Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.

I see your argument, but I disagree with it.

First, “science” does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.

“Science”, as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can’t. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can’t afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can’t afford the new technologies can’t sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.

Every scientific “advancement” by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can’t afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.

And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn’t matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.

And if you were arguing “this is bad, but it’s not as bad as a bunch of other stuff” I would be more likely to agree.

But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.

Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is “one of the good ones”. That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.

And I think, if we think about what NASA’s budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of “science”, we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.

That’s correct. I don’t.

As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.

The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID’s defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world’s poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.

And it’s happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don’t even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an “apolitical triumph of the human species”.

All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.

So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it’s more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.

I found the Tumblr post I got it from and there’s no source there either. Sorry. Lots of dank memes tho.

Sorry, it was a random Tumblr meme I saved a while back and I’m not sure who shared it. I’ll try to find the original but no promises.

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.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

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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