In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?

English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.

American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.

The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.

But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?

In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.

Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.

And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.

Both can be done, of course, and we live in a world with limited resources. There’s no reason to commit resources to nuclear when those resources can, demonstratively and statistically, be used far more efficiently to implement other options.

It’s like saying, yes, I can buy a used car for $5k cash now, or, on the other hand, I could pay $50k to get on the waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck to be delivered in like five years.

And when I point out that the Cybertruck is less reliable, more expensive, and will leave me without a car for 5 years while I’m waiting, you say “well, why don’t you buy the used car and put yourself on the Cybertruck waiting list?”

And I haven’t even touched on the moral and environmental issues with nuclear power. I shouldn’t have to. New nuclear is clearly the least efficient form of non-emitting power generation in the world. That should be the end of the discussion.

Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions.

I guess you could say nuclear power can be built “now”. From a certain point of view.

The last nuclear reactor to go online in the United States took 14 years to build - from breaking ground in 2009 to going online in 2023 - at a cost of thirty billion dollars.

And that wasn’t even a new nuclear power site, it was a additional reactor added on as an existing site, so planning and permitting and so on were significantly faster then a new nuclear power plant would be.

So yes, we could start the process of building a new nuclear reactor in the United States and commit 30 billion in taxpayer money to it. And after 20 to 30 years that reactor might come online.

Or we could commit 30 billion dollars to subsidizing wind and solar power, and get that power generation online in the next few years, at a significantly lower cost per kilowatt.

Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don’t give a shit about the environment personally, because they’re going to be dead before things get really bad. They don’t give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don’t talk about it. Shocker.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.

And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.

I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.

So here’s the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.

And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.

And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.

Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.

Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.

The essence of white Berkeley liberalism.

How naive. True change doesn’t come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won’t harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.

Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.

That’s the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.

Am I still being too subtle?

You don’t understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn’t like it. Responsible protests don’t hurt people’s feelings. They went too far.

Wait, do you really expect British citizens to fly to the US or China in order to commit vandalism?

What do you think they’d put on their visa application? “Purpose of travel: throw paint on the Statue of Liberty”?

In a world full of bad faith “I support your cause but not your methods” attacks on environmental activism, this is one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve ever heard.

We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.

When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

The fact you think “off brand” is garbage is painful. And telling.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

I didn’t find one, someone else might have better luck.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)

Libraries have free books. That takes profit from Amazon.

Libraries have free Internet. That takes profit from ISPs.

Libraries have free research tools and expert guidance from librarians. That takes profit from all sorts of companies that profit off your ignorance.

And worst of all, that stuff is all publicly funded, so when you look at a library you see government helping people. And there’s nothing conservatives hate more than government that helps people.

Have you ever seen a sheep be sheared? It’s violent and bloody. If your barber held you down and cut and scraped scraped the hell out of your scalp while shaving your head, you’d fire them.

Also, sheep too old to produce good wool don’t get a peaceful retirement. They get slaughtered and turned into dog or chicken food. The same thing happens when there’s a disease epidemic - common because of the crowded and filthy conditions in factory farming - or crop failures or drought. As soon as it’s not profitable to keep the sheep alive we kill them.

But neither of those points are actually the point of the conversation at all. The point is it’s immoral to use an animal as an object to benefit humans. If you wouldn’t keep humans in pens and shave them to make clothing, you shouldn’t do the same thing to sheep. Simple as.