Yeah, it's bad to know your enemy. Victory comes from being an ignorant belligerent.
>Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country's racist apartheid laws. Musk's family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk's upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. "Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life," said McGreal. "If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call."
>Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
The epoch in human history in which the nationalist, patriarchal asshole replaces the neoliberal sociopath as the dominant subject: this is what I call the assholocene
> Author is Tadzio Müller > > >To be sure, this concept has come under convincing criticism, inter alia from the left – firstly, of course, it is not "man" who is in charge, but very specific people, mostly rich, mostly white, mostly male; and secondly, it is not man "as such", but “man on capitalist steroids” who exploits the earth – but it has prevailed against much weaker competition, such as "capitalocene" (my term will of course suffer the exact same fate, but there's no harm in trying ;)), because it articulates a widespread affect, with Freud, a "discontent within the culture", a kind of repressed collective awareness, something like: "Wow, ok, right, we're charge, and, holy crap, are we fucking up this 'world domination' thing." The Anthropocene is thus not only the age of "human" causal and ecological dominance, it is also the age of “repressed failure" of those who were in any relevant way “deciders”. We're in charge, we know that our fossil capitalist mode of production and our imperial mode of living is an ethical disaster, we know what the rational and ethical choice would be (I dunno, let's call it global degrowth communism) - and yet we are entirely incapable of making that choice, of taking that path, of changing our “normal-and-yet-insane”, deeply fucked-up collective behaviour.
The Unification Church came under scrutiny after the killing of former PM Shinzo Abe in 2022.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuya_Yamagami
You've made the decision to live without a car. Congratulations! While a car is a useful solution to getting from place to place, it can also cost a lot of money to maintain. Cars can also cause a lot of unneeded stress. Without one,...
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26874488
> Capitalism is a scam, and a part of a broader scam culture, a scam tradition.
>Researchers have been eavesdropping on an unusual family of crows in Spain, collecting data on hundreds of thousands of different sounds the birds made. Small microphones recorded a variety of soft calls, far quieter than the familiar 'caws' people usually hear. The team then used AI to analyse the sounds and group them together. The researchers hope is to one day be able to understand the meaning of the birds' vocalisations and perhaps even try to speak their language.
Our patriarchal culture animalizes women and sexualizes animals, and without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory , joins us.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26551891
> > Our patriarchal culture animalizes women and sexualizes animals, and without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, joins us. Highlights include: > > > > - How Carol got started on her personal journey to veganism; > > > > - Why patriarchal cultures associate masculinity with meat-eating and how women and animals become ‘absent referents’; > > > > - Why feminism and veganism have a long history of deep interconnection; > > > > - How sexism persists in the animals rights movement; > > > > - Why a vegan diet is a daily act of anti-oppressive resistance.
Do we draw a line, even when it's hard?
Do we draw a line, even when it's hard?
"Pastured" and "factory" are not opposites, they're the same thing with a different scale of intensity. There's no meaningful ethical difference, but there are points to make about the environment and the climate, such as the basic fact that "grass fed" means more enteric CH4 emissions, making "factory farming" better for the environment due to efficiency. No amount of "regenerative grazing" is going change that, the methane is tied to the amount of fiber in the rumen, and grasses & forbs are full of fiber.
For a more detailed explanation see: Grazed and Confused
Economically speaking is when you see how this is scam on meat eaters. Most of the animal flesh comes from CAFOs. That's not because grasslands are ugly and CAFOs are beautiful, it's because that's the most efficient way to exploit those animals, which means it's the most efficient way to keep production costs low, which means that it's the most efficient way to come to market with the lowest prices, which is how "the market" is expanded to a large part of the population (who expects cheap meat). The productive grasslands are already maxed out in most of the World and overgrazing is very common.
The US is plagued with ranchers going into natural parks and other places where they compete with wild herbivores (and call on state agencies to exterminate predators). Put simply, if CAFOs disappeared, then the average meat eater would find animal flesh to be very expensive - a food that is afforded a few times per month in "main dish" quantities, or even a few times per year (traditionally at Easter and Christmas holiday feasts). I would be glad to see that happen, but it wouldn't be enough, and it fails to teach the ethical lesson, to do the moral work. It only makes animal-based meat a more obvious luxury (it has always been one), creating black markets and creating economic demand to deforest land and to occupy cropland and turn it into pasture -- and that's something that wars have been fought for, for thousands of years.
The only sensible option is to go vegan globally (don't let animal farmers get away with exports). That frees up plenty of cropland to be reforested or used in more extensive ways.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26074492
> >Everybody and their grandpa is fascinated by fascism- how it takes root, builds to power, and causes so much damage along the way. But we so rarely talk about the uncomfortable connection it has with beloved European pastime colonialism. Let’s get into it!
by Wisecrack > > # Are Family Values Fascist? > > Recently a number of right-wing figures have become obsessed with children, whether it's having lots of them on their own, or creating a moral imperative for the rest of us to reproduce. So are they just really into the idea of spreading their own genetic code, or is there something more insidious going on? We'll explain in this video on the right-wing obsession with having children.
'The Turning Point' explores climate change, the destruction of the environment and species extinction from a different perspective. Music by Wantaways Created…
> 'The Turning Point' explores climate change, the destruction of the environment and species extinction from a different perspective. > > > > Music by Wantaways
Each fish is an individual. https://fishfeel.org/an-underwater-friend/
Give peat a chance!
Power is measured in the number of network nodes. What's the estimate? Non-sentient bots excluded.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25314740
> >https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08057 Abstract: SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities. However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI's impact on environmental humanities, this paper introduces Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history, and especially the "Sustainability Solution" proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum. This solution suggests that sustainable coupling between extraterrestrial intelligences and their planetary environments is the major factor in the possibility of their successful detection by remote observation. By positing that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern, this solution rules out space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or galaxies. This paper elaborates on Haqq-Misra's and Baum's arguments, and discusses speculative implications of the Sustainability Solution, thus rethinking three concepts in environmental humanities: technosphere, planetary history, and sustainability. The paper advocates that (1) technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into biosphere; (2) planetary history must be understood in a generic perspective that abstracts from terrestrial particularities; and (3) sustainability is not sufficient vector of viable human inhabitation of the Earth, suggesting instead habitability and genesity as better candidates.
oh, a new one on this topic, neat!
and this trash food has more microplastics in it
It's not just in it, it's the packaging too, and it's the fat content, because fat usually helps with moving that plastic (and many other things). Packaging also refers to the containers used for food delivery.
from this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165993623000808
If you're only focusing on "processed foods", you're missing the bigger problem.
It means that you are comparing apples to orange trees. You do not understand what the challenges are and what the require effort is.
SO₂ is not the same functionally in the economies as CO₂, just like the ozone destroying gases aren't teh same functionally in the economies as CO₂.
You are breathing optimism like oxygen in an oxygen poor environment.
Do you see the global GHG emissions going down? Actually down.
Do you know when the targets for ZERO are and what the downwards angle has to be?
Good luck with your optimism.
In Deutschland trägt die Tierhaltung zu 5,3 % aller THG-Emissionen und zu 68,1 % der THG-Emissionen aus der Landwirtschaft bei. Eine maßgebliche Rolle spielt hierbei die Fleisch- und Milchindustrie. Mit der vorliegenden Studie liefern wir erstmals eine Berechnung der THG-Emissionen der jeweils zehn ...
Auto-translation:
>Study on their greenhouse gas emissions and climate commitments
>With this study, we are providing for the first time a calculation of the GHG emissions from the ten surveyed slaughter and dairy companies in Germany, including discussing their general climate-related obligations – such as those from sustainability reporting in the course of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
>We show, among other things, that the emissions of the ten most selling slaughter companies and the ten highest-grossing dairy companies in 2022 corresponded to around 61% of the emissions cast in Germany in Germany in the same year. If the opportunity costs are taken into account in the calculation, then the issues of the companies will even increase to 1.5 times the passenger car emissions.
>We also take a closer look at previous climate protection-related self-discreet data from the two market leaders, Tönnies and DMK Deutsches Milchkontor, and we also come to the conclusion that these two companies in particular still have to improve significantly in terms of completeness, transparency and coherence.
PDF (DE): https://www.germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/germanwatch_super-emittenten_in_der_fleisch-_und_milchwirtschaft_0.pdf
It's a conflict of interest, it will go wrong or the system will be cancelled.
I don't think that selling licenses to pollute is a good strategy to reduce pollution (it needs to be reduced to zero ASAP).
The carbon grifting is a problem.
How Tesla Made Great Profits from Regulatory Credits? | SINBON
Take T-brand's SUV as an example. New cars emit around 210 grams of CO2 per kilometer. Under the current EU regulations (95g/km of CO2 emissions for new cars, with a €95 punishment for each gram over the limit), every new car will face a fine of up to €10,925 (115*95 = €10,925). In contrast, every new Tesla vehicle will receive 25 grams of carbon emissions credits, bringing Tesla considerable revenue in the long term.
Do Tesla car owners know that the Tesla company is selling carbon credits on their vehicle? If anything, they should be the ones getting the money, not Tesla. It's a pretty clever scam when you can sell a thing twice.
Tesla's Carbon Credit Revenue Soars to $2.76 Billion Amid Profit Drop
This revenue comes at a minimal cost to Tesla, making it a near-pure profit stream. Unlike other automakers that must purchase credits to comply with emissions regulations, Tesla generates them simply by selling zero-emission vehicles.
And do Tesla owners understand that they are not individually reducing their carbon footprint because Tesla is selling that absence of pollution as a license to pollute (carbon credit)?
This resilience is due in part to the slow transition of legacy automakers to electric vehicles. While companies like Ford and General Motors have made strides in EV production, many still rely on Tesla’s credits to meet tightening emissions standards in the U.S., Europe, and China.
In fact, Tesla’s carbon credits are helping automakers meet strict EU emission targets. Companies like Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, Mazda, and Subaru buy Tesla’s credits to offset their emissions and avoid hefty fines.
ICE car makers are buying Tesla carbon credits so that they can pollute.
Depends on the ingredients, you have to ask more specific questions.
There are studies on this, but it's a somewhat novel thing if you ignore traditional foods like tofu and seitan.
https://sentientmedia.org/fake-meat/
Fake Meat Versus Real Meat: Nutrition
When comparing the nutrition of plant-based and animal meats, an important factor to look at is their saturated fat content. Although fats are a necessary part of a healthy and balanced diet, consuming large amounts of saturated fat can increase levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and increase the risk of coronary heart disease and strokes. Saturated fats are found in high quantities in red meat, but are usually present in smaller amounts in plant-based meat products. One plant-based source of saturated fats to watch out for is coconut oil.
Some plant-based meats are higher in fiber. Eating high-fiber foods can help aid digestion, lower blood cholesterol levels and control blood sugar levels and appetite, which can help with weight management.
On the other hand, some plant-based meat products contain high quantities of sodium, and others may not contain enough vitamin B12. Although some manufacturers add this nutrient to their fake meat products, others do not. But this can be rectified by taking a vitamin B12 supplement.
Still in its early stages of development, the full nutritional value of lab-grown meat is difficult to ascertain. Yet because these meats are grown from just a few cells, there could be the potential to manipulate their growth and nutritional makeup to create an even healthier alternative to animal meat.
I agree that it's important, but I'd point out that "local" means location is very important, and if you're building some new expansionist entity, that's going to be a problem. In general, getting low-tech will still require transportation (I'm not calling it 'trade').
And oligarchs aren't the only problem, there's also climate mayhem. Every community needs to have friends elsewhere for when it's time to evacuate or even migrate, and the capacity the same for others.
Without the adaptation and related capacity, localism just means waiting for a disaster to wipe the community out entirely like Pompeii being consumed by a volcano eruption.
LE: typos
