Fascists believe in inequality based on identity, so how could they ever feel betrayed by Trump doing outrageous things? They are DELIGHTED the more outrageous Trump acts, because he is their glorious king they wish they could be. They go “Oh gawd did you see what our leader did? I wish I could do that too!”. He’s their golden idol. All he has to do is keep promising them inequality in their favor.
Look closely - how does she still looks good for people. She just dedicated her Nobel price to Trump. It might just be conspiracy lol.
It’s also indisputably true that the US sponsored coups and engaged in economic warfare for over 20 years, and Machado is right there working with the US against Venezuela. How is that peace? So, how DOES she look good? Is it something with your eyes? Or maybe with the words you read that you allow to program your mind? Like brainwashing? Like, how even the Nobel committee thinks she is a good person? How can people have a good opinion with her?
And more importantly, how can you have a democracy when people are this brainwashed? How do you defend against it? How should Venezuela defend itself against this hybrid war?
Can you point to the comment you suspect of being a russian bot?
Woah everybody is going wild and jumping on Stephen King like piranhas haha. He said one vague things and now everyone here is accusing him of being a pedophile. Fucking crazy!
consumerism is fundamental to human nature
I don’t disagree. Like Nietche said: “I shop, therefor I am” haha. Also:
Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.
I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree “Extreme Consumerism” on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.
Advertising is the primary “infection vector” that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn’t require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.
I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this “DLS” becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the “one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth” isn’t more sustainable than a gaming PC.
There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full “deep dive VR” is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can’t let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The “sheepism” is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it’s mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.
Fundamentally, we can’t keep going as we have. It doesn’t matter if nobody “wants” the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.
Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that’s already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.
Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond “subsistence farming” locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.
What technology can’t give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn’t lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.
We’re probably talking about different things, like “you can’t grow almonds or citrus fruit locally”. But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it’s just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.
And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you’d want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don’t want a uniform regime. One man’s utopia is another man’s gulag.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don’t have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.
That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done
No it doesn’t! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).
A major driver of this is advertising or “brainwashing” people to buy garbage they don’t need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!
Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.
Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.
PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn’t forget or deny it’s possible.
because their power of authority is based on the strength of the economy
Yeah I feel like this is the biggest open secret we never talk about. Like ideology is just a lie, like a nursery rhyme we repeat to keep calm, but completely irrelevant in the face of how well people are doing economically.
But it’s been shown that a serious green new deal or “war economy” would be great for the economy. Just not for the pocket books of those who own “the world” like factories or are part of the value chain that is based on either fossil fuel or industrial processes that emit greenhouse gases otherwise.
Basically we could have looked at the previous investments and business value that would be lost or be “redistributed” if we had adapted. Like every long term investment in the world is at risk. It could be in the order of the value of the whole world, and that’s the “power” this idea of climate adaptation was up against.
The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.
And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn’t need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.
I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You’d just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.
yeah the false dichotomy represented by Thanos is the propaganda.
Not sure what you’re trying to say, but the paper assumes current population trends and means 30% of currently available resources in 2025 would be enough to give everyone a decent living standard (DLS) in 2050. We have everything we need to do this right now.
This is a major flaw in science and basic economic comprehension. You could grow enough potatoes to feed the world enough calories with just the area of France. We could build huge apartment blocks surrounded by farmland and connected via tiny mono rails. We could build apartments and appliances and computers that last for a century. We could genetically engineer microalgae to taste like pancake butter. If we half the number of required workers, we’d save a mountain of resources on commute. We could design everything to be recyclable. Wind energy with Kites Power gives us near unlimited energy. Our footprint could be tiny but with the luxury of free time, learning, arts and living in a community and in nature.
We are nowhere near carrying capacity, we’re just over because we waste so much on consumerism, planned obsolescence, unsustainable crops and artificial scarcity.
Our civilization is a fucking joke but science treats current conditions as if they were normal and immutable.
There probably are ad-men who pride themselves on being able to make any word filthy, or make people love even the filthiest of things. The only obstacle is in who has the most money to spend on the best ad-men and can hire the smartest sociopaths. Checkmate socialists!
This is just copium.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
The solution to the trolley problem is to kill the experimenter. He’s the one that keeps strapping people to the tracks. And also to convict the one asking these questions for thought crimes.
The trolley problem is a question designed to make you think ethics is both simple and impossible, that there are no good answers, and that principles are both valid but arbitrary tools to solve complex ethical questions. If you ask me such terrorist thought experiments, off to the gulag with you!
Out of curiosity, if you woke up tomorrow in the body of the opposite sex, how do you think you would feel or act on this in the long term? Like through magic, or alien science. Like in those 80s body swap movies, just permanent. Can you imagine that?
Personally I think I would just adapt. I’m a straight male and perfectly comfortable and like being a male, but I think I’d just live as a lesbian women then. It would be challenging and weird and people would see me differently, but it would also be intellectually interesting.
I recently realized that this makes me more gender-fluid than most trans people. Basically they might be more bonded to a concept of a specific gender than even the majority of people. And that is why it’s hard to imagine what they are going through, and hard to emphasize. If I imagine I’d have grown up as a girl I’d be perfectly comfortable as that too.
I like science fiction and consider myself a transhumanist, someone who believes that we should gain advanced bodies with full control over them, and e.g. change sex or appearance without needing surgery. Like if you could spend a year as a opposite sex without having to suffer and bleed for it, why wouldn’t you do it, even just to gain insight.
I don’t think you can make any argument saying that a human is sick just for strongly preferring or needing to be one gender. I don’t understand this need either, and think what lengths some people to is weird and some results questionable, but I can’t say they are wrong. There is an infinite number of ways a human mind can be. Why do you think it’s a mental illness?
Also, if you imagine a future where you could turn “flawlessly” into the opposite sex, and change back too, do you still think it would be a mental illness?
Yikes. Is this from the “committee to save endangered ideologies”? Which think tank came up with this lol
You’re not wrong. Obama won because he was a corporatist and easily manipulated and ran on empty slogans, so he had the backing of the mainstream. Harris did too, but AOC won’t have that backing.
That also means she could run on actual popular policies. Something Trump did. His voters now kinda got the same scam with him than the progressives got with Obama lol.
But there is deeply entrenched propaganda in the media and the minds of people. Like you’d need a movement that comes together. But you can see the liberals in this thread would balk at any tankie demanding and end to US or EU imperialism lol, just like they will balk at putting another women on the ticket.
Nice! I want to build a rack too but want to fit a regular ATX board to fit older / cheaper hardware. So it has to be at least 304mm wide, probably 400mm