mozz

Just to put some perspective: polls. The Emerson College one at the top is notable in several ways.

I suspect that if it really was over, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to put out propaganda that it was over. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that a ramping up of the vigor level in the attempts to paint Biden as a clear loser and invest hard in capitalizing on his fuckup of a debate is indicative of someone thinking that that’s badly needed.

Dude. No.

The occupation after the war sure wasn’t pretty, but the allies didn’t hang around for 75 more years oppressing the shit out of Germany and going back in any time they felt like shooting some civilians, or wandering into somebody’s house and saying hey this one is mine now, or destroying water supplies just for the hell of it.

They didn’t kill around 10% of the civilian population of Japan over the course of less than a year after the war after any real military threat was ended, just because they felt like getting back at them for Pearl Harbor.

Yes, all countries commit atrocities in war. War is the process of atrocity. It’s an abomination. But not every way of going to war is the same, and what’s happening in Gaza is so different from “collateral damage” or bombing civilians in an actual military conflict, even an unequal one, that to describe it as such is basically apologia on behalf of Israel.

Oh

I for-real misread this, as asking what is an example of tech that actually has gotten better, because the general rule is that things become more shit over time, as capitalism gets its hands on them

I was gonna say programming languages. Having come up in the time of C++ and Java, having Python and Go and Rust around is fuckin fantastic. Even Typescript is… well… it’s not JavaScript! See, things are getting better.

Literally everything else is getting worse over time.

neither a Biden presidency nor Trump presidency would put the U.S. on track to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, the benchmark needed to prevent catastrophic warming of over 1.5 degrees Celsius.

My guy, we’re at 1.5 now

There’s a fiction that it’s far away, because all the pleasant theories that meant we were going to avoid the catastrophic outcomes put it far away

But it’s not. It’s here now. And things will get much, much, much worse from this point forward. As the author points out, we’re still setting a new record for how much fossil fuel we are burning, every single fucking year.

Yes, Biden is better, by a significant-fraction-of-the-federal budget amount. He spent a trillion dollars on the problem, and how he got the current government to be okay with that much, I have no idea.

But compared to what’s required, it’s pitiful. It’s turning on the seat belt sign when the plane’s engines are off, and you’re over the ocean. It’s moving the steering wheel around when your car is already sliding down the embankment towards the high cliff-face.

The problem is, we’ve still got our foot hard on the gas, even though we’re clearly going to go over the edge, while we keep congratulating ourselves on hitting our targets, because we lifted up on the pressure by a fraction of a fraction of an inch.

The little prod with it in his direction is absolutely perfect

"Should is a fucking lie -- it might be what oughta be, but it ain't what is." -Lenny Bruce

One of my absolute favorite part of the wild, semi-hallucinogenic nature of the Lord of the Rings books and why I like them so much better than even the perfectly serviceable epic fantasy of the movies, was the trees.

You may already know this, but in the books, it's not quite so simple as some trees can walk around, and some are normal trees. It's like... all trees exist on a spectrum. Almost all of them are sleeping and stationary almost all of the time. But that's not their only mode. When they are roused, which takes quite a lot both in terms of events and in terms of time, they become different. Not just some special trees, but all of them, although some are more lively and rousable than others. Only the special ones have eyes and branch-arms and stuff and can get up and be mobile, but all of them are rousable.

When Saruman starts woodchippering his way through the forest, killing trees on an industrial scale, they don't really get roused up enough to be cognizant of it for quite a while. They're just wood, after all, just normal trees, almost all of them. But after it goes on for a while, and the ones of them that can walk around and talk start to discuss the problem and how it's for serious something that they can't take lightly, the level of activity they can display -- all of them, not just the special ones who can walk around -- slowly gets to be greater, as they start to get roused to action about it.

There's an orcish army, during the big fighting that starts to develop among the mobile types of creatures, and they have to go through a forest to get where they're going. And it's not really clear what happens, but this ungodly screaming and clashing sound starts to come from the direction of the forest, and then dwindles, and then goes away. And nothing of the army is ever seen again. They're just gone. The whole fuckin army just like it never was.

It doesn't end there. The war continues, and there's a sort of foggy period in the weather, and when the sun starts to burn away the fog, the forest is just in a different place, overlapping with Saruman's big factory and fortress. The trees are growing in among all his stuff, busting through the paving-stones and cracking through the foundations of his buildings and their solid stone walls, with thick roots stronger than anyone could cut through with any metal tool. The whole fuckin place is ruined, like a tree buckling through the sidewalk, or the foundation of a house, or a water-pipe, effortlessly.

But they're just trees. They weren't there before the fog rolled through, but now they are, and his fortress is smashed to bits with their roots growing through it now.

LotR is some fuckin great, great stuff

And chop the wood, and have a little fire for when it gets cold at night and hunt for deer with a bow and arrow. And have a little drone network watching the surrounding woods, so that when Trump's lackies try to come for me, I can see them coming and run into the woods behind the house and hide in safety while the booby traps get them.

I know, I thought about it, too. It gets more attractive with every few weeks that goes by.

Maybe part of the outcome of this whole godawful mess will be that people will wake the fuck up and realize that they have to prosecute things like this (going all the way back to Fox News doing things that got Gabby Giffords shot).

I don’t agree with Germany’s implementation, exactly, but Germany after the war just said no we are not fucking around if you are against democracy then you go to prison. We tried giving short sentences to the people involved and letting them out, and all it did was teach them to be more cunning, and look where it got us. So now the answer is fuck you, you wanna be the enemy well guess what, we’ll treat you like the enemy. I think the US needs way more of that energy than it has right now. I hope that we develop it before something catastrophic and unfixable goes wrong.

You gotta ask the lemmygrad and lemmy.ml people. It makes perfect sense apparently, and they'll explain it all to you and how you're the dumb one (not just dumb but like openly malicious and lying and you're trying to fuck up the whole world on purpose and you are bad) if you don't get it.

I have to warn you, though, the middle step is "???".

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

I don’t even know if they are right or wrong about this, but I stand 1,000% in favor of people getting out in the streets with their water pistols and being the change they want to see in the world

Fuck ‘em up boys, fuck ‘em up. Get those tourists the fuck outta here like a buncha cats that went on the counter.