Hobbies Masterpost!

I thought it was fairly normal to feel empathy for bad people.

I thought it was common, even.

But after my Elon/Grimes post... now I'm wondering if I was mistaken about that.

I wrote a post about Trump being traumatized after his assassination attempt and a post about his poor adaptation to aging. I expressed sympathy for him in both cases. But I still maintain my white hot hatred of him and wish for him to face consequences.

Elon was abused by his father. Some of the stories are incredibly tragic. Hearing those stories triggers an involuntary response in my emotional systems that I can't stop no matter how much I despise present-day Elon. I also wonder if that abuse never occurred maybe we wouldn't be dealing with this current clusterfuck.

I have never held so much anger towards a single person as I do my brother. But I also see him as a victim of abuse. I know he was once a really good person and he was slowly corrupted. I feel sorry for him. I mourn the amazing person he used to be. And I still love him.

But that doesn't make me any less angry.

It’s hopeful. Solarpunk doesn’t require an apocalypse. It’s a world in which humans haven’t destroyed ourselves and our environment, where we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of ourselves and our…

The #1400challenge - How to turn stimulus checks into collective power | Inhabit

The last year has demonstrated just how razor thin our margin of survival is—from the brutality of the police to the viciousness of the virus, from the absurd ups-and-downs of the economy to the glaring incompetence of the government.

Now that they’ve been forced to send some cash our way, we’d like to propose a little something they maybe didn’t expect. The idea is simple: what if we took our stimulus checks and put them towards collective use?

In recent weeks Inhabit has been collaborating with groups around the country to put together a series of kits called the #1400challenge. The result is a handful of introductory guides for a variety of collective projects—from soundsystems and meshnets to pop-up dwellings and community gyms.

Each project is based on a proven and replicable idea, a working model that has already seen action in the streets and in neighborhoods. And each could be a jumping off point for new designs, new skillsets, new encounters, and newly expanded frontlines in the battle for the future.

No doubt many of us will have to spend our checks on necessities like groceries, rent, medical bills—all the bullshit it takes to stay alive in this bullshit world. But for those who can, and especially for those who want to pool resources, the opportunity is clear: invest in collective infrastructure that increases our shared capabilities, that augments our ability to live and to fight.

Here’s our wager. We have to translate isolated, temporary solutions to individual problems into the material and ethical basis for building collective power. We need autonomous solutions that scale at the level of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Our power together unlocks more potential than we have alone.

It’ll take more than a stuck container ship to break the hold of the economy over our lives. Design and build new ways of living together, that lessen our dependence on their system at the same time that we cultivate trust in one another. Leverage all the means at our disposal—including their cold hard cash—to bring out the beauty, dignity, and creativity of our shared existence.

Read more…

If you want even more ideas, check out my #practical tag

Let's talk for a moment about food prices, inflation, and the nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and steps you can take. We're going to go from food bank to growing your own, so stick around. This is mostly written for people who do not have much, if any, start up money.

To be brief, food prices are high, and inflation is going to mean more people will be struggling. On top of that, there has been a nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and on top of that, China and Russia said they wouldn't be exporting any until June.

I'm not here to discuss how bad it'll be, I'm here to provide some options.

First off, if you have money, donate money to food banks. If you're in a well-off area and your food banks have lots of support, consider donating money to areas that aren't as well off. Food banks can buy in bulk, so they can get way more food for the same dollar, which is why I'm not saying donate food.

Secondly, if you're struggling or even if it would make life a bit easier, use your food bank. If it's coming down to rent or food, go to the food bank and pay your rent. This might be different where you are, but here they get enough support that they really want and encourage people to come get food. If you're not sure, you can always call and ask.

Consider joining a bulk buying club (this is where a lot of food coops started) - people joining together so they can buy in bulk, get the cheaper prices, and then divide it up. If there's not one where you are, consider starting one. Buying in bulk is so much more cost efficient!

Where to grow:

Next comes growing food. If you don't have space, see if there are community gardens that you can join- or start one by asking the owners of vacant land if you can put in a garden. Join your local gardening groups (they're probably on facebook) and see if there's anyone with space willing to let you garden, or make some kind of arrangement.

If none of those options work, look into guerrilla gardening. Two factors for success here are that your plants be located a) close enough to you that you could feasibly walk by them multiple times per week and b) located where they either won't be noticed or won't bother the type of people who would notice. There has been much written about this, read up on it.

Of course, if you're lucky, you have your own yard, and can just grow in the ground there.

What to grow:

We've got a different mind set than many self-sufficiency folks, because we don't have enough time or space to grow all our own food. So, the focus instead is on growing what we can to reduce our grocery bills as much as possible.

What do you eat a lot of? What costs a lot per square foot and unit of time? It's the plants that you eat a lot of AND are costly AND are productive that we're going to want to focus on. Keep in mind that what might be true for my climate might not be true for yours. I'll give you a few examples:

Onions: If you eat a lot of onions, you might be tempted to grow them- but they are usually less than $1/lb and they take the whole growing season to make one harvest.

Kale: relatively expensive to buy, multiple harvests, and super easy to grow while not taking up a lot of space.

Artichokes: super expensive to buy, easy to grow (once established), but takes up a lot of space.

Personally, I grow the kale, and skip the artichokes & onions.

This person actually looked at yield per squarefoot and cost at the store and made a table for it:

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

The most expensive vegetables in your vegetable garden - The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Many vegetables can be expensive to purchase by growing the most expensive vegetables in your garden and buying the least inexpensive vegeta

But keep in mind, again, yields depend a lot on climate. In general, fresh herbs, leafy greens, and things like tomatoes are your most cost efficient plants to grow.

Look at what you actually eat and figure out what will be most cost efficient to grow. Don't grow a bunch of cilantro unless you really like to eat it, no matter how cost efficient it is.

Once you know what you want to grow, check out your local extension office/ master gardener program and learn HOW to grow it in your area!

Next: getting and growing food plants

If you're doing this on the cheap, first look to your local free groups, mutual aid groups, seed libraries, and gardening groups. There will be seed and plant swaps where people just want to share and don't particularly want or need a trade in return.

If you get food stamps, those can be used to buy seeds and vegetable starts in some states.

Other than that, I prefer to grow from seed, but I know that can be scary for new gardeners. Give it a try anyway! You'll be amazed.

How to feed your vegetables for free:

The best time to start composting is 6 months ago, but alas. Start composting now. Get coffee grounds, get lawn clippings, get whatever you can, and compost it. Heavy feeders grow well with a mulch of lawn clippings around them. Someone near you has horses or rabbits or something else and would love to give you some manure.

You can also straight up bury kitchen scraps and plant over them and the decomposers will still do their job if you don't have room for a compost pile.

Do you know what the limiting nutrient in most gardens is? Nitrogen. Do you know what you have an unlimited, free supply of?* Just saying, raspberries love it. Look into it and read up on it so you're not just going out there willy-nilly and burning your plants to a crisp.

Also, if you're municipality has yard waste/Organics pick up, there's a good chance they have a very large pile of free compost/mulch some where. Make use of it.

I'm sure there's more, but I gotta get going. Add your thoughts!

P.S. if you really do want to look into growing more of your calories, look into potatoes, corn for corn flour (not the same as sweet corn!), fava beans, and dry beans. What will work for your climate might be different.

*pee

I’ve been thinking about starting a vertical farm as a way to provide free food to anyone in need. I’m still trying to figure out how much it would cost but I’ll probably need to crowdfund. I don’t know how to approach this. Should I form a 501c3? Maybe just do a GoFundMe campaign? I don’t have experience with mutual aid networks or nonprofits so any advice from people with experience would be very helpful.

I already have a few people who are interested in helping but they also lack experience with this sort of thing.

I need help feeding my family

I'm 22, non-binary, and disabled. I am currently 3 months behind on rent, behind on my utilities, and only have enough food left for one more day. There are 3 adults and 3 dogs in my house. We have food stamps, but got our first two months at the same time and don't get any more until the 18th of June. My partner and I do tattoos and piercings, but business is slow rn and we are really struggling. If you are able to help at all it would be greatly appreciated, and if you are not comfortable sending money but want to help we would really appreciate an instacart or some other grocery delivery, I'm really most worried about having food. If you do want to send money, my cash app is $enbymickie . Whether you are able to help or not, please share!! Thank you 💜 feel free to message me if you have any questions

The peryton is a mythological creature resembling a deer with the wings and overall plumage of a bird. Sometimes perytons can have bird-like hind legs, but are often depicted as being entirely deer aside from the wings. Last image created by the talented Skallan of Deviantart.

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

Here’s a thing I’ve had around in my head for a while!

Okay, so I’m pretty sure that by now everyone at least is aware of Steampunk, with it’s completely awesome Victorian sci-fi aesthetic. But what I want to see is Solarpunk – a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between. A balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics. 

A lot of people seem to share a vision of futuristic tech and architecture that looks a lot like an ipod – smooth and geometrical and white. Which imo is a little boring and sterile, which is why I picked out an Art Nouveau aesthetic for this.

With energy costs at a low, I like to imagine people being more inclined to focus their expendable income on the arts!

Aesthetically my vision of solarpunk is very similar to steampunk, but with electronic technology, and an Art Nouveau veneer.

So here are some buzz words~

Natural colors! Art Nouveau! Handcrafted wares! Tailors and dressmakers! Streetcars! Airships! Stained glass window solar panels!!! Education in tech and food growing! Less corporate capitalism, and more small businesses! Solar rooftops and roadways! Communal greenhouses on top of apartments! Electric cars with old-fashioned looks! No-cars-allowed walkways lined with independent shops! Renewable energy-powered Art Nouveau-styled tech life!

Can you imagine how pretty it would be to have stained glass windows everywhere that are actually solar panels? The tech is already headed in that direction!  Or how about wide-brim hats, or parasols that are topped with discreet solar panel tech incorporated into the design, with ports you can stick your phone charger in to?

(((Character art by me; click the cityscape pieces to see artist names)))

Very cold take but the reason I think a lot of settler vegans view meat as murder (and therefore immoral) is because they cannot get past their colonial mindset of viewing all interactions as either consumption or domination instead of the reality of a vast web of mutually beneficial and self sustaining relationships with the ecosystem and eachother