Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.

You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.

People that vote right wing aren’t better off just because they voted that way. They’re not tyrants oppressing the left, they’re fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn’t win them anything.

The solution to right-wing banding isn’t left wing banding, it’s disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they’re being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.

Leftist “infighting” is healthy. It’s a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.

Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.

To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).

Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn’t mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we’re black bagged one by one.

Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.

If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

I would gladly sacrifice modern conveniences as part of a societal shift towards degrowth, but it’s psychologically and socially taxing not to choose convenience when it is available. I want these conveniences taken away from me, or taxed into inconvenience.

And perhaps most importantly, when these conveniences are taken away at scale we can replace them at scale with other good things, the way we can’t when making individual choices.

I do not want to drive but I can’t buy a place in a walkable neighborhood when capitalism refuses to build them. I want to save on heating by living in an intentional community but society is so atomized and group housing so rare that I can’t find one to call home.

The solution to a tragedy of the commons is not to have a few people still pay into the commons, it’s to rebuild the system around the commons that makes it the best choice for you personally to support the commons and take sustainably.

but pragmatically and philosophically. They’re like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they’ll be “dead in 20 years”.

Imagine saying this as if human prosperity wasn’t built on people building places for their children and grandchildren.

Capitalism is one of very few philosophies that pretends that selfishness is good, and it would be silly not to blame people that believe in it for the consequences of that philosophy when implemented.

Ordinary western citizens are to blame, because ordinary western citizens could have changed this merely by being morally offended and voting for something else. Most of them personally chose to support capitalism over any alternative. To not even explore the space of possibilities, but to get paid off by corporate-government partnerships that were robbing both the future and the rest of the world.

Also prisons and other concentration camps can be more than deadly enough if the sanitation isn’t up to standards. And would the GOP really demand that sanitation for prisoners is kept to a high enough standard?

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?

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.

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.

Because if we are too optimistic and prepare for the wrong future, hundreds of millions of people will die that didn’t need to.

Climate adaptation is necessary to prevent people 50 years from now from resorting to fossil fuels, war, or ecosystem destruction to try to avoid starvation.

I’m optimistic about our ability to affect change. The difference between 2.5K warming and 4.5K warming is hard to comprehend, and we still have that to play for. How soon will New Orleans or Miami or Amsterdam be surrendered to the sea? What refugee infrastructure awaits their inhabitants? How much has the world economy prepared for the loss of these cities and the surrounding regions? It depends on us. There is so much we can still do that matters.

but principle is a luxury of the wealthy

This is the opposite of true. When you’re poor you can’t afford to take a chance on people, so you have to rely on people whose principles guide them to doing things that help you. So when someone with these principles is suffering, it’s in your self interest to help them out so they can help you when you’re in trouble.

Poor communities run on principles. Hospitality, loving your neighbor, forgiving your enemies, treating others as you treat yourself, trusting each other with your life, utterly ostracizing those that break the principles, etc.

This is also why religion is so big in many poor communities. It’s a set of principles for that community to rely on that is predictable even if it isn’t perfect. You don’t know which principles will only have you to work for others and which ones will have others work for you, but in total you will all work for each other when you most need it, and that helps you through the worst of poverty.

And principles work. They’re massively profitable for every society that has them. Socialist healthcare is the principle that we all pay for everyone’s health care no matter what, and it extends people’s lives by 5 years while costing 70% less compared to capitalist healthcare.

Between people who have fewer principles, trust is expensive or even impossible. Every piece of nuance opens up risk that you have to mitigate with labor or reserves.

Principles are so massively beneficial that we are immediately suspicious when someone with both power and principles doesn’t make our lives better. Are we really in that unlucky small percentage of people that pay more into it than we get out, or do their principles not care about us as much as we thought?

The DNC has principles, but caring about the working class is pretty far down the list. Mamdani ran on principles that put the working class much higher, so he could be honest about the policies that result from them and just win.

Trump ran on fostering that suspicion into complete disbelief. The DNC won’t help you, nor will establishment republicans, nor even religion and its commandments (“Love thy neighbor”? No, “the sin of empathy”).

When nothing means anything and you can’t trust anyone, how can you keep yourself relatively safe? Well, you try to be the most like the most powerful people that will accept you (for now) and bundle together with those that are most like them to fight those who are less like them.

And because you can’t trust anything, the best way to determine who is like them is things that are relatively visible that can not be changed or are difficult to change - race, religious rituals and paraphenalia, culture, nationality, wealth and power, cultish devotion to the great leader, etc.

This is fascism, and there is no exit clause. They’ll fight until they lose, and if they ever run out of enemies they shrink the circle and fight everyone outside that.

So let’s honor our principles. And if we find that our principles keep hurting those around us, just get better principles.

There are only 0.5 acres of arable land and 5 acres of solid land per person on the planet. (or 2k and 20k m^2 respectively) So you may, if you use that land to feed and provide lumber to at least 20 people.

But not “way more than you would think” where “you” includes readers such as /u/agmemnonymous and myself.

IMO you should be able to guess >5% just from the OP image. The OP implies that corporations actually used sawdust as a substitute, which implies it was a profitable substitution, which implies it was worth it to set up an entire supply chain for bagging sawdust in sawmills, outbidding other parties interested in industrial quantities of sawdust (such as paper mills), shipping it to cereal factories, mixing sawdust into the mix, and trying out ways to make it homogeneous, not to mention the risk of customers noticing and switching to alternatives with less sawdust.

That said, nobody uses sawdust anymore because it’s too expensive. Hay, straw, and chaff are much more common sources of cellulose, also known as dietary fiber. Most people in the western world would be healthier if they ate more sawdust (assuming it has been produced in a way that didn’t introduce toxic pollutants).

I mean, it’s not free, but yes, edible sawdust would be good for the health of most people in the western world. Though they tend to get cellulose from cheaper sources like straw or chaff.

Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.

Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it’s better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it’s a buyer’s market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.