There were no primaries in 2024…

That’s the fucking point.

Don’t tell me I can fight the billionaire masters of the Democratic Party in the primaries when those billionaire masters canceled the primaries just last year.

We need a new progressive movement, not just to outcompete the failed Democrats, but to move this country away from a broken system of electoral politics that lets us “choose” between two oligarchs from the Epstein caste and calls it democracy. We don’t need progressives banging their heads against a billionaire funded wall and lending credibility to a rigged primary process through their participation.

And before that, Obama, Kerry, and if I remember right even fucking Gore were all accused of being the most radical left Presidential candidates in American history.

Funny how the Democratic Party keeps running more and more progressive candidates - both the Republicans and Democrats say they’re doing it, so it must be true - and yet the Democratic Party keeps moving more and more to the right.

Remember Democrats, if he’s the Democrat option come election time it’s TOO LATE TO bitch!!

And that’s why I’m not a Democrat.

Jesus Christ, if you think Presidential primaries matter, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. If the Democratic primaries weren’t rigged to hell and back Bernie would have finished his second term last January. And if Democrats had been allowed to have a primary in 2024 Newsom would probably be president now.

If you want us to believe that your primaries are an opportunity for actual choice, maybe you shouldn’t have appointed a 2024 Presidential candidate who never, in her entire life, won a single fucking primary.

To be fair, it’s strongly suspected that Trump had extensive ties to the New York Mafia.

I mean, Jesus Christ, he was a real estate developer in New York in the '70s and '80s. There’s no possible way he wasn’t in bed with the mob.

Say what you will about Trump, he’s probably closer to gangster than like 99% of us.

I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.

(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)

The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.

And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.

Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.

I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.

For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.

One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.

I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

One of the freedoms the American military purportedly protects is the freedom to talk shit about the American military.

At least the newly unemployed soldiers will have a nice well-paying paramilitary to join, so they can keep supporting their wives and their wives’ boyfriends.

Distance also matters a lot. I know where a bunch of little free libraries (no trademark) are in my community, but I don’t visit them because they’re too far away - I can check out books from Libby, I’m not going to take a bus ride for free books 😆

So advertising something like a free farm stand has diminishing returns, because you’re going to reach a lot of people for whom the stuff at the stand isn’t worth the time and effort to get to even if it’s free.

Which is to say, instead of creating a farm stand and then trying to advertise it, one might want to figure out what the people in walking distance want in a farm stand first. Then you set up an email chain or something similar and let the locals know what’s ripe when.

If you’re in the United States, don’t worry. Between tariffs and mass deportations, ordinary grocery store veggies are going to be more expensive than farmers’ markets pretty soon.

The cultural divide between you and I is so great that I don’t even know where to begin to respond. I appreciate you sharing your point of view, at least.

Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you’re wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It’s pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they’re not going bad they’re fine to use, whether there’s an expiration date or not.

Which is to say, I don’t think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it’s a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn’t buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.

At this point, “we should install more solar panels and waste less food” is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.

If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as “crazy hippies”.

Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn’t care what laws it has to break in the process.

The Democrats haven’t been able to effectively challenge MAGA’s utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild “let’s do things a little bit better” leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.

It’s not about being crazy hippies. It’s about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.

They told us a rising tide lifts all boats. They didn’t tell us they’d strand us on the beach when the tide came in.

Yeah, but you know what they can do? Select the representatives we’re allowed to vote for.

I think there are at least two other reasons, too:

One, sweat equity matters. I know I value pieces of furniture I built myself more than furniture I bought, even though the furniture I bought is better quality - because what I made myself represents my skill and my labor and my commitment. And in a throwaway culture, creating that emotional commitment to clothing or furniture or a home matters.

And two, rammed earth tires require no supply lines, no 3D printers, no expensive tools or complex chemistry, no gas or electricity, even. Just used tires, local dirt, and local labor. If global supply chains fall apart and resources get scarce, people can still build Earthships - and the people who are building them now will be able to teach others how to build them in the future.

I don’t have a source, I’m afraid. I screenshot this off Tumblr and didn’t save the original link, but I know that it was a repost and that this image had been circulating for quite a while.

…it’s a joke.

It’s literally a joke.

No rational person would believe they’re calling themselves terrorists literally.

The message here is “liberals will think the worst of us no matter what we do, so why not just call ourselves terrorists, lol”. And by taking it seriously you prove them right.

And after the barrage of cringe tone deaf “humor” about a fucking political assassination I think my side doesn’t have room to criticize other people’s jokes.