How Do Ignans Comfortably Live In The Desert At Night When The Temperatures Drop Extremely Low? I’m

the thing that I've got to say is that it really is ethically straightforward that you should vote Harris.

it's not even a trolley problem, it's a trolley triviality. I don't want to use the meme because it seems disrespectful to use those specific images of MS paint people when these are real lives we're talking about.

The analogy itself is serious, though. it looks like this:

the track diverges at the lever; many people are on lower track, while no one is on the upper track. then: the tracks re-converge and continue, and there are people on the track after that convergence.

The point is that the lever—the vote—can be used to prevent those lives on the lower track from being lost, but cannot save the lives lost after the re-convergence.

it differs from the classic trolley problem in an extremely important way: there isn't anyone on the upper track. as such, it's not a question of "who do we save?"—it's only a question of "do we save the people we can?"

(I need to emphasize, because many on this site have long shed the shackles of reading comprehension, that this does not mean that no one dies as a consequence of U.S. or presidential policy choices in a vacuum. It means that your vote cannot prevent that, but your vote can prevent strictly more people from dying, with no trolley-problem type tradeoff of "who do we choose to die".)

~~~~~

you might think that this is abstracting away too much of the real situation—but it turns out it's ironclad.

to see that it is, and reconcile it with reality, we have to ask: what is not modeled by this analogy? where might it fail?

this amounts to asking the question: is there a benefit to killing the people on the lower track that makes doing so "worth it"?

that is: what justification might you have for saying "yes, we actually need to let those lives on the lower track, the ones we could save with the lever, be lost"?

and the answer—as you might have guessed—is that there is no such justification. no peculiar fact about voting means that you should let those people die.

~~~~~

so why do some people—very passionately—insist that not voting is right? I'll survey a few of the most common attempted justifications I've seen, such as:

"I'm not going to vote for less genocide." This is obviously equivalent to "I am totally fine with more genocide!", a truly horrific stance, and yet I have seen it nearly verbatim from so-called "leftists" a few times. My guess is that this usually stems from a kind of perceived moral contamination: a feeling that a "vote for" a candidate is a moral alignment. This is artificial; not real; not consequential. A vote only makes you responsible for the difference between the two tracks while they diverge. Touching the lever doesn't make you responsible for the track. Choosing between these two outcomes is all voting can do—and because voting for most is easy, and doesn't stop you from doing anything else, there are no trade-offs. No "I'm not at the lever, because I had to work on another way." (If your vote is suppressed, that's another story—but this doesn't imply a general anti-voting stance.)

Ironically, some who aren't voting feel they are "keeping their hands clean", when they are in fact actively increasing the chance of more death and suffering. This is kind of the definition of getting your hands "dirty"; it just doesn't feel like it because they're not touching a voting machine, which is kind of just magical thinking. it's not a point not made frequently enough, I think: what some think of as "doing the right thing" here is very much doing the wrong thing, with respect to their own underlying values of right and wrong, and with respect to what they say they care about. those who claim to have the moral high ground by not voting do not actually have it at all.

On that note, some people (fewer, though) seem to think that touching the lever does make you responsible for the track in a real outcome-based way. That somehow, voting lends "legitimacy" to the track, and that by not voting, we are maybe creating a future with no people on tracks. This is just not true; a dangerous fantasy that asks you to sit back and wait for a utopia that's not coming. There are enough voters in this upcoming election that that institution is not going anywhere anytime soon; you'd need a coordinated movement of not voting plus plans for what to do after the state has lost legitimacy, and that is just...obviously not here. To think otherwise is to live in that fantasy, and so to abandon ethical thinking at all, as ethics comes first from a confrontation with reality. you cannot act ethically without acting practically. However: the margins are thin enough that a few people deciding to vote (who wouldn't otherwise) could actually change the outcome. You can actually save the people on the lower track.

Some people think that the tracks never separate at all, or that the same people are on each, or that one way or another, Harris and Trump are "the same". If you think this, please look beyond tumblr "leftists" for facts here. You've been bombarded with all and only all the bad stuff about Harris (not arguing with most of that—though there are misconceptions, e.g. that Biden/Harris provided no protections for trans people); but you haven't seen how much worse Trump is on every single one of those cases, issue for issue, including Gaza. If you think Gaza can't get any worse, you've essentially written everyone still alive there off for dead. Likewise for any group who would suffer more under Trump. Needless to say—don't do that. The comparison—the difference between the diverging tracks—is all that ethically matters when deciding whether to flip the lever or leave it alone.

Some people think voting is primarily "speech", a means to communicate (or worse, merely express), and probably do not realize that this means they think the outcome of "sending a message" (which would do nearly nothing in real terms) is worth killing the people on the lower track.

Similarly, some people think that it's meaningful to "punish" Harris or the dems. (Truly, putting punishment over the cost in lives and suffering is the most horribly american thing to do here.) Some people just want the feeling of punishment, of blame; some people try to excuse their actions in advance ("well, if the dems lose, it will be their fault"), conveniently omitting their own agency in voting, and thus excusing them from the practice of acting ethically at all. Some people think that punishing the dems will actually push them left in the future, to which I say: you don't have a good reason to think this at all, based on history. Parties go where the winning is. And if you do still have a hunch to the contrary, I am sure you don't have a good reason to be reasonably certain of it. This means that you are paying for a gamble, a mere chance, one unsupported by fact, with the lives on the lower track. You can find another way.

~~~~~

Let's be concrete for a moment.

Since this is about difference, let me gesture to a few obvious differences between Trump and Harris: LGBTQ+ rights, Gaza, climate change, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, education, voting rights (and, yes, democracy), the economy, housing, the long-term future success of leftist movements and activism (much more difficult under Trump, who, no joke, has said neatly verbatim he wants to use the national guard and military to handle the leftist "enemy from within", and who can now do so thanks to the supreme court's ruling on presidential powers), everything Lina Khan and Deb Haaland are doing, etc.

And before you respond with something bad the dems or Harris are doing with respect to one of these—I know. Now compare it to Trump on the same issue. That is the only thing relevant to acting ethically in this brutal, tightly-constrained situation.

For example: Harris doesn't want to ban fracking or reduce oil consumption (bad), but wants to fund renewables, stay in the Paris agreement, strengthen climate initiatives in general.

Trump wants to completely gut funding for renewable energy, withdraw from the Paris accords, dramatically increase oil consumption, commercialize NOAA, weaken the EPA, and so on.

We don't get neither. A vote for none is a vote for "worse is fine by me". We are handed the terrible task of making one of these work, and any person actually, practically concerned with that would choose to try to make the Harris version work then spend precious resources fighting the overwhelming tide of the Trump version.

Only someone who does not actually care about these issues is okay with letting Trump in.

Unless you are capable only of black-and-white thinking, unless you can write off the lives in the difference and convince yourself this is ethical, you can see that letting Trump in only lets more lives be lost, and does not reduce anyone's suffering. No trolley "problem". No trade-off.

Voting Harris is not moral alignment. It's not unconditional support. It is maybe the most conditional action you can take: there are only two real outcomes. One not only has more people, as in a trolley problem, but also results in the death and suffering that would result otherwise.

~~~~~

So there it is, spelled out in the most painstaking detail I'm willing to give to a tumblr post: a few of the failure modes of reasoning that lead to not voting. Often simplicity is too simple, a meaningful departure from reality, but in this case the opposite is true: the simple argument

There are two possible outcomes: one of them eases no one's suffering and creates a great deal more. Therefore choose the other, instead of allowing the worse one to come to pass.

—stands up ethically in this case to every sublimation of righteous anger into misguided action.

And I am not using "righteous" sarcastically: it is right to denounce the Biden/Harris admin on Gaza, it is right to denounce the dems on not doing enough for climate change, etc. But that is not the question being asked by your vote. Do not give the right answer to the wrong question.

The question is only: Harris or Trump? Which outcome should happen, now, in the real world, when it's one of exactly two, when "neither" really, truly isn't an option?

If you do not vote, what will your answer be to the people on the lower track? I am sorry; I dreamt nobly, of no track, no lashings at all. No, I was not kept from the lever. It did not even compromise my dream to push it. Still, I just couldn't bear to touch it; still, you had to die, to save me this discomfort.

acting ethically does not always feel righteous. it is not always a release valve for righteous anger. it does not always feel like progress; sometimes it is only the prevention of catastrophe. it is still ethical. it is still necessary. vote Harris. vote to save the people you can.

You know, if you’re a goy, and you want to help with antisemitism online, you want to know one of the biggest things you could do right now?

Just reach out to some Jews to shoot the shit. Not about Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Netanyahu or any of it. Just…how was Chanukkah? Half your blog is OFMD, who do you ship if you roll that way? Love your cat posts, what’s the kitty’s name?

We have been reduced to Good Jew Who Hates Israel And All Things Jewish, and Evil Jew Who Doesn’t Want To Die To Be Absolved Of Palestine. We are not allowed to be people anymore. Someone I know on here, a goy, got harassed because she was having a crummy week and asked for cheer-up things and when I reblogged with a picture of one of my cats she reblogged from me with something like “HE’S SO FLUFFY.” Someone literally went after her for thinking a Jew had a cute cat. Apparently an Australian reblogging a cat pic from an American is somehow oppressing people in Palestine.

We’ve been isolated and alienated and people are calling for our deaths because apparently killing Jews will help Palestine, or something. Please, just…let us be people. A lot of us have lost a LOT of friends in the last two months. One of my losses was someone I’d known for seven years who instantly started simping for Hamas. That cuts. That cuts DEEP.

If you want to help, start by being a friend. It’s really that simple.

gofundme.com

Help Muhammed and his family evacuate to safety, organized by Matilde Cunha

I'm Matilde Cunha and I'm a veterinary medicine student from Portugal. … Matilde Cunha needs your support for Help Muhammed and his family

Please help Mohamed evacuate his family out of Gaza to safety! Share his gofundme and donate if you can!!

ice king pipeline ig

unfortunately, samah's @ammarfamily2 son ammar is in trouble. as we were not able to raise the funds required for his injection to help his heart for a long while, he has gotten very sick. he has extreme fatigue, which is terrifying to see in a baby

samah is terrified that ammar may die, and she needs this amount as quickly as possible, so donations sent to the gofundme campaign will not reach her in time. she has asked me to switch my focus on ko-fi from getting this injection to getting him the medication for this.

the medicine costs $346, but due to fees that take around 30%, if not more, of the money sent to gazans right now, in order for that money to reach her i have had to set the amount to $500

Ko-fi

Support CAM.exe on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/systemprotocol

Support CAM.exe On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

her campaign has been shared by 90-ghost

she requested i use my ko-fi as shown here

$0 / $500

Everybody shut the fuck up Dana Terrace is collabing with Glitch on a sci-fi psychological thriller along with the head writer and one of the storyboarders of TOH

Foreign Policy

No, It’s Not Too Late to Save the Planet

Doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis.

Climate denial may be on the decline, but a phenomenon at least as injurious to the cause of climate protection has blossomed beside it: doomism, or the belief that there’s no way to halt the Earth’s ascendant temperatures. Burgeoning ranks of doomers throw up their hands, crying that it’s too late, too hard, too costly to save humanity from near-future extinction.

There are numerous strands of doomism. The followers of ecologist Guy McPherson, for example, gravitate to wild conspiracy theories that claim humanity won’t last another decade. Many young people, understandably overwhelmed by negative climate headlines and TikTok videos, are convinced that all engagement is for naught. Even the Guardian, which boasts superlative climate coverage, sometimes publishes alarmist articles and headlines that exaggerate grim climate projections.

This gloom-and-doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis. As a writer on climate and energy, I am convinced that we have everything we require to go carbon neutral by 2050: the science, the technology, the policy proposals, and the money, as well as an international agreement in which nearly 200 countries have pledged to contain the crisis. We don’t need a miracle or exorbitantly expensive nuclear energy to stave off the worst. The Gordian knot before us is figuring out how to use the resources we already have in order to make that happen.

One particularly insidious form of doomism is exhibited in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, originally published in 2020 and translated from Japanese into English this year. In his unlikely international bestseller, Saito, a Marxist philosopher, puts forth the familiar thesis that economic growth and decarbonization are inherently at odds. He goes further, though, and speculates that the climate crisis can only be curbed in a classless, commons-based society. Capitalism, he writes, seeks to “use all the world’s resources and labor power, opening new markets and never passing up even the slightest chance to make more money.”

Capitalism’s record is indeed damning. The United States and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s emissions since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, yet the global south suffers most egregiously from climate breakdown. Today, the richest tenth of the world’s population—living overwhelmingly in the global north and China—is responsible for half of global emissions. If the super-rich alone cut their footprints down to the size of the average European, global emissions would fall by a third, Saito writes.

Saito’s self-stated goals aren’t that distinct from mine: a more egalitarian, sustainable, and just society. One doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist to find the gaping disparities in global income grotesque or to see the restructuring of the economy as a way to address both climate breakdown and social injustice. But his central argument—that climate justice can’t happen within a market economy of any kind—is flawed. In fact, it serves next to no purpose because more-radical-than-thou theories remove it from the nuts-and-bolts debate about the way forward.

We already possess a host of mechanisms and policies that can redistribute the burdens of climate breakdown and forge a path to climate neutrality. They include carbon pricing, wealth and global transaction taxes, debt cancellation, climate reparations, and disaster risk reduction, among others. Economies regulated by these policies are a distant cry from neoliberal capitalism—and some, particularly in Europe, have already chalked up marked accomplishments in reducing emissions.

Saito himself acknowledges that between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s GDP increased by 27 percent while emissions fell by 9 percent and that Germany and Denmark also logged decoupling. He writes off this trend as exclusively the upshot of economic stagnation following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. However, U.K. emissions have continued to fall, plummeting from 959 million to 582 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2007 and 2020. The secret to Britain’s success, which Saito doesn’t mention, was the creation of a booming wind power sector and trailblazing carbon pricing system that forced coal-fired plants out of the market practically overnight. Nor does Saito consider that from 1990 to 2022, the European Union reduced its emissions by 31 percent while its economy grew by 66 percent.

Climate protection has to make strides where it can, when it can, and experts acknowledge that it’s hard to change consumption patterns—let alone entire economic systems—rapidly. Progress means scaling back the most harmful types of consumption and energy production. It is possible to do this in stages, but it needs to be implemented much faster than the current plodding pace.

This is why Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, is infinitely more pertinent to the public discourse on climate than Saito’s esoteric work. Ritchie’s book is a noble attempt to illustrate that environmental protection to date boasts impressive feats that can be built on, even as the world faces what she concedes is an epic battle to contain greenhouse gases.

Ritchie underscores two environmental afflictions that humankind solved through a mixture of science, smart policy, and international cooperation: acid rain and ozone depletion. I’m old enough to remember the mid-1980s, when factories and power plants spewed out sulfurous and nitric emissions and acid rain blighted forests from the northeastern United States to Eastern Europe. Acidic precipitation in the Adirondacks, my stomping grounds at the time, decimated pine forests and mountain lakes, leaving ghostly swaths of dead timber. Then, scientists pinpointed the industries responsible, and policymakers designed a cap-and-trade system that put a price on their emissions, which forced industry into action; for example, power plants had to fit scrubbers on their flue stacks. The harmful pollutants dropped by 80 percent by the end of the decade, and forests grew back.

The campaign to reverse the thinning of the ozone layer also bore fruit. An international team of scientists deduced that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and aerosol cans were to blame. Despite fierce industry pushback, more than 40 countries came together in Montreal in 1987 to introduce a staggered ban on CFCs. Since then, more countries joined the Montreal Protocol, and CFCs are now largely a relic of the past. As Ritchie points out, this was the first international pact of any kind to win the participation of every nation in the world.

While these cases instill inspiration, Ritchie’s assessment of our current crisis is a little too pat and can veer into the Panglossian. The climate crisis is many sizes larger in scope than the scourges of the 1980s, and its antidote—to Saito’s credit—entails revamping society and economy on a global scale, though not with the absolutist end goal of degrowth communism.

Ritchie doesn’t quite acknowledge that a thoroughgoing restructuring is necessary. Although she does not invoke the term, she is an acolyte of “green growth.” She maintains that tweaks to the world’s current economic system can improve the living standards of the world’s poorest, maintain the global north’s level of comfort, and achieve global net zero by 2050. “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact,” she writes. For her, the big question is whether the world can decouple growth and emissions in time to stave off the darkest scenarios.

Ritchie approaches today’s environmental disasters—air pollution, deforestation, carbon-intensive food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing—as problems solvable in ways similar to the crises of the 1980s. Like CFCs and acid rain, so too can major pollutants such as black carbon and carbon monoxide be reined in. Ritchie writes that the “solution to air pollution … follows just one basic principle: stop burning stuff.” As she points out, smart policy has already enhanced air quality in cities such as Beijing (Warsaw, too, as a recent visit convinced me), and renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power globally. What we have to do, she argues, is roll renewables out en masse.

The devil is in making it happen. Ritchie admits that environmental reforms must be accelerated many times over, but she doesn’t address how to achieve this or how to counter growing pushback against green policies. Just consider the mass demonstrations across Europe in recent months as farmers have revolted against the very measures for which Ritchie (correctly) advocates, such as cutting subsidies to diesel gas, requiring crop rotation, eliminating toxic pesticides, and phasing down meat production. Already, the farmers’ vehemence has led the EU to dilute important legislation on agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity.

Ritchie’s admonishes us to walk more, take public transit, and eat less beef. Undertaken individually, this won’t change anything. But she acknowledges that sound policy is key—chiefly, economic incentives to steer markets and consumer behavior. Getting the right parties into office, she writes, should be voters’ priority.

Yet the parties fully behind Ritchie’s agenda tend to be the Green parties, which are largely in Northern Europe and usually garner little more than 10 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe, environmentalism is badmouthed by center-right and far-right politicos, many of whom lead or participate in governments, as in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. And while she argues that all major economies must adopt carbon pricing like the EU’s cap-and-trade system, she doesn’t address how to get the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, to introduce this nationwide or even expand its two carbon markets currently operating regionally—one encompassing 12 states on the East Coast, the other in California.

History shows that the best way to make progress in the battle to rescue our planet is to work with what we have and build on it. The EU has a record of exceeding and revising its emissions reduction targets. In the 1990s, the bloc had the modest goal of sinking greenhouse gases to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12; by 2012, it had slashed them by an estimated 18 percent. More recently, the 2021 European Climate Law adjusted the bloc’s target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from 40 percent to at least 55 percent by 2030, and the European Commission is considering setting the 2040 target to 90 percent below 1990 levels.

This process can’t be exclusively top down. By far the best way for everyday citizens to counter climate doomism is to become active beyond individual lifestyle choices—whether that’s by bettering neighborhood recycling programs, investing in clean tech equities, or becoming involved in innovative clean energy projects.

Take, for example, “community energy,” which Saito considers briefly and Ritchie misses entirely. In the 1980s, Northern Europeans started to cobble together do-it-yourself cooperatives, in which citizens pooled money to set up renewable energy generation facilities. Many of the now more than 9,000 collectives across the EU are relatively small—the idea is to stay local and decentralized—but larger co-ops illustrate that this kind of enterprise can function at scale. For example, Belgium’s Ecopower, which forgoes profit and reinvests in new energy efficiency and renewables projects, provides 65,000 members with zero-carbon energy at a reduced price.

Grassroots groups and municipalities are now investing in nonprofit clean energy generation in the United States, particularly in California and Minnesota. This takes many forms, including solar fields; small wind parks; electricity grids; and rooftop photovoltaic arrays bolted to schools, parking lots, and other public buildings. Just as important as co-ownership—in contrast to mega-companies’ domination of the fossil fuel market—is democratic decision-making. These start-ups, usually undertaken by ordinary citizens, pry the means of generation out of the hands of the big utilities, which only grudgingly alter their business models.

Around the world, the transition is in progress—and ideally, could involve all of us. The armchair prophets of doom should either join in or, at the least, sit on the sidelines quietly. The last thing we need is more people sowing desperation and angst. They play straight into the court of the fossil fuel industry.