One more Winstanley quote that goes hard:
And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”
I would say trees growing in neat rows in an industrial monoculture orchard, or squeezed into a 3-ft strip of otherwise barren land next to a sidewalk slowly choking to death on concrete and pollution, have been destroyed in almost every way that matters. They physically still exist, yes, but trees are part of an ecosystem; capitalism kills the ecosystem and raises the tree as a zombie servant. It forces the tree to perform its profitable function, and nothing else, and destroys everything about it and everything around it that doesn’t serve that function.
Zombie trees may be alive, but they aren’t really living.
Or maybe we’re overthinking and the poster is talking about logging and not about absolutely everything in the world that people might use a tree for.
In fact recent famines in Iran and Afghanistan were the result of overproduction of cash crops like Saffron
Do you have sources for this? I’ma be honest: when a country is laboring under brutal sanctions - sanctions designed to create famine conditions, to make ordinary citizens desperate enough to overthrow their government - claiming that the famines are really caused by that government making farmers grow the wrong crops… I’m willing to be proven wrong but that doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
It’s the opposite. More aerodynamic modern cars are more likely to hit insects on the road than the older blockier ones. They’re not hitting insects because there aren’t any insects to hit.
Have you ever lived in a HOA?
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Someday, these items will all be eaten slowly, or perhaps quickly. When will this begin in force? When will it affect our daily lives and health? Will we be able to prepare?
Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn’t sweet corn, and doesn’t taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.
And calling opposition to ethanol “oil and gas propaganda” is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.
There are certainly those kind of irrational AI boosters out there. Though I strongly suspect the AI bubble is much like the crypto bubble, in that the true believers are vastly outweighed by fakers who don’t believe their own bullshit and are just hyping the product to make money.
When it comes to the billionaire caste, though, I think most of them know AI isn’t, and probably won’t, live up to the hype.
But the point isn’t to actually replace people with AI.
The point is to replace free people with serfs.
We’re already seeing AI being used as an excuse to replace American workers with foreign workers overseas. That is to say, American companies fire a bunch of well-paid American software engineers, “replace” them with AI tools, and then when the tools inevitably fail, hire much cheaper labor from India.
And the techbro support of Trump’s immigration crackdown has the same goal. They don’t want to bring foreign workers to the United States and pay them salaries sufficient to live in the United States - they want their workers trapped in countries with low wages and low cost of living.
Now expand that to, basically, every other working class sphere of employment. AI can’t replace workers. But if enough businesses can be convinced to fire workers and try to replace them with AI, we will get mass unemployment, economic collapse, and political turmoil - and, as always in a collapse, the ultra-rich will get even richer, because the unemployed working class will be forced to sell whatever they have at fire sale prices, and the billionaire caste will be able to buy up land and houses and businesses cheap, and consolidate even more wealth in their caste.
And when the dust settles, the unemployed masses will be desperate to work at whatever wage and conditions the billionaire caste wants to set.
I mean, if saving seeds wasn’t dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be, Monsanto wouldn’t have made it illegal.
God, fuck ethanol. Last I checked it literally took 1.5 gallons of oil/gas to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away soil fertility doing it.
I read an article some time ago arguing the purpose of ethanol (and ag subsidies in general) is, consciously or unconsciously, manifest destiny - we have to have a “use” for all the land we stole, we have to do something with it even if that something is a complete waste, because otherwise, people might start asking why we don’t give it back. Seems more likely to me all the time.
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I like to ask bloodmouth concern trolls “what would convince you to go vegan?”
And when they come back with some soft appeaser bullshit, “you clearly know that information, so why hasn’t it convinced you to go vegan?”
messy and expensive.
Expensive for whom, though?
The American people will pay the cost, in blood and tax money, for occupying Venezuela.
Big Oil, weapons manufacturers, and the Trump crime family, will reap the profits from it.
(Edit: and yes of fucking course the Venezuelan people will suffer far more than Americans safe in the imperial core. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be fucking said.)
Every American invasion and occupation is another massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the poor, isn’t that the saying?
That’s actually a part I don’t disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don’t treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.
And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.
Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.
If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying “hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything’s good now, go back to consuming as usual”.
I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.
I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.
(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don’t pay.)
Why do people act like not using a gas powered stove is akin to stripping away some fundamental right?
Because change is bad.
I’m not (just) being snarky. People get defensive when something important to them changes, even if the change is for the better.
And food, and cooking food, is extremely important to most people.
How so?
Besides all the vegans, vegetarians, and people who can’t afford or don’t have access to beef, there are roughly 1.2 billion Hindus in the world, most of whom don’t eat beef for religious reasons.
I don’t see how beef can be irreplaceable when literally billions of people don’t eat beef and are perfectly healthy without it.