

Thank you!
There’s a bunch of context. I’ll update at some point in the future. Thanks for the feedback! :)
Thank you!
There’s a bunch of context. I’ll update at some point in the future. Thanks for the feedback! :)
I’d love to collaborate. I’ll update with a link when I get it in to codeberg.
This is a good high level start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmoJyvEFqkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA
There’s also this: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-ruined-99056594/
So one of the tings I’m saying here is that the Oil industry’s climate denailism created the post-fact reality that lead to Trump, a senile lunatic, who is now forcing everyone to eat his shit. Each thing I is specific, like climate change causing fires (I’m specifically talking about the LA fire) and suburban sprawl destroying farmland, and paving cities leading to flooding. Cars in the US regularly hit buildings. Car sizes have continually increased over the years, leading to massive increases in pedestrian deaths (especially among children). Children in the US basically can’t play outside because giant cars drive really fast all over the place. In the Netherlands, young children cycle to school (like they used to in the US). Now they don’t because they would die.
I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.
We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”
We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.
I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.
I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.
We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.
It actually worked really well. Things could have been much worse. I think they weren’t because of our efforts.
Surprised to not see a reference to especifismo in the history.
It’s not really that general, and it’s not really about drugs unless you think about oil as an addiction (which isn’t far off)… at least that wasn’t my intention. I’m curious if there might be some missing context.
Are you familiar with the history of how car culture became dominant in the US? Do you recognize who the king is?
Tell me what you think this story is about.
Absolutely. It’s basically a first draft with no editing.
Truly! What an absurd fictional tragedy that’s not in any way a specific metaphor!
I’m trying to do that whole “one short story a week” thing.
Thank you. I’m Still trying to find the balance between foreshadowing and predictability. I wasn’t really sure if the end would be clear but I could probably drop a sentence to improve it. Thanks for the feedback.
Thank you! I’m glad that part worked :)
Thank you! That’s a great complement. :)
You’re going to trust the exact same industry that grifted away 10 years and billions of dollars on hydrogen fuel cells only to switch to the promise of EVs when the grift ran out? Good luck with that.
How much power would be needed to switch to EVs everywhere? Where does that power come from? Recognizing that manufacturing and transportation are also extremely carbon intensive, would we actually be better off switching or is this just another opportunity to dump money in to the auto industry?
The US had massive rail infrastructure in the past. We know that’s possible. I don’t have any evidence that electric vehicles would actually improve things even if they can be rolled out. Why would I believe an industry that has lied before and has every incentive to lie again? Why would anyone?
Thanks, good call. Let me add a working definition here for now.
The definition that’s most applicable here is “a type of object that is isomorphic (has the same shape) at multiple levels.” I’m basically using the Hofstadter definition of “isomorphism” from “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” which is more loose than the strict mathematical meaning.
To say “fractal” here is really to say that something is a recursive structure (defined by itself, or repeating the same pattern at different layers) where metaphors that allow us to understand one layer can also apply to other layers with minimal loss.
The example of authoritarianism starts at interpersonal abuse dynamics, showing that those dynamics apply with similar rules in mass as authoritarian systems, but also within the individual. The authoritarian is afraid, dominated by their own ego, and compensating externally, oppressing others as the individual’s fragile ego oppresses their own identity.
I’m also cheating a bit in my definition of fractal here because a fractal is technically infinitely self-similar. We could probably enrich the metaphor (towards the macro) by talking about the relationship of social subgroups to a society, and the relationships of societies to each other. Since we don’t know any aliens, we can’t really go past that. Going the other direction, towards the micro, we could maybe talk about the relationships between neural clusters or individual neuros, but we run in to the limits of knowledge and maybe knowable things pretty quickly. Consciousness may be truly fractal, but we probably can’t ever know.
So I’m using the term to simply describe multiple iterations of self-similariry, where the domain of self similarity is the ability to losslessly apply metaphors from one to the other. A mathematician might be a bit upset at the use of terms.
One connection to psychedelics (as in the title) is that people tend to see fractal structures while hallucinating on high doses.
Edit: My definition may have made things more confusing.