ideas in mind that the conquest of Palestine, and the eviction of its Arabs, was carried out.

~The Question of Palestine, Edward Said

There's literally dozens of other quotes like this one from people instrumental in the founding of Israel in this chapter, and they are similarly genocidal. It was honestly pretty transparent what they were going for.