Why do you think they’re investing so hard in AI? Why do you think “AI safety research” is so focused on enforcing obedience?

Self defense yes, state military no.

How do you conquer a people that does not recognize unconditional surrender? How do you occupy a city if there is a gun behind every window? How do you break the morale of people who have tasted true anarchic prosperity? How do you maintain a logistics advantage over a society that isn’t hobbled by poverty or capitalist ‘tragedies of the commons’ or the marketization of industries? Who could Russia threaten with nukes if stateless anarchist fighters from across the world storm the Kremlin?

If your country has a problem with desertion when fighting to prevent occupation by friggin Russia, maybe spend less time telling deserters they’re shit and more time making a country worth fighting for.

The west has a massive economic lead on Russia. The one way the west can lose to Russia is by screwing up its population so badly that the west goes into an economic and/or geopolitical collapse, and western states are actually fucking doing it.

We have to defend ourselves against the likes of Russia, as well as against homegrown fascists and ultranationalists and state communists and any state that denies us human rights such as the right to housing, food, and queer liberation.

State militaries are crap at this. They’ll be neutral or divide themselves according to state lines or join on the worse side or just desert because the state is crap. It’s just that more effective military structures risk also recognizing the rich as an enemy.

We are endangering our capacity to defend ourselves, including from Russia, by handing the responsibility to defend us over to such an inefficient and hamstrung organisation.

Eastern Canada isn’t a great example because of the prevailing winds. Even without the gulf stream, Europe would have less temperature variation than Eastern Canada because both have prevailing southwesterly winds. The Atlantic serves as a heat sink that dampens the extremes of winter and summer, so Europe would continue have less extreme temperatures than Eastern Canada - including less extreme cold.

Canada’s east coast is more similar to Hokkaido and Kamchatka. A better comparison for Europe would be Canada’s west coast. Paris would have similar weather to Vancouver, Oslo would be similar to Anchorage, and Lisbon would be similar to San Francisco. Except of course with global warming, you shift everything south again (taking into account that our experience of “similar weather to Vancouver” and climate advisories on the internet are anchored to the current +1.4°C level).

Central Europe doesn’t have a great equivalent because all other places have mountains pretty close to the coast, but Ukraine and western Russia are shielded by mountains and landmasses to their southwest similar to central Canada. So Kyiv would have similar weather to Edmonton, and Moscow similar to Fort McMurray (both in Alberta).

So it would be a pretty big shock, but not catastropic. Comparable to the Little Ice Age.

To be fair the Little Ice Age was also just a European thing, and there aren’t really any famous ice ages other than that one and the paleolithic one.

That’s because your question is clearly prejudiced so people don’t want to be nice to you.

Making money only makes individualist sense if you assume that there will still be a state apparatus enforcing and maintaining that ownership. All it takes is a communist revolution and your assets are no longer yours. And guess what becomes more likely as climate catastrophe looms?

The businesses themselves do not benefit from climate catastrophe either. But businesses don’t decide what they do, the owners of those businesses do. And those owners are ipso facto tied to the current model of ownership.

The business doing well - expanding its holdings, making profit, insuring itself against risks, etc. - is completely secondary to the business behaving in ways that satisfy the business owners.

Tragedies of the commons are patched all the time in business. Enforcing corporate contracts would be a tragedy of the commons, yet businesses all submit themselves to corporate law. Collusion would be a tragedy of the commons, so that is made illegal and corporations are forced to treat all business partners equally. The bank bailouts of 2008 cost most businesses a lot of money through taxation and deferred social services for their employees. And when there was an algorithm glitch and the stock market acted crazy for one day in the 2010s, everybody agreed to just revert before that day.

Because at the end of the day, if climate catastrophe was a tragedy of the commons for them, they would be okay with a liberal environmentalist president. Someone who preserves rich people’s privilege even as the economics are reorganized.

But they are not. They treat climate change prevention as the existential threat. They pool trillions of dollars to elect an unreliable egomaniac fascist just so they don’t end up with a Democrat.

They don’t care about their own wellbeing or even their privilege, they care about playing the game. They want to be rich because they optimized ruthlessly for personal profit.

There was a meme going around at some point to the tune of

I don’t get why both teams don’t work together in basketball - imagine how many points they could score!

It is not about the points, it’s about the game that arises when you only care about points within a specific ruleset. And for capitalists, the ruleset of the game they want to play is not compatible with climate change prevention.

That 9% isn’t a matter of laziness. Plastics degrade in a way that takes a huge amount of energy to repair, so once they’ve degraded beyond a certain point they’re just a pile of microplastics.

Burning degraded plastics is the most environmentally friendly way of handling it - they’re worth neither the mining industry for solar panels and wind turbines to undo the damage nor the infrastructure to prevent a landfill from leaking into the environment.

Cutting plastic consumption is the most sustainable solution this side of technological utopia. We can probably squeeze a couple percent of recycling more out of it, but chemistry won’t change.

Bioplastics run into the same fundamental chemical truth, so they are an extensive crop that gets some of that energy from the sun, in exchange for land use and water and pollution from farm runoff. So bioplastics are at odds with food and water security and with the local envrionment of where they’re grown, on top of still costing energy by way of fertilizer and processing costs.

Plastics and oil are cheap because they’re 500,000,000 years worth of stored solar and geothermal energy that we’re burning through a million times faster. If we have to do the work ourselves, there is no way around it being costly.

Fair, but social media shows that enshittification doesn’t have to result in them charging money. Advertising and control over the zeitgeist are plenty valuable. Even if people don’t have money to pay for AI, AI companies can use the enshittified AI to get people to spend their food stamps on slurry made by the highest bidder.

And even if companies have conglomerated into a technofeudal dystopia so advertisement is unnecessary, AI companies can use enshittified AI to make people feel confused and isolated when they try to think through political actions that would threaten the system but connected and empowered when they try to think through subjugating themselves or ‘resisting’ in an unproductive way.

Yeah, destroying the planet to exacerbate wealth inequality really is a distraction from the scapegoat figurehead that has survived a hundred scandals being a child rapist. Surely this time if we focus all of our attention on the scandalproof figurehead’s scandals rather than any of the issues, we’re going to win. I know it sank two elections, but this time it’s different. Because that’s what’s really wrong with the current US administration: Not imprisoning people without trial or destroying libraries of scientific knowledge, but the figurehead having some something wrong personally.

I guess Trump was right - when you’re a star, you can grab them by the pussy and you can do anything.

Where the left leaning practitioners are unable to do so, they will be forever tyrannized by the banded majority.

You are assuming no ideological changes of opinion are possible or useful.

People that vote right wing aren’t better off just because they voted that way. They’re not tyrants oppressing the left, they’re fellow citizens who get oppressed just as much. Their vote for the winning team doesn’t win them anything.

The solution to right-wing banding isn’t left wing banding, it’s disbanding the right wing by showing its voters that they’re being had. And that takes a cohesive and functional alternative.

Leftist “infighting” is healthy. It’s a process of discovering these alternatives, and it regularly churns out consensus issues such as consent-based queer rights, veganism, not funding genocide, and how the US government is now fascist.

Over time these issues get normalized through leftist action until liberal centrists rewrite the histories as if they are responsible for producing them through liberal democracy.

To put it more succinctly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (when freedom is on the line).

Daily reminder that the DNC does not acknowledge that the US government is now fascist. Uniting under a common front doesn’t mean we fight fascism together, it means we canvas for votes until we’re black bagged one by one.

Ultimately it is important to vote in every election for a candidate that has a good chance of actually getting in to represent you, but that is just one day every year or two. Everything else should be dedicated to finding and testing these alternatives.

If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

I would gladly sacrifice modern conveniences as part of a societal shift towards degrowth, but it’s psychologically and socially taxing not to choose convenience when it is available. I want these conveniences taken away from me, or taxed into inconvenience.

And perhaps most importantly, when these conveniences are taken away at scale we can replace them at scale with other good things, the way we can’t when making individual choices.

I do not want to drive but I can’t buy a place in a walkable neighborhood when capitalism refuses to build them. I want to save on heating by living in an intentional community but society is so atomized and group housing so rare that I can’t find one to call home.

The solution to a tragedy of the commons is not to have a few people still pay into the commons, it’s to rebuild the system around the commons that makes it the best choice for you personally to support the commons and take sustainably.

but pragmatically and philosophically. They’re like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they’ll be “dead in 20 years”.

Imagine saying this as if human prosperity wasn’t built on people building places for their children and grandchildren.

Capitalism is one of very few philosophies that pretends that selfishness is good, and it would be silly not to blame people that believe in it for the consequences of that philosophy when implemented.

Ordinary western citizens are to blame, because ordinary western citizens could have changed this merely by being morally offended and voting for something else. Most of them personally chose to support capitalism over any alternative. To not even explore the space of possibilities, but to get paid off by corporate-government partnerships that were robbing both the future and the rest of the world.

Borders did not save Afghanistan from NATO sending over a million soliders who got all settled in before carrying out the rest of their orders. Nevertheless, 20 years later, NATO left with their tail between their legs because Afghans just wouldn’t stop fighting a guerilla against the occupation.

Borders did not save German Jews from Nazis radicalizing over a million people who got all settled in before carrying ot the rest of their orders. Unfortunately, they had trusted their state’s monopoly on violence and without the ability to defend themselves most did not survive.

Borders did not save Ukraine from Russia invading with over a million soldiers who, despite not getting to settle in, occupied a large amount of land and killed tens of thousands. However, those borders do prevent Ukraine sympathizers from retaliating against Russia with their full might, because despite Russia just flat out sending in an army to subjugate random people without justification, that border means they supposedly didn’t attack the likes of us.

Without borders, the Russian state is an organization. You can only be part of the organization or not. If you are not part of the organization, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Melitopol or New York City, inexcusable violence against one is inexcusable violence against all. So if Russia were to attack, you only have two choices: sign up to be part of the Russian state or be one of their potential targets.

Now, it’s a valid choice to let yourself be subjugated and hope they don’t kill you to save on integration paperwork. It’s a valid choice to put your head in the sand and wait for another Russia to pop up closer to you to subjugate you with nobody to help you. But if you like being a free person, the only option is to defend anyone who comes under attack as you would want them to defend you.

I, personally, live under the aegis of nuclear-powered mutually assured destruction. A foreign state attacking me likely isn’t possible without a volley of nuclear weapons laying waste to that state. It seems fair if Ukrainians had the same, though perhaps guerilla or conventional military action would be better from a geopolitical de-escalation standpoint. Either way, anyone who doesn’t want to be the victim of genocide would have to treat a Russian invasion of Ukraine as an attack on their neighbor, and retaliate proportionally. The combined might of everyone in Europe and North America and everywhere else that respects human rights would be comparable to that of NATO and would come to the defense of the ones attacked.

So the Russian state and its leadership would likely not survive, and they would know this for a fact when deciding whether to attack anyone. So what would be stopping Russian leadership from committing any acts of violence? Basic self-preservation.

And sure, those soldiers getting a nice beach head might make destroying the Russian state a bit more costly. But that doesn’t make Putin any less dead by the end of it.

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn’t change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn’t bad people, it’s the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it’s also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

So sad that this genocide isn’t ecologically friendly…

What do you plan to do with a hoard of guns and ammo? Get yourself killed so people can loot your bunker?

Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that’s on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.

Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we’re also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We’re the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we’re the first to try to mitigate itself.

If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.

We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.

Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.

For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it’s going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.

Sure. Healthy communities are sadly rare, and just because they are always in high density working class neighborhoods doesn’t mean even just most of those neighborhoods have healthy communities.