stabby_cicada

joined 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yep. The race to the Moon was just a dick measuring contest between the US and USSR. Manned space travel is a meaningless ego trip for governments. Unmanned space travel is equally useless in practical terms - learning about other planets does nothing to help the proletariat on our own - but at least wastes less money.

Global internet connection via satellite, and GPS, on the other hand, have helped the proletariat in actual practical terms. It's a shame it took all that billionaire ego dick waving to get there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The "evidence" can point to many conclusions.

Not when reviewed objectively.

Also, from personal experience, I'm not at all convinced we are causing global warming. And I'm not even convinced the earth, on average, is warming rather than cooling.

Global average surface temperature has been rising since 1850. The ten warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade.

The earth is getting hotter. This is an objective fact. Facts don't care about your feelings.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Remember when kids used to play "cowboys and Indians"?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

That's why the joke is funny. Because it's literally true, but no American would other their culture that way

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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Project 2025 has a plan for that.

Unfortunately the plan is "build lots and lots of nuclear power plants and produce more coal, oil, and national gas domestically". But at least it's a plan.

 
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn't stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.

And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party's pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn't afraid to say it in public.

The difference between Trump and Harris isn't policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone's common humanity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

The Democrat convention was the most aggressively warmongering, conservative, corporate friendly Dem convention in my lifetime, and I remember Kerry "reporting for duty" in 2004.

No one was allowed to speak in favor of peace - in Palestine, in Ukraine, anywhere else. Palestinian protesters were shouted down and silenced.

It had mindless chants of USA USA USA over and over again.

It had billionaires smugly congratulating themselves on their wealth - Christ, they had JB Pritzker, the billionaire Hyatt heir who bought his position from Rod Blagojevich, speaking directly after Bernie Sanders, and the next speaker was the fucking CEO of American Express, and I can't read that as anything but a personal insult to Bernie.

It had reams and reams of copaganda in favor of the would-be cop in chief, hammering the theme of "law and order", boasting of giving more funding to police.

It had Obama's director of the CIA - the man whose drone warfare program ~~killed thousands of innocent people~~ produced acceptable levels of collateral damage - publicly masturbating over killing Bin Laden.

There were a whole bunch of literal conservatives and Republicans who hadn't changed their conservative beliefs at all but just moved to Democrat because Trump was insane and the Democrats had moved right enough that their conservative beliefs were now mainstream in the party.

It was all law and order and aggressive policing and secure the border and sell more guns to Ukraine and sell more bombs to Israel and kill kill kill for freedom - and then Harris took the stage and boasted of having the most lethal military in the world and I tuned out and gave up.

This year's Democrat Party convention was indistinguishable from a generic Republican convention of the 2000s. It could have been hosted by Cheney and Kissinger and nominate Bush Jr for a third term and not a single word or policy proposal would need to change.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I admit it's hard to tell. But Lemmy users aren't a random selection of Americans - they lean white, male, urban, liberal or leftist, and significantly more technologically savvy than the average person (which is why they use Lemmy in the first place - don't forget how many users are Reddit refugees who left because they knew enough about Reddit's policies, and had strong enough opinions about them, to want to leave). And that demographic is quite likely to engage in, or passively benefit from, the gentrification of low income urban areas.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

But if you're selling energy bsck to the grid, you're using the infrastructure and they have to pay you for running your meter backwards. Even paying you a reduced rate for the energy you produce is a losing proposition for them.

It's a bit worse than that, even. If there are too many people sending too much energy back to the grid, the grid can get overcharged and blow up. So energy companies have to dump the excess power somewhere to keep the grid stable.

There are a lot of potential solutions to this problem. (Before anyone says Bitcoin fixes this, no it doesn't.) unfortunately, energy companies are currently taking the laziest and least efficient solution - pay business owners to run their factories uselessly in order to drain excess power from the grid, and pass the cost on to consumers.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Thing about batteries is.

From an environmental standpoint, both mining the raw materials and producing the batteries uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution.

Morally, many raw materials for batteries come from desperately poor conflict zones, so you have megacorps staffing mines with slavery and child labor, paying local warlords/dictators for permission to operate, having those warlords/dictators kill protesters and union organizers, etc.

If we can get a hydrogen economy working, and the equipment and technology don't need conflict minerals or polluting heavy industry to manufacture, it would be a boon for the world both practically and morally.

But that's a big if.

 
 
 
 

Please read the whole thing (and if capitalists and conservatives were consistent, they'd be livid, too, at the idea homeless people's property can be stolen and thrown away under the euphemism of "cleaning" - aren't property rights sacred to them?), but here is the conclusion:

This is what we give up — always so much more than we think — in agreeing to scapegoat, to sacrifice the homeless everyone else gives up public space. An ordinance that says no camping or sleeping in public quickly becomes no loitering in public. Stories are already emerging in the wake of the Grants Pass ruling of random people being told that they cannot sit, cannot eat, cannot exist in public space. Often these people aren’t homeless, but how can they prove that? This ruling furthers the trend, one which is not new, of the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world. And this is just one way that abandoning the unhoused hurts us all. Equally significant is that in abandoning those who cannot afford housing we agree to frame shelter as something you must earn, rather than a basic need that we all must be granted in this world. That cannot stand.

What we need, now more than ever, is solidarity across all forms of division. We cannot allow the dehuamnization or that criminalization of homelessness, of poverty, of those struggling to get by in this system, both because it is unjust and because it hurts each and every one of us. Anything that targets struggling individuals instead of the system they struggle under reinforces the oppressive mechanisms of the system and takes us a step further from liberation, from freedom, and from the world we need.

 
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