I used to enjoy sarcasm until I realized how many people don’t recognize the sarcasm and take it as genuine support for whatever vile cause someone is being sarcastic about.

It’s like the old Stephen Colbert show, where he kept having conservatives on who didn’t realize Colbert was a satire of conservatism and thought he was genuinely on their side.

And I get it’s funny when people don’t get the joke.

But, see, this is bad. Because people are emboldened when they see vile rhetoric they agree with being posted, unchallenged. It makes them think that more people agree with them and gives them courage to keep spewing vile rhetoric. So when, for instance, a racist sees something racist being posted sarcastically, and sees a bunch of upvotes and “agreeing” comments, and doesn’t get the sarcasm, he reads it as support for his racist beliefs, he feels his racism validated, and he gets more committed to racism.

Lack of reading comprehension literally gives these people superpowers.

And repeating vile ideas, and racist memes, and other garbage that has no place in a civilized society - even if you’re doing it sarcastically, or ironically, or in order to debunk it or criticize it - just shares that vile garbage further and emboldens the people who believe it.

Which is why I downvoted that sarcastic comment. If you want to contribute to discussion, contribute positively and say what you actually believe. We’re all better off that way.

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.

There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.

It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren’t going to change that.

What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.

Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world’s resources.

A sustainable comfortable future doesn’t just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world’s wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.

It’s precisely as inaccurate and ethnocentric as American media’s discussion of, say, politicians in Africa or Latin America would be. Which is the joke.

“Poor Americans don’t deserve electricity because rich Americans are privileged and wasteful” is certainly one of the takes of all time.

You spent a lot of paragraphs on a “dumb” argument. Sounds like, despite your insistence it doesn’t matter, it really does matter to you.

USians gonna US, I guess.

When you think about it, it’s kind of offensive to call ourselves (US residents) “Americans” as if in all of North and South America we’re the only country that matters.

Done

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.

But if you’re selling energy bsck to the grid, you’re using the infrastructure and they have to pay you for running your meter backwards. Even paying you a reduced rate for the energy you produce is a losing proposition for them.

It’s a bit worse than that, even. If there are too many people sending too much energy back to the grid, the grid can get overcharged and blow up. So energy companies have to dump the excess power somewhere to keep the grid stable.

There are a lot of potential solutions to this problem. (Before anyone says Bitcoin fixes this, no it doesn’t.) unfortunately, energy companies are currently taking the laziest and least efficient solution - pay business owners to run their factories uselessly in order to drain excess power from the grid, and pass the cost on to consumers.

Mineral oil is a petroleum distillate, a byproduct of fossil fuel production. I’m not saying it’s necessarily unsafe or unethical to use, but calling it “all natural” is a bit of a reach.

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You do realize Joe Biden has been President for the last four years, right?

You realize the changes he wants to make were recommended to him by an advisory panel in 2021, right?

You realize Biden has sat on his thumbs for the last four years watching America’s economy and political climate fall into the gutter, watching the world fall into war, watching the global environmental and economic collapse and the worst refugee crisis in world history grind on and doing absolutely fucking nothing, right?

But now that the Supreme Court that Biden enabled has formally instituted the imperial presidency that everybody knew they would institute, now that the end of democracy in America is literally in sight, Biden and the Democratic Party are finally going to start fighting for the court reforms we’ve been begging for his entire presidency?

Forgive me for not expecting much.

In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?

English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.

American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.

The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.

But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?

In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.

Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.

And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.

Food Not Bombs has a cookbook with a similar style of “protest food” recipes.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)