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Cake day: April 6th, 2024

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  • We’re talking about two different groups of people here. The working class trying to survive get a pass on individual actions because they have no means. They should probably vote and organize and get engaged to better their outcomes.

    I’m talking about the millions of people that have the means, but just don’t because they quite literally don’t care. I see them every day. It’s the millions of people buying new $60k trucks and SUVs every few years, and large suburban homes, and who have trash cans that are 5x the size of mine that still can’t contain their mindless shopping detritus, and spend tons of money on trendy home furnishings but “don’t think solar makes sense” or don’t bother trying literally anything that reduces carbon.

    I’m saying that giving millions of these people a pass because a billionaire is worse isn’t helpful, and expecting these folks to magically work towards sustainable collective action when they spend their entire lives living the opposite of sustainability is simply not going to work. If you can convince neighbors to get heat pumps solar and give them a test ride on your ebike and show them how easy it is to live without gas you can probably get them to vote for someone that is focused on the climate. Sitting around you and your neighbors matching F150s blaming China and Bezos and speaking in abstract terms about “collective action” seems less effective to me.

    Sorry for the rant!


  • They’re not a distraction. Lots of us have solar, eliminated fossil fuels in the home, use public transit, don’t buy shit we don’t need, etc. Thats literally collective action, and we need a lot more people to do it. Nobody is pretending like their single action is going to magically fix everything.

    What does collective action mean to you? We have tax incentives for electrification as a result of policies borne from voting correctly in 2020 - now actually getting those solar panels is an individual action that magically doesn’t matter? Or is it a result of collective action and it is ok?

    Everyone should be doing as much as they possibly can given their means - personal and collective. It’s not an either or.


  • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.worldChoices
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    8 days ago

    The point is that if everyone did what you (and I) do, we’d actually get somewhere. Seems like we’re in the minority though, unfortunately. That doesn’t make the person you replied to wrong, it just means most people continue to just blindly consume, and when they can’t consume as much as they want they blindly vote for asswipes promising them even more. That’s the cultural problem at the heart of this all. I’m running out of individual actions I can do too, but that doesn’t mean those were not helpful.





  • None of that changes the reality that they did not vote for harm reduction and now more harm will come to the people they purport to protect (and likely themselves, now that evangelical christians are in power). This is textbook shooting off your nose to spite your face. There is no rule saying you need to pass a moral purity test to earn a vote, that’s a dumb construct that is hampering progress. You can vote for harm reduction, it’s ok. The conservatives keep winning and moving further right. The democrats could win and move further left if their cranky coalition would accept not getting everything they want for once.







  • True, but those are different products than proper motorcycles although they are creeping up in terms of power/speed. The regulatory structure (US focus here) has a huge gap for such “ebikes”. In the good old days, you could ride a 49.9 cc scooter without a motorcycle license on the road (not paths), but after that there was a pretty big power jump to proper motorcycles. Up to 50cc gets you a top speed around 25 mph and very slow acceleration. Now we have “ebikes” that are significantly faster, in particular acceleration but also top speed, that are effectively completely unregulated. And unlike gas scooters, they use bike/pedestrian infrastructure and not just streets/roads. It’s frankly a mess. We need to allocate road space from cars to bikes/“ebikes” and encourage these vehicles (and licensing/training/safety) but I fear many areas just don’t want to deal with it.