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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • I don’t disagree that anarchist ideals about localization make sense as a reaction to our modern, global, hierarchical world. I’m not arguing to preserve the efficiencies of centralization but pointing out that their gravity makes opposition by other means impossible. Here’s the issue that I never see resolved:

    if one group starts consolidating power and turning coercive, that’s a problem. However it’s not solved by having centralized oversight in the first place. That’s how we got here.

    Then how does it get solved? History shows a thousand instances of empires expanding through piece meal conquering of fragmented autonomous polities. Look at the European conquest of Mesoamerica, how the Roman’s picked apart most of the world, the colonization of Ireland, the fate of the Iroquois Confederacy, etc… The aggressor doesn’t even need a material or martial advantage, as in Macedonia’s subjugation of the loose federation of Greek city states.

    Generally, the expansion only stops from an internal shift (dynasty change, leader death, coup, etc…), hitting a geographical limit, or when the aggressor runs into someone too large to bully.

    I’ll point out as well that this doesn’t even need to be a nefarious, expansionist scheme. Changes in climate can apply a survival pressure to take what you need from neighbors. Take for example, sea level rise reducing arable land for the Vikings, one of the causes for their invasion and settling in Britain.


  • I asked this in a thread a while ago but I’ll repost it here since I never got an answer:

    [I don’t see how anarchism] would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.

    As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.

    Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives (“Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?”), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.

    Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?..

    And if you don’t do anything to bridge the ocean, what’s to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.

    Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there’s nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.

    The gist of it being that hierarchies form due to the natural gravitation of civilization towards efficiency. Delegating someone with power to direct the actions of a large group will always be more efficient than getting N subunits to reach a web of equilibrium. If you’ve ever tried to horizontally coordinate a group of a large size it’s pretty obvious.

    Efficiency begets power and power propogates and entrenches the system that it’s derived from.


  • I assume it’s supposed to mean magically find the raw materials and production somewhere else? These people have no rational thought, they can’t even put 2 and 2 together and see why solar is cheaper.

    Why do these people have such frothing opposition to nuclear? You’d think a meltdown killed their whole family, but somehow only at 2% coverage.

    They bought the oil lobby’s ancient anti-nuclear propoganda hook-line-and-sinker and don’t care about any of the actual data. But I’m the shill 🙄


  • Lmfao holy shit you’re dense. You know you can’t just drop wind turbines in any location? That insolation and geography can limit effective solar usage? That nuclear has way more flexibility?

    Do you know how to read that chart? Did you notice that the majority of emissions happen upfront during construction of those sources, unlike nuclear which is amortized over its whole life span?

    Did you realize that might matter quite a bit when we need to halt/reverse emissions NOW to stop spiraling?

    Ignoring all that and you even admit I’m right in the end. Someone here is coping and it definitely isn’t me.





  • It’s very telling that you think I should be more concerned about my backyard and neighbors rather than the billions of people who will suffer while we try to dig our way out of this pit with more palatable tech that can’t do the whole job.

    Also funny that you think having a radioactive hole in the ground that loses the majority of its potency in less than 100 years is too high a price to keep our planet habitable. I’d rather be relocated out of my neighborhood than deal with billions of climate refugees moving in. Your NIMBY-ass logic is why our planet is fucked.


  • Did I miss something or are we moving the goalposts from dirty to hazardous?

    The average operating age of nuclear plants in Germany was 30+ years old. Yes they’re not built to modern safety standards. Yes, operating with radioactive materials is more dangerous than not doing that. But they still ended with a minimal impact to climate change over their lifetime.

    If you want sensational claims about energy saftey you can write a whole expose about working conditions in Xinjiang, which produces 45% of all of solar grade polysilicone. Are those deaths less important because they didn’t happen in your neighborhood?

    So yes, it’s political because a handful of human deaths override an energy technology that is, mathematically, one of the best tools to save our planet. Throwing away nuclear energy because people can get preventable cancer is like throwing away wind energy because an aluminum blade can drop on your head.


  • Again, efficiency is not the same thing as scalability. You’re optimizing for investment cost (maybe build time? I can’t tell). If we planned/regulated our usage better that’s irrelevant because power usage is predictable.

    People won’t need more tomorrow than today unless they make a drastic change. If electricity isn’t cheap and elastic by default, they just won’t buy that high watt GPU or electric car. Bitcoin isn’t such an important social good that it needs instant access to a continent’s worth of power, but it gobbled it up because nobody stopped it.

    And even if you do need account for something unpredictable, you can still adjust with other sources. That doesn’t mean they need to be the foundation of your whole grid.