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Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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How many election cycles can we postpone climate action for?
Their unwillingness to act on climate change is a major (if not the biggest) reason we need representation. The Democrats hand power back to Republicans who undo this session's climate action.
Destroying the world more slowly by slightly impacting one election at a time brought us here.
I understand and support the sentiment: something needs to change. I just don't think that re-framing electoral politics will work unless it's backed by a mass movement of organised workers. If that happens, the question becomes, why bother with the middlemen? They can legislate for themselves without having to beg the ruling class for mild compromises.
That's kinda what I was driving it. How many elections would it take to abolish FPTP? We'd have to wait for that and only then could we think about voting in politicians who might do something and the system would still be dominated by capital. That makes a three-step process out of a two-step process.
Seems like a request to wait for an indefinite number of election cycles—the same request of those who say to vote for this or that faction of the capitalist party and one day, just maybe, conditions will be just right for one of those parties to effect any change. Too many African, Latin American, and Asian homes and lives would be destroyed while they wait patiently for the US to get its act together.
It would take too long to work unless you know of a massive campaign across the western world to implement FPTP. If it doesn't exist already, it must be built within the next year or so or the west will be locked into another four-ish years of no progress. And that's just for a shot at electing politicians who might vote to abolish FPTP. Before they even come within hearing distance of, never mind face-to-face with, the contradictions of imperialism.
Currently, almost all I see in the west is how to do business as usual but in green. That means denying progress to the subjugated masses so that USians can maintain their standard of living. Oppressed people shouldn't have to wait for the US to figure out how to tactically solve the world's ills through an electoral technicality. Round and round we'd go with electoralism.
At this point, there is one, single option: revolution. Anything else will take too long. Luckily for humanity, whatever the US thinks or wants is largely irrelevant. The world is revolving anyway. The only question for the world is what form the revolution takes. And the additional question for USians is whether they want to be part of the change or to ruin everything out of spite and self-interest.
The Red Deal may be of interest (click drop-down menu under 'articles'): https://therednation.org/environmental-justice/
While I agree with revolution, I don't think pursuing that is at odds with voting a certain way once a year. There's already a movement to eliminate FPTP in the USA and it has been making real progress. This additional step is necessary (within the framework of voting) for the other two steps to work - the second step keeps getting undone.
Personally I've been pushing for this since the 2000 presidential election. It has indeed been painfully slow... But it does seem to be getting somewhere. Not to imply we shouldn't be organizing outside of elections, too.
Can't argue with that.
You're the world's biggest sucker if you think that's even a possibility.
Or more likely, a russian/right wing shill
"Voting is useless" is right wing propaganda.
I have to admit, I did not expect this response. I'm struggling to see how an anti-capitalist argument in favour of socialist revolution is right wing.
A possibility? It's happening as we speak. Time will tell.
It's a spoiler, a red herring. "Don't bother doing the thing that could actually threaten our power. Instead, focus on this other thing that has no shot of happening."
And in your view, the thing that threatens their power is voting Dem? Please let me know if I've misunderstood. If not: (i) how does this 'solution' help people who aren't in the US and (ii) the Dems are in power and have been in power recently before this, and recently before that, and they achieved… what? They brought as much horror to the world as the GOP.
You've misunderstood.
They're in power by a THREAD now, and they brought us the IRA, which is the best thing we've done for the climate in a long time, probably decades.
And they haven't been in power before this since a few months in 2008 when they brought us the Affordable Care Act.
The example I keep using is California, where Dems have effectively a permanent supermajority. California will be 100% clean energy by 2045: https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-03/california-releases-report-charting-path-100-percent-clean-electricity
This is such a ridiculously wrong statement that if I hadn't already been talking with you and could see you're not an idiot, I'd assume you're too stupid to reason with and just start calling you names. How could you possibly come to that conclusion?
Depends on the country, but it's generally applicable to most places. A revolution is not happening. Change within the system. And for some places, having Dems in charge in the US allows the US to pressure those countries to change in better ways.
Please familiarise yourself with Rule 2. You've been struggling to satisfy it throughout this thread and it's starting to get tedious.
Unfortunately they don't care. They know what they're doing,
And yet they keep doing it, and defending it.
And it's not just this thread: read their comment history, and it's littered with name calling and personal attacks. I report their really egregious stuff but it's tedious reporting every single comment that has personal attacks.
I think you might be right. I let it slide in other comments as I put it down to the ordinary liberal world-outlook. But there's only so long I'll put up with schoolyard name-calling. I've got better things to do.
I think Lemmy needs a little bit of work on how blocking a user works. It gets confusing seeing new comments come through and not being able to see what they're replying to. You also have no option to report a comment if you can't see it. Even if you click the "show context" button, knowing that you're about to force a blocked user's comment to show, it just refuses. You have to open in an incognito tab and click show context. Basically, I want the ability to not see their comments in general, and not see them on the "new comments" feed, but if I explicitly ask to see their comments, let me do that.
I have blocked a large number of users who have consistently added nothing to conversation, or who routinely resort to personal attacks.
I am truly frustrated and disappointed that so many people:
I know it's naive to think people will be able to always get along. And I guess it is naive to assume that people actually want to learn, and try to help others learn. But that's what I want. I'd much rather converse with someone who shares none of my values or beliefs as long as they're level-headed, not resorting to trickery or fallacious reasoning, are willing to source their statements, and respect me in dialogue.
[^1]: I saw one yesterday where the person copy-and-pasted something like "Russia started the war" about 10 times across a thread, several times replying to the same person, sometimes other people. Every time, it wasn't actually directly relevant to the comment they replied to. It's just an attempt to brute-force shut someone down.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'll stop feeding them.
Yeah I had them blocked for a bit over a day, but they're so prolific that I keep seeing other comments responding to theirs (without the ability to see theirs) which confuses me even more while reading my feed.
...no NSFW content?
"Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here."
I read the page that 133arc585 linked. I can't actually see the lemmy.ml homepage unless I log out of my fediverse account, I believe.
I understand the intent of the rule, but I've seen communities who require "only respectful discourse" get swamped by sealions and bad-faith "just asking questions" types with dogwhistles and veiled references. In my opinion, sometimes namecalling and insulting is a necessary counter to someone spreading a poisonous bad-faith idea, especially when it's outright propaganda. But, I'm not a server admin, so I'll try to be more respectful of that rule in the future.
You called me an idiot after a few hours of us talking in what was apparently good faith. This isn't tone policing because it's not the way that you're formulating your argument that I'm objecting to, rather, it's the fact that you're mixing arguments with name-calling. There's very little point in us continuing to engage as everything I say that doesn't confirm your worldview is more evidence that I'm a shill. Where do we go from there? You're clearly not interested in a discussion.
Instance rule 2 is
I suggest you read the linked page as well.
Ah. I'm from kbin, so I can't view the lemmy.ml homepage (to my knowledge) unless I navigate outside my fediverse account. The linked post seems to be down right now, but I'll view it when I get a chance.
You can view it, by pointing your browser to https://lemmy.ml. This community is hosted on lemmy.ml, and as such, the instance rules apply in addition to the community rules. Just like on the rest of the fediverse.
The post is not "down", whatever that means; it pulls up fine for me. Either way, here is an archived version.
Yeah, that's outside of my federation account. For example, right now I'm viewing this post with the url kbin.social/m/[email protected]. But I don't think there's any mechanism to look at the page kbin.social/lemmy.ml or something. Or at least I'm not aware of it.
Anyway, the page is back up, and I read it.
I understand the intent of the rule, but I've seen communities who require "only respectful discourse" get swamped by sealions and bad-faith "just asking questions" types with dogwhistles and veiled references. In my opinion, sometimes namecalling and insulting is a necessary counter to someone spreading a poisonous bad-faith idea, especially when it's outright propaganda. But, I'm not a server admin, so I'll try to be more respectful of that rule in the future.
I am so confused at your comments here. It's a webpage. You can point your browser to (or click the link:) https://lemmy.ml. You can do it on your computer, on your phone, on your refrigerator. It's a website. Just like https://youtube.com is a website. I don't know why you're even mentioning kbin here, it would be like saying you can't view facebook because you're logged in to kbin.
The presence of name calling and insults is always a problem. The absence of name calling and insults does not guarantee there is no problem. Moderation is still necessary even with "only disrespectful discourse" rules; any effective moderation needs to know how to moderate as well: moderators need to know how to spot and resolve types of detractive content that aren't simply name calling.
Name calling and insults are also not a productive way to address what you consider bad-faith conversation. You should attack an idea and not the person. There are already other rules in place to help address when the idea itself is harmful: there is a rule against bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and the like; there is a rule about knowingly spreading false information. I would also stipulate (and this is personal speculation but I feel it to be an accurate view): most people who are "spreading propaganda" are not doing it with the knowledge that what they're saying is propaganda and with the intent to spread propaganda; most probably believe what they say to be true for various reasons including their media exposure, the political climate in their interpersonal interactions and their community and country, their parental influence on their beliefs, etc. If you look at it from that point of view, what good is insulting someone who isn't actually acting with malice? They're going to be less likely to reevaluate their beliefs and look at what you're saying objectively if you're spewing emotionally charged personally attacks at them, even if you are mixing in valid logic and evidence. And you're hopefully not here purely to argue and throw insult; hopefully at least part of you wants to learn and help others learn. If that's even part of what's driving your participation, wouldn't you want to do so in a manner that's more productive to everyone involved? So, in my opinion: if they're not acting with malice, insulting them does nothing good; if they are active with malice, report them and if there's proper moderation it'll be removed.
It means there's no link to it from the [email protected] community that I'm viewing. I would have to proactively navigate to a new website to check the rules, and why would the instance have different rules than the community? I wouldn't naturally in the course of logging into my kbin account, opening this thread, and commenting on it, see those rules or a link to them anywhere.
This is a nearly impossible ask, because that type of content is tailored specifically for plausible deniability. There's a ready-made "mods are overreaching/censuring" argument if they get banned or silenced. Community censure is the only way to stop these types.
I disagree. Attacking an idea requires a lot of effort; indeed, that's why sealioning and JAQing off is a type of trolling at all. It's asymmetric warfare, designed to wear a person down who's trying to attack an idea.
Conversely, responding to a bad faith argument with "that's stupid and you're stupid for saying it" is a no-win position for a concern troll. They either waste time getting dragged into the mud with you trading insults, which doesn't convince anyone of the thing they're pushing. Or they leave and they don't get the chance to push the thing in the first place.
It's a quarantine. How often have you managed to convince someone of something by arguing with them on the internet? Or been convinced of something yourself? It's quite rare. The whole idea is that forums are a debate stage, and the 85% of forum users who just lurk are the audience. You're not trying to convince your opponent; you're trying to convince the audience.
Sometimes, yes. But we can't ignore that the internet is an ideological battleground. For us (democrats, and US leftists in general), ignoring that fact got us Trump in 2016, and I don't want to make that mistake again.
And this is just a personal thing, but I'll often get more involved with arguments than with learning when my brain is spent from work. It's easy (for me) to point out propaganda and cognitive dissonance, and yes to call people names. It takes more mental effort to learn or teach.
So you're here to play a game. To play whack-a-mole. I find that to be a disturbing approach to interacting with humans. I know I'm idealistic, but for anyone who (like me) is attempting to have real human-to-human conversation, someone coming in with the intent to just shout "fallacy!", "propaganda!", "wrong!" and play a game is extremely offensive.
You have contradicted yourself here with another of your comments. In another comment you said
And now you're saying you have a duty to convince others to change their mind by arguing with them on the internet. So is honest argumentation effective or isn't it?
No, I think you misunderstand. If I'm arguing with you, my intent is (usually) not to convince you, personally. This is usually because I pick arguments with people I suspect are speaking in bad faith, or who are heavily emotionally invested in an idea. My intent is to convince lurkers.
You might also notice that as I get further down an argument thread, I tend to engage more directly with the person I'm arguing with. That's because there's less audience down here, and we're actually having at least a little bit of a productive conversation.
It can be effective but it is rarely efficient. In the time it takes you to present a detailed, sourced, and well-reasoned argument, and convince a single person who strongly felt the opposite way, twenty other people who have no strong feelings either way have been convinced by a well-timed quip or insult. And that's if you could convince the other person at all.
The only thing you’ve convinced any reader of is how much you suck.
Only because idiots like you don't vote.
Democratic strongholds are making massive gains on climate change. Look at California. That's what happens when we get a democratic supermajority.
The federal government has had a Democratic supermajority exactly once in the past few decades. For a few months. And they used it to get us the Affordable Care Act.
Biden got the IRA done without a supermajority, but he's a brilliant politician.
You fuckers keep claiming democrats are ineffective or colluding or something but you haven't actually given dems a chance to fix anything yet.
Give us a democratic supermajority for 8 years and you'll be amazed at what gets accomplished.
Every assumption you just made was incorrect. But if you're going to start with name calling, then this isn't going to be a productive discussion.
If someone has decided voting isn't worth it to the point that they're trying to convince others not to vote, they're generally too stupid and emotionally invested to change their mind. Or they're a shill.
This discussion (and name calling) isn't for you. It's for the audience. People feeling hopeless and powerless who might buy into the "don't vote" bullshit. Voting matters.
You just called me an idiot who doesn't vote after I suggested for whom you should vote. What will your vast audience think of that?
Voting 3rd party is effectively the same thing as not voting. I mentally tend to consider those as the same thing. But yes I should have clarified that.