Police riot. Trump and ICE are the institutionalization of the lynch mob. If government disappears, everything will not be just fine. People can be unreliable. The police and government are made of people. Governments fail, societies collapse. Solarpunk is a movement to adapt communities so that when government fails again, the harm can be mitigated.

The lynch mobs you’re referring to didn’t happen in spite of government, but with tacit approval of government at some level of administration. The people doing the lynching knew that they wouldn’t be held accountable, and that they would be protected by the government from retaliation. They aren’t examples of anarchy, they aren’t typical of small communities.

Lynch mobs typically are the result of unwritten laws being tacitly enforced by government.

Small communities do have problems, so we should continue the collective discussion of how to best resolve those problems in ways that preserve justice. Bringing in the FBI to deal with the racist police who were leading lynch mobs only worked until the federal level was recaptured by a more virulent strain of white supremacy. ‘Strange Fruit’ didn’t end because the FBI suddenly discovered injustice. It was a result of a long running grassroots community conversation about the problem until progress on alternative solutions showed enough success to become threatening to the supremacy of the federal government.

Reality is real, messy, and complex, and doesn’t get simpler by abdicating responsibility for that messy complexity to a class of people with even less accountability than ourselves. Communities fail, and often people with the imagination to think of creative alternative solutions and are doing the hard work of community building are the reason that they don’t. Assuming we don’t live in real, vibrant, complex worlds only telegraphs the simplicity of your own worldview.

The article title buries the lede.

Even so, coal use is still rising in absolute terms. Output from thermal power plants increased in the first half as electricity demand grew, partly driven by high-tech manufacturing, electric-vehicle charging and data centers. Coal’s share fell as cleaner sources expanded even faster.

China is still using more coal, creating more gaseous carbon, and building new coal-fired power plants than ever before.

They’ve always had trouble transferring power from their mega solar projects in Tibet to their coastal population centers. Upgrading their grid was never a priority, and a large percentage of their solar output went to waste.

The implication from these numbers is that they’ve built AI datacenters near the solar megaprojects that are putting that unused solar energy to use, in addition to increasing China’s fossil energy use. This is a classic case of Jevons-y solar energy production creating more environmental devastation while being falsely touted as a green victory.

Two years ago, Lemmy.world tried a similar move with their MediaBiasFactCheck bot. It was soundly rejected by the community, and they finally relented after weeks of outcry. Why is @Rimu putting us through this again?

I love Doctorow posting.

• 0:01 Rich Girl - Gwen Stefani
• 3:56 When I Grow Up Digital Dog Remix - The Pussycat Dolls
• 7:46 This Is What You Came For - Rihanna
• 11:24 The Sweet Escape - Gwen Stefani
• 15:00 American Boy - Estelle ft. Kanye
• 18:53 Birthday - Katy Perry
• 22:24 Blow - Kesha
• 25:28 I Kissed A Girl - Katy Perry
• 28:27 Run Away with Me - Carly Rae Jepsen
• 32:34 Burn - Ellie Goulding
• 36:23 Hollaback Girl - Gwen Stefani
• 39:19 Telephone - Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncé
• 42:45 Cooler Than Me - Mike Posner
• 46:15 Boom Clap - Charli xcx
• 49:02 Super Bass - Nicki Minaj
• 52:21 Single Ladies - Beyoncé
• 55:52 Can’t Get You Out Of My Head - Kylie Minogue
• 59:20 Crazy In Love - Beyoncé ft. JayZ

This is some funny ‘long tail’ shit.

“We can’t return what we stole, if we did, they’d do ethnic cleansing to us.”

– jimmy90

“it is easy to call land stolen, but what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim? Are they thieves?”

This is the kind of shit that makes me think capitalists don’t actually believe in property. They only have an issue with theft when the loot isn’t laundered properly. ‘Civilization’ is just a word that means ‘fence’ to them.

That tracks. I think you’ll have a better time in the city.

Large protests are a great place to meet allies who can support you building alternatives to ‘politics as usual’ in rural areas too.

Please don’t spread FUD about direct actions against the Trump regime. In some small towns, Democrats are the only game in town, and can control the protest agenda. In large cities, these protests are organized by a coalition of organizations, with Democrats playing a much smaller role.

If someone at the march has a problem with Palestinian liberation, you can always tell them to fuck off or you can find a section of the march where you’re in good company. I have never seen a 1k+ person No Kings march without Palestinian flags.

National Shutdown, tomorrow.

National Shutdown, this Friday.

Bryan answered by explaining in a post that the song “hits on both sides of the aisle”. He later added: “Left wing or right wing, we’re all one bird and American. To be clear, I’m on neither of these radical sides.” But this both-sides-ism felt incongruent with the song’s scathing message, heard in full for the first time on 9 January: law enforcement, ICE, and the onslaught of gun violence in America are contributing to the “fading of the red, white and blue”. (Bryan’s team declined an interview offer.)

It’s a start, but it is so milquetoast.

Fuck yeah!

Chomsky is neither a Zionist nor anti-BDS:

‘I am opposed to any appearance in Israel that is used for nationalistic or other propaganda purposes to cover up its occupation and denial of Palestinian human rights. I’ve been involved in activities to hold Israel accountable for its international law violations since before the BDS movement took shape. While I have some tactical differences with the BDS movement, I strongly support the actions and continue to participate in them.’

https://bdsmovement.net/news/chomsky-clarifies-position-cultural-boycott-israel

I’m glad you’re exploring uploading your videos to places besides Google’s walled garden. What do you think of Peertube?

Even taking the Chinese government at its word, they’re getting ~60% of their energy from Coal, and are opening new coal-fired power plants at a pace not matched by any other industrialized country. Framing their solar adventures as anything other than supplementary power for their growing fossil fuel economy is wildly irresponsible. China is #1 producing 3x the CO2 as the next largest producer (United States) and they’re not resting on their laurels.

People in the pro-Xi camp might claim China is planning to transition to renewables based on the rate of growth of their alternative energy sector, but that’s not a claim the Party has ever made or is likely to make. Their top priority is growing their economy, preventing global warming isn’t even on the list. They over-produced solar because it seemed like the west was signalling they were going in that direction, but now that demand is depressed, they’re likely to cut back production. Based on the Chinese government numbers on installed capacity vs. actual solar energy power use, they’re sending surplus panels to the Tibetan desert to rot.

The reporters at NPR are pining for more competent authoritarians. They don’t care about global warming either, or they’d do actual journalism on the subject.

I realized you are hex, are you also Kairos? That’s exciting, and I’m happy to be a part of it. “A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power” is a great quote that obviously pays homage to Clarke’s third law, and is delightfully pithy and original.

I agree and I’m aware it has negative connotations – it is inseparable from modern methods of administering power. Without records, how can you demonstrate you’re distributing resources equitably? I recognize that my role as admin is basically an anarchist bureaucrat – approving applications, responding to reports, writing reports on progress for the community each month; it’s done digitally now, but it’s the stuff that would otherwise be the paperwork for which bureaucracy was made famous.

Bureaucracy was invented in France during the reign of kings, in hopes that it might quell the frequent revolutionary uprisings. It used to be that the only way you could get a license to do anything was through an audience with the king, or access via one of his courtiers – a role similar to modern lobbyists. This exclusivity of access meant the richest and most well connected were granted corporate charters, business licenses, or land titles, creating extremely stark class division between the bourgeoisie and even the petit bourgeoisie.

The role of bureaucracy (named after the drawers where they kept the mountains of paper this activity generated) was to ‘democratize’ distribution of licensing and grants to everyone based on meeting the same requirements and paying the same fees. It was popular enough to get grafted into the organs of the new republic once one of the uprisings hit the mark.

It was ‘democratic’ in the same sense that electoral ‘democracy’ is democratic - that is, it is closer to the ideal of freedom than autocratic rule. But citizens are still vulnerable to the whims of tyrannical bureaucrats. Even at the local level and at small scale, a bureaucrat can do a lot of damage if there isn’t popular power prepared to resist him.

For example in Chennai, the Zero Rupee was invented to build popular power against a culture of compulsive bribery that is endemic to all levels of the state bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a burden that’s accepted because the alternative is clearly worse, like the French kings of old. But all bureaucracies are not the same, and merely making them smaller or ‘distributed’ does not solve the problems that can arise when they are not open to public challenge.

The primary purpose of distribution centers is to serve capital, and there are plenty of private libraries. In the case of a library or dispensary, a bureaucracy can definitely increase the equanimity of the distribution of wealth in a society, but that relies on both the bureaucrats and the public they are supposed to serve to be willing to fight for that ideal.

I think wider discussion of micro-bureaucracies would be valuable. During the November meta, a member requested some kind of vote on our descision to defederate nazi instances, which I think was adequately discussed and concluded. It stood out to me that the member objected to my description of voting in this manner as ‘bureaucratic’ – a word I felt I was using descriptively, but was interpreted as pejorative. I think it’s interesting that different people have different definitions of bureaucracy.

What is bureaucracy?

Yikes.