You’re doing Gaia’s work

Love it!

Yep. I think it’s Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that’s immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It’s species wide insanity.

And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.

Preach.

Housing is a human right.

Private land ownership violates that human right.

All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

But we are a long way from implementing that.

It boggles my mind how people still insist there’s a “free market” in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.

This shit is why we need rent control.

Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.

And lawyers required laws.

First laws had to be passed protecting the environment. Then lawyers (and government agencies like the EPA) could go to court and enforce the laws.

And we got those laws passed because enough people advocated for them loudly enough and persuasively enough that government listened.

In other words: talking to people worked.

I think this is more directed to conservatives who claim people are inherently selfish and self-serving, which is why only capitalism works (because it starts from the assumption that people are inherently selfish and will always do what profits than the most) and communism / socialism / anarchism can’t possibly work (because they require people to cooperate instead of exploiting each other for personal profit)

Besides, the idea that “we should all be forced to pay” for anything presumes a capitalist system where money is exchanged for goods and services. The point is to get rid of that.

This is why you talk to people - ordinary people - and convince them to (1) buy less plastic garbage (2) vote for restrictions on plastic garbage.

And then the people you talk to talk to other people and convince them.

And then those other people talk to still other people.

And eventually you have a critical mass. And politicians listen to them when they demand changes in the laws. And corporations have less money because enough people are boycotting their products so it’s harder for them to hire lobbyists and bribe politicians.

And all this starts with you talking to people.

If you want change, you need a critical mass of people to demand change.

If you want a critical mass of people to demand change, you have to recruit people to that critical mass.

And you recruit people by talking to them.

You do not have zero control. You vote with your dollars. You vote with your actual vote. And most importantly you talk to people to get them to vote with their dollars and their ballots. When you commit to a cause and you live the values of that cause, you can convince other people to commit to the cause, and they convince other people to commit to the cause, and so on and so forth. That’s how collective action works. That’s how all political change works. This is how you force billionaires to stop polluting and get laws passed that actually help the climate - by getting enough people to support climate action that politicians and businesses have no choice but to yield.

And you do this by talking to people.

Christ, the same people who insist get out the vote efforts work will tell you talking about climate change is useless, when it’s the exact same phenomenon - individual action inspiring more individual action and ultimately becoming collective action.

See, this is why art appreciation classes are not a waste of class time. It teaches you that artists use metaphor and symbology to refer to complicated ideas in simple images, and that political cartoons especially are rife with simplified symbology because of the limited space artists have and the complexity of many political ideas.

If you understood art and symbology, you’d recognize the treeless wasteland on the right represents the devastation of climate change, the lack of trees symbolizes environmental destruction, and nitpicking how many trees would actually be left is missing the point entirely.

But the average American has the reading comprehension of a fifth grader, so how can I expect them to comprehend a fucking artistic metaphor?

(Also: at about 116° f, leaves can no longer photosynthesize. So it doesn’t matter how much CO2 is in the air - if summers get hot enough that leaves can’t photosynthesize during the day, it’s going to kill forests, and we are pretty close to that point in a lot of places already. But that’s completely beside the point.)

Since Democrats Republicans are so corrupt they refuse to abolish the antidemocratic electoral college and have already ~~lost~won two elections they had the majorityminority of votes in.

FTFY.

If anyone wants to be a grown up and have a grown up discussion, then they need to stop shifting blame around and acting like governments exist in a vacuum and corporations aren’t selling anything.

Exactly. Thank you.

That’s how collective action works, yes.

A lot of people in this thread are deliberately missing the point because they don’t want to hear it.

They want to live in independent suburban homes, in isolated subdivisions where you can only get to jobs or groceries or social events by car, with big yards soaked in pesticides so they don’t have bugs in their houses, etc, etc.

They want to live high consumption lifestyles. They don’t want to live in resource efficient, high density housing because they imagine it will reduce their standard of living.

So they nitpick the image and make up reasons why it’s unrealistic because they don’t want to admit the kinds of homes seen on the left are unsustainable and unrealistic in the long term.

This thread is an object lesson in why the whole world hates Americans.

Your faith in the U.S. legal system is touching.

In many parts of the United States, if any parent or child sued over mandating the Pledge of Allegiance, their family would have to flee town for their own safety, after which the local judge would throw out the case for lack of standing because the student isn’t enrolled anymore.

Laws are pieces of paper. They mean what the men with guns say they mean. And in red America, the men with guns say shut up and salute the flag.

Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

Helps keep them from questioning why they serve and obey the state as adults.

the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I’d go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren’t so bad, workers wouldn’t fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.