Nice try, FBI.

The best time is decades ago. The second best time is now.

Capitalism has ethics. Even if the profit motive were supreme, that would be an ethic. Choosing to be evil is an ethical stance.

But in practice capitalists are always ready to sacrifice their profits and prosperity to maintain hierarchies, and more specifically white supremacy. Capitalists will pay billions to bail out banks so that the banks maintain their hierarchy over the capital of the petit bourgeoisie.

Capitalists will pay trillions to fight wars to destroy a nation’s production capacity to prevent them from becoming socialist egalitarian, or to secure control of oil deposits that will produce mere billions in profits to shore up their dominance over the market.

Capitalists will burn down a low-status corporate department and spend millions on temporary replacements rather than admit their work is necessary. They will work employees to the bone rather than profit off their relaxed creativity.

Capitalist insurance companies will rather waste billions of dollars on birth complications rather than tell doctors to defer to midwives on birth positions. They will rather be in the lurch for millions of dollars of emergency healthcare for the medically bankrupt than provide preventative care.

In capitalism, profit is an excuse for exploitation. If you intend to exploit people and you’re upper class, there are always venture capitalists willing to give your idea a try. If you intend to empower people and have scientific studies to prove it’s profitable, then sadly they just need a couple more studies believe you.

And if you manage to crowdsource the funding to do the profitable empowering thing, inspectors and cops and vandals will come crawling out of the woodwork to tear you down. And if none of that sticks, they will create a competitor to operate at a loss to drive you out of business and restore the capitalist hierarchy.

Glad we agree liberal democracy is not a bulwark against fascism.

It’s odd because the trash in the corner on the left is consistent, and the blood pattern is the same, and even the cracks on the wall behind them are the same, but the pillar shifts location and color.

It seems to me like there was a reference image. Whether it’s the AI plagiarizing something it was trained on, or an actual image that was thrown through a processing pipeline with AI.

But of course, the most charitable guess is as always that it’s deliberate Mossad misinformation, because we just spent a couple hundred collective hours analyzing an image rather than burning down an embassy because they did actually murder children.

That seems pretty simple. Use the small snow plow that clears cycling lanes clear the raised sidewalk lengthwise, then have the snow plow that clears car lanes drive over it without being weighed down.

…you do have a snow plow for non-cars, right?

Right?

Also, more generally, building a 5-15 minute city means snow plows don’t need to clear nearly as much area. A city built for people can afford to spend more time clearing pedestrian infrastructure and modal filters, because it’s still less than clearing ten thousand kilometers of suburb.

With the reduced driving time for emergency services, you can even waste some time clearing a path ahead of them or having ambulance personnel walk, and keep side streets unplowed if the weather is right.

That’s a very outdated view of traffic engineering and psychology. People (and animals in general) don’t stop doing things in response to punishment unless they have a very high chance of expected punishment, way higher that any society could afford in case of traffic control.

If you want people to stop, you’ve got to build the infrastructure in a way that makes it psychologically natural to stop. Some paint on an otherwise Amercan road won’t do shit. You’ve got to visually and physically narrow the space for drivers to make it uncomfortable or even damaging for them to pass through at unsafe speed.

That low speed is also slow enough that drivers don’t feel like they’re losing as much by stopping, making them feel like stopping for pedestrians is a lot more fair.

Look at Dutch traffic engineering standards for pedestrian crossings. They’re a car-centric country that puts a lot of effort into getting cars everywhere in a relatively safe way.

The drivers are actors, and the pedestrians probably are too. It would definitely be illegal to jump this sort of thing on drivers without their consent or knowledge.

In that case it would be useful to write “egoism” instead of “individualism” in text at least once.

In the meme template, you are not the child, you are advised to behave like the youngest parent. So the youngest parent should already be an egoist anarchist.

But instead the child being the one that draws the egoist anarchist flag implies that you should help people develop it without necessarily being it. So what should you be? Well, the parent is called an individualist, so it’s reasonable to guess that’s what you’re asking people to be.

Thus the miscommunication.

Maybe

dead guy: “Individualism is the collapse of common decency”

old guy: “Egoism is neglecting your community”

young guy with superimposed anarcho-egoist flag: “Your well-being comes first”

kid: makes a solarpunk drawing or whatever else would best signify a flourishing anarcho-egoist community in your eyes.

or

dead guy: “you anarchists are entitled thieves”

old guy: “you egoists are neglecting your comrades”

young guy: “your well-being comes first”

kid: draws a bank on fire, an image of handing out food, or some other symbol of voluntary mutual aid.

True, but that makes the critique fundamentally correct. “This is a distraction from the Epstein files” means “I choose to see this as unimportant because of the Epstein files” which means they’re playing right into the fascists’ hands.

Their concept of the US government’s villainy maxes out at individuals being bad people to be purged from a liberal democratic system they don’t call into question, which prevents them from escalating beyond liberal democratic forms of opposition.

Because, ultimately, what distinguishes “flooding the zone” from the normal torrent of news is that everything keeps being a shock. And what distinguishes shocks from curiosities is whether they make sense in your worldview.

The non-shocked version will sound something like “Of course the fascist empire does fascist and/or imperial shit. Does this affect my plans? Or is it something I’m curious about? Or is it boring?”

But to no longer be shocked by US atrocities means not just reckoning with their current fascism, but with how liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. The pattern that extends to the first liberal democratic regimes saying all men are created equal while enslaving and genociding men.

There are non-liberal forms of oppression that may be called fascism, but fascist ideology has always been about getting liberal states to shrink the whitelist of people they deem human that they already maintain.

Understand this, and the news gets unsurprising. Alex Pretti got executed like he was black. Trump threatened Greenland like it’s a caribbean nation. US citizen Latinos are getting deported like foreign brown people. Trans people are getting experimented on like mental patients. Young girls are treated like embarrassing sex toys.

The specifics of how and when the circle shrinks are like the battles of a war. There is useful analysis to be done, for sure, but you can just go “yeah i know they’re fascists” and move on with your life.

(Though personally I do still spend time in these threads because I like explaining how fascists are fascists and it’s recruitment praxis).

proxy for what?

Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t proxy wars either, afaik. The US is just a oppressive empire that attacks places to subjugate them, worse than Russia.

Yes, it is very understandable that an old white guy would side with a multi-millionaire old white guy against the lower class women that accuse him of rape while describing those women as hysterical vultures. When you join the old boys’ club, you agree to look out for each other and you leave your ideological differences at the door. And then maybe one of the old boys likes the cut of your jib and invites you to be a guest on their TV show, and hey, now you’re the most famous anarchist of your generation. You scratch their backs, they scratch yours.

It is genuinely very understandable. But to call someone doing that ‘a victim’ because people found out? That’s not a good lock.

The revolution will not be televised. Sharing identifiable information about insurrectionary activity, especially your own, is dangerous and stupid. If all that is holding you back is that you’re not seeing stuff happening online, please, for all that is holy, physically travel to an anarchist or other activist community near you. See what is happening in places where recording devices are banned.

Also, I’m not USAmerican.

Removed by mod

Fresh air shops already exist. If the need grows, the supply will grow.

If atmospheric CO2 becomes a health risk, I could imagine future buildings having an attached greenhouse that provides a steady supply of fresh air.

According to this source, “Crops grown in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) production systems such as greenhouses and vertical farms in warehouses consume CO2 as they undergo photosynthesis when exposed to light. A typical greenhouse crop will use 4.8-9.6 kg per hour per acre. This process can drop the concentration of CO2 from ambient levels (around 400 ppm) to as low as 100 ppm if the production site is not ventilated.”

This means one acre of greenhouse can provide fresh air to about 15-30 people. That same greenhouse could also provide enough food to feed 5-7 people. Extreme weather will make 20th century style industrial agriculture increasingly fragile, so we’re going to need to switch to food forests and greenhouses anyway. Hooking those greenhouses up to housing so people can breathe would be a nice synergy.

dual boot goes F2F2F2F2F2F2F2F2F2F2F2

I do think people can have an unhealthy mental schema of opposing and defying others, which doesn’t go away in an anarchist society. It’s not nice if, after fully consenting to a schedule of who does the dishes when, you have a panic attack when it’s your turn because now you have to do the dishes.

This schema will tend to trigger more often in hierarchical situations. But even then, it’s better if you defy authority because you want to and you expect things to end well, rather than because you feel like you have no other choice.

That said, the APA is authoritarian garbage and the DSM should not be respected.

Okay, so they have at least 9 more months of free reign and they’re already disappearing citizens to concentration camps. Or considering you’re talking about a third term, maybe 21 months?

Don’t get me wrong, good that you have some standards, but maybe you want to win? Just a thought.

If the right wing wins, liberals get to be the heroes from their stories as they heroically beat back the fascist menace. If the left wing wins, liberals are the villains and people dance on their graves. So I get why their heart isn’t in it.

As for leftists spreading leftist information… Hi! We don’t have capitalists funding us so it’s just me right now.

Looking at how they calculate the CAT fair share, they do not address my critique that it’s unfair that if someone buys a polluting product, only the producer is held responsible. This “fair share” score still unfairly gives economies that export services and import goods a free pass.

I trust those scientists to have gotten an accurate measurement of their working definition of fairness, but I have no reason to trust the procedure that gave them that working definition.