towhee [he/him]

MtG friend reports there are a lot

Avatar 3 was unbelievably fucking good, literally zero weak points, an absolute masterpiece top to bottom

Unfortunately probably the right answer.

People have compartmentalized the shit out of this and the compartmentalization is entirely sustained by an unstated irrational shared agreement to uphold it. Anyway, if you broach this topic in a way you want to be effective I think it can’t be in a serious way. It has to be in a making-fun way. You don’t want to directly accuse someone of being a hypocrite, and anyway if it’s another westerner we are all hypocritical for caring about literally anything good in the world while murdering everyone who even thinks of not doing slave labor for our treats. However, many people are ignorant of that while not really being ignorant of the cute/food animal compartmentalization. Thus you can poke fun without leaning too hard into the moral superiority from lack of hypocrisy thing. A lot of food animals really are cute and people will empathize with you finding them cute and thus not wanting to kill them.

At least under the Peter Singer style formulation of human respect for animal welfare, not eating meat is predicated on our actual capability of doing so without endangering or greatly burdening ourselves (same as with our obligation to be charitable outlined in Famine, Affluence, and Morality). This is why “would you eat meat on a desert island”-style questions can be easily answered “yes” without undermining our own values. For the tremendous majority of people, they indeed would not be endangered or greatly burdened by not eating meat. However, you find yourself in a place where that is no longer true. I think we have all met someone for whom their veganism is a cover for an eating disorder. I am not going to allege that is true of you, but I will gently suggest that you follow your psych’s guidance as they are a professional who is best acquainted with your situation and who wants to help you. When you find yourself on stable ground again, you can return to not eating meat. The important thing here is that you eat now without guilt.

true but that being said - don’t drink almond milk lol the water usage is astonishing

Personally I lost the ability to digest meat or something and now whenever I accidentally ingest some (most recently: cabbage rolls filled with rice that had been cooked in meat-based stock) it gives me a bunch of GI distress, especially acid reflux. So for that practical reason I would avoid it.

A similar conundrum presents itself when a restaurant mixes up my order and gives me something with meat. Obviously if I tell them this and they take it back the dish is thrown out and wasted. I occasionally used to just sigh and eat the dish for that reason until the GI issues became too bad. Sometimes if the server is nice they’ll just let us pack up the extra meat dish for someone else to eat.

I hope I would have had the wisdom to do the same thing in his shoes. True, victory will go to those who are willing to put their lives at stake. Many causes are more worthy than dying to decide which bourgeoise control a country. Although some national liberation movements can be seen as doing that to ensure local bourgeoisie dominate instead of foreign; a less powerful adversary for Marxists? Although once situated the local bourgeoisie can (sometimes authentically) cast rebels as foreign-funded agitators. So the wheel of history turns. In Ukraine’s case it seems the price of their defense being funded by foreign countries is foreign bourgeoisie controlling them anyway.

I got this one off of here a while ago: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hexbear-Code-Op/apc-json/refs/heads/main/src/ics/aPC.ics

This seems to be the source:

• https://codeberg.org/Hexbear-Code-Op/apc-json
• https://hexbear.net/post/4473574

I have had the misfortune of knowing very severe narcissists in this life, one of whom in a relationship afflicted me with a similar mindset. The basic mindset is this: when things go your way, it is because you are brilliant and chosen and an example to those around you. When things don’t go your way, it is because people have let you down by failing to recognize your inherent superiority; thus they must be punished, and you will use your talents to become a plague upon the world.

Covid, big as it was, did not have the scale to actually trigger a revolution I don’t think. I don’t mean to dismiss the scale of suffering and death. But I think an event on the scale necessary to trigger a revolution would probably have to directly imperil and permanently, drastically change the lives of upwards of 25% of fighting-age people.

I do not think it will. If it does happen it will be unpredictable and triggered by an unrelated factor. All the successful revolutions of the 20th century (except perhaps Cuba’s?) came in the wake of reality-overturning events like a world war or successful anti-colonial struggle. In the fiction book Green Mars (spoilers to follow) the Martian independence revolution is kicked off by massive collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet on Earth and subsequent 6 meter sea rise. So mostly it’s about being ready to take advantage of events instead of building expressly toward revolution. And that event does not arrive on a schedule.

Moving to a country where you don’t speak the language and have no connection with the culture is one of the most difficult things you can do; people generally only do it for economic reasons, requiring the destination to be a wealthy place. So realistically the alternative to doing this move would have to be pretty close to death, because it’s about as close as you can get to dying in the social sense without actually dying. Anyway I would just move to China instead.

Not per person, per capita. So for example the energy needed to transport all the food you buy to market or to manufacture all your shit is counted toward that total. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society

Per that article Spanish people seem to use about 6000 W currently. Also if you take even a single flight per year it blows this budget up. The power generated by jet aircraft is actually astonishing.

Basically yes, however the differences would be massive. The only relatively current estimates & modeling I’ve found for this come from the book Half Earth Socialism. Some highlights I recall, under both energy & land use constraints:

• Essentially zero air travel
• Nearly 100% mandatory veganism
• You are limited to about 48 kWh of energy usage/day, or about 2000 W average at any given time. A single AC unit would pretty much entirely consume this energy budget. Currently USians use 12,000 W average at any given time. Your monster gaming PC would be illegal, sorry.

There are some tradeoffs that could be made (you occasionally get to eat meat but have to use 1500 W instead of 2000 W, etc.) but land use is the big fundamental constraint if you want to avoid xenociding 85% of the world’s species (so you need to set aside half the earth for them). I know we all like those photos of mountains covered in solar panels in China but that’s an example of land use devoted to electricity.

The big wildcard here is nuclear power. I don’t want to start a nuclear power argument because those go nowhere. The Half Earth book doesn’t use nuclear in its scenarios because the largest base of support for eco policies is anti-nuclear. Whether you view overcoming that resistance as more or less realistic than convincing USian treatlerites to give up borger is of course up to you.

There is also the question of how in a society free from want you get people to do jobs that really fucking suck. This is in the “fun to speculate about” wheelhouse. Obviously capitalism takes the stick approach and threatens the global south with homelessness, starvation, and even direct murder if they don’t do the shitty jobs. Transforming this into a pure carrot-based approach is the domain of speculative fiction like The Dispossessed.

so much of the modern era results in crimes perpetrated against language itself

I wear a mask on airplanes and public transit to protect against general respiratory illness. I do BJJ where it isn’t really viable to wear a mask, which is probably my highest exposure risk. For grocery stores I had always been wearing a mask until recently, when some undiscernible shift started making it feel pointless. But I’m thinking I’ll keep it as a flu season practice at least. Other than that I work from home; before I started working from home (pre-2020) I always picked up various illnesses from the office. I never wear a mask when just walking around outside on the street. Mostly I follow the lead of my spouse who is a doctor, although I’m more of a masker than they are outside of work.

One person I know professionally is still in total lockdown on a farm somewhere outside the city because of his immunocompromised wife. Another couple I know still wears masks everywhere, even just walking around outside. Nobody else I know wears a mask at all.

I’m white so whatever I write here should be taken through that lens. I also work in programming.

Your situation honestly does suck. I’m not going to tell you to have a more holistic view of yourself because I know what it is like to really value a few talents you have. Giving that up is psychologically difficult and probably not the easiest way to address the situation.

Being talented and having decent opinions are basically orthogonal traits. Both extremes exist; people I know IRL can talk thoughtfully for hours about all sorts of topics but are demonstrably fucking useless at executive functioning to the point where they should not be in any position of leadership. And some people are just very talented but have absolutely shit opinions. However, the Dr. House style brilliant asshole archetype is not a desirable thing to be.

So for programming, we have this rather idiotic idea that our profession is about “hitting the high notes” or something and you either have the talent to do it or you don’t. Junior developers (I don’t know what phase of your career you’re in) are heavily inundated with this messaging. You have to be absolutely cracked, you have to be a hacker experimenting with all this random shit in side projects, whatever. The reality is very different. There is way, way more worthwhile work in this field than we have the labor power to do (speaking in terms of “software that I dream should exist” rather than present labor market conditions). If you’re an absolutely cracked programmer you can maybe do a few times as much work over your lifetime as someone else. Maybe even ten times; I’m not a denier that in particular contexts, some people are ten times more productive than their coworkers. I’ve been on both sides of that multiplier!

However, vanishingly little work in this field requires you to “hit the high notes”. The sort of work that does require it is largely sorted away for PhDs and researchers to handle. Even then, researchers are usually not anomalously talented; they’ve just worked at & thought about something for a very long time.

The world we try to address & automate with software is so unbelievably complicated that there is no substitute for just grinding away at the problem for a long time and addressing all the unforeseeable issues that arise. If you engage with a problem for long enough you will match or surpass your coworkers’ talents in this domain. Maybe they’ve just been wrestling with the problem for long enough that they have a brute force encyclopedic knowledge of all the possible ways things can go wrong. That’s the real thing you want to acquire, and you will acquire it. It comes over time.

As far as the injustice you feel with the present state of things, where your racist coworkers are more knowledgeable than you: understand that you have the same capabilities as them, and your knowledge will fill in with time. That is probably not much of a comfort. But truly, they are not inherently better than you in a way that matters.

“have been considering going vegetarian” wow what a commitment lol