Terrarium [none/use name]

In the funny pope thread, “maybe we should at least consider cultural sensitivity re: the pope and be more kind to one anothet” was responded to with a slew of unfounded accusations, seemingly deliberate misreadings, and pushback from a defensive posturing.

And now this has spawned at least two major threads whose premise is, “Christianity us reactionary and we must explicitly and openly reject it to be a good communist”.

I’m not sure what the actual goal would be. Is it to berate any and all Christians on this website into disavowing a bunch of things they already don’t believe and apologizing for things done by other people? Is it to ban the dead Christianity comm? Socially police anyone from admitting to being part of the most popular religion regardless of their direct views on the topics where you note Christianity having reactionary sentiments?

Personally I don’t think there is a goal in mind. Just people getting in between a Hexbear user and their treats: a false catharsis because the pope died. And getting between the Hexbear and those treats in any capacity, you must be tarred a reactionary object of hate.

People are talking about state atheism and the church-monarchy feudal system and the USSR. Comrade, you (most likely) aren’t even in an organization. We are not the inklings of Chinese national liberation but in [X Western country]. We’re in a lost Redditor pro-trans vaguely commie site full of yt people eager to weaponize their marginalization to verbally kill each other and I’m suggesting you be slightly less reactive and escalatory towards comrades.

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The only examples I’ve seen of this are people saying it’s antisocial and counterproductive behavior to crab dance this pope’s death. It definitely is antisocial, it’s only something a small group would enjoy and most would be very alienated by it.

This is just a fact of what it is. For some it makes sense to embrace the antisocial, often creating and preferring a new in-group. Unfortunately this tends to mean cloistering oneself and failing to actually build anything, and adopting habits that prevent it.

This forum’s name was originally from a podcast by not-particularly-funny white guys in New York. They have not actually built anything. They are not of an organization. They don’t mobilize anyone to do anything. They make snarky jokes poking fun at the liberal political establishment and electoral politics and are increasingly irrelevant. That is the inevitable trajectory of seeking conflict and infighting and being eagerly disrespectful to your comrades.

With our luck we’ll get Tortellinimalo, though.

Believe it or not this is just what Italians looked like back then.

I would recommend thinking about it this way: whenever a comrade is “wrong” about something, literally anything, how much do you make it your business to “correct” them?

When it comes to socialism and organizing, the answer must always be, “to the extent it improves the organization or helps them personally”. A sign of a dysfunctional social space is that people are constantly getting in each others’ business for no reason other than that they are “wrong” about something. Dysfunctional socialist spaces will even dress this up in left language and (ironically enough), for example, say it causes disunity for a member to be dating a liberal. Of course, the disunity comes from the org trying to control a member’s romantic life.

In this scenario, what is the existence of socialist Christians here actually doing to disrupt you or others? Are there certain problematic posts that inspired your question or did you just see “Christian” and start attacking? Are there a bunch of Calvinists in there doing Calvinism to us? Do you think you might actually be the source of disruption in thus scenario?

As I explained, the more likely thing to look for is certain kinds of dissimilarity. Not a phone, but something living off rocks. The bias is reversed from what is probable.

The bias is incorrect, though

That thing weighs 50 lbs so it at least takes a good chunk of welding steel to put it together and it is probably made overseas and shipped. But there are a ton of brands out there that are basically US designers and sellers where the quality of what you get vs. what you pay for it varies a lot. I don’t have a cargo bike and haven’t really evaluated the different companies there, but I think this trend applies to alll bikes.

Though to put things in perspective a half decent standard bike with similar specs is $500-1000 new in the US. That bike has low end Shimano components and Tektro disc brakes. Those aren’t oo-la-la expensive bike nerd parts but they are pretty good parts and a company selling such a bike knows this and is pricing according to what others charge for such things. I see a similar REI bike for the same price that has hydraulic brakes and would probably go on sale this year.

But it is a very silly market that wants to charge more for new hype because that delivers more profit. With some exceptions I recommend buying used instead. Kind of like with cars, half the value is lost moments after sale. Cargo bikes with that design are a fairly new trend, and so are disc brakes on anything other than a mountain bike, so it might take a little while to find a used one. But if you wanted a 2000s mountain bike or road bike with rim brakes man you could get one free from a dumpster or buy one for $75. And then throw on $200 of racks to hold stuff.

PS there’s a Walmart one (Mongoose) for $600 new.

The bike in that image appears to be a manual bike, like your peddling supplies all the input for movement. The cargo bikes you are mentioning are all e-bikes, they are all custom designed for a relatively small number of orders, are overengineered/overbuilt to handle the extra weight of an e-bike, have hydraulic brakes because it is so heavy, and have a battery and motor. That’s what the Urban Arrows are, for example.

You can get a used cargo bike (not electric) for around $500-750 in the US.

Thia is still somewhat expensive but part of that is the overall bicycle industry being based on new expensive components.

Right? Where are the serfs!?

The problem here is that we don’t know you dropped your phone. Instead of a phone it might be a pool of jelly or an entire asteroid or a lichen thing that eats methane and only lives on the absolute best, truly primo rocks. So when you illuminate it you go, “aww man it’s just a rock!” and move on. And you already know other life isn’t going to be a phone, that’s something for humans in particular. You need to look for the rock dwellers, they are more likely than the phone-havers.

One also has to make peace with the fact that we may not know if there is life in other solar systems for a very, very long time. It probably requires making an actual visit and sending back results. And that would likely take hundreds of thousands of years in our small neighborhood of systems. We can imagine getting really good telescopes before that, I suppose, but they would probably have limits. As in, with what resolution could we make observations via a constellation of telescopes distributed around the solar system? So we can get much better spatial resolution to ask the most important question: is there metabolism?

I think it’s a somewhat useful thought experiment for asking why we don’t observe EM signals like our own (albeit incomplete re: detectability of far off signals). But it is very anthropocentric so it also serves as a useful object of criticism, as even the questions it asks are probably wrong.

Even then, evolution is historically contingent. If you rewound and replayed the tape of life on earth and changed a few early conditions, you’d end up with a very different story. Evolutionary biology teaches us that life on other planets should be different from us more than similar. This also applies at the biochemical level.

It’s understandable that people take your logic and run with it, but it rapidly clashes with evolution. In addition, we don’t actually know what conditions are necessary for abiogenesis (probably not just one kind). Even on our own planet! We know there wasn’t much atmospheric oxygen at the time. And possibly not that much water. Yet exobiologists look for oceanic planets with atmospheric oxygen because that’s what we have. Sure, oxygen is a good electron receptor and can be produced from water (in our case, chlorophyllic photosynthesis), but there is mo reason to think photosynthesis would evolve the same way independently. Exactly the opposite, actually. It should be different. No reason to think there would even be proteins. The chemistry would be very different. And it took over a billion years for chlorophyllic photosynthesis to evolve on earth!

Yes but it’s actually the opposite of what to look for, understanding evolution. Evolution is historically contingent - it only builds on what it already has. Life on earth has billions of years of a semi-random walk on which life was built. If you replayed it under slightly different conditions you would expect to see something quite different.

For example, we depict aliens as humanoid in fiction, mostly so we can tell storoes. The more imaginative writers might make them look reptilian or something. But there’s no reason to think they would even have bilateral symmetry. Or have cells. Or live on the same spatial or temporal scale. The same applies to biochemistry.

It’s understandable that people would want to look for the familiar to look for life, but our own knowledge of how life on earth operates tells us that we need to look for something fairly unfamiliar.

What are you, some kind of commie?

Except they are already vibes based so there is no reason to think the initial approximation is accurate. They could all be massive overestimates. There is no reason they need to regress to the mean.

They used telescopes to infer that this planet has a specific molecule on it that is known to be made by life on earth and not en masse by any other process.

IMO this is a stretch because life on another planet probably has somewhat different chemistry. There is a massive unfounded bias in all pop exobiology that finding other life means finding stuff just like life on earth.

Which is not to say it isn’t neat but it is literally another planet light years away. We know almost nothing about it.

When I see a Ford F-150, I shake my head and think, “loser”.

“The workers” will not wake up on their own, ever. Concerted organizing is always required and even the successful movements never arrive fully formed. Expect overt violence and heightened contradictions. More fertile ground for organizing coupled with repression and 20 new kinds of Pinkertons. Trying to organize younger workers that won’t recognize the dangers of organizing with their phones and spying cloud services until their friends start dying. There is no guarantee that “the workers” will succeed on any first round. The path may involve a fascisy takeovet, bourgeous revolution, and only then a socialist surge. The intermediary period could look like the status quo but with a higher prison population, lower pay, higher rent, worse education, and increased reactionary sentiment.

We do still need to organize, to build the best possible path. And hey, there might be a soft balkanization where we can organize more safely in certain states.