As a Canadian who generally fits this category, i am fairly privileged, have all my basic needs met and some security for the future under status quo conditions. I have my struggles, but they have not so much to with marginalization or oppression. But it depends on who you are. Indigenous women are still going missing, racists are still gonna racist, billionaires are still exploiting people struggling with food and housing security, etc. same goes for the USA. For millions of Americans who are upper-middle/upper class, heteronormative, and white, life is continuing on just fine, feeling safe and experiencing a government that functions as well as it ever has from their perspective. They’re too busy living their lives to get caught up in the “noise of angry squabbling of childish politicians”. Maybe expenses have gone up, but they can still sustain all their expectations out of life. He’ll you can imagine there are a not insignificant proportion of the Russian population are like this.

Wheels.

Yes, we are in agreement on the outlook. As they’ve been saying in Ukraine, “The situation is grim”. My point was more about continuing to fight on all fronts, including the political/legislative fronts.

There are people in Congress who want that and are exactly working towards that. It isn’t lost yet, and they are not giving it up without a fight.

I don’t want to shake the ruling class, I want to take away their power to exploit people. I want insurance companies reigned in. Getting Obamacare passed did more than what a thousand vigilantes could, and that was after the Republicans and lobbyists gutted it.

If people really want to stick it to the man (conservatives and liberals alike), then they can vote in representatives and Senators who will actually legislate for the people, rather than ones who will enrich themselves off their backs.

You can revolt, you can eat the rich, it feels great. But what matters is how the system gets changed or doesn’t change. Plenty of revolutions have replaced the system was something worse, with these heros who took down the ruling class in their place. Keep a close eye on Syria, here’s hoping for the best.

He’s not dead.

Lol that’s some serious cherry picking my dude. One is one of the best action movies of the last 20 years and launched a franchise. The other is a middling coming of age story made for streaming. There are plenty of bland action movies just as bad as Damsel and without an ounce of activism that come out every year. Try comparing it to Get Out, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Mad Max Fury Road, hell even Inglorious Basterds might be considered activism now that fascism is back in fashion.

My friend, the messages that only uneducated people can be pro-fascist and educated people are immune to propaganda is propagandistic. It’s reductive and misleading. Evil does not limit itself to the ignorant. Still,I think we have different meanings of “educated”

Sure we can quibble about the median quality of a college education in the US, you you have to draw the line somewhere. But the issue I’m pointing at is people get lazy conflating education with social progressiveness and egalitarianism and dismiss people with different worldviews as “uneducated”. There are plenty of intelligent well-educated people who are morally bankrupt or deeply mistaken. After all, eugenics came from some of the most “educated” minds in the world.

Yeah… that’s the uneducated citizens part dude…

Yes and no. Yes, it is true that more uneducated people voted for Trump, and lack of education means people do not understand the risks and negative implications of voting for Trump over Harros for themselves. No, that argument doesn’t explain the whole picture. It is also true that educated people who understand the implications voted for him anyway because they saw it as benefiting them/their worldviews. Keep in mind half of college educated male voters and over a third of college educated female voters went for Trump.

Great question! The reason why I was using the 2017 report is that the Guardian arrival you originally referred to was from 2017, so I looked at the report they were working off of. While the article is still misleading (shame Guardian) the notion that a small proportion of companies, both state and private owned (100-200), are responsible for the majority (>50%) of global emissions.

Looking at the updated graph of annual emissions, it seems like this is still true, though I haven’t counted the companies. Again I agree the 72% figure is misleading, but I am pushing back on the alternative implication that relatively few companies are not actually making up the majority of annual emissions.

Yes and no. The Carbon Majors Report provides two ways of looking at global emissions: Cumulative and Annual. The table you showed reflects the Cumulative Emissions Since Industrial Revolution (1751-2022)

While not reported in the Guardian article, the same 2017 report stated 72% (p5) of global industrial GHGs in 2015 came from 224 companies, with the sample breakdown in the 2017 report, Appendix II (p15). As you can see, pretty much all of those producers are private/state-owned companies and much closer to the current picture of annual emissions. I’m not sure what counts as “industrial”, but crunching the raw numbers of 30565/46073 Mt (Global Emissions, statcan) it works out to about 66% of global emissions in 2015.

I think there’s probably something wrong with the math around per-response water consumption, but it is true that evaporative cooling consumes potable water, in that the water cannot be reused until it cycles through the atmosphere and is recaptured from precipitation, same way you consume water by drinking and pissing it out, or agriculture consumes it for growing things. Fresh water usage is a major concern and bottleneck, especially with climate change. With the average data centre using 300k gallons of water per day, and Google’s entire portfolio using 5bn gallons per day, it’s not nothing.

EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.

“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting

Fuck you morning people and normalizing waking up early in the morning to the point where sleeping until we’re rested is lazy and staying up “late” is irresponsible. We adapted to your schedule using the aids we have available and now you shame us as addicts for doing what we had to do to accommodate your morning hegemony. I say, how dare you sir! /Half-joking

Okay, so let’s go with your position that attacking soldiers with explosive weapons in civilian areas are not justifiable.

Based on your beliefs, what do you see as a justifiable response to Hezbollah’s year long barrage of rockets and missiles into Israeli cities. Keep in mind Hezbollah by and large conducts these strikes directly embedded in or right beside civilian sites. And they also store weapons in civilian sites.

The goal now is not to say which is worse, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The goal is to understand how you think about conflict and the principles you believe in that shape your views.

That doesn’t answer the question. Let me rephrase to be more direct.

What do you believe makes for acceptable and unacceptable civilian casualties (e.g. children) in urban warfare and what principles do you draw on to form these beliefs? Please use an example from a side you feel are “the good guys”.

If you’re a pacifist or believe not a single civilian casualty is acceptable, what would your approach be to resolving a conflict where your civilian population is being attacked with rockets/missiles?

Serious question, would you condone assassinating Putin with an IED even if several children were killed? Would it be better if they used a missile strike with 5x the civilian casualties because at least it isn’t an IED? Would it be better to do nothing and allow an opposing military force to continue bombarding your cities and your children with rockets and missiles?

I abhore the mass bombings and utter destruction Israel has wrought over the last year. It is beyond the pale. I would genuinely have prefered it if they could’ve taken out all of Hamas by blowing up cell phones in their pockets instead.

Oh snap, that’s awesome! I wasn’t aware of this. I assumed NATO would be consistent with the US on mines. Thank you for sharing this.

I’ll modify my argument to “Even the US and Ukraine use mines”

It’s interesting though, according to my research the distinction between mines and weapons lie in how it’s activated. For example, the C19 ex-Claymore is now remote detonation only to comply with the Ottawa treaty because it can only be activated remotely and cannot be used with an indiscriminate activator like a tripwire. Therefore it is a weapon. With this les, the pagers/radios are more akin to weapons rather than mines.

So booby traps are allowed, as long as someone is there to decide when to press the button, which the Israelies clearly did.

Did you forget that every “responsible” western power(Edit: Ottawa treaty) the US and Ukraine (who was a signatory of the Ottawa treaty) also has an arsenal of anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines which are specifically meant to be hidden and disguised? Quite literally booby traps with long-lasting risks for civilian lives. Many children have lost their lives due to mines, yet they are still deemed acceptable in war.

Anything that risks civilian lives is pretty messed up. But even compared to the mines being used in Ukraine, the pagers/radios were far more targeted and posed less risk to civilians.