This is tragic.

Language is really important, to a degree that most mono-lingual people just do not fathom. I am mono-lingual, when I was younger I thought language was just a way to communicate. That language diversity is a bad thing, because it creates barriers between people groups. I thought that in a globally connected world not knowing the most popular language puts people at a disadvantage, so we ought to all learn the same language, and obviously that should be the one I grew up with.

That is a deeply colonial mindset. English, French, and Spanish are only as popular as they are because of Colonialism. The world is globally connected today because certain groups of people worked very hard to conquer, exploit, and repress everyone they could. This process continues today, in different forms. The unmitigated disaster that is the Climate Crisis has been a direct result of colonization and the economic system it created. Nearly every component of this situation, climate emergency, language extinction, globalized planet, is the result of horrible systems and acts. So the idea that people should try to fit into this world, that easier communication on the terms of the conquerers is good, is wrong. I was wrong, and you might be too.

The other part of this that’s important is the value of language. I will focus on one aspect of that value. More than simple communication, the languages we know structure the ways we can think. The relationships between concepts in a language, as well as the concepts themselves, set the stage for the sorts of thoughts a speaker (or signer or writer) can have. Language diversity matters in part because diversity in language means diversity in thought.

There are whole sets of concepts you and I cannot fathom, because we lack the linguistic framework to explore them. This touches everything we experience, from emotions to gender to philosophy to law to the common experiences we have every day. Look around you, and I’m sure you can find something you lack the words for. The particular way that a tree’s branches connect and sway, the vast variety of sounds that machines make, the particular feeling of knowing something you can never hope to fully convey. And I’m just an English speaker, think of all the possible ideas that these peoples who are losing their languages do have, and imagine the infinite possibility of what they could concieve. Such a tiny sliver of life thinking is, but even it’s consideration overwhelms me. What endless beauty there is in the possibilities our lives contain, yet all of it is being systematically destroyed. There is a feeling I get when thinking about this, maybe you get it too, “tragic” feels inadequate for such a thing.

It feels so weird to see her character compared to cartoonishly evil ones like Darth Vader and the Joker. When watching the movie she is clearly a very damaged person, her character is tragic. The way she treats Gump makes sense, her culture is intensely ableist which combined with her trauma provides context to her actions. The idea that she is somehow a bigger asshole than a domestic terrorist with no concrete backstory, a serial killer, or even evil space jesus, is ridiculous. Frankly it reeks of casual sexism whenever I see people smear her, it feels like folks are either parrotting the opinions they found online, or never tried to understand her character while watching the movie.

Wow, wrong from the first sentence of the subtitle. I’ll concede that a democrat will do less damage than a republican in the white house, but beyond that I take issue with this opinion piece.

The Willow project. The Biden administration approved this expansion of oil production, against the outcry of millions of people, most notably the Native Village of Nuiqsut and City of Nuiqsut. This opinion piece focusses on the fact that this project will directly release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. What is not mentioned is the habitat destruction, poisoning of fish, harm to caribou, air and water pollution, and blatant disrespect to the Native people who are directly affected (I’m not even going to get into how resource extraction causes much of the crisis of MMIWG2S).

As the author concedes in the article’s conclusion, the specifics do matter. So how, specifically, does his opinion piece counter the fact the Biden administration took deliberate action to increase fossil fuel production? With a proposal they made to increase water heater efficiency, backed by a statistic that looks at the cumulative effect nearly 40 years from now. Unstated are the assumptions that this will pass, not get repealed in the future, and that industrial civilization will exist in 2060. There is a similar statistic involving automobiles and fuel efficiency, again involving a future date (2050 this time) and many assumptions, like that people will be using cars for their daily transportation 30 years from now.

These things are not comparable to the immediate harm of the Willow project, taken together they paint a grim picture, one in which fossil fuel production continues to expand while politicians push the problem down the road with reforms that assume society does not need to fundamentally change. We need action now, and the Biden administration is actively making things worse in the present while selling us an unrealistic future.

Electing Joe Biden to be President of the United States of America for a second term in 2024 will not limit global warming to 1.5⁰C. If we actually want any chance of limiting the warming of Earth to 1.5⁰C, we need nothing short of global revolution. Fossil fuel production has to stop, agriculture has to drastically change to regenerate the land, ecosystems must be healed. None of this is workable under global Capitalism, and States will never be an effective method for organizing the kind of human labor necessary to save ourselves and our home. This is a scary idea, it requires us taking personal and collective responsibility for the fate of humanity, going out of our comfort zones, and genuinely caring for one another.

Go ahead and vote for Joe, but don’t kid yourself, he isn’t a solution.

Philanthropy is a pr scam for billionaires.

It let’s them doge taxes while feeling like they are doing good in the world, while using their money to cause more problems. That article is about Gates screwing up education systems while trying to ‘fix’ them, because he has billions of dollars while the people who actually have a clue on how to fix things do not. Look into the other actions his foundation takes and you will see similar patterns, from funding destructive agriculture to sourcing their funds from private prisons.

For the claim that Buffett is doing any good to the world, in his own words:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s good to see this division inside the French State’s forces. Clearly the pressure from recent protests is having an effect. Let’s hope these cops, judges, and politicians ruin their collective ability to maintain this perverse ‘order’.

Fuck that.

The fight is not over, there is a lot that needs to be done, but this situation is far from hopeless.

We gotta organize, not to push governments into dealing with the disasters they caused, but to solve them ourselves. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, if you have any of these you can do something. Unions, of workers and tenants both, are gaining ground. We can win when we work together, and increasingly we are.

To save Earth we need to stop using fossil fuels, rapidly work to rebuild local ecosystems, and engage in intensive regenerative agriculture to feed everyone. It will be necessary to draw down hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, that is possible to do but it will take our whole species working to make it happen. That includes you, who are reading this now. You have a part to play in this, no matter how hopeless you might now feel.

To start, look towards those currently resisting. Find a way to join them, or learn from what they are doing and make it happen where you live. Maybe this means a tenant’s union, or Food not Bombs, perhaps there are local gardeners near you, or the seeds of a library economy (tool, toy, or other libraries). Try to do something, even if it feels small. Do it with other people, and don’t get discouraged.

The problem is vast in scope, but there are a lot of us, don’t give up before it’s over.

Wow, this is sick! Thanks for posting your art, it’s great to see even if I’ve never played the game.

“Food we eat” is half the size of “livestock feed”. Plus look at how small wetlands/deserts are, wetlands especially are essential to climate resillience. What egregiously bad land use, wow. Thanks for this post, it’s great.

I get that the EFF has to say this bill has “laudable goals” for political reasons, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Protecting children is a typical excuse for broad expansion of State power, and this is no different. Don’t be fooled, and remember it’s the democrats who are trying to push this through. Both major political parties in the US are enemies to personal autonomy, one is just more subtle about it. Liberation will never come from within the ruling power structure.

“Apolitical” is a political position.

If you claim to support trans rights, and with them the broader struggle for gender self determination, then you ought to support the people putting their bodies on the line to defend it. Specifically the antifacists and anarchists (many of them queer themselves) who fight facism on the streets. Supporting a group targetted for genocide requires supporting the kinds of tactics that can fight the facists working to exterminate that group.

For real, this is sobering information. I already try to avoid microwaving plastics, but I’m gonna be even more careful now, and try to spread this study. Billions of nanoplastics per square centimeter, it’s scary to think about the size of containers, number that would likely be used in a day, and the fact that infants are so small with that information in context.

I’m honestly impressed. Like, yeah, it isn’t cool to mislead people and whatnot but you know that. I hope you can find a creative writing outlet on Lemmy because I’d love to read your stories. Also, just because your stories aren’t in a book format doesn’t make them less real, if writing books is your goal then please seek it, but there are other formats that are no less “real”.

Web serials, for example, tend to be first draft work so people are about as chill about grammar as they are on reddit. Or you could take a bunch of stories you made on the internet (like you have here) and make them into a collection someday if you really want to have a book. Point is, you are actually writing, and its good writing at that. Please keep doing it, and I hope you find a place where you feel good about what you’re making, whatever that looks like to you.

Holy moly this is a wild story. I really hope people don’t get murdered, and Braxton gets a positive outcome from the legal system. But beyond the shock from reading this, I’m left with anger.

The sheer audacity of these racist clowns, and the fact that its working!? Like, courts just refuse to hear cases on a lot of the discrimination that happens surrounding elections, so even though it might be illegal its the white courts that decide that. And they BURNED DOWN LEWIS’ HOME! Holy shit is that terrifying, and we know nobody’s ever facing any consequences for it.

One thing that is truly inspiring amidst all the racism and systemic violence is the mayor himself. This guy is out here practicing mutual aid, organizing community events, and fighting to get food for his community. One of his goals with becoming mayor was to get a grocery store in town, huge respect for this guy.

Fuck White Supremacy, fuck the State, but hats off to this man. I hope he gets what he’s fighting for.

It’s important to question the beliefs we’re raised with, especially when seeking truth as scientists tend to do. I’m glad to see research like this, and especially the bit at the end of the abstract about examining prior conclusions that were influenced by patriarchal cultural bias. There’s something about how hard this notion of, “men hunt, women gather and take care of children, in all human societies past and present” is to shake that has me reminded of something:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

That heuristic is generally taken to be accurate among the scientifically literate, Carl Sagan coined it even, but it is deeply flawed. Cultural notions of ordinary define what is seen as extraordinary. An idea that is normalized in our society needs much less evidence to convince people of it, while one that goes against normality needs much more to even begin to gain traction. The concept is flawed because ‘ordinary’ is socially defined, so while it can be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the existence of ghosts, it can also be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the CIA using LSD to (try to) control peoples’ minds. Pretty extraordinary claim, but it did happen. Maybe you see the issue with this heuristic, while the idea expressed is intuitive, it hides a sneaky cultural bias.

I think something similar goes on with ideas like the one this study refutes. It seems so clear in our patriarchal society that men and women are different, suited to different roles as we’ve been told so many times growing up, that the opposite concept is extraordinary. So you get scientists coming up with truly extraordinary explanations of why women are buried with hunting tools to maintain their conception of ‘normal’, and anyone who wants to refute it needs to go above-and-beyond only to still be met with skepticism.