How often do you think they’ve heard “you’ll be okay” and had it turn out false?

The fact that you’re willing to say things will be okay when you have no information to base that on makes you unreliable, and unsafe to be around when there is danger.

So you’re saying people should go to war because it’s bad to see the benefit of people dying?

Do you know what war is?

That is the meaning of “based”, as I understand it - the moral equivalent of truthiness. Possessing the flavor or moral goodness without necessarily being morally good.

Though if we’re comparing crimes against humanity, it seems like the “Battle of Okinawa” was similar to the “Nanjing massacre” in terms of civilians raped or killed. Or how about the institutionalized rape and enslavement of millions of people in the US prison system to this day?

Zooming out, Imperial Japan is a direct response to US colonial aggression. When the US forced Japan to sign an exploitative trade agreement at literal gunpoint, it forced Japan to industrialize to meet demand, which it did according to a western colonial template. Without western colonial violence, Japan would not have engaged in colonial violence itself.

More importantly, we’re talking here in the context of the relative willingness of going off to war, killing and dying for the cause. You are free to lay down your life for the lesser evil, but why should someone else? One cause being unjust does not make the opposite side just - if you don’t believe that for the US and Japan, then perhaps consider the USSR and Nazi Germany. Would you respect USSR draft dodgers, such as someone who doesn’t want for the state that caused the holodomor? Then why not a US draft dodger?

Yes, so it’s a testament to how ridiculously ideal for public transit this fictional scenario is that in this fiction, hyperloop might be a worthy investment.

One of the reasons hyperloop was a scam is that they never really tried. There were some very public-facing stunts, like the design competitions, but they didn’t do the SpaceX thing of throwing a couple billion dollars worth of government subsidies at failing prototypes until they started working.

Another reason is that high-speed rail makes a lot more sense when you have regular stops like a real-world HSR line would. Accelerating and decelerating take distance, so the faster you go the longer you need to go between stops for a top speed to matter.

And another reason is that high-speed rail didn’t exist yet, and this was presented as a better alternative. If you already have the best open-air HSR money can buy, the next logical step is to stop having it be open-air.

Though, saying that, an atmospheric pressure pneumatic tube where the surrounding air is brought up to the same speed as the maglev train would probably make a lot more sense than a vacuum tube.

I don’t have a dislike for paper books.

You do have somewhat of a point that the value of floorspace isn’t linear; that the marginal volume lost to a book will probably be less valuable than the mean volume. But to say that the value of that volume is zero is absurd. Like saying my arm doesn’t weigh anything because it’s attached to my body so I’m carrying it around anyway.

Japanese intentions weren’t noble

?

Really? Can you point to a democracy that has done much of note that doesn’t have an economic system based on free market capitalism?

*points to a bombed-out shell of a city*

*points to a council massacred by some suspiciously well-armed drug gangs*

*points to a nation that has survived centuries of economic siege*

For some reason, wealthy liberal democracies get kind of angry whenever you try something other than strictly regulated neocolonial capitalism.

The US could have helped Korea when they got invaded, or China when they got invaded, or south-east Asia when they got invaded, or Poland when they got invaded, or France when they got invaded. All of those would have meant the US entering WW2, and all of them would have been pretty righteous. (Though, to be consistent, it would have meant fighting Britain and France because of their colonial atrocities, as well as not committing atrocities within their own borders).

But instead the US was happy to let the fascists do their thing until the fascists attacked their colonial outpost.

The sovereign nation of Hawaii was violently overthrown by US colonists just 48 years before Pearl Harbor. Japanese intentions weren’t noble, but destroying US military engaging in the colonial occupation of Hawaii was based.

It’s hard to call any war by the US legitimate, even defensive ones, because they are defense of stolen land taken from people the US committed genocide on. Japan made no indication of targeting US civilians, they purely went for dismantling the colonial occupation forces.

US civilians were not under threat, the US colonial empire was.

US victory paved the way for US-backed fascist rule over tens of millions of people in South America, as well as US killing millions of innocent people directly or by proxy in the Americas, South-east Asia, and elsewhere, not to mention the exploitation and displacement of native Hawai’ians.

So no, I don’t think the US cause was particularly legitimate. And before you talk about killing nazis - the US specifically did not want to go to war to kill nazis. There was a lot of nazi sympathy in the US, and after the war the US would go on to rescue many nazis through operation paperclip as well as advocate for the return of fascists to positions of power in Germany and Japan. The US went to war because their colonial empire was under threat, and that is hardly a legitimate reason.

Defensive alliances are legitimate. If Russia invaded Lithuania, it would be legitimate for EU and NATO member states to help Lithuania out.

If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.

With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.

My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.

That makes perfect sense. From among all possible ways to “fight for your country”, your country actually being invaded is the most legitimate.

So of course being invaded is going to result in more war readiness and invading someone else is going to result in less war readiness than the poll that tries to answer both questions at the same time.

“Fighting for the UK” is statistically quite likely going to involve something evil like contributing to the genocide of Palestinians or massacring refugees at the border or invading Iran under false pretenses because the US asked them to, so being unwilling to “fight for the UK” makes sense.

“Yeah, I’m going to need €50 billion for the suspended monorail to make a very tight sweeping arc alongside the valley. No I don’t care it’ll only be able to do 30 km/h, it’ll look sick”.

Paper books have a subscription fee in terms of the physical space they take up. Social housing in my city is €800/month for 40m^2, so €20/month/m^2 , or €0.002/month/cm^2. A physical book might take up a floor space of 4x25 cm^2 , divided by 5 if your bookcase has 5 shelves, for around 20 cm^2. Meaning you’re paying €0.04 per month on every book in your library. If you’ve got 200 books, that’s €8/month, or almost €100 per year.

The only way to cancel this subscription fee is to lose access to the books, which is a worse penalty than for most DRM.

the United States itself is a violent white supremacist settler colony. It is inherently fascist

No, it is a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies commit genocides all the time, that does not make them fascist. Liberal democracies may have a lower class to treat as cattle, that does not make them fascist. Fascism does not have a monopoly on the worst forms of oppression that humanity has to offer.

Fascism, specifically, is the oppression of a liberal democracy turned inward. It is the dehumanization of people that the liberal democracy used to not dehumanize, and the political and cultural systems needed to get a population on board with that. But dehumanizing people that are already dehumanized takes very little effort, and in liberalism a person’s rights do not exist unless they are enumerated by the state.

Thus, fascism and liberalism are different in psychology, culture, and political structure, even though both are often genocidal, white supremacist settler colonies.

We must do better than liberal democracy. Genocide doesn’t end at fascism.

The Tories promised to honor the non-binding vote. If they had overturned the result, they would probably have gotten wiped out in the next election, and that would mean they would no longer be able to do the jobs they enjoy doing.

If they cared about the wellbeing of the country, they wouldn’t be Tories.

After the midterms get rigged (ICE at polling stations, a multinational mercenary group at USPS warehouses, Trump supporters in election certification offices, etc.), some leftist accelerationist expecting to get killed anyway will probably provide a Reichstag Fire. The Trump administration will have national security agencies look the other way like the Bush administration did with the warnings about 9/11, and voilá, the current amount of surveillance will “be insufficient to stop the threat from within”.

As for the specific terrorist attack they’ll let slip through the net - I don’t know. Maybe let the white house get bombed so all of it will need to be rebuilt in a grander style. Maybe let the VP get assassinated so some unelected billionaire puppet can take his place and take over when Trump croaks. Maybe there are few enough terrorists that they’ll let most plans through, or maybe they’ll do a false flag to have full control.

As far as I can tell, the LPI is defined as such:

• Divide the world into realms and all animals into species groups.

• For each species, divide the realm into populations, and consider the percentage change of those populations relative to 1970. Take the mean of all percentage changes.

  • For example, if a species of bats exists in two populations, and one population went from 1000 to 0 and the other went from 10 to 100, then the species’ average change is (-100% + 900%)/2 = +400%.

• Take the mean of species within a species group.

  • For example, If bats and deer are the only species of terrestrial mammals, and bats “went up 400%” per above while deer went extinct (-100%), terrestrial mammals “went up 150%”.

• Take a weighted average from among realms and species group, using a weighing that is not specified.

The fact that the LPI is down to 0.27 while half of species declined means that populations have increased mostly among species groups and locations that the authors think don’t matter as much for planetary wellbeing.

Of course. But that’s an article of faith of the order they support, not a prediction about what happens statistically within that order.

It’s like how Republicans can watch Starship Troopers without understanding it’s a satire. Soldiers dying in stupid ways because of conservative protocols in no way reflects negatively upon those protocols. They can recognize that the tactics will result in failure but that’s observational humor rather than critique.

Apes together strong.

Buy guns; organize and practice with other people from your neighborhood; stockpile supplies; start using secure messaging services; practice mutual aid to provide each other with essential services so you don’t need to go to a corporation or state for help for a year if shit hits the fan; recruit more members at protests; read literature on non-capitalist ways of living and practice them within your community to be more efficient and independent; decentralize so that if specific people get assassinated it won’t disrupt the movement. All of these things are legal.

Simply keep amassing power as a movement until you are attacked, until things pop off on a national level, or until you get a majority in congress.

If you had started on this road with the re-election of Donald Trump, you would be in a pretty solid position right now. If a couple million others had done the same, you could make the fascists understand that rigging the election means things will pop off, and not in their favor.

If you start now, you’ll be in time for the second re-election of Donald Trump.