Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

I'm not saying you're wrong, but our elite class seems determined to stay there, and historically violent revolution is what unseats them and allows their wealth to be redistributed from their Scrooge McDuck vaults.

Nonviolent resistance might work, but we haven't seen the kind of mass wealth dispersion that will be necessary.

And the elite are content to drive us right into extinction via the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. Even if you make technology that disrupts the meat market, they're going to legally wrest control of it from you (unless you are rich enough to defend it from Nestlé). Regardless, when it comes to the climate crisis, the deal is done. The pooch is screwed. We know after the collapse the upper limit of sustainable population will be about one billion, and that number dwindles with each day of inaction.

Meanwhile the industrial world is choosing far-right parties over the usual neoliberal crap we've endured through the latter half of the twentieth century, so we're not even serious about managing the climate crisis without the aforementioned revolution (and in that case, into some kind of communal government, since the typical outcome of a people's revolution is a chain of dictators).

Good luck convincing our officials, elected or not, to choose veganism over the meat industry, or even nutrition over junk food. You will need all you can get.

Let's put it this way, our bodies really like the smell, taste and mouthfeel of meat. So long as our system is focused on compelling people to eat via yummy food, there's going to be a market for it. It's not prescription, just description.

That's why I was saying we'll have to overcome capitalism before we can really beat this. Otherwise actual balanced nutrition will be a < checks spelling > commodifiable feature of food, rather than its essential point.

I have no question that everyone across the industrialized world would gladly switch to your delicious recipes.

Maybe you should start a business!

Trump made it super clear what he intended to do, which was entirely in line with neutering the election system and installing a one-party autocracy. Fascism is merely a tool that prolongs peace before discontentment and public unrest. War follows.

The only reason for someone had to vote for Trump was because they wanted a one-party autocracy, maybe because they agreed with the white Christian nationalist movement and its mission.

Maybe they voted for Trump out of ignorance. I'm sure some of the 77 million who vote for him fall into this category. It doesn't matter. They voted for one-party autocracy.

Maybe they voted out of criticism of the Democratic party. Maybe they were tired of neoliberalism (I sure am!) but what they voted for was one-party autocracy. Again, I suspect no small percentage of that 77 million were motivated this way. It's happening throughout Europe. But it means they get to duck and cover while King Heron chooses what frogs get eaten.

Maybe they voted for Trump because Harris was not white enough or male enough. Those people, again, voted for the one-party autocracy guy. I can't tell how many of the 77 million that voted for Trump did this, but the votes that pushed Harris out of the battleground states were single-tick voters (they voted only for Trump, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. It's a common behavior in US elections.) Guess what they voted for? (Hint, it wasn't the continuity of democracy in the US.)

And yes, a small percentage (probably millions, still) voted against Harris on a specific issue. She was a hard line corporate neoliberal probably going to do what Obama and Biden did, too little too late. Maybe they're angry because we're letting Israel massacre the whole of Palestine. I get that. But what they voted for was: You guessed it, one-party autocracy.

Trump's entire campaign was about what he'd do as dictator. Project 2025 and Agenda 47 both featured largely the objective of seizing power, consolidating it to the executive, neutering the election system and installing a one party autocracy. Trump may even be looking to being the monarch, and passing the presidency to Don Jr.

So even if Trump voters were shocked and dismayed by Musk's salute, there was an orgy of evidence and indicators that fascism, dictatorship and a fuck-the-public-twice agenda were on the table if they voted for Trump. It was a Faustian deal from the get-go and they signed on the dotted line in blood.

And in blood they will pay. We're not even at the find out phase. This is still the prologue.

But yes, absolutely, every one of the 77 million Trump-voters are responsible, not for Musk's salute, offensive or no, but that we're staring down the barrel of what it represents.

PS: I have secret hopes that there are a lot of Edmund Pevensies out there, who get they fucked up and want to make right and put heart and soul into the resistance.

Especially because I'd rather this end in overthrow and reform (the Magna Carta ending) as opposed to the China bombing Washington (the Allies storm the US ending) or the nuclear holocaust (the Dr. Strangelove ending)... but all this is speculation.

(Yes, there is the possibility that civil rights lawyers and Democratic lawyers hold off Trump's agenda and a Democrat gets voted in a mandate like Obama did in 2008, but that will only lead to four-to-eight more years of neoliberalism, after which we'll get a new autocratic usurper, and we get to play the game yet again.)

PSS: Note this moment, and the flying sabot that is DeepSeek (and make sure you know what it is) because it's about to disrupt the economic power that the tech-bros were depending on to install their camarilla around Trump. The game of thrones is about to get crazy.

But that argument is utter tosh. Anyone sprouting it is a Nazi collaborator.

So you're dismissing the (granted, slight) majority of voters in the United States? Or the wave of elections choosing far-right-wing parties over more of King Log's neoliberalism across Europe?

I mean you can do that. They often seem inaccessible to me. Certainly, my stanch-MAGA father is. But then the next step is for Trump's weaponized law-enforcement machine to come collect you for the detention centers.

To borrow a quote from Aliens (1986), Maybe you aren't up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!

The human brain is fueled by about 20% of your caloric intake. We're evolved to be omnivorous. This isn't prescriptive but descriptive. It's going to take development to make vegan food delicious and something we want to eat (and then all the other features we want out of food: cheap, storage-safe, easy to prepare, etc.)

For those of us who still eat a meat diet, it usually takes a chef to make something actually enjoyable from strictly vegetables. Otherwise, we're used to receiving oddly-spiced bland mush from our vegan friends. But we could do better if we were putting billions into it, and not another more-addictive cheeto.

But we live entrenched in capitalism, so no one is going to take this seriously until we're already dropping dead from natural disasters and famine.

Telling boys to just go masturbate got us the Immorten Joe's Warboys ^† that are the alt-right, that got Trump into power twice. The boys we told to literally go fuck themselves when they raged over their sexual frustration got us the army of militants and voters behind the white Christian nationalist movement. I was among them in the 1980s, when the society gave a meager few more fucks about them than they do in the twenty-first century.

I suspect similar movements exist through Europe, which is generally rejecting neoliberalism for fascist-thick movements towards one-party autocracy.

No, I don't have a solution, and I've been working on it for thirty years. Christianity's proscription against sex (later limited to non-reproductive sex) figures largely into the problem and it's served so far as a sufficient distraction from class consciousness and effective response to industry's effect on climate, and the imminent climate crisis.

We don't have a way to let our young guys sow their wild oats, while we're careening towards multiple great filters we are unprepared to navigate.

I know: 🧶📌📇

Maybe even: 🐰🎩🫖☕

And yet, very few people think about it, still. Those who do ponder the angry-young-men problem discount them as ineligible or feel they are too repugnant to civilized folk to consider. I've heard otherwise rational content creators actually say (I paraphrase) these guys were mistreated as kids and are now a societal problem. But they suck, so fuck those guys.

It might be a failing of the human species itself, that we are compelled to cast our young men out the way gorillas cast out their adolescent females (but welcome strange females), and capitalism intentionally only has limited seats where they can pick themselves up, so the system teaches them from the beginning to be aggressive, ruthless and transactional. Not to get completely nihilist, but maybe our capacity for civilization is limited and we just can't overcome the paradigms that served us as migratory bands of hunter-gatherers.

In the meantime, our boys are taught they suck in our Christianity-heavy abstinence-only sex-ed, ^‡ from which they descend into the incel movement, the manosphere, gamergaters, etc and from there into the transnational white power movement. Our society gave Trump his instant army, and it was ready for him the moment Trump went into politics. And our lack of interest or concern about the new batch of warboys we churn our from the US education system every year, is going to literally kill us all.

Just go vegan is going to end the same way, especially since the food industry cares not about actual nutrition but profit. Taking a page from Fourth International Posadism, we may have to end capitalism before we can create an ethical food production system (probably incorporating farming invertebrates as well as vegetables), but the problem right now is not what's the end result ( Fully Automated Gay Space Communism ) but how the heck we get there and not crash and burn with the global ecology.

Totally open to ideas, but I'm not the guy you have to convince.

† Not to be confused with Warboyz of W4K fame.

‡ Twenty six states mandate abstinence-only sex ed, that stuff that teaches girls they are chewing gum, or someother one-use safety-sealed metaphor, and that boys aren't allowed to think about sex until they have a salaried job and a ring. Seriously, this is still what is taught.

Three states mandate comprehensive sex ed: The west coast. And none of them require discussion of consent. (Some teachers include it anyway, as an elective topic). Of course, if we demanded opt-in consent in our sexual relationships, we might demand opt-in sex in our other contracts as well, say our jobs, our devices, our software, etc.

I would have called him a fascist and a monarchist (interested in being king, himself) but memes seem to work better using simple street language unless explaining the language itself.

e.g. The scary part is not the fascism, but the one-party autocracy, which can marry / fuck /kill the public without its consent. The fascism just slows dissent and unrest.

What ever horror humanity has done, we are still holding the beer of invertebrates.

And yet nature's is is not a justification for aught. The fruit of the tree of wisdom (mythically) gave us empathy that we may live in harmony with neighbors, and in the late game, we have learned the imperative to see value in the fallow wilds.

A century ago, a vegan diet for humans as extremely difficult, possibly impossible. And to quote Saruman the forests will burn in the fires of industry! And they have.

We are not a vegan culture today because the food industry focuses on sales and profits, not on nutrition and health.

Though to be fair our massive land-hungry industrial farms will affect the biomes around them regardless of whether we grow plants or ranch livestock. Veganism is part of a solution towards a more harmonious civilization, but misses several pieces.

Before his direct involvement, he was more like the BMW and Porsche moguls who financed NSDAP to put down the communists. Though now, yeah, he's trying to play as a principle official.

It's a consistent critique. I was trying to play on the current argument that his salute was ambiguous, since so many of Musk's behaviors before that moment indicated his Naziness, his monarchism and fascism and unending lust for power.

But then I suck at memes, even with practice.

I get that a lot. I am, however, against ostriching.

I was trying to play on the current that's a Roman salute. That doesn't make him a Nazi with the point that the salute was only his most recent Nazi-indicating behavior, the most egregious of which was buying and ruining a $40 billion social media platform so he could push his monarchist agenda. (With himself being the final monarch. It's always that way.)

This is how the US AI-dev sector decides to proceed at flank speed without safeguards towards friendly AI, leading to a robot apocalypse, sparing us from climate-crisis-induced famine!

I'm ready to call the United States North Mexico or the Unincorporated British Colony of the Indies

Part of the dystopian horror is learning they don't care where you came from, and often will deposit you right into the hands of human traffickers.

And they'll lock foreign-looking American citizens in a room with no contact and no lawyer and say You have forty-eight hours to prove your citizenship. Good luck. Followed by deportation as above. So no, your birth certificate in a hospital in San Diego will not help you.

And between those places are the detention centers that are packed at over double maximum safe occupancy, which get super dirty and super infected, and the ICE troopers / PSCs would beat the crap out of people for fun.

Some of the scary bits of the German Reich concentration camp program are already happening here in the US.

I think that would be a great Lemmy feature that puts an AI content warning when it is so tagged, similar to how it blurs images tagged NSFW.

Azathoth just happens to be really useful to make idealism and the simulation hypothesis plausible. Either way, the mechanics that govern the universe are profoundly consistent and are not as fragile as our own dreams / our own simple, buggy simulations. So yeah.

The most direct correlation (consistent from city to city) was the mandate to swap leaded gasoline with unleaded gasoline. The entire city once covered in leaded soot is now covered in unleaded soot, which reduced our general lead intake.

One of the early symptoms of lead poisoning is an increase in violence, and decrease in impulse control.

Not the only factor, but likely the primary factor of the general reduction of violent crime in the 1990s. Curiously however, the accessibility of porn on the internet (especially niche porn) correlates with reduction in violent sex crime.

In the meantime, yes, people should generally -- in their pursuit of critical thinking skills -- become savvy with the phenomenon of spurious relationships.

If you're near a university, get your butt to the law school department and ask professors how feasible this is. (Buy them lunch if possible / necessary) And if it's as brilliant as it sounds, they might be able to hook us up with the legal experts necessary to follow through.

We are in very interesting times, which may give the notion more traction than a far off whimsy.

We have colleges here in Sacramento. I'll see what I can do here.