Steven Universe too!

Yup. It should not be a thing.

Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.

Here is a fact: an authoritarian non-democracy is doing a lot for securing the future of humanity, while the “leader of the free world” are vandalizing the climate and accelerating apocalyptic climate catastrophe.

In 2025, China is a net positive for the future of humanity, while the USA is a net negative.

If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

If you, like me, care about the future of democracy, we have to do a LOT of digging.

Vodka 25 years ago.

Excellent opportunity to prove the superiority of our localized moderation model!

Yea, that’s exactly why I thought it was worth asking.

It seems Aral has actually done the work: https://mastodon.social/@staff/115129752094733480

A stick is an essential part of an axe but not a sufficient one. And the same handle can be used to make different tools. Axes, hammers, mallets, etc. And you can use a stick for non aggressive tasks, like a measurement stick, or a door prop, or a tiny pole for a tiny tent for Chihuahuas. And even when used as a weapon, well you tell me if you’d rather battle a fighter wielding an axe or one wielding just the handle of an axe.

Isn’t there? The handle is basically just a stick.

Too tired to figure out if you’re trying to call me a tankie or not.

Your line is the soviet line before Barbarossa. Are we really going to re-litigate WW2 here?

Edit: lol, you want a meme? The top panel would be the bourgeois/Democrats+traditional-GOP using a water cannon on the working class. The bottom panel would be the fascists/MAGA-Republicans using an actual cannon. Like I said, a meaningful difference.

Edit2: your meme by the way, absolutely accurate up until about 2024.

Under imperialist capitalism, this is turned into laïcité that is then weaponized against the other.

This is silly. There is a meaningful difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism.

One of the most interesting explanations I’ve seen is that Western Europe was politically fragmented just enough so that big enough entities were competing with each other for dominance. So there was no central authority strong enough to pacify it, and the individual states were powerful enough to mobilize resources, creating a competitive power race. It was in trying to beat each other that they reached out and colonized the rest of the world.

Edit: I’m thinking now how during the apex of pax Americana, space exploration really subsided for example. When the US and the USSR were competing it was on. Now that US hegemony is declining, it’s seems to be on again. Too strong of a political unification keeps the centrifugal forces in check.

The idea of conquering the world was Persian. Alexander just took over what Persia what already conquered.

The demonization of the Romans is silly.

It doesn’t change absolutely anything in my argument, it remains exactly the same. Antinatalism absconds not only the responsibility to improve the world but even the possibility of a better world existing in the future, it assumes à priori that existence is and will remain insufferable.

You’re contradicting your own argument:

It was never meant to remedy shitty living conditions.

Vs

Ask anyone with disabilities, abusive families, trauma, financial hardship, and generally going though too much shit in life and you’ll find that it was never about a lack of imagination.

This is a contradiction. You are literally picking the antinatalist option because of shitty living conditions.

And of course, the lack of imagination is not whether you can imagine things being better but whether you can imagine things becoming better starting from where we are here and now.

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We suffer because we are able to imagine how things could have been so much better. It is because we can imagine ourselves in a better place

If you can imagine such a place, steelman your argument then, try making it without a premise of shitty living conditions. Pick a convivial world, and make an antinatalist argument from that world. Does it still stand?

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Finally, the argument that says nonexistence might be better is literally vacuous: False implies True. Nonexistence therefore is trivially whatever you want it to be, but not In any meaningful sense.

In a society whose official ideology is that “There is No Alternative”, antinatalism is basically a dressed up version of “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

It’s basically just lack of imagination. Doomerist defeatism.

LMDE 💕

Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I’m just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.