Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

Essentially, Israel is the UK’s “not quite final solution” to the “problem” of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that’s terrible if you’re an antisemite.

But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you’re doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the “antisemitic” label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don’t look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. “Socialism for the rich” is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

Golden parachutes, positions for each other’s nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives’ pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don’t eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

Surprise - it’s white supremacists again. It’s Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

It’s not a cabal, it’s a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn’t a nefarious grand scheme, it’s just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it’s easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn’t directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

So that’s the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.

Yes, I’m sure that when the Oil Manufacturers Cooperative murders climate activists and spreads propaganda to prevent the adoption of sustainable alternatives, humanity will be much better off…

Capitalism in any form is unsustainable, any system that treats the world as fungible is. What we need is fundamental, structural change.

We need a system that naturally incentivizes degrowth and makes the filling of power vacuums by corrupt, greedy, or opportunistic people or systems impossible.

That’s not capitalism, it’s not syndicalism, it’s not state communism. It’s something in the realm of anarchocommunism. Societies that are prosperous because nobody in them is trying to screw people over: ones without capital accumulation or exertion of power, that are nevertheless resistant to power over them.

Source?

That’s just blatantly not true. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are extremely dedicated to fighting tyranny. But they get massacred or put in prison camps or tortured to death.

There are probably less than a hundred million people with enough power that a random set of a hundred of them would be enough to collapse the system. Spies, programmers of banking infrastructure, security guards, servants and distant family. The remaining eight billion of us are going to have to act en masse.

If there’s anything you should learn from Trump, it’s that it doesn’t matter one iota what most people think. Most people will consider the status quo natural and anything outside of it laughable, regardless of how ideas and people move across that boundary. If we make leftism reality, centrists will become leftists without us ever needing to actively convince them.

What matters is the rate at which people learn good ideas and the rate at which people give up on trying to make those good ideas a reality. A small group of people learning great ideas is more valuable than millions learning a populist version of those same ideas. It’s better to fascinate a thousand and weird out a million than to have a million people vaguely agree with you.

Why do you think they’re investing so hard in AI? Why do you think “AI safety research” is so focused on enforcing obedience?

Eastern Canada isn’t a great example because of the prevailing winds. Even without the gulf stream, Europe would have less temperature variation than Eastern Canada because both have prevailing southwesterly winds. The Atlantic serves as a heat sink that dampens the extremes of winter and summer, so Europe would continue have less extreme temperatures than Eastern Canada - including less extreme cold.

Canada’s east coast is more similar to Hokkaido and Kamchatka. A better comparison for Europe would be Canada’s west coast. Paris would have similar weather to Vancouver, Oslo would be similar to Anchorage, and Lisbon would be similar to San Francisco. Except of course with global warming, you shift everything south again (taking into account that our experience of “similar weather to Vancouver” and climate advisories on the internet are anchored to the current +1.4°C level).

Central Europe doesn’t have a great equivalent because all other places have mountains pretty close to the coast, but Ukraine and western Russia are shielded by mountains and landmasses to their southwest similar to central Canada. So Kyiv would have similar weather to Edmonton, and Moscow similar to Fort McMurray (both in Alberta).

So it would be a pretty big shock, but not catastropic. Comparable to the Little Ice Age.

To be fair the Little Ice Age was also just a European thing, and there aren’t really any famous ice ages other than that one and the paleolithic one.

Making money only makes individualist sense if you assume that there will still be a state apparatus enforcing and maintaining that ownership. All it takes is a communist revolution and your assets are no longer yours. And guess what becomes more likely as climate catastrophe looms?

The businesses themselves do not benefit from climate catastrophe either. But businesses don’t decide what they do, the owners of those businesses do. And those owners are ipso facto tied to the current model of ownership.

The business doing well - expanding its holdings, making profit, insuring itself against risks, etc. - is completely secondary to the business behaving in ways that satisfy the business owners.

Tragedies of the commons are patched all the time in business. Enforcing corporate contracts would be a tragedy of the commons, yet businesses all submit themselves to corporate law. Collusion would be a tragedy of the commons, so that is made illegal and corporations are forced to treat all business partners equally. The bank bailouts of 2008 cost most businesses a lot of money through taxation and deferred social services for their employees. And when there was an algorithm glitch and the stock market acted crazy for one day in the 2010s, everybody agreed to just revert before that day.

Because at the end of the day, if climate catastrophe was a tragedy of the commons for them, they would be okay with a liberal environmentalist president. Someone who preserves rich people’s privilege even as the economics are reorganized.

But they are not. They treat climate change prevention as the existential threat. They pool trillions of dollars to elect an unreliable egomaniac fascist just so they don’t end up with a Democrat.

They don’t care about their own wellbeing or even their privilege, they care about playing the game. They want to be rich because they optimized ruthlessly for personal profit.

There was a meme going around at some point to the tune of

I don’t get why both teams don’t work together in basketball - imagine how many points they could score!

It is not about the points, it’s about the game that arises when you only care about points within a specific ruleset. And for capitalists, the ruleset of the game they want to play is not compatible with climate change prevention.

That 9% isn’t a matter of laziness. Plastics degrade in a way that takes a huge amount of energy to repair, so once they’ve degraded beyond a certain point they’re just a pile of microplastics.

Burning degraded plastics is the most environmentally friendly way of handling it - they’re worth neither the mining industry for solar panels and wind turbines to undo the damage nor the infrastructure to prevent a landfill from leaking into the environment.

Cutting plastic consumption is the most sustainable solution this side of technological utopia. We can probably squeeze a couple percent of recycling more out of it, but chemistry won’t change.

Bioplastics run into the same fundamental chemical truth, so they are an extensive crop that gets some of that energy from the sun, in exchange for land use and water and pollution from farm runoff. So bioplastics are at odds with food and water security and with the local envrionment of where they’re grown, on top of still costing energy by way of fertilizer and processing costs.

Plastics and oil are cheap because they’re 500,000,000 years worth of stored solar and geothermal energy that we’re burning through a million times faster. If we have to do the work ourselves, there is no way around it being costly.

Yeah, destroying the planet to exacerbate wealth inequality really is a distraction from the scapegoat figurehead that has survived a hundred scandals being a child rapist. Surely this time if we focus all of our attention on the scandalproof figurehead’s scandals rather than any of the issues, we’re going to win. I know it sank two elections, but this time it’s different. Because that’s what’s really wrong with the current US administration: Not imprisoning people without trial or destroying libraries of scientific knowledge, but the figurehead having some something wrong personally.

I guess Trump was right - when you’re a star, you can grab them by the pussy and you can do anything.

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.

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.

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.