Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

Ok, explain how it is true that every human purely by being born is equally culpable, and that human society isn’t at issue? And then you can explain why this doesn’t apply to you and your family.

It is absolutely not a fact. There is nothing inherent about any human being that causes damage to the environment. It’s what human society as we organize it does, and a very small number of people do an incredibly outsized proportion of the damage. Focusing on things like birth control and overpopulation is a major part of ecofascist rhetoric. It is also very much about punishing a distant other because after all, if you really believed that all human births were inherently damaging to the environment, we wouldn’t be having this conversation as you would have already undone the damage caused by your own parents. But you haven’t, and nor should you for many good reasons! Those reasons also apply to everyone else too.

That’s ecofascism.

Yay, happy hail Satan day everyone. I remember when Intel chickened out and rounded up their 666 megahertz pentium 3 processors to report as being 667 megahertz. Absolute cowards, no wonder China is kicking their ass.

Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.

To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.

Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.

Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.

Even more than it used to be. Canadian foreign policy regarding Iraq, Vietnam, and Cuba took a very different position to the US and was on the whole quite good (for a western country). But that was all decades ago. Practically speaking, Canada no longer has its own independent foreign policy.

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Yeah, and telling people to just pay for a VPN isn’t a great answer either - that’s just another fucking pay-forever subscription with the price rises of Netflix plus the added jank and nonsense that comes with being a copyright infringement hobbyist.

Maybe I’ll just cancel everything and do totally offline ripping of borrowed physical media from the public library, like some kind of pirate hermit.

Yeah, also the TikTok clones on YouTube and Instagram, and Musk’s plan to make Twitter/X a WeChat clone. The Americans have been stealing tech from China for a long time now.

Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union

In the sense of “liberal” as used in political philosophy or how the word is applied to party names in most countries around the world, yes Bush was a liberal. Americans tend to use the word differently though, since both major US parties are pro-business liberal parties, of a sort. This maybe applies a bit less to the Republicans today than in did in GHW Bush’s day, although by how much is still up for debate.

I’m trying to be delicate, but the misguided rhetoric you are advocating is commonly used to justify violent, psychopathic, and misogynistic behaviour. You need to stop thinking of human social relationships as transactional. They are not. You could really hurt someone if this is genuinely what you believe.

Yes, you might want to speak to a psychologist or psychotherapist before you do something that you may later come to regret.

Please take this as friendly advice: you appear to be describing a dangerous view of social relationships and this could get you in some potentially very serious trouble with the people around you. Please, do not treat your relationships with other people as transactional.

No it wouldn’t become subject to the same law. A new and different law would be required. But that’s wildly hypothetical, given the differences between an open distributed system and a massive private corporation.

Also, human behaviour and social interactions are seldom quite so transactional.

I really don’t understand the people who (on an open source social media platform of all places!) rush to defend Meta/Facebook on bill C-18. Any action taken against Facebook’s power in society, no matter how flawed, is inherently good.