A lot of it comes from conservative AstroTurf.

And, unfortunately, a lot of it comes from farmers and other people living in rural areas, who see fields of crops being turned into solar farms and think “these panels are ugly, these panels are industrial, these panels are taking up fertile farmland” and see it as just one more way the government is exploiting rural areas for the benefit of the cities.

They’re wrong, of course, but rural America has been abandoned and neglected and made the dumping ground for all sorts of polluting industries for so long I can’t blame them for thinking that way.

Capitalism is a system of distribution of goods with a basis of private property and competitive markets. In the past it has been praised for high rate of innovation and low costs of goods compared to older systems such as feudalism and aristocracy where small states subservient to a crown owned and managed industry.

Cool. Now tell us why it’s been condemned. You’ve only got half the definition there, and that doesn’t count as an honest explanation.

(Also: capitalism may work like that in theory, but it’s never been fully implemented in practice. Every so-called “capitalist” economy has the rich putting their thumb on the scale to make markets less competitive in their favor. The “economics 101” definition you give is so simplified that it’s useless for describing any real world economy. But that’s another rant.)

Or pick the sprouts, cook them, and eat them. They’re like hardier asparagus 😆

I don’t know. I stole it from Tumblr. Share at your own risk.

I think if we’re talking about “real dystopian collapse”, as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you’re thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR, take it to the range every weekend, and don’t waste your time with slings and arrows.

And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that’s where I’d start.

social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul

Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆

That being said, don’t be too dismissive of “supplementing” your diet. If you know what you’re doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, “hypothetically”, some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world’s fertilizer passes through - and they’re also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.

(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you’ll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )

Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you’ll have those skills when they become necessary.

I wonder if Malcolm X ever considered that alienating white liberals decreased their ability to help his cause.

Did you look up the context of this quote? Because here, read the whole thing:

The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man.

Let me first explain what I mean by this White liberal. In America there’s no such thing as Democrats and Republicans anymore. That’s antiquated. In America you have liberals and conservatives. This is what the American political structure boils down to among Whites. The only people who are still living in the past and thinks in terms of “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican” is the American Negro. He’s the one who runs around bragging about party affiliation and he’s the one who sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican, but White people in America are divided into two groups, liberals and Republicans…or rather, liberals and conservatives.

And when you find White people vote in the political picture, they’re not divided in terms of Democrats and Republicans, they’re divided consistently as conservatives and as liberal. The Democrats who are conservative vote with Republicans who are conservative. Democrats who are liberals vote with Republicans who are liberals. You find this in Washington, DC.

Now the White liberals aren’t White people who are for independence, who are liberal, who are moral, who are ethical in their thinking, they are just a faction of White people who are jockeying for power the same as the White conservatives are a faction of White people who are jockeying for power. Now they are fighting each other for booty, for power, for prestige and the one who is the football in the game is the Negro. Twenty million Black people in this country are a political football, a political pawn an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn…

Politics have changed a lot since then, of course, but I think his message is pretty clear, and still valid. If you’re the kind of “white liberal” who doesn’t give a shit about Black rights except when you need Black votes to get your candidates elected - and there are tons of those holding office in the Democratic Party today - then you are an enemy of the Black man and America as a whole.

Shocking that these fascist clowns aren’t good at governing even for their own ill ends.

You’re missing the point of the exercise. They didn’t want to govern - they wanted to break shit.

Musk went in with the attitude “we will cut everything we have an excuse to cut, and then if one of our political allies objects to a cut, we’ll put it back”.

And DOGE implemented that plan perfectly.

They cut a bunch of grants that had nothing to do with “wokeness” because their goal was to cut as many grants as possible, no matter what they were for. The LLM was there as a propaganda tool - it let them falsely claim they were only cutting “woke” grants. It was there to give DOGE an excuse. The fact that it was wildly inaccurate was the reason they used it.

people losing income

More than a million of the poorest people in the world have died - so far - of starvation, exposure, and preventable disease, because of DOGE’s illegal cuts to federal programs like USAID.

Sure, we can call that “people losing income”. It’s technically true.

But Jesus, if I did something illegal and a million people died because of it, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.

I’m sorry, what presidential candidate in the last five generations wasn’t part of the Epstein class?

Even Bill Clinton, a poor boy from rural Arkansas, got to be an honorary member of the Epstein class. And my God did he enjoy the privileges of that class.

look, hate harris all you want, but iran? venezuela? cuba? migrants in cages?

Remember Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine? And also Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and a dozen others? And all the proxy wars and “interventions” I’m forgetting about or that never made the news?

Pre-Trump America was less blatant in its warmongering. It made the effort to build “international consensus” before bombing the fuck out of poor brown people. And it preferred to made economic warfare, through sanctions, which don’t make headlines when they kill poor brown people.

Harris would have killed Iranians with sanctions rather than bombs. And perhaps you think that makes a difference. But whether a little girl dies of starvation from American sanctions, or is blown up by American bombs, she’s still fucking dead.

Fuck, Trump’s “random bombing go” strategy let Iran close the Strait and made America take the blame for it - and if that lets Iran negotiate with the world and end Western sanctions using the Strait as leverage, Trump’s war might end up saving more lives than it kills.

As for migrants in cages: Trump made no new laws. Trump made no new policies, even. Trump enforced existing laws more harshly and blatantly and publicly than America previously had. And Harris promised to do the same fucking thing in her campaign.

What’s happening to migrants today is what the American people wanted. The killings, the beatings, the disappearances, the private prisons and forced labor and inhumane conditions, all of it.

Only we saw it happen openly, on the streets in Minneapolis, in front of a million cell phones and cameras, instead of out in the Texas desert where the only cameras belong to the Border Patrol. And seeing the Border Patrol treat middle class white protesters like immigrants was too much for some people.

Putting migrants in cages is what America wants. America just doesn’t want to see the cages. It hurts their feelings.

I don’t vote.

Good people don’t vote.

I may not be a good person but I try my best.

And at least I can claim the dignity of refusing to participate in the Epstein class’s quadrennial popularity contest.

deleted by creator

The Democrats are a right-wing party.

They are the secularist wing of the American Capitalist Party, and the Republicans are the theocratic wing.

They aren’t the fucking opposition, and they’re certainly not the fucking left.

I mean, OP copied this image from some random web site somewhere, but somebody could have retrofitted a newer drive to whatever this is 😆

You’re correct, but your analysis is incomplete.

It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide.

But governments were motivated to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs.

And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change.

Here’s a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who’s more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle?

Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who’s more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn’t? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn’t know how to cook without it?

And who’s going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down?

Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.

I hope you find your way back, because it’s true. Millions of others will.

I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.

Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.

Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.

And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.

You and I are both part of the same slrpnk community, and I’m doing my part, so that’s at least one person you can believe in. Why not try believing in more of us?

Doomerism is capitalist propaganda. They couldn’t convince us that climate change was a hoax, so now they’re trying to convince us that climate change is inevitable. And the point of both propaganda campaigns is the same: protect the status quo.

Because if we really were doomed and climate change was really inevitable, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to convince you that it was.

They want you to believe what you do is meaningless. But it’s not.

You don’t need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that’s all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it’s still worth celebrating because you’re still fucking alive.