sweetpotato

Enough so that I can pay the AC bill during the night, cause healthy sleep requires low temperatures.

Besides that, I will ask for as much as I can get away with.

Depends really. What do you value in your life? What ethical framework do you use? Do you value freedom and self determination, do you value people different from you as much as people of your nationality/race? Or perhaps do you value the Western stability, growth, dominance and wellbeing at the expense of the economic South more? There’s no objective answer, it depends on you and your viewpoint.

If we do away with the propaganda and misinformation we are left with this question. Because the US and Europe would never support anyone for the sake of them being the only democracy in the middle east or fighting terrorists or whatever. If that were the case the US wouldn’t have been complicit with the dictatorships of the gulf countries or any other of the innumerable dictatorships they have established throughout the years in the world. And they would also not be funding the ISIS or other terrorist groups in Columbia, Cuba, Nicaragua and so many other countries.

No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.

So what do you value? Freedom and dignity for all, or more power for the Western states and corporations (- and whatever religious crap you want to excuse colonising and ethnically cleansing a nation)?

If you see this, it’d save you a lot of time from arguing about every single event of the conflict. If you see every human in the world as equal and deserving of freedom, then you’d see that Israel and the West is bringing these people at the brink of extinction, torturing, killing, humiliating, starving them, expelling them from their land, destroying their vital civil infrastructure, stealing their land and property for 75 years now. And when you see all this (not from Western mainstream media though), you’d recognise the right for armed struggle against a colonizing entity that Israel is. No civilian casualties are acceptable, but the ones affected in 7/10/23 would have to turn against their government for ethnically cleansing Palestinians, bringing them to that desperate point of retaliation, not Palestinians.

My “attitude” in no way excuses the very offensive remarks on your part, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to defend undefendable claims. You jump from claim to claim, when you are proven wrong, like how you edited out the part where you claim the European trend can be extrapolated to the entire world and you personally attack me with the excuse that I was taken aback by the ignorance on a straightforward Google search.

From what you remember (from where? That’s a good question I guess no one will ever answer us apparently)that does not make up for the overall downwards trend of consumption and emissions. Ok let’s deconstruct that quickly. Consumption has not been decreasing, it has been increasing, proven by the ever rising GDP, which measures exactly that, the total output of goods and services and considering the imports and exports are roughly equal for Europe and that material consumption is coupled to gdp, that’s the consumption.

When I say that Europe has outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries, I wasn’t talking just about “importing goods”. I was talking about their entire production. And the fact that fossil fuel consumption is still ever growing in Europe as well as in the entire West, coupled to the GDP growth is proven in Hickel(2019) “Is green growth possible”, where the domestic material consumption index is proven not to be accounting for the outsourced fossil fuels and materials consumed in third world countries to produce the goods imported, vital for Europe. The actual material footprint(which is the fossil fuel consumption and materials combined) is growing along with the GDP. And when you understand this, you realize it is all an illusion of accounting.

These are your two tragically false claims. For the third paragraph I don’t have much to say besides that third world countries need to increase their GDP to be living comfortably since they are destitute and the first world countries need to degrow like we said. Scientists have been saying this for so many years. There is a space between planetary boundaries and the decent living conditions that all people can and should be living in. The west exceeds the planetary limits(per capita), the economic south is below decent living conditions. That’s what degrowth preaches. It refers to the west, not the world in general.

Why would you assume I am talking about Europe which accounts for 1/10 of the global energy consumption and why would I be talking the continent that has mostly outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries? Why would you assume this?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy?time=2000..latest

Here’s your source. Here’s your total energy consumption. It couldn’t have been that hard to look at our world in data right? How can you be so absolutely wrong about data in plain sight while being confident about it? Do you have an agenda?

Wasn’t expecting this under a random unrelated post. A very welcome comment nonetheless.

Never forget that the exponential boom of renewable energy tech the last 20 years has entirely served as additional energy, not as replacement of fossil fuels.

Because it’s a far right party. Trump happens to be more far right, but that doesn’t change that fact. I’m not voting for far right, neoliberal, genocidal freaks.

At how many genocides do you draw the line? If the democrats committed a second one along with the Palestinian genocide they are committing right now? You’d again say trump would be worse, vote for Harris. If they committed three? Four? No matter what they do, Trump would do worse, so again you’d tell us to vote for Harris.

I draw the line at a genocide and at everything this neoliberal party stands for. I am not giving that party my approval because it is going in the exact opposite direction of what I stand for. At some point, the lesser evil is too evil.

You don’t spend millions on data analysts who gather voter data from social media, government data advertisers and other sources, you don’t have photographers, videographers for every public appearance of yours, you don’t have psychologists and communication specialists who decide what you’ll say, do and express with your face. In general, you don’t plan ahead every move you make when people will see you and you don’t control your entire environment, the people you will interact with and what you will see and do every time.

You seem to have a really simplistic/naive view of how politics work at this level with the analogy of an ordinary person you gave. You need to realize that these people have absolutely nothing to do with you or me. These people will never tell you who they are funded by, who are lobbying them, who they owe to, who influences them, who threatens them and why they take most decisions, they will lie, they will hide their wealth, they will hide their ties. The only reason they are able to compete for presidency is the fact that the rich people support them, because their media take their side(channels, newspapers, websites) and their money fund their campaigns. So they will always, necessarily serve their interests, that’s the deal, otherwise they will drop them and go to the next willing politician. This means that the big politicians can never tell the truth.

So with all that said, the fakeness of their campaign reflects the irreconcilable situation they are in, having to serve the 0.1% and having the people as a means to this end.

Everything they say, everything they do, every interaction with another person, every camera shot taken, everything is staged and planned ahead by teams. Their character is staged, their expressions are staged, so what’s different? The fact that they may do something like that, though differently, once in a while? The goal is still the same, to connect with voters and to create a more likeable and relatable image of them. Regardless if other candidates have not explicitly dressed up as workers of a field they’ve never worked for. They film themselves going to factories listening to people, talking to people in the streets and all of that is 100% controlled, so I don’t see the difference. It’s not like anyone claims Trump works in McDonald’s for years, they don’t fabricate anything more than any other campaigner does.

The distinction you make doesn’t have a tangible meaning to it, all of them are showing something staged based on data science, psychology and communication and nothing else.

You are right, I’m sorry for my aggressiveness. My point was that any big politician stages any public appearance and video they make, because they all have a very big team of communication experts who curate the best possible image for them. There is no authenticity ever and that’s why so much money is spent on the campaigns. Staging a campaign is not a fascism issue, but a big politics issue

Jesus christ, can you people stop meatriding Harris for a millisecond? How do you make this about her?

Do you understand the meaning of the word staged? I was talking about the fact that any appearance of any (important) politician ever is controlled by a team of people specialized in communication. They want to obviously portray the politician in the best light possible, every impression counts. It’s not a fascism thing, every politician constructs and curates their image to accomplish their goals and pass the messages they want to the people. Unless you think that these two rich politicians and the billions they get as campaign funding from other rich people are spent on pizza parties and that the videos and pictures they take are authentic lmfao

Staged? You mean that any other politician photo ever isn’t staged?

Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better

That’s fair, but I believe cities can’t be like that regardless. It’s where you live everyday, the forests do not fix that. Your surroundings everyday affect mental and physical health (and these two interact with each other as well) and although a Sunday walk in nature is important, it will be negligible.

You have a much higher chance of living a sedentary life because you have to be in a car all day, so statistically less exercise, more obesity, worse quality of sleep (shown in scientific studies) all of which lead to mental health deterioration. There is also more noise pollution the more cars there are and the less trees there are, not only in the house(let’s suppose you have good insulation) but also when you are out of the house. This is causing stress (you can’t always realize this but it’s happening), so high blood pressure, mental health issues etc. And of course air pollution. Besides all that, there are also less interactions with other people, less public spaces, so less socialization which is also a big factor in mental health and overall wellbeing. I personally really value the latter.

I’m not trying to throw shade to the country, I wish the way of life was better, cause I’d like to work there for some years and I’m not saying Europe is perfect, obviously the problems exist there as well but to a very lower degree. I could live almost wherever in Europe, but I can never live in the US.

Haven’t been there, I can imagine, but could it be any other way? I mean, what would the alternative be? Have no forests and green spaces in the entire country? That would not be sustainable.

Your urban planning. Your cities are unwalkable, the scenery makes me depressed af, everything is scaled up for cars, even restaurants are for cars, the highways are huge, all I can see is tar. I don’t know how you can live like that.

Ong, first they eliminate the competition and then they start going for profit, which always goes hand in hand with enshitification, for the very simple reason that if there was something they could add to increase profits and user satisfaction at the same time, they would’ve already added it.

They are not trying to make the app work for the user but against him, to take his data, privacy, attention, money etc.

It doesn’t have to bother you personally to be unfair. I don’t pay this amount of money on their games and consoles to be bombarded by ads. It’s not a “big” problem, but it is a problem. Some people don’t want to see so many ads, to be tempted to buy stuff all the time or have a bloated home screen.

Just because you don’t mind doesn’t mean everyone has to do so as well.

I don’t get why you purposefully obfuscate what ruling class I am referring to. What kind of example are managers and drivers when I am clearly talking about the people comprising the decision making body or Communist party under communism? I think that’s simple enough and also the fact that any communist government that survived long enough gradually became more and more authoritarian, more detached from the people - never in the other direction. The evidence is there and we both know it. The burden of proof that this isn’t the case is on you, not me…

You simply dismissed my claims without any evidence on that. Although you seem to like to meticulously answer every sentence separately, you dismiss the core of the argument. I understand most communism movements start off with noble and admirable intentions and I’m not ignoring this, but the fundamental issue here is that in the longterm, by design, in order to preserve state power, for whatever reason, you’d be heading to the opposite direction of a stateless society.

I’ve read enough Lenin to understand this from his descriptions of the ideal Party. I don’t need reading recommendations, thank you. I am not saying anything profound here, this is like mainstream critique of marxism.

What does it mean to have a misreading in this context (last point)? You are just reiterating what they said but reassuring us that the most “advanced” among them are not going to turn into a ruling class because…?

Any form of political power is poison. You don’t get to a state-less, egalitarian society by going in the exact opposite direction, by enforcing a ruling class and an hierarchy like any else.

And you can see this practically not in any massacre, genocide, famine or war communist countries have inflicted, these are up for discussion. The actual evidence that this is not the right path is in the lack of accountability of the governing Party under communism, the lack of freedom of speech inside that party and the decision making body, the absolute discipline required to be in it or you get kicked out for having a different opinion for any topic, the gradual increase in authoritarianism by it and the Party’s gradual alienation from the people. These all are fundamental structural problems that stem from the fact that you set out to solve a problem by endorsing it and practising it.

People are never going to free themselves from hierarchy and the state if they don’t learn to live without it in practise, take decisions for themselves, develop the skills, knowledge and tactics to abolish it etc. You are/become what you practise in your life, not what you preach.

Wait what do the android updates have to do with Graphene? Does the phone need to still be supported by Google and android for Graphene to be secure and work?