Literally. That’s why the United States didn’t ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Recognizing the rights of children would have limited the rights of parents to control their children. It would have made parents less free to do whatever they want to their kids. And we can’t have that.
(Edit: also the freedom of states to execute juvenile offenders. Forgot about that. The freedom to kill kids is vital to American culture.)
Dude would have been a great president, and having him at the helm instead of Bush would have drastically change global politics to this very day.
People keep saying that and they keep being wrong.
There was no daylight between Bush and Gore on foreign policy, and very little daylight between Bush and Gore on domestic policy.
A hypothetical Gore administration would have invaded Afghanistan. It would have invaded Iraq. It would have implemented the Patriot Act and instituted the policy of destabilizing Muslim countries to honeypot terrorist groups into civil war (the so-called “Bush Doctrine”), all the vicious realpolitik warmongering that Kissenger taught Clinton and Bush and Obama to do so well.
Understand: we have lived under the Kissinger Administration from 1972 to the present day. Anybody who thinks a different President would have made a difference in global politics is fooling themselves.
That’s why you have multiple security teams, each reporting to you through a different chain of command, so that disloyalty in one group won’t spread to others and one leader can’t win the loyalty of all your forces.
And that’s why you have additional security teams whose job is to spy on the others and report disloyalty back to you.
And that’s why your security teams are not deployed where their families live, so if one team stages a coup their families will be elsewhere, in the hands of other, hopefully loyal, security forces.
Oh hey you just reinvented government.
Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.
And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.
I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.
So here’s how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they’re so fundamentally repulsive.
You’re homeless. Let’s say you just got evicted and you’re broke so you’re sleeping in your car.
A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.
You can’t pay the fine, because you have no money, because you’re homeless.
The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don’t get, because you have no mailing address, because you’re homeless.
When you don’t show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.
You get arrested and thrown in jail.
The prison charges you $50 a night.
When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can’t, because you’re homeless.
Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can’t pay, because you’re homeless.
And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.
And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn’t help you at all.
And ultimately you go from “temporarily financially unstable” to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal “gratuities”, so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn’t be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.
And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you’ll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.
And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.
Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.
We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.
When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.
If it helps, don’t think of it as dying early. Think of it as dying at a normal time. It’s earlier generations of Westerners that lived abnormally long lives. They lived in the “sweet spot” when childhood diseases had been defeated by vaccines and we hadn’t yet poisoned the environment with forever chemicals and microplastics, and benefited from the colonial wealth extracted from the rest of the world to give most of their white elders the best possible medical care in their last years - medical care the average person can no longer access or afford.
Simple fact: the 80-year life expectancies the last few generations enjoyed had never been seen before in human history and will never be seen again.
Yawn.
“Genocide” only applies to humans. The correct term for animals is “extinction”.
And I remind you: we humans control when and if our domestic livestock breed. And we let specific breeds of domestic livestock go extinct all the time. There are dozens of breeds of cows and chickens and sheep that are now extinct because they were replaced by other, more useful breeds - or the cultures that bred them were wiped out. Consider the Tautersheep, for example.
Let me be blunt. If scientists developed synthetic wool that was chemically identical to sheep wool but ten times cheaper, domestic sheep would be extinct within a decade. And nobody but sheep farmers would complain. So when carnists argue we have a moral duty to the species of domestic sheep to continue breeding them for human use I just roll my eyes.
in no small part because it’s much more difficult to get the nutrition you need from a vegan diet without money.
Lol. Compare the price of a pound of beans and a pound of beef and get back to me, would you?
I can’t get more specific about costs unless you get specific about what you mean by “nutrition”, but studies have consistently found plant based diets are both cheaper and healthier than omnivorous diets. Especially the average American diet.
Nothing makes the average person angrier than telling them their consumption matters.
Blame governments! Blame Taylor Swift! Blame the 100 fossil fuel companies that produce 70% of the world’s fossil fuels, and the factory farms covering entire states in corn monoculture to fatten billions of tortured animals, and the multinational corporations filling the oceans with garbage and our veins with microplastics!
But don’t ask who is buying that plastic garbage, or eating those animals, or whose cars and homes are burning those fuels.
Don’t you dare expect me to change what I eat and wear and drive.
The majority of children born today are born in densely populated - and highly polluted - cities where they can’t see the stars, and are unlikely to ever have enough disposable income to travel for pleasure. The thesis holds.
Not sure beating up old men for hot takes benefits anybody.
It’s often told how the Nazis banned and burned “degenerate” art - art with messages they didn’t want people to hear.
It’s less often told how the Nazis set up art galleries to celebrate art they found useful - art that supported their ideology or the cultural and social messages they wanted the German people to believe, and so was valuable to them.
If art serves the desires of the wealthy and powerful instead of the needs of the people, that art is fascist. Disrupting it is not an attack on free speech; It is a blow for liberty.
The message given by climate activists disrupting a play is far more important than the message given by the play itself. I expect the audience will remember the disruption for far longer than they would have remembered the play - particularly given the irony of the message of the activists paired with the original message of the play itself. And I hope they think deeply about that message.
So I did a little math.
This site says a single ChatGPT query consumes 0.00396 KWh.
Assume an average LED light bulb is 10 watts, or 0.01 kwh/hr. So if I did the math right, no guarantees there, a single ChatGPT query is roughly equivalent to leaving a light bulb on for 20 minutes.
So if you assume the average light bulb in your house is on a little more than 3 hours a day, if you make 10 ChatGPT queries per day it’s the equivalent of adding a new light bulb to your house.
Which is definitely not nothing. But isn’t the end of the world either.
I deeply dislike the line of argument that goes “we shouldn’t bother reducing our personal energy consumption because 100 corporations produce 70% of greenhouse gases” or similar arguments. Of course we should. Because it’s the right thing to do.
But it’s also true: those 100 corporations and their ilk absolutely promote a false narrative that personal responsibility is the solution to climate change, in order to prevent climate regulation that might harm their bottom line.
And frankly, I think that’s what’s going on here with panic over AI power consumption. Corporate lobbyists and PR creating yet another distraction to slow the course of climate regulation and guilting ordinary people for doing ordinary things in the process.
In my city there are a lot of bicycle lanes but practically no bike racks near any businesses - and the lanes themselves avoid the main commercial streets and wind through residential neighborhoods instead.
It’s painfully obvious the bicycle infrastructure is designed for rich yuppies exercising and not commuting or shopping. Because fuck the poors.
Yep. Which is why any government that’s serious about the environment needs to provide significant subsidies so people can get rid of their old polluting technology without being financially punished for it. We can’t have climate justice without economic justice.
Dude’s smuggling the HFCs because they keep old refrigeration units running and keeps people from having to buy new. And new units are so shoddy and poorly made that - even with the black market markup - it makes more sense financially to buy gas and keep the old ones running. And when big corporations can buy themselves exemptions and bribe inspectors and ignore greenhouse gas regulations completely, I don’t really care about some guy making a living with small time residential violations.
Not to mention the atmosphere is global. If this person didn’t smuggle HFCs into the United States, they’d be used in Mexico or wherever just the same. Throwing the book at him doesn’t keep a single molecule of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
And frankly, anybody who thinks there’s no reason to reduce your personal consumption when a hundred big corporations produce 70% of all pollution, or whatever the talking point is, doesn’t have any standing to criticize this guy. You think personal consumption is not a problem? Then how can selling gas to individuals for residential use be a problem?
The solution isn’t throwing the book at random poor people trying to make a living in the hope it’ll discourage the hundreds of others the law doesn’t catch. The solution is better technology and a more equitable distribution of resources so there’s nobody who wants to use the old systems and nobody who can’t afford better.
It’s modeled after the Texas abortion law which allowed anyone to sue anyone else who “aided or abetted” a prohibited abortion - so if you were a doctor, a nurse, a driver taking a woman to a clinic, a family member who helped pay for the abortion, any random Texan who knew about the abortion could sue you and get a bounty for doing it.
That law became irrelevant after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, of course. But I believe that strategy - giving ordinary citizens the power to file weaponized lawsuits against your political enemies, giving them a financial incentive to do so, and then turning them loose - is going to be seen as transformative in American politics. It’s one of the greatest Republican legal innovations in the last two decades. It gives those tiny radical conservative special interest groups, populated by Quiverfull homeschooled kids who went to law school and joined the Heritage Foundation to fight for God in the courtroom, an enormous amount of power - and it means, if you’re doing something Republicans don’t like, you have an enormous potential liability, because anyone could sue you at any time. And since you’re guaranteed to have a conservative judge in most jurisdictions in the United States, very few organizations are going to take that risk.
Conservatives spent the last two generations fighting to capture the judicial branch. And they succeeded. And now they’re trying to funnel more and more power away from other branches of government and to the judicial system so they can exploit that power. And they’re doing it very, very, effectively.