Tiresia

Why do you think it doesn't scale well? The ocean isn't going to run out of water, and Texas being huge only means it's easier to find space for all the solar power you would need.

I'm also curious about what you think the alternative is.

You want to have your cake and eat it too. You pay those corporations to pollute in the process of getting you the things you refuse to live without. You vote for those politicians to enable your consumerism and then blame corruption for the policies they pass to give you what you want. You claim that regular people can't afford the needed changes, yet you insist on eating meat and using cars to get around as if those are free. You claim to want corporations to increase their operating costs to be more sustainable, but you complain about your purchasing power decreasing. You blame corporations for greed, but you insist on a personal electric car because you would rather spend >$50k than learn the difference between walkability and only being traversible on foot.

Not all corporate emissions are for private consumption, but most of them are. Not the whole decrease in personal purchasing power is from decolonization and switching to more sustainable production processes, but a decent chunk of it is. You will have to sacrifice products if you want any hope of a better world.

If there is one ray of hope I can offer you, it is that you seem to have too little faith in the quality of life in a degrowth economy. Modern walkable cities are more pleasant to traverse for more disabled people than car-centric ones, with mobility scooters and public transit chauffeurs. Alternatives to meat are delicious if prepared by a competent cook, and it's easier to get a competent cook to make a fancier meal for you if you share meals with flatmates. Without SpaceX-raised satellites your internet and television connection might be worse, but as you share a meal your human connections can be stronger.

Corporations have spent the past 150+ years permeating every form of media about how necessary it is for you to consume and consume and consume. You don't need their products nearly as much as you think you do, at least in the long term if we work together.

You like forest fires? You monster.

There is political pragmatism and there is political naiveté.

Did you notice what happened when Biden's performance dropped the Democrats' chance of victory below 40%? Donors, private media, and politicians all started piling on the pressure for the Democrats to pick a more appealing candidate, and now Harris has already managed to pull the needle back to 45% with the help of a rush of donations and private media support. If losing to fascism is so bad, why don't major players get that upset at 50%? Why don't they push for 60% chance of winning, or 80%? Could they if they actually tried? How many big donors donate to both the Republicans and the Democrats?

When you do phonebanking, you're not fighting against fascism, you're fighting so that a company like Coinbase donates $100k less to the Democratic campaign and $100k more to the Republican one, presumably meaning the Democrats owe them one less favor and the Republicans owe them one more. You're not fighting against fascism, you're fighting to make the Democrats a bit more likely to crack down on crypto if they win, and Republicans a lit less likely.

The fascists have 50% of winning, and you can do less to change that as an individudal than you can change the stock price for Apple on NASDAQ. You can either spend all your time phonebanking and be utterly unprepared if we lose the coin flip, or you can do non-electoral things like help set up an underground railroad to Canada. (Or neither). Whether or not Natalie Wynn dies does not depend on whether you phone bank, it depends on whether she can get out in time as a political refugee if we lose the coin flip. And there we can improve her odds through preparation. Natalie is right that a lot of online anti-electoralism is roleplay (not even LARP, because that involves props), but to be fair so is a lot of (online) electoralism. Most people in the US neither phonebank nor prepare for fascist takeover, but if you're going to do one, the latter is more meaningful.

This isn't a fully general argument against elections. If the opponents weren't fascists, making the Democrats less dependent on crypto donors and more dependent on people being willing to support them would be a meaningful improvement. If private advertisement or donations for political campaigns or other forms of corruption were illegal (and enforced), there wouldn't be a force to counterbalance your shift of voting numbers. If there were three or more viable alternatives, there wouldn't be an optimal point for donors to keep the parties' sizes at. If polling was unreliable or illegal, donors wouldn't have feedback on which party to donate to, so phonebanking in an untraceable way would help. If you're in a local election with few enough donors you can overwhelm those donors with labor. And in the end, votes do count: Republican donors can't retroactively increase or decrease their contribution depending on what you fill in, so there in the booth with nobody looking over your shoulder, you do actually decrease the chance of fascism by voting D.

As for it being funny that these discussions pop up around peak campaign times, how strange that people are inclined to talk about a phenomenon that is flooding every corner of social media.

I seriously wonder about the credentials of this psychologist. There are forms of CBT like ACT and other approaches like Prolonged Exposure or EMDR or group therapy that specialize in dealing with anxieties about things that are real, massive, ongoing, and out of someone's control. Things like chronic illnesses in oneself or loved ones, abuse that someone isn't able to escape for financial or social reasons, homelessness, discrimination and bullying, or even just mortality itself.

Climate change is not the first and it won't be the last. Treating it like it is realer than other phobias and special enough to need its own field seems like it's feeding and taking advantage of an actually irrational phobic response.

Honestly, this looks like a grift to sell her book. Maybe a self-delusional one, but a grift nontheless.

That proves too much. Boomers and the Silent Generation are better than people born 50 years before them, because Boomers and the Silent Generation (again, as statistical trends) refused to beat their children and decriminalized interracial marriage and homosexuality. Why wouldn't Millenials be capable of similar moral progress?

bonk

Sure, I'm not denying that, but what matters in a democracy and even a corporation isn't the purity of each generation, it's the relative fraction of different groups. Going from 60% petty dictators to 20% is far more important than going from 20% to 0%, especially when it's just one demographic among several.

Empirically, the public loves radicals who engage in violence and disruption. It both moves the overton window in those people's direction and gets support from people frustrated with society but no place to vent it.

Whether it's Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, the Gilets Jaunes, violent farmer protests in the Netherlands, Black Panthers, Suffragette terrorists, labor riots and lynchings of factory owners, the assassination of Shinzo Abe, hell, even Al Qaeda and Hamas. The pattern is always the same: radical and often violent disruptors get a massive amount of sympathy, attention and support while centrists wring their hands about how inappropriate it all is.

If you want to win public support, set something on fire. But if you're offended and scared off by something being set on fire, you're not the target audience yet. They'll get around to winning you over when the movement has grown. Eventually, bringing up that it was bad that things were set on fire will make your friends and family uncomfortable, if they don't outright confront you by saying that it was necessary to overthrow the old ideas. At which point you can re-examine it or retract that part of your politics from the world, forming a seed of conservative confusion and dismay that lies dormant outside the Overton window waiting until someone starts a fire in its name.

Trump shows that FPTP doesn't have to result in a closest-to-center career politician. The DNC likes to pretend that it does in order to prop up their most centrist candidates, but as long as there is a large group of radicals and non-voters, a candidate who appeals to those voters can defeat a candidate who appeals to the center.

There were people who switched from Bernie to Trump. There were people who didn't want to vote Biden because he supported Palestinian genocide too much. Those people are idiots, but they still vote. Lower class workers tend to vote left-wing if they trust that fair competent government is possible and right-wing if they don't, with most of them in the US voting right-wing, especially in rural areas.

Foelly

The difference is that Millennials seem to be disproportionately tired of responsibility while Boomers hoarded it. What sort of Millennial wants to go through the effort of maintaining a home owners' association or of showing up at town halls to complain about new developments? Just give us some mtg cards and a runescape membership and you can have the White House.

Abrogation of responsibility is still messy selfishness, but it's easier to work around for people who do want to be productive. Those in power are more than old enough that Millennials not replacing them in large enough numbers means reasonably middle-aged Zoomers get those positions instead.