This is tragic.

Language is really important, to a degree that most mono-lingual people just do not fathom. I am mono-lingual, when I was younger I thought language was just a way to communicate. That language diversity is a bad thing, because it creates barriers between people groups. I thought that in a globally connected world not knowing the most popular language puts people at a disadvantage, so we ought to all learn the same language, and obviously that should be the one I grew up with.

That is a deeply colonial mindset. English, French, and Spanish are only as popular as they are because of Colonialism. The world is globally connected today because certain groups of people worked very hard to conquer, exploit, and repress everyone they could. This process continues today, in different forms. The unmitigated disaster that is the Climate Crisis has been a direct result of colonization and the economic system it created. Nearly every component of this situation, climate emergency, language extinction, globalized planet, is the result of horrible systems and acts. So the idea that people should try to fit into this world, that easier communication on the terms of the conquerers is good, is wrong. I was wrong, and you might be too.

The other part of this that’s important is the value of language. I will focus on one aspect of that value. More than simple communication, the languages we know structure the ways we can think. The relationships between concepts in a language, as well as the concepts themselves, set the stage for the sorts of thoughts a speaker (or signer or writer) can have. Language diversity matters in part because diversity in language means diversity in thought.

There are whole sets of concepts you and I cannot fathom, because we lack the linguistic framework to explore them. This touches everything we experience, from emotions to gender to philosophy to law to the common experiences we have every day. Look around you, and I’m sure you can find something you lack the words for. The particular way that a tree’s branches connect and sway, the vast variety of sounds that machines make, the particular feeling of knowing something you can never hope to fully convey. And I’m just an English speaker, think of all the possible ideas that these peoples who are losing their languages do have, and imagine the infinite possibility of what they could concieve. Such a tiny sliver of life thinking is, but even it’s consideration overwhelms me. What endless beauty there is in the possibilities our lives contain, yet all of it is being systematically destroyed. There is a feeling I get when thinking about this, maybe you get it too, “tragic” feels inadequate for such a thing.

It feels so weird to see her character compared to cartoonishly evil ones like Darth Vader and the Joker. When watching the movie she is clearly a very damaged person, her character is tragic. The way she treats Gump makes sense, her culture is intensely ableist which combined with her trauma provides context to her actions. The idea that she is somehow a bigger asshole than a domestic terrorist with no concrete backstory, a serial killer, or even evil space jesus, is ridiculous. Frankly it reeks of casual sexism whenever I see people smear her, it feels like folks are either parrotting the opinions they found online, or never tried to understand her character while watching the movie.

Wow, wrong from the first sentence of the subtitle. I’ll concede that a democrat will do less damage than a republican in the white house, but beyond that I take issue with this opinion piece.

The Willow project. The Biden administration approved this expansion of oil production, against the outcry of millions of people, most notably the Native Village of Nuiqsut and City of Nuiqsut. This opinion piece focusses on the fact that this project will directly release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. What is not mentioned is the habitat destruction, poisoning of fish, harm to caribou, air and water pollution, and blatant disrespect to the Native people who are directly affected (I’m not even going to get into how resource extraction causes much of the crisis of MMIWG2S).

As the author concedes in the article’s conclusion, the specifics do matter. So how, specifically, does his opinion piece counter the fact the Biden administration took deliberate action to increase fossil fuel production? With a proposal they made to increase water heater efficiency, backed by a statistic that looks at the cumulative effect nearly 40 years from now. Unstated are the assumptions that this will pass, not get repealed in the future, and that industrial civilization will exist in 2060. There is a similar statistic involving automobiles and fuel efficiency, again involving a future date (2050 this time) and many assumptions, like that people will be using cars for their daily transportation 30 years from now.

These things are not comparable to the immediate harm of the Willow project, taken together they paint a grim picture, one in which fossil fuel production continues to expand while politicians push the problem down the road with reforms that assume society does not need to fundamentally change. We need action now, and the Biden administration is actively making things worse in the present while selling us an unrealistic future.

Electing Joe Biden to be President of the United States of America for a second term in 2024 will not limit global warming to 1.5⁰C. If we actually want any chance of limiting the warming of Earth to 1.5⁰C, we need nothing short of global revolution. Fossil fuel production has to stop, agriculture has to drastically change to regenerate the land, ecosystems must be healed. None of this is workable under global Capitalism, and States will never be an effective method for organizing the kind of human labor necessary to save ourselves and our home. This is a scary idea, it requires us taking personal and collective responsibility for the fate of humanity, going out of our comfort zones, and genuinely caring for one another.

Go ahead and vote for Joe, but don’t kid yourself, he isn’t a solution.

Philanthropy is a pr scam for billionaires.

It let’s them doge taxes while feeling like they are doing good in the world, while using their money to cause more problems. That article is about Gates screwing up education systems while trying to ‘fix’ them, because he has billions of dollars while the people who actually have a clue on how to fix things do not. Look into the other actions his foundation takes and you will see similar patterns, from funding destructive agriculture to sourcing their funds from private prisons.

For the claim that Buffett is doing any good to the world, in his own words:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s good to see this division inside the French State’s forces. Clearly the pressure from recent protests is having an effect. Let’s hope these cops, judges, and politicians ruin their collective ability to maintain this perverse ‘order’.

Fuck that.

The fight is not over, there is a lot that needs to be done, but this situation is far from hopeless.

We gotta organize, not to push governments into dealing with the disasters they caused, but to solve them ourselves. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, if you have any of these you can do something. Unions, of workers and tenants both, are gaining ground. We can win when we work together, and increasingly we are.

To save Earth we need to stop using fossil fuels, rapidly work to rebuild local ecosystems, and engage in intensive regenerative agriculture to feed everyone. It will be necessary to draw down hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, that is possible to do but it will take our whole species working to make it happen. That includes you, who are reading this now. You have a part to play in this, no matter how hopeless you might now feel.

To start, look towards those currently resisting. Find a way to join them, or learn from what they are doing and make it happen where you live. Maybe this means a tenant’s union, or Food not Bombs, perhaps there are local gardeners near you, or the seeds of a library economy (tool, toy, or other libraries). Try to do something, even if it feels small. Do it with other people, and don’t get discouraged.

The problem is vast in scope, but there are a lot of us, don’t give up before it’s over.

Wow, this is sick! Thanks for posting your art, it’s great to see even if I’ve never played the game.

“Food we eat” is half the size of “livestock feed”. Plus look at how small wetlands/deserts are, wetlands especially are essential to climate resillience. What egregiously bad land use, wow. Thanks for this post, it’s great.

I get that the EFF has to say this bill has “laudable goals” for political reasons, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Protecting children is a typical excuse for broad expansion of State power, and this is no different. Don’t be fooled, and remember it’s the democrats who are trying to push this through. Both major political parties in the US are enemies to personal autonomy, one is just more subtle about it. Liberation will never come from within the ruling power structure.

“Apolitical” is a political position.

If you claim to support trans rights, and with them the broader struggle for gender self determination, then you ought to support the people putting their bodies on the line to defend it. Specifically the antifacists and anarchists (many of them queer themselves) who fight facism on the streets. Supporting a group targetted for genocide requires supporting the kinds of tactics that can fight the facists working to exterminate that group.

I suppose it’s a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not “private” even if it is not publicly available.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.

It’s going to take a lot more than legal challenges to hold the people profitting off of this to account. The system is designed so that those with money can drag things out, something oil companies in particular are expert about. Plus the rich write the laws, and love fossil fuels’ effect on their wallets, I doubt they’ll take this seriously until we’re well over the brink.

But there is another way. Fossil fuel infrastructure exists physically, it can be destroyed with a few dedicated people, a good plan, and high risk tolerance. Executives and billionairres also exist in the physical world, as bodies that require food, shelter, and medical care. I’m honestly surprised there hasn’t been more focus on making change where they are weak, instead of this focus on institutions and policy where they have already stacked the deck.

They are further along their trajectory now. They were always heading this direction, that much should have been obvious to a lot of people all along. I believe it was, but that the endless propaganda of the US media machine kept most of its population from realizing it. There are all sorts of (arguably) respectable political issues conservatives of the past focussed their words on, while their actions spoke different.

Some of them might even have believed they wanted ‘small government’ or ‘fiscal responsibility’. But their actions were clear in intent, from racial segregation, to the Red Scare, to suppressing social movements, to implementing a politic of austerity. I only fail to mention war because their liberal ‘opposition’ carries roughly equal blame for the US war machine.

The people today may be different in body, action, word, but this is a continuation of a long political project that ended up in facism.

I have one of those too! Glad yours is blooming. Mine flowers sometimes, but sadly it got infected with thrips a couple years ago and I haven’t been able to kill them. It flowers less often, but does okay with regular maintenance on my end (rubbing all the surfaces with a little neem oil and soap in water).

For real, this is sobering information. I already try to avoid microwaving plastics, but I’m gonna be even more careful now, and try to spread this study. Billions of nanoplastics per square centimeter, it’s scary to think about the size of containers, number that would likely be used in a day, and the fact that infants are so small with that information in context.

I’m honestly impressed. Like, yeah, it isn’t cool to mislead people and whatnot but you know that. I hope you can find a creative writing outlet on Lemmy because I’d love to read your stories. Also, just because your stories aren’t in a book format doesn’t make them less real, if writing books is your goal then please seek it, but there are other formats that are no less “real”.

Web serials, for example, tend to be first draft work so people are about as chill about grammar as they are on reddit. Or you could take a bunch of stories you made on the internet (like you have here) and make them into a collection someday if you really want to have a book. Point is, you are actually writing, and its good writing at that. Please keep doing it, and I hope you find a place where you feel good about what you’re making, whatever that looks like to you.

They’re saying they aren’t vegetarian, so know what real chicken nuggets taste like. OP worried that people might assume they are vegetarian, and therefore might not have a good idea of what chicken nuggets taste like. That sentence is meant to avoid people assuming that.

That’s my best guess anyway.

Capitalism is inherently contradictory to my basic values, terrible at efficient economic allocation, actively destroying everything, and is built on a foundation of war and genocide.

I believe that everyone should have as much autonomy as possible. Capitalism’s basic premise is that economic allocation is determined by those who own capital, allocation of the resources communities and individuals use is an autonomy problem. Since Capitalism concentrates power among a very few, it is actively limiting the autonomy of literally billions of people for the benefit of less than a thousand.

The allocation of resources itself, the basic purpose of any economic system, is incredibly inefficient undee Capitalism. Take food, vast amounts are produced, enough to feed everyone, yet people starved to death while I was writing this. Not only that, food itself is peoduced in such a way as to maximize profit. This comes at the expense of local food systems, which have been in large part dismantled by environmental damage. It comes at the expense of vast CO2 emissions to run the machines that mine phosphorous, manufacture fertilizer and pesticides, run the various pieces of farm equipment, process food, and the planes, ships, trucks that ship it to stores. It comes at the expense of soil health, which monocropping, tilling, fallow, and agrochemicals all harm. This is just food, look at any other sphere of human activity and you will find a similar story. Meaningful measures of efficiency and system health are ignored to pump out as much profit as possible, and this gets called “efficient”.

Capitalism is the great machine that is destroying everything. Under it’s logic of endless expansion we have seen entire ecosystems bulldozed and turned into suburbs, watched millions of people be enslaved even in the present day, witnessed war and genocide on a scale never before fathomed. Both world wars happenned under Capitalism, and war has continued unabated ever since. The so-called United States is the dominant Capitalist power on Earth, and holds millions of people in legal slavery, if you don’t believe me read the 13th amendment to its constitution. Many other people are describing the results of ecosystem destruction, the Climate Catastrophe, as their primary reason for anti-capitalist beliefs.

Capitalism as a system grew under feudalism before supplanting it, and directly springboarded off of Colonialism to become the dominant economic system of this world. The horrors of colonization follow(ed) a similar logic of expansion to capital, exploiting millions of people through slavery and genocide, spreading plagues that have killed countless individuals and entire cultures, introducing poverty to places where the concept had not preciously made sense. Capitalism cannot be separated from its historical roots, if you want to learn more about this I recommend the, “A ______ People’s History of the United States” series of books. I’d prioritize the Indigenous and Black histories.

This is an indictment of Capitalism, but presents no alternatives. I will do that here.

Indigenous cultures had/have land-based economies that center care. This is not an alternative, it is thousands of them, each adapted to a local ecosystem. In order to survive we need to localize resource production, and land-based economies are the way to do that. I would recommend learning about how Indigenous people groups in your area thrived before Colonialism forcibly severed many of their connections to place, how they survive today, and how they are working to heal their relationships to the land. A related concept is that of the gift economy, a common practice for many groups world-wide, the particulars of which are as diverse as our species. Look into it, gift economies work, and operate on principles that are essentially as “anti-capitalism” as one can get.

Commons-based peer production is another, complimentary option for future economic systems. It is directly born out of the open source software movement, and imagines structuring all production around simular principles. People produce for themselves and their peers, keeping resources in common to ensure equitable allocation. If you do not believe commons can work, I would recommend looking into Ostrom’s eight principles for managing commons, just highlight that phrase and paste it into a search engine. A related concept is that of “cosmo-local production”. The idea is that physical production is localized to reduce impact on the planet (local), while information on process is shared freely with everyone (cosmo). This ties into the idea of “donut economics” which is basically the idea that we should meet human needs while staying within planetary boundaries, the inside and outside of the metaphorical donut respectively. Look up any of these terms and you will find loads of thought-provoking writing, imagining a better world. Plus many of the people doing the theorizing are programmers like you, I’m sure you’ll find ideas that resonate with you if you look for them here.

It took courage to make this post, thanks for starting some interesting discussions. I might believe you are wrong about Capitalism, but I respect your honesty and willingness to engage with other ideas here. I would strongly encourage reading further to understand these concepts on a deeper level than a Lemmy comment can give you, especially the economic alternatives, I basically just skimmed over a whole field of emerging theory.

Edit: accidentally posted before I was done, added 3 paragraphs.

Holy moly this is a wild story. I really hope people don’t get murdered, and Braxton gets a positive outcome from the legal system. But beyond the shock from reading this, I’m left with anger.

The sheer audacity of these racist clowns, and the fact that its working!? Like, courts just refuse to hear cases on a lot of the discrimination that happens surrounding elections, so even though it might be illegal its the white courts that decide that. And they BURNED DOWN LEWIS’ HOME! Holy shit is that terrifying, and we know nobody’s ever facing any consequences for it.

One thing that is truly inspiring amidst all the racism and systemic violence is the mayor himself. This guy is out here practicing mutual aid, organizing community events, and fighting to get food for his community. One of his goals with becoming mayor was to get a grocery store in town, huge respect for this guy.

Fuck White Supremacy, fuck the State, but hats off to this man. I hope he gets what he’s fighting for.

I think we gotta work on building community if we want to see people really move away from streaming services. One person with a NAS in a small apartment building could help a lot of their neighbors out with entertainment. It would be more work for the person hosting, but if the folks who benefit help their friend out too it might end up being less work overall.

I’d give someone access, teach them how to use the software, and download some of their favorite shows if they let me borrow their truck when I needed, shared dinner sometimes, or helped me clean house. I think a lot of folks would benefit from that kind of thing, but it would require us making friends with our neighbors. Which, on reflection, is actually really really hard. I imagine it would be kinda awkward to start the conversations around this, but you’d get around the step of everyone getting their own NAS at least!