Capitalism is a system of distribution of goods with a basis of private property and competitive markets. In the past it has been praised for high rate of innovation and low costs of goods compared to older systems such as feudalism and aristocracy where small states subservient to a crown owned and managed industry.

Cool. Now tell us why it’s been condemned. You’ve only got half the definition there, and that doesn’t count as an honest explanation.

(Also: capitalism may work like that in theory, but it’s never been fully implemented in practice. Every so-called “capitalist” economy has the rich putting their thumb on the scale to make markets less competitive in their favor. The “economics 101” definition you give is so simplified that it’s useless for describing any real world economy. But that’s another rant.)

Or pick the sprouts, cook them, and eat them. They’re like hardier asparagus 😆

I don’t know. I stole it from Tumblr. Share at your own risk.

I mean, OP copied this image from some random web site somewhere, but somebody could have retrofitted a newer drive to whatever this is 😆

You’re correct, but your analysis is incomplete.

It took global, coordinated, governmental action to ban CFCs worldwide.

But governments were motivated to ban CFCs because so many individual people, ordinary citizens and voters, learned that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. Those individuals called on their governments to act. They funded the NGOs that studied and lobbied and suggested alternatives to CFCs. And they bought those alternatives instead of using CFCs themselves, which helped build the consensus to eliminate CFCs.

And individual action was part of building that consensus. Individual people, spreading awareness about the damage CFCs did, and choosing alternatives to CFCs in their own individual purchases, helped build consensus for system-level change.

Here’s a couple thought experiments. A new train or bus line is a system-level solution to improving public transit. So is a bike lane. But what individuals are more likely to vote for a new train line? People who drive to work, or people who rely on public transit? Who’s more likely to support a new bike lane, people who drive or people who bicycle?

Factory farming of animals is one of the greatest atrocities in modern society. But it provides cheap meat. Who’s more likely to support the system-level change necessary to ban factory farming? Someone who eats meat or someone who doesn’t? Someone who eats meat everyday or someone who eats meat once a week? Someone who knows how to cook without meat, or someone who doesn’t know how to cook without it?

And who’s going to be more passionate about banning factory farming - someone who consumes the products of factory farming daily and is necessarily going to feel conflicted about it? Or someone who has already rejected those products, in their own life, through individual action, and who will not lose anything in their own life if every feedlot and slaughterhouse is shut down?

Systemic change transforms the individual actions of entire communities. But it also works the other way around. Individual action builds consensus for systemic change. And we need to encourage and celebrate both.

I hope you find your way back, because it’s true. Millions of others will.

I’d argue that the concept of a carbon footprint is not, inherently, a scam. You do have an impact on the world. Your carbon footprint is a real and genuine measure of that impact. And taking actions to reduce your carbon footprint is a way to mindfully track, measure, and reduce that impact.

Oil company propagandists may have used this real thing - your carbon footprint - to shift blame away from the oil companies and redirect people’s efforts to reducing individual consumption instead of working for political change. Which is bad. But the carbon footprint, itself, is not a scam - just the uses to which big oil put it.

Plastic recycling, on the other hand, is fake industry propaganda from start to finish.

And honestly, if I’m on my soapbox, I’ll remind everybody that “reduce, reuse, recycle” is in order of preference. Recyclable paper bags may be better for the environment than single use plastic bags, but bringing your own reusable cloth bag to the grocery store is even better. Just because a single-use product is recyclable doesn’t make it environmentally friendly.

You and I are both part of the same slrpnk community, and I’m doing my part, so that’s at least one person you can believe in. Why not try believing in more of us?

Doomerism is capitalist propaganda. They couldn’t convince us that climate change was a hoax, so now they’re trying to convince us that climate change is inevitable. And the point of both propaganda campaigns is the same: protect the status quo.

Because if we really were doomed and climate change was really inevitable, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to convince you that it was.

They want you to believe what you do is meaningless. But it’s not.

Only a fraction has a balanced, protein-rich vegetarian diet as the norm.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not because of bad dietary choices, but because of poverty? I mean, the problem isn’t the vegetarian diet, but that people can’t afford enough food in general?

You don’t need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that’s all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it’s still worth celebrating because you’re still fucking alive.

Sharing economy! That’s pretty cool. And pretty straightforward to open source if your community doesn’t speak German 😆

I see your argument, but I disagree with it.

First, “science” does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.

“Science”, as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can’t. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can’t afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can’t afford the new technologies can’t sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.

Every scientific “advancement” by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can’t afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.

And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn’t matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.

And if you were arguing “this is bad, but it’s not as bad as a bunch of other stuff” I would be more likely to agree.

But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.

Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is “one of the good ones”. That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.

And I think, if we think about what NASA’s budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of “science”, we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.

That’s correct. I don’t.

As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.

The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID’s defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world’s poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.

And it’s happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don’t even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an “apolitical triumph of the human species”.

All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.

So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it’s more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.

I found the Tumblr post I got it from and there’s no source there either. Sorry. Lots of dank memes tho.

Sorry, it was a random Tumblr meme I saved a while back and I’m not sure who shared it. I’ll try to find the original but no promises.

One more Winstanley quote that goes hard:

And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”

I would say trees growing in neat rows in an industrial monoculture orchard, or squeezed into a 3-ft strip of otherwise barren land next to a sidewalk slowly choking to death on concrete and pollution, have been destroyed in almost every way that matters. They physically still exist, yes, but trees are part of an ecosystem; capitalism kills the ecosystem and raises the tree as a zombie servant. It forces the tree to perform its profitable function, and nothing else, and destroys everything about it and everything around it that doesn’t serve that function.

Zombie trees may be alive, but they aren’t really living.

Or maybe we’re overthinking and the poster is talking about logging and not about absolutely everything in the world that people might use a tree for.

In fact recent famines in Iran and Afghanistan were the result of overproduction of cash crops like Saffron

Do you have sources for this? I’ma be honest: when a country is laboring under brutal sanctions - sanctions designed to create famine conditions, to make ordinary citizens desperate enough to overthrow their government - claiming that the famines are really caused by that government making farmers grow the wrong crops… I’m willing to be proven wrong but that doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

It’s the opposite. More aerodynamic modern cars are more likely to hit insects on the road than the older blockier ones. They’re not hitting insects because there aren’t any insects to hit.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

Have you ever lived in a HOA?