Tiresia

For context, this is what the street above this station looks like, and what this propaganda piece by Singaporean state media would have you believe means "the only way to improve public transit is to build an expensive underground subway system where everyone who gets off at this station has to go up 43 meters of escalators".

So hooray for another car supremacist boondoggle. It's better than nothing...

Borders did not save Afghanistan from NATO sending over a million soliders who got all settled in before carrying out the rest of their orders. Nevertheless, 20 years later, NATO left with their tail between their legs because Afghans just wouldn't stop fighting a guerilla against the occupation.

Borders did not save German Jews from Nazis radicalizing over a million people who got all settled in before carrying ot the rest of their orders. Unfortunately, they had trusted their state's monopoly on violence and without the ability to defend themselves most did not survive.

Borders did not save Ukraine from Russia invading with over a million soldiers who, despite not getting to settle in, occupied a large amount of land and killed tens of thousands. However, those borders do prevent Ukraine sympathizers from retaliating against Russia with their full might, because despite Russia just flat out sending in an army to subjugate random people without justification, that border means they supposedly didn't attack the likes of us.

Without borders, the Russian state is an organization. You can only be part of the organization or not. If you are not part of the organization, it doesn't matter whether you're in Melitopol or New York City, inexcusable violence against one is inexcusable violence against all. So if Russia were to attack, you only have two choices: sign up to be part of the Russian state or be one of their potential targets.

Now, it's a valid choice to let yourself be subjugated and hope they don't kill you to save on integration paperwork. It's a valid choice to put your head in the sand and wait for another Russia to pop up closer to you to subjugate you with nobody to help you. But if you like being a free person, the only option is to defend anyone who comes under attack as you would want them to defend you.

I, personally, live under the aegis of nuclear-powered mutually assured destruction. A foreign state attacking me likely isn't possible without a volley of nuclear weapons laying waste to that state. It seems fair if Ukrainians had the same, though perhaps guerilla or conventional military action would be better from a geopolitical de-escalation standpoint. Either way, anyone who doesn't want to be the victim of genocide would have to treat a Russian invasion of Ukraine as an attack on their neighbor, and retaliate proportionally. The combined might of everyone in Europe and North America and everywhere else that respects human rights would be comparable to that of NATO and would come to the defense of the ones attacked.

So the Russian state and its leadership would likely not survive, and they would know this for a fact when deciding whether to attack anyone. So what would be stopping Russian leadership from committing any acts of violence? Basic self-preservation.

And sure, those soldiers getting a nice beach head might make destroying the Russian state a bit more costly. But that doesn't make Putin any less dead by the end of it.

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn't change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn't bad people, it's the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it's also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.

To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don't last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they're catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can't prevent waste without risking shortage.

Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.

Need more lithium and also have a growing junk stash of tons of lithium batteries full of … lithium? Take a minute … see if you can get there.

Why do you complain about needing food? There's a pile of excrement right there. It's the same elemental composition as what you normally eat.

So sad that this genocide isn't ecologically friendly...

What do you plan to do with a hoard of guns and ammo? Get yourself killed so people can loot your bunker?

Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that's on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.

Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we're also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We're the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we're the first to try to mitigate itself.

If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.

We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.

Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.

For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it's going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.

You're reading my comment backwards. I'm not saying it's okay to exile someone just because you have 20 people, I'm saying it's absurd to consider it a problem that you can't exile someone when you can't even get 20 people together to do it.

You were the one complaining about not getting to exile them. You were the one wanting to use a power structure to commit violence. I'm just saying you can't cheat by using cops as a force multiplier.

If you want a power structure to commit violence you're going to have to convince people that its existence is just. You can't just say that the people doing it are cops and therefore shouldn't be stopped.

And I disagree that the Mafia arose in southern Italy due to things going on in the USA. I hope that helps. (Though to throw you a bone - people want justice and safety, and without anarchist principles there are many unjust ways to provide a shitty version of the two).

I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.

Those anarchists aren't telling you to be violent over a disagreement, they're telling you that if you aren't willing to be violent over something you shouldn't be able to send a cop to be violent for you.

When a law requires constant violence to be upheld, that doesn't mean you should personally be violent, it means your law sucks. Cops are a crutch that allows unjust laws to be enforced.

Sure. Healthy communities are sadly rare, and just because they are always in high density working class neighborhoods doesn't mean even just most of those neighborhoods have healthy communities.

Yeah. They're insurance systems and economies of scale that most people personally expect to benefit from existing.