America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

For those of us new to whatever this is, I’m legitimately curious about what a “3-level summary” is.

Sorry to keep bugging you but I’m looking for solutions for my entitled cat. Currently trying a rope ladder on my window. She doesn’t like leashes. Do you use a leash?

How do you explore the outdoors with him? You take him hiking?

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

Ok I see my sarcasm was lost on you so let me try again. There is nothing ethical about pet ownership or industrial civilization. If we cared about the well being of pets we wouldn’t keep them, and if we cared about the well being of the planet we wouldn’t build cities or burn fossil fuels.

I already have a cat. The above is moot for me. If I had to rethink this then maybe 12 years ago I would have made a different decision. At this point I am not going to euthenize my cat or blow up an oil pipeline. If you allow my cat agency then she should be allowed to explore her world and make her own decisions, just like the pigeons and rats that are forced to adapt to human civilization by eating garbage.

Anyway she’s safely locked away and miserable now so none of this matters.

Yup, and I’m the only one with agency in the whole world. It’s all about me.

Here is a perspective from someone who has owned an inside/outside cat for the last 12 years. My cat is independent and resourceful and yes, contributes to ecodestruction by killing birds and mice occasionally. To me this is negligible compared to the ecodestruction of simply existing in a city. If I lived in nature I would not have a cat. I don’t think you can conflate my cat killing a pigeon twice a year in an urban environment with destroying the ecosystem.

It’s also disengenuous to ignore the quality of life improvements of having a cat who is free to explore vs. one locked in an apartment all day. I recently moved and am now experiencing this and it sucks. I feel terrible for restricting her freedom and she is visibly less happy. If you think animals are sentient and have emotions, and you care about the environment, then none of what we are currently doing makes any sense.

Your meme led me to the definitive comparative study on raptor talon morphology (2009). It’s a pretty interesting read so here you go.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007999

Idk it doesn’t look like we’ll run out of food and the population bomb turned out to be a dud. Maybe the food chain will collapse in the ecocrisis, but Capital will find a way to produce food more energy-intensively to compensate.

It’s a classic, but it reflects the anxieties of the time for sure.

Having visited Berlin and Auschwitz, I agree with you. I just implore you not to take the perils of the military industrial complex required to defeat such evil lightly. Especially important is the alienation that it creates in its adherents, which prefigures additional evil. To paraphrase Einstein, our civilization will not survive the next world war.

Since you’re into Douglass, here’s a snippet from across the ocean. One of our greatest poets was Petőfi, who rallied the Hungarians to revolution against the Habsburgs. He died in the war but his compatriot, Kossuth, escaped and toured America, and much was written about him in Douglass’ paper.

The parallels to today are uncanny, with a war in Crimea, a divided Europe, and an overstretched Anglo empire.

I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don’t believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.

The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don’t extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.

But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don’t think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.

You have to talk to them and admit they’re human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it’s like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can’t trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don’t have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.

I’m sorry but this just doesn’t work. A society that abandons hope for the redemption of the worst transgressors of its social norms is a society like the US, with the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan). You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.

Redemption does work. It is documented within the most extreme circumstances. It’s not easy and it requires time and resources. But it can only happen with patience and kindness. And I admit that this brings with it a lot of contradictions but I won’t be a part of an extermination campaign no matter how grotesque the vermin might appear.

So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.

Yeah, and 70 million people voted for a fascist.

There’s something called an environmental Kuznets curve that suggests that a population will sacrifice environmental health to industrial degradation in favor of per capita income up to a point, after which they are affluent enough to care, and after this environmental health improves. China seems to be at the inflection point.

I bought one from Aventon. It was easy to repair and didn’t require anything special.

What is wrong with it? I’ve been using it for years and it does what it’s supposed to do.

Listen how can I get a quart of milk from the store without also taking two chairs, a loveseat, a sound system, my heater and air conditioning unit, some steel armor plating, and a storage unit?