:3c

We produce 1000 times the food we need.

no, we don’t.

You’ve taken a roundabout way to tell me that mass adoption of veganism […] has nothing to do with our economic system.

no, i didn’t.

(literally the only way to save this planet)

no, it isn’t.

The only […] solution that can support our absurd population is […] tech advancements bordering on magic

no, it isn’t.

Lying is ugly. […] It is trivial to prove. Open Google.

says the person who cannot read, ignores sources, puts words in other people’s mouths, and makes simplistic, baseless, harmful assertions.

To feed the billions of sentient animals that are tortured to death each year in factory farms. Do you have any idea how sustainable that is?

i — a vegan — and the two sources i provided advocate for sustainable plant-based diets, and point to the systemic economic obstacles: agribusiness lobbying; little to no farmer control; subsidised incentives and poor farmers’ dependence on these subsidies; and severe economic and political inequality.

to quote another vegan in this thread who you’ve insulted:

for every animal I don’t eat, a billionaire throws a meat party and goes hunting for exotic animals. Again, why are you blaming me? Even if I ate meat every meal I wouldn’t come close in a year to doing as much damage as a billionaire does in a day. So again, stop telling me about it and go after them.

you’re arguing for a vote-with-your-wallet approach, which ignores conspicuous consumption, ignores the plight of the lower classes, and greatly favours the wealthy elite and the state (who can always outbid you). this is not to say we shoudn’t change (our) individual behaviour, but that it cannot be the sole solution, and that there are systemic changes which would boost mass adoption of sustainable choices.

i once again point you to my book suggestion, the concept of superstructures, and to the responses to your last malthusian tangents.

if you have anything else to say: tell it to a mirror.

Given that the environmental depredation of this planet is driven by […] can people explain why they believe that without capitalism

capitalist industry and commerce have been the driving force of the mass extinction of the last 500 years[0][1][2]. climate change didn’t begin until the late 1800s with the rise of tycoons, and accelerated with mass production in the mid-1900s.

for a current example: datacentres are wasting entire regional electricity and water supplies on investment grifter bullshit. because it makes money. it doesn’t even turn a real profit, and it’s not everyday people paying for it.

can people explain why they believe that without capitalism everyone would be […]

could be, not necessarily would. because a humanistic, socialised means of production would: allow for truly ‘democratic’ control over what is produced; remove nested interests and subsidies to overgrown polluting industries[3]; and make alternatives viable without the need to bend or break to top-down market pressures and monetary policy dictated by dragons.

I also assume they’re wearing hemp and have no interest in fashion.

capitalism has existed for less than 300 years. consumerism has existed for less than 100 years. when you have an economic system which emphasises the independent individual — simultaneously a motivator and a mere cog in the machine — and posits that the mere potential to own things is the source of value: buying wasteful, exotic, unnecessary shit is a way to define yourself and your status. it’s called conspicuous consumption, and it happens from the micro to the macro in the lower and the upper classes, and there’s top-down pressure to do so to keep currency current.

i recommend the documentary The Century of the Self for an overview of the commodification of identity and culture.

Keep in mind there are 8 billion people on this planet, so presumably they wouldn’t be having children either.

we are already producing enough food to sufficiently feed 1.5x the world population[4], and could continue to do so even within planetary boundaries[5] with changes to economic policy and the adoption of less profitable methods of agriculture.

i didn’t cover everything here, because i recommend:

1. the book Less Is More.
2. familiarising yourself with the concept of the superstructure; it’s a very helpful analytical tool.
3. going back to the last time you were on your malthusian debatebro bullshit and really trying to engage your imagination with much of the same arguments made there.

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

— Anatole France, Le Lys rouge

as Cowbee wrote: the ‘free market’ narrative assumes the market is participatory, and that you can simply opt out (‘go live in the woods’).

but capitalism doesn’t work without a labour market, and the labour market isn’t stable without a buffer of un[der]employment. so living outside the market — and general ‘propertylessness’ — is criminalised or made so inconvenient/unsustainable that you’re left with ‘the choice’ between peonage or starvation. the people who fall into homelessness and houselessness serve as a warning to anyone who might consider ‘opting out’.

i don’t think anyone genuinely believes this is a real choice, but i’ve experienced this narrative being used to dismiss critiques of capitalism and wage slavery.

what does this have to do with houseless people?

my experience is also primarily with tired parents with mortages… who blame minorities for their unhappiness (so they vote right-wing) and get all of their social and emotional fulfilment from work (so they willingly buy into the C-suite cult).

they are also usually so tech illiterate that they have the vibe of someone who never learned a trade and fell for the ‘learn to code’ advice at some point in their life.

tell you that violence is a terrible thing that can never be excused or condoned.

aha! but they say violence has no place in the so-called United States (if you ignore wage slavery, prison labour, the police, and the entire capitalist system). violence overseas always serves their interests, until it doesn’t.

checkmate tankie /s

I’m not disagreeing, but it seems to me I’ve known of white supremacist groups that do want other races to exist, but as subjugated classes.

not OP, but at least in Europe the raceless racist trope is more common, particularly among liberals. in one breath they’ll say that the concept of race is pseudoscience (true), but then conclude that this means racialisation doesn’t happen (uhhh). then in that same breath they’ll say that people from Muslim countries are destructive radicals who are ‘incompatible’ with European culture, which is almost neo-racist, until you realise that they don’t know what a ‘Muslim’ ‘looks’ like, and that in practise it’s ‘anyone with dark hair and/or a von Luschan index higher than 20’.

it’s not that they want to subjugate brown people: it’s that they wish they had never existed, and that they could never see them again. but the people they vote for to accomplish this do want to subjugate brown people.

before you know it: the group of ‘incompatibles’ has grown to encompass 2/3 of the world’s population by hair colour and skin index alone, and antisemitism is back on the table. but they believe in nonviolent democracy and the ‘rule of law’ and eat organic so it’s ok.

sidenote: this is why a lot of far-right supremacist groups in Europe tend(ed) to be more about (national) ethnicity than race. historically, even people from neighbouring countries were parasitic ‘others’ to be corralled and expelled.

la oficiala lingvo de la Eŭropa Parlamento estas ‘neresponda’

yeah.

that’s all i’ve got to say, but i have a strong urge to say it.

if i had a penny for every time a neocon accused me of being ‘uncivil’ right before and after casually dropping a slur…

i already have a pet theory:

• the sick children are sick because they’re subjected to secret medical trials.
• rescuing the children means rescuing the research which means secret new booster.
• bonus: the children will die either way.

now, the booster doesn’t need to be good. it would just be really funny if the immaterial benefit of saving the children turns out to be materially beneficial in an almost eviler way than forsaking the children for the antitank mines. (pls give fire resistance)

now, if the booster is bad, that would be thrice as funny: antitank mines forsook and children sacrificed, for shitty research that amounted to nothing really helpful.

this all could also explain how they’ve managed to survive so long.

1. threads that absolutely don’t interest me. this way, my feed becomes a list of new posts, or posts i’m (noncommittally) following for comments.
2. threads that make me upset. extension of above: not having to see or be reminded of things i’m actively dis-interested in. this is more for when i’m surfing All for new communities.

the main three solutions i have to #2 are: RSS; userscript; or blocking the OP. i already use RSS a lot, but RSS clients can be arcane to customise the way i want, and i don’t like following aggregators from my aggregator. i’m satisfied with the official web UI.

really looking forward to the post hiding and vote display changes

thanks for the heads up!

mine came with a battery defect and no longer turns on. i used it a total of four times.

postcovid prevents me from going to the library to print the RMA and then to the post office to actually ship the fucking thing, and i have no one to help me get rid of it. so now it’s a paperweight.

you mean the migration ‘crisis’ and collapse in ‘“living” standards’ which were brought on by US-EU neoliberalism driving down the standard of living in other parts of the world before coming home to roost?

there are certainly ways of reversing direction, but people in the core would sooner choose literal fascism before giving up their imperial lifestyle. they use the IMF to politically terraform ‘underdeveloped nations’ and export their own harms so they can say they’re ‘meeting climate goals’, and then complain about all the emissions and migrants coming from those countries which are ravaged to supply their hyperconsumption. the same migrants which predominantly staff their service, medical and technology sectors to prop up their precious treats and their oh-so superior ‘knowledge economies’.

voting for fascism is the individualistic choice which lets them keep their treats and means they don’t need to interact with their neighbours or advocate for real change. it’s easier to blame the victims of their actions than to cut the DARVO shit and accept responsibility.

whoops, i forgot i have lemmy.world blocked. i don’t see comments or posts from that instance.

still tho, i wasn’t getting the undiscovered 404 on dbzer0.

i don’t know about lemdroid. federation could be backlogged for aforementioned reasons.

the link you gave works fine for me in Firefox: clicking, dragging or pasting. the 404 likely indicates that lemdroid hasn’t discovered that community yet; probably because it’s still waiting to finish asking lemmy.world about it.

how do I interact with a community I cannot connect to?

are you using the website, or an app? i can see the community, but not the posts (presumably because they aren’t synced) (forgot i have lemmy.world blocked).

do you not see the community landing page at all? is there no ‘subscribe’ button? subscribing is the best way to trigger the sync job; i could try doing it for you, but i want to see if it’s possible for you to do it first.