There’s certainly a reason hardcore activists in the environmentalist and animal rights movements were targeted so heavily. I’m partial to the belief that it’s something way too many people might empathize with or even worse, copy. It’s also a pipeline into real leftism and anti-capitalism that can’t be countered with muh 100 gorgiollion dead from cummunism
I’m conflicted, as I do believe that action for the sake of the climate is morally correct, but that these actions aren’t accomplishing much of anything at this point.
Andreas Malm has done a few talks about XR, Just Stop Oil, or Insulate Brittain vs groups like Tyre Extinguishers, Ende Gelända, or Les Soulèvements de la Terre: his conclusion is that the former groups have done some amount of good with consciousness raising but at this point those who are going to be moved or sympathetic have been ‘activated’ and further nuisance activities alone will not advance the cause further and could instead harden people against the movement because it is action that is seemingly targeting ‘regular people’ and not the ones responsible for the situation we are in. He commends the groups for targeting banks and other institutions but doesn’t believe actions like blocking roads for the sake of doing so (obstruction of access to specific targets is another story) or throwing powder on a game advance the cause.
He goes on to say that arrests should never been seen as some kind of virtuous thing and instead should be seen as failures because it is taking people out of the movement and making their further contributions more difficult and potentially dangerous for their continued freedom.
I generally defend blocking roads as an act of protest, but I also understand the idea that there needs to be further escalation targeting the actual polluters because you will never turn all of the western public to your side.
Here are a couple of the talks I’m referring to, interesting to listen to the perspectives:
Liquid Thorium Salt Small Modular Reactors address a lot of concerns.
By the name, they are smaller and modular which allows for a scalable solution to building which will address time and cost of construction. Thorium is not dangerously radioactive until it is being turned into fissile material inside the reactor and then the waste can be run inside it under specific ‘recipes’ to fully consume it which addresses another big issue.
Unfortunately it does create some problems surrounding proliferation, but at this point we’re all dead anyways, so I’m inclined to say fuck it, who cares. Proliferation concerns themselves seem like advanced powers pulling the ladder up and saying they get to be kings of the world and everyone else must be their subjects aside from the handful of MAD capable states.
Tofu and lentils are so much cheaper than meat.
Diy’ing things too. If you ever need a new tool or household item or have to fix something you’re almost certainly not the first, so searching up DIY _ or How to Fix _ will almost always pull up a handy guide. I’ve saved thousands at this point
I haven’t explored LEDs too much, but have an education related to transistors. Because they are diodes, significant overvolting will degrade the diode itself and if it were to happen often enough could damage the junction to the point of no longer working. Fluctuating voltage could damage other parts of the device, but I’d guess overvolting is the bigger danger
Had the misfortune of listening to State Department and White House policy ghouls talk to a class recently. They don’t believe moving to less fossil fuels quickly is viable because we’d become “dangerously dependent on Chinese minerals for batteries and solar cells” ignoring the fact that the entire globe is “dangerously dependent” on a liveable climate
With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.
And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.
Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.
You live in the US, how are you not being bribed to think the way you do?
You’re such a redditor
It’s also kinda hard to have 99% of people dislike China if 18% of the global population lives there and is very satisfied with their government, not even counting anyone in Russia, other parts of Asia and the Pacific, Central and South America, or Africa.
You’re really showing whose opinions you actually care about. A bunch of propagandized to the brim, comfortable Americans, Canadians, and Europeans
Time for you to go make friends with the fascists and shitlibs who share your opinions I guess
What an awful analogy that misses any sort of context or nuance about the situation.
That’s the problem with liberals like you, that you think things can be understood by imagining it as something superficially similar.
Do you understand what historical materialism is?
Sounds like there needs to be an active, maybe kinetic, effort to maintain the peace