america, home of the crybully industrial complex

No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.

Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.

That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.

If everybody acts collectively in their own interest, we all win.

I mean this is only really true so long as everyone is allowed to vote, which is inevitably never the case. We always have certain subsects of the population which aren’t really given access to democracy. It’s very easy to, even in a “total democracy”, still have a ton of xenophobia and imperialism, because obviously, people who aren’t citizens can’t vote. That’s a very large top-down example, right, but this creation of subsects happens at every level. Famous more american examples are gerrymandering and the electoral college.

The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.

They’ve successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they’re bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn’t matter and they’ve really done nothing.

I dunno, I’ve definitely seen enough people immediately default to, oh you’re a paid russian troll, chinese troll, in almost any political argument as a sort of easy thought terminating cliche, just as people will do so by calling anyone they disagree with fascists or SJWs or whatever the new terminology of the last 5 years is. Wokies, maybe, I dunno. This is just a slightly more conspiratorial extension of that, I think. It’s not so much that everyone will be convinced that everyone else is a bot, it’s that there will probably be more than a select few people that start to believe dead internet theory style shit, or start to punch at ghosts that don’t exist. I don’t know if those people would’ve just like, naturally existed otherwise, either, like if they would’ve naturally been paranoid schizos, I think probably they wouldn’t have and our actions do indeed have an affect.

But then this conversation is littered with “I thinks”, so it’s all just sort of, tautologies and feelings, so who really knows. I just don’t think it’s probably good for people to basically engage in mass amounts of what is basically spam, and then have that be acceptable just because it’s “funny”.

Their link shows some infographic in french, for me. I have reposted it.

trains run on time

I am here to regretfully inform you about the state of american rail infrastructure…

How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before

christ, I feel like every time I hear anything new about brake particles, I wonder why we haven’t moved to some other material for them yet. ceramics, regenerative brakes that just charge a small battery or capacitor or something, that just exists on the wheel, fuckin something.

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I mean idk if it’s that funny of a time. Even if they were criticizing 5-6 months ago, and who’s to say they weren’t, it’s a much more engaged in conversation right now, so it’s not a fuckin shocker that people are gonna start talking about it.

Yeah see, that’s what I’m talking about. Like what the fuck would the water wars even be? That shit don’t make no sense, it’s not like water is a non-renewable resource. Freshwater is maybe a larger concern, right, but climate change means more solar heat which means more water evaporation which means more fresh rainwater and not less. Maybe in combination with increased acidification because of emissions and related things, maybe in combination with a decreased capacity to absorb that rainwater because of desertification and much increased rainwater runoff due to too large a volume of water for a dried out landscape. No part of that really involves a water war, though. That’s just some pop culture shit.

Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.

That’s not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don’t really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it’s going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That’s looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don’t think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren’t we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of “natural” things. Or, isn’t reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It’s all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.

I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don’t really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there’s even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we’ll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.

Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that’s a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with “the revolution”, evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.

Fuck that shit, all the gas lawn tools should be backwards converted to run on hydrolysis-produced rocket fuel, feasibility and efficiency and safety be damned.

I mean we technically do have the hot dog car in real life, so that’s neat

You know fun fact I learned recently from a let’s play: tentacles only refer to the appendages which end in suckers, but along the rest of their length, have no suckers. The other appendages are called arms. So, octopuses actually have no tentacles, they have arms. Squids have 8 arms, and 2 extra tentacles, which are the long ones that have little spade shaped sucker hands on them. So, probably when you pictured tentacles, you were actually picturing cephalopod arms.

I thought they tried reintroducing wolves to yellowstone, no?

I think it’s established as a draw since hydrogen bomb blew themselves up

Wolf. It’s a singular wolf, so it honestly cannot beat me if it tried. Even if we assume the other two are more docile, all they need to do is try and I would be dead.

lol at this

But, like, a man could still kill you, right? Is that better than being eaten?

I mean generally being eaten entails entrails leaking out, whereas getting killed could entail any number of things. Neck snap, choked out, slit throat, whatever. I dunno if your average idiot man is gonna be as proficient of a killer as a bear, even if they happen to be a murderer or like, just evil, right, so, I dunno. Kind of a toss up. Me personally, I would rather not have my guts spilled out, ribcage crushed, spine snapped, bones gnawed on while I’m still conscious, slowly lose blood and lose consciousness over the course of 30 minutes to an hour. I mean I guess theoretically a man could do those things too, but I dunno many men that could. Maybe like, the mike tyson of 40 years ago?

I guess the argument I’m making hinges on the idea that humans are generally bad at killing in a physiological sense, and their need to kind of, up themselves in the game means that they tend to get filtered into a bunch of more painless and efficient approaches relative to the kind of uncaring cruelty of nature more generally. But then I dunno, humans also have a capacity for needless cruelty and torture, so I’d also be betting my chances that I don’t get shafted and stuck with like, a super jacked serial killer that can torture me with their bare hands, which there’s probably only like 2 or 3 of in the world. Maybe more if you include government contracted ones.