[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 16 points 1 month ago

Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

Essentially, Israel is the UK's "not quite final solution" to the "problem" of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that's terrible if you're an antisemite.

But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you're doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the "antisemitic" label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don't look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. "Socialism for the rich" is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

Golden parachutes, positions for each other's nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives' pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don't eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

Surprise - it's white supremacists again. It's Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

It's not a cabal, it's a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn't a nefarious grand scheme, it's just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it's easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn't directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

So that's the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 16 points 4 months ago

Ah yes, because the recent explosion of tick population is surely because of our biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

Do you know what the natural predators of ticks are? Do you know what sort of environments they like to sleep and rest and hunt? Do you know what the average American's response is to finding a burrow on their property? Or their cats' and dogs' response?

We truly haven't learned from medieval cityfolk killing cats because of the black death.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 13 points 6 months ago

Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don't try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there's so much money going into AI? They can't wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won't affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won't find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If not for capitalist modes of production, would your home still be designed in a way so ill-fitting to the environment that you need a thermostat right now?

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 14 points 7 months ago

And how much CO2 was produced training the AI that was put on your device? How many slaves spent how many hours generating data to train that AI? How many slaves cut down how many forests to extract the materials that how many slaves turned into the chips that ran the training process?

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 13 points 8 months ago

Run where? An even less hospitable planet?

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).

Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).

Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

edit: Thank you for taking my comment to heart!

Original comment:


With all due respect, I think you're being racist.

This is an active religious practice described objectively and with voice being given to those observing it. To dismiss it as "eastern mysticism narrative" is to deny Shinto itself a place in media on par with western religions.

A couple years back there was a similar bunch of articles about German Hunger Stones - stones expressing pity for the next people that would see the river level go low enough for them to be visible, because the drought would mean disastrous crop failure.

They're long-lasting traditional climate disaster markers, expressed through the worldview of the culture that discovered the marker, with a news article focused on the unhinged fact that they are now constantly warning that disaster is incoming.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 16 points 1 year ago

I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if "your emissions" don't include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 year ago

Could you explain why?

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 year ago

Police have discretion on which crimes to prioritize. They're not honor-bound to ticket someone who is double-parked in the middle of a car chase. They can opt not to arrest people for trespassing if it gets them to cooperate with a murder investigation.

Going to arrest pacifists engaging in criminal conspiracy to temporarily block nonessential industry and infrastructure at one location while ignoring ongoing racially motivated assault, looting, and arson is a choice.

[-] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 13 points 1 year ago

It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.

My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.

One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.

Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.

I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.

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Tiresia

joined 1 year ago