ChatGPT is the ultimate ‘cultural product of the postmodern era,’ and very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought," Foster concluded in his newsletter.
The best description of this distinction I’ve encountered was in a science fiction novel - Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
I get where you’re coming from, and also, being a politician in the United States means being a public figure, and if you ride public transit you expect people to recognize you and talk to you. It’s part of outreach. It’s a populist thing.
Joe Biden rode Amtrak to work for 40 years - and from what I understand, now that he’s not president, he’s riding Amtrak to his office again (albeit guarded by his handlers in case he sundowns). People stop to talk to him, take selfies with him, whatever. It’s not (necessarily) rude.
The thing about the United States is, unfortunately, no politician is so poor they have to take public transit. So any pol on the bus expects people to recognize them and start a conversation. If they didn’t want that, they wouldn’t take the bus.
Climate change is the acceptable price of modernity. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion that Energy Secretary Chris Wright reaches in his recent essay in The Economist, a composition representing the studied fatalism increasingly found in the debate on energy transition.
Tldr: we’re going to accelerate climate change, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I suspect Republican politicians and American fossil fuel companies got together, looked at the real studies, and realized climate change will hurt North America much less than it will the rest of the world.
So they put a plan together: seal the borders, move manufacturing back to the US, seize Canada and Greenland, and prepare for the United States to dominate the world as less well-positioned nations collapse from climate disaster.
And the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate collapses, and the closer America comes to global dominion.
It’s not fatalism. It’s manifest destiny.
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Sure. Fascism, at its core, is just a fancy 20th century version of the age-old human instinct to respond to problems with violence. And we all have to watch out for that instinct. Progressives are human too.
Fascists typically believe in strongman leadership, but you don’t have to swear allegiance to a specific strongman to be a fascist.
Eco-fascists, in particular, want a Pol Pot-style dictator, someone who will ignore laws, human rights, and common decency, in order to drastically reduce the human population and force the survivors into low-tech subsistence farming. Last I checked, no one like that is anywhere near power anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t make eco-fascists any less fascist for it.
In general, the problem with that narrative is that Trump was openly promising to act in ways which were guaranteed (and in fact have) raise prices and take away healthcare from people, while transferring money from the pockets of the less wealthy into those of billionaires.
Yes. And. Do you think the average American voter was economically literate enough to know that? Or did they just buy the propaganda that Trump economic policies would leave them better off?
A lot of the Fox News propagandists and conservative talking heads are, absolutely, vicious racists. Or they understand the racial impact of the policies they shill for but don’t care, which is just as bad.
But frankly? If you think the average American voter knew Trump’s policies would hurt the economy and chose to vote for him anyway because they’d rather be racist than prosperous? I think you are overestimating the average voter’s intelligence.
And, for that matter, underestimating their selfishness.
I can’t say she’s wrong.
Let’s not forget: one of the big reasons Trump won was because the Biden economy was shit, and Biden and Harris refused to even admit it, much less offer any solutions.
And one of the big reasons Mamdani won was clear specific policies to help New Yorkers economically.
Because you can argue principle all you like, but principle is a luxury of the wealthy. It’s hard to get people to support animal rights when they can’t afford food, or convince them to support refugees and foreign workers when their own jobs aren’t secure, or convince them to support electric vehicles when they can’t afford to replace their 20-year-old Honda and gas is getting more expensive every day.
I guess every generation of Democrats has to relearn Clinton’s maxim.
This comment has a super rough scaling algorithm, and using it I’d eyeball the grain patches at 20x50 ft each, so 2000 sq ft or about 185 square meters, which, if the grain was wheat, would make between 185 and 740 loaves depending on yield.
Which is frankly more than I expected, though given how much effort it takes to process wheat into bread flour, I’d go with corn or potatoes 100%.
Thank you for that video - it gave me a few interesting articles and a new book for my reading list 😁
And one of the points in that video is there’s a huge difference in the carbon footprints of different types of urban agriculture - actual urban farms make efficient use of resources, whereas home gardens and community gardens don’t.
And even then, those urban farms are not “self sufficient” the way prepper fantasies like this meme promise - they rely on external inputs like fertilizer and building material and irrigation.
Which is, yeah. I love competently designed urban farms. I love competently designed home gardens. The image in my post is neither.
The image in my post is selling a rugged individualist, manifest destiny, pioneers breaking sod in the prairie image of homesteading - the lone smallholder supporting himself and his family solely through the production of his land - which has rarely been true and, when it was, really sucked for the people stuck doing it.
Small scale farming is viable. Rugged individualism is crap.
I love that book!
The interesting thing about Seymour’s one acre compared to the prepper fantasy in the meme is that he doesn’t try to pretend an acre is “self sufficient”. He optimizes the space for crops that make a big difference to his quality of life - fresh vegetables take up almost half his diagram, for example - instead of putting in a few tiny plots of grain and a duck pond. He has a cow in the same space as the meme does but notes he’ll have to buy fodder for it because that’s not enough land to feed a cow - but he’s cool with that because fresh milk is so important to him…
The difference between an actual farmer and an online bullshitter, I guess.
You want the government to control all the means of production and the distribution of wealth, and be able to dictate the prices of goods and services and wages?
The thing is, I think, anybody who wants an answer from ChatGPT can ask ChatGPT themselves - or just Google it and get the AI answer there. People ask questions on social media because they want answers from real people.
Replying to a Lemmy post with a ChatGPT generated answer is like replying with a link to a Google search page. It implies the question isn’t worth discussing - that it’s so simple the user should have asked ChatGPT instead of posting it. I agree with the OP - it’s frankly a little insulting.
Yes, and that’s why, even in brutal hypercapitalist America, we fucking regulate the free market.
And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.
Because having the “freedom” to buy poisonous adulterated foodstuffs, if you’re too poor to buy real good food, is like having the “freedom” to accept sub-minimum wages if you’re desperate enough for money. Not freedom, but exploitation.
10% sawdust before people notice sounds pretty fucking high to me :/
And while the hyper-violent “rivers of blood” framing may be useful for some - I thoroughly refuse the “sad” positioning as I’d much rather build toward happiness in the ideal of “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”
I’m reminded of the old saying from the days of the AIDS crisis, when Reagan decided HIV was God’s solution to homosexuality and researching a cure went against His will - bury your friends in the morning, protest in the afternoon, and dance all night.
Which does kind of put things into perspective.
And as to the OP’s article - I got to the part where it said “Solidarity is a learned behavior” and was like, okay, yes, this is what prefigurative politics is for. You go out and do stuff together so you can learn to do stuff together so you can do bigger and more important stuff together.
But the article seems to use “prefigurative” to refer to slacktivism and online shitposting and political discussion that serves as virtue signaling rather than a goad to concrete action and so on.
Edit: I do think the article makes half of a good point. If we want to make a change we have to put in the work, go out, work with people, get our hands dirty. I’m not so sure about the sadness and the rivers of blood. I suspect that’s counterproductive.
This kind of feels like a solution in search of a problem.
I mean, it’s neat that it’s possible to wirelessly charge a bicycle through its kickstand, but I don’t see many people being willing to pay $300 for it.
Now hold up.
I’ve had jobs I literally could not get to without driving. As in, public transit did not go from walking distance of where I was to walking distance of where my job was. At all.
I’ve lived in places without grocery stores within walking distance. Without hospitals, dentists, without pretty much anything but a shitty strip mall within walking distance because suburbia sucks.
Look, there are whole suburbs in the United States that open directly into highways. If you try to walk to or from those suburbs you will be arrested because it is illegal to walk on highways. Let me emphasize that one more time: in some places in the US you cannot legally leave your neighborhood without a car.
You can say these aren’t obligations - people can just move or quit their job. But then you’re circling back to the regressive policy issue, because it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re poor.
And “unless you’re disabled”? One in four adults in the US is disabled. And that will inevitably include you if you live long enough to experience the side effects of old age. Yeah, not all disabilities impact one’s ability to walk or take public transit, bet’s not write off disability with an “unless”.