I Have A Knee-jerk Disgust Reaction To The Tweet, But It's Because Israel Cannot Credibly Claim To Even

Idea: I don't want to settle for choosing the lesser of two evils; I want to abolish the system that confined me to those choices in the first place. Choosing a lesser evil is better than choosing a greater evil, but choosing good is best.

I KNOW IS TOO MUCH TEXT BUT I DID MY BEST DON’T BULLY ME.

"Finally, we gradually eliminate all words from our vocabulary. The working classes hate words. They’re all illiterate, probably; I assume they communicate in grunts and squeals. We must learn to squeal like they do. Roll around in the muck. Hide your delicate bourgeois face in a plastic snout. Lap up corn syrup from the trough. Drape yourself in a soiled flag and grunt the name of Jesus Christ. Squeal, piggy, squeal."

-Sam Kriss

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

Vox

American democracy’s Senate problem, explained

A huge — and growing — source of bias in the political system.

Pretty bold of Vox to advocate for destroying the Senate because they vote the wrong way. As a bonus, the memo they link to doesn't contain a single mention of the House, which (at least attempts) to balance the small-state bias of the Senate with a large-state bias.

This tendency always fascinated me. There's a guy in my neighborhood with a big sign on his fence claiming that Obama passed a certain law making propaganda legal, as though Obama (or any ruler) would want to make sure his naked seizure of power was legalized prior to doing it? Such a strange mix of total paranoia combined with a childish belief in the law as inviolable.

i’ve been thinking about a bit in a recent Shaun video, where he has a short clip taken from a terf or anti-vax or wayfair truther rally, i don’t remember which (sort of the point, these groups all bleed into each other), where someone was claiming that the mRNA vaccine was a plot by transhumanists to alter people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be human anymore and thus, under the law, they would no longer have human rights.

and, like, the major takeaway here is just “oh, these people are crazy crazy,” but i can’t help but be kind of astounded at the logic regardless. like, the existence of legal rights predates the discovery of DNA. your rights as a person do not at all depend on your genome. nevermind that the casual conflation of DNA with the true essence of a living organism is a fundamental misreading of science; if you could magically remove all the DNA from someone’s body, they would still (in the brief interval before they died horribly) have human rights! no court anywhere on Earth would entertain the argument that someone’s legal status as a person is dependent on a DNA test.

and obviously there are much more salient objections to this whole line of reasoning, which is purely emotive “technology bad” nonsense rhetoric, but like… do they think that if they trick someone into standing next to a strong gamma-ray source, they have the legal right to murder them??

Humans : correct in making leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure : wealth ultimately is extension of desires, fluctuating with emotions and state of mind. Desires : when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved.

-Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"

7 Points of Green Accelerationism

this is maybe the most coherent political ideology I’ve ever had, I’m kind of excited: 1) Climate change is irreversible.  There is no way - other than an arbitrarily restrictive and probably needlessly difficult exercise in self-terraforming - we are going to return to anything resembling a “natural” Earth system.  If there are specific aspects of the current ecosystem we would wish to conserve - such as biodiversity, temperate weather, specific local equilibria - we must isolate them from any presumed set of “natural” interrelations and figure out how to influence new conditions to maintain and generate them in new ways.  2) Climate change is not a crisis based on scarcity or depletion of resources for consumption. It is quite literally a surplus of productive solar energy in the Earth system which its current structures are inadequate to use productively or expend, and which unused can only destroy.  Some proportion of solar energy must always be wasted (Bataille), and our current systems have little or no effective control of this waste; where they do, the forms it takes are not desirable. The “accursed share” must be decided on and disposed of collectively and rationally; the share that can be used productively can and should be maximized.  Climate change can and should be seen as a positive opportunity; attempts to simply “mitigate” instead of harnessing it are not only doomed but regressive. 3) In a non-orthogonal, unconditional sense, all of this (the Anthropocene, the formation of radically new systems of energy circulation) will inevitably happen regardless of our efforts.  The goals of “Green Accelerationist” praxis, therefore, should be understood in strictly political terms (and from my stake in this comes in, leftist ones: the capacity for productive energy use and the right to a say in destructive expenditure should be fairly distributed, not only among humans but, as far as possible, throughout the biosphere as a whole).  However the most effective methods for achieving those goals will likely be found as far from the “political” as currently understood as possible.  All present “political” institutions - states, activist organizations, - are as obsolete as the ecological ones, and will only drain any energy invested in them.  The “economic”, as a direct site of energy circulation, is a more useful site of contestation, and traditional working class tactics of organization and disruption will likely remain valuable tools for redirecting energy into more sustainable cycles.  However, the “technical” (including not only positive acts of production, but hacking and sabotage) will become a probably more important site of political contestation, as well as (to an extent identical) the “ecological” itself.  Different technologies will open radically different political and ecological prospects - and different social deployments of technologies conversely must be thought of as technically, not only politically, different.  Technology, ecology and politics are no longer feasibly separable: they are all concerned with directing energy circulation at a global scale. 4) Technical development as a form of praxis must not be allowed to be monopolized by existing institutions such as corporations, universities and governments, which determine its current “political” character.  We must not treat the control of technology by obsolete and reactionary forms as a politically neutral fact whose products are then to be harnessed and regulated by a separate “politics”, as in naive forms of “ecomodernism”.  Control of the means of research and development is as if not more important to political outcomes in the near term than control of existing means of production.  Making scientific research widely accessible is perhaps the most significant struggle currently being fought; it should be understood as the minimal precondition for almost any effective ecological praxis. 5) Green Accelerationism should be distinguished from naive ecomodernism, not only in its radical approach to the specific conditions of technical development, but in adopting a general critique of extractivism.  Extractivism is a specific, dangerous, ineffective and inherently reactionary technical, ecological and political formation that treats vast swathes of sophisticated circulatory infrastructure purely as sites of energy extraction for a small set of processes.  Extractivism should not be conflated with technology itself, whose role is now to design as many new mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships as possible. 6) Green Accelerationism should strive not only for interdependence but independence, not only for humans or an economic or national elite but for as many living beings as possible.  With a large energetic surplus and sophisticated, redundant social, political & ecological technologies permitting a wide multiplicity of sustainable relationships, the coercive dimension of ecological interrelation (understood by the Enlightenment as “nature”) can be minimized. Nor should we limit our sights to the “terrestrial”.  Access to the resources, energy and literal space of the rest of the universe would increase the flexibility and resilience of systems on Earth to change, as well as allowing greater individual independence for individuals.  Clean space travel is an ideal non-destructive outlet for excess energy that cannot be redirected into circulation on Earth. 7) The category of “ecology” resolves the antinomy of “praxis” and “anti-praxis” posed by the Unconditional Accelerationists.  No single element, including the human, within an ecological process can direct it, but ecological relationships are always reciprocal, even if unintentionally: struggling to adapt and struggling to influence are the same.  Green Accelerationism, however, emphatically rejects the claims that powerful nonlinear, nonhuman processes are incomprehensible - perhaps by humans, but the act of comprehension itself can be ecologically distributed - and that (extractive) “technocapital” is out of all of these inevitably the most powerful, except insofar as any combination of energy and intelligent organization is “technocapital”, a definition that obscures the territorialization of energy flows at present by a specific extractive class that is inadequate to the force it has unleashed.  Technocapital is not the genie, it is the bottle. The unharnessed share of solar energy increasingly exceeds that enclosed in existing “technocapital”.  Whoever or whatever controls this share controls the future.  

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

It *is* a good argument; the point is to force the theist to acknowledge that their god is just one among thousands, none of whom have any persuasive evidence for their existence. What argument can Catholics offer me for the existence of God that are any different that that of a pagan and their "idol"?

I also think the analogy with Communist leaders is telling: regardless of your thoughts on Mao, Lenin, Che, etc., there is indisputable proof (often video evidence) that they all existed and said/did the things their followers claim they said/did. Rejecting them is a matter of political opinion, not denial of their factual existence. The second poster assumes the same of God; the facts are not in dispute, atheists are simply *rejecting* God, whose existence is as certain as Leon Trotsky.

"we're both atheists, I just believe in one god less than you" is rarely a good argument.

it is never a good argument when used to compare a pagan idol to the Lord.

There is a reason why neopaganism comes at a time of uncertainty and rests on either the reinvention of paganism or on irrationalism.

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.