#accelerationists should never be taken seriously.

[snekdood]

"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.

[foreverlogical]

As much of the political world went into an uproar over Donald Trump floating the idea of delaying the November election, inside the president’s orbit, his Thursday morning tweet suggesting just that was seen as something far narrower and more strategically focused.The president isn’t really trying to delay the vote. He is trying to preemptively delegitimize the likely results.Two administration officials and another individual close to the president say that what they saw Thursday morning was the most recent tantrum—“frustration,” as one of the officials put it—of a president in search of a scapegoat in case he’s denied a second term. None of these sources said they were aware of any serious effort to trample the clear constitutional guidelines and delay a presidential election.“He is terrified of losing this one,” said the person close to Trump. “I have heard him say more times than I can count how insane it would be to live in a country where the people could possibly prefer this guy, Joe Biden, over [the president] and think that this buffoon could be a better leader than Trump.”Asked at his press conference Thursday about the tweet, Trump said “it doesn’t need much explanation” before launching into a lengthy assertion of claims that there would be widespread fraud in the election due to the use of mail-in ballots, relying heavily on reports of delays and irregularities in New York City’s primaries. “I just feel, I don’t want to delay, I want to have the election. But I also don’t wanna have to wait for three months and then find out the ballots are all missing and the election doesn't mean anything,” said the president. “That’s whats gonna happen… smart people know it. Stupid people may not know it.” “Do I want to see a change? No,” said Trump, when pressed on whether he actually meant to change the election’s date or if he meant to sow doubt in the outcome. “I don’t want to see a crooked election.”Will Trump’s Voter-Fraud Rage Backfire?Even if Trump’s tweet about delaying an election—an act for which an army of legal scholars noted Trump lacks the authority—was just a bluff, it underscored a reality that isn’t much more reassuring: The president and his allies have been busy for months sowing doubt about the credibility of an outcome in which Trump isn’t the victor. And they’ve done so through increasingly baseless, self-serving means, including by directing tens of millions of dollars in advertising, multipronged legal action, and nonstop messaging, towards attacking the practice of voting by mail.On Thursday, following the president’s morning tweets, Trump’s lieutenants made clear that that was Team Trump’s primary concern: turning voting-by-mail, a well-established and fairly common practice in American elections, into a convenient bogeyman. “The president is just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting,” alleged Hogan Gidley, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “They are using coronavirus as their means to try to institute universal mail-in voting, which means sending every registered voter a ballot whether they asked for one or not.”Across town on Capitol Hill, the president hitting the send button on the Thursday tweet sparked a time-honored reaction: Republicans ducking and claiming they didn’t see it. For those who copped to looking, nearly all pointed out that Trump lacked the authority to follow through on his presumed threat. Others suggested he was merely joking. “I don’t know how else to interpret it,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told The Daily Beast. “All you guys in the press, your heads will explode and you’ll write about it.”But on the question of whether Trump’s words served to sow discord over the trustworthiness of the election, a familiar split developed, with lawmakers close to the president validating his stated concerns about mail-in ballots, and his critics expressing fear that Trump’s tweet was posted in earnest. Asked if she was concerned that Trump’s tweet would undermine public trust in the election, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) quickly said yes. “I think that we should all be working to shore up the faith in our electoral system,” Murkowski said.And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has formally warned against undermining trust in U.S. elections, told The Daily Beast he wished Trump hadn’t said what he did. “He can suggest whatever he wants,” Rubio added. “We're going to have an election, it's going to be legitimate, it's going to be credible.”Even a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society expressed horror at Trump’s tweet. “Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate,” Steven Calabresi wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Fox News Analyst: Trump’s Election Tweet a ‘Flagrant Expression of His Current Weakness’Many Republicans were content to sidestep questions about the impact of Trump’s words on the public’s trust in elections. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded by saying that Trump was raising legitimate concerns about mail-in voting. But he also expressed confidence in the electoral process. “I feel like we’ll be ready to go in November, and we’ll have a free and fair election,” said Graham.While Trump’s main objective may have been to seed doubts about the outcome of the election, the fact that he expressed it shows the erosion of bulwarks against authoritarianism, according to lawyers and scholars. They warned that those safeguards depend in large part on Republican condemnation. The fact that they weren’t, said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, poses an urgent threat to U.S. political stability, particularly as Trump “surges” federal agents into what he describes as Democratic-controlled cities against protesters he conflates with terrorists. “Republican leaders have to denounce this. Trump is testing the waters, like he always does,” said Stanley. “The worry is that after multiple presidential elections in which the minority party won and governed in a way untethered from its electoral support, American democracy is seriously challenged.” Legal scholars agree that the law provides no authority to the president to delay an election, but instead leaves that power in the hands of Congress. In 2014, a Congressional Research Service report assessed the prospect of delaying an election due to a “sufficiently calamitous” terrorist attack. It concluded that while the Executive Branch held “significant delegated authority regarding some aspects of election law, this authority does not currently extend to setting or changing the times of elections.”But the Trump years have provided routine lessons about the fragility of American institutions as bulwarks against authoritarianism. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said that beyond the illegality of delaying the election, it was significant that Trump believed he possessed the power to delay it. “There’s a difference between saying, ‘He’s not allowed to do this’ and saying, ‘He won’t do it,’” Jaffer said. “That’s what’s most disturbing here, not the possibility they come up with a colorable argument, but that the president will act in spite of the absence of any colorable legal argument.” A Justice Department spokesperson did not reply to a query about any recent guidance its Office of Legal Counsel has offered on the issue. During Tuesday testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr said he had “never looked into” whether the president could override statutes establishing the date of the presidential election. Barr also demurred when asked if he committed the department to noninterference in a contested election outcome, saying merely, “I will follow the law.” Several prominent Trump allies—including some of his chummiest advisers and most hardened legal defenders—dismissed the notion that he could or would push the election back. In a brief phone conversation, celebrity attorney and Harvard Law figure Alan Dershowitz, a member of the defense team during Trump’s impeachment trial, said, “The answer is clear: only Congress can change the date of the election. A president doesn't have the authority… Of course, any citizen has the right to ask Congress to make a change, but I can’t imagine that they would do that.”But others close to the president kept the door propped conspicuously open. Testifying on Thursday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an attorney, said about presidential authority to delay an election, “In the end, the Department of Justice, others will make that determination.” Stanley, who authored the book How Fascism Works, said the presence of federal law enforcement in American cities rendered it “a dangerous time” for Trump to “raise doubts about the election in case he loses.” He noted that in Portland, agents from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security “went and did what Trump wanted them to do” while using the language of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to justify suppressing protesters.  Vigilante violence tied to the election is also possible in the event that Trump disputes the outcome. Armed accelerationist elements like the Boogaloo Bois, a meme-turned-militant movement, seek a civil war or a race war. In Louisville over the weekend, opposing armed militias assembled at a rally for Breonna Taylor but avoided violence. Historically, “it’s very familiar when you have a militarized force used to going after foreign enemies and then allowed to operate domestically to separate citizens from noncitizens, and now the worry is they’ll be sent against protesters and demonstrators, and all of this is worrisome ahead of the election,” Stanley said. “Unfortunately, this is on the Republican Party, and unfortunately, the Republican Party has not been acting like a party in a democracy for quite some time.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[theteenagetrickster]

Techno-fix futures will just increase temperature disarray-- do not feel the buzz

Do not assume the future to turn out like popular 1960s TELEVISION show The Jetsons. James Vaughan/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

With the help of the efforts of temperature protestors, the environment as well as ecological urgent has actually never been additional famous. Acknowledging the concern is simply a beginning factor. Currently this momentum should be actually taken advantage of to greatly decrease green house fuel discharges and reverse habitation destruction.

To increase this change, our experts require a sight of the future-- and also there are actually several available. The concern is actually that a few of these sights gravely misconstrue and undervalue the nature of the dilemmas our company face. If our company move behind the incorrect one, our team may wind up pushing the planet even more promptly in the direction of damage.

Constructing a future compatible the natural planet will definitely certainly not be actually simple. Our cumulative creativity is bound to suggestions that have actually provided our team to the peak of ecological misfortune. The methods our company work, take a trip, eat, as well as also believe are all latched right into devices that perpetuate making use of fossil fuels, encroach on the environment, and also manipulate wide range and information from the Global South.

This indicates that to steer clear of the most awful of weather break down, our company possess to transform every facet of society as our team understand it. To perform this well calls for deep understanding of why markets have actually been actually permitted to pollute the higher ambience, and how our company can easily create financial and political structure to cease producing garden greenhouse fuels as well as degrading ecosystems.

Worringly, this understanding is sorely being without in 2 of the absolute most prominent developing eyesights of the future-- ecomodernism as well as left behind accelerationism. Essentially, both imagine that technical progression is going to permit our team to take care of environment and eco-friendly malfunction while additionally considerably boosting production and also consumption.

These pictured futures possess noticeable entice those that take pleasure in the luxurious of consumption and technological development. The premises on which they relax are actually fatally flawed.

The second is completely released coming from sustainability scientific researches. Ecomodernism is actually more engaged, yet it has a tendency to neglect the unjustified circulation of ecological perks and also problems coming from environment malfunction, and downplay just how our the organisation of our societies pushes environmental situations. As a result, it focuses merely on superficial social adjustment. Supporters of each are actually usually unfavorable to many tips and people within the ecological movement. They are seriously wrecking drive in dealing with the environment dilemma.

Wouldn't it be less complicated if our experts just survived on the ground? James Vaughan/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The clinical documentation informs our team that it is actually merely certainly not achievable to carry on enhancing intake and garden greenhouse fuel exhausts on the present velocity without tiring The planet's resources and also intercrossing planetal boundaries-- frontiers to The planet's organic, chemical and also bodily devices that exemplify a safe operating room for humanity. Past these borders, our team risk of causing sudden as well as irreparable ecological changes that imperil the security of Planet's devices as well as human civilisation.

Mermaid story futures

For starters, all technology-focused potential sights call for extremely unlikely rises in energy age. This is actually an issue due to the fact that considering that our experts have actually consumed a lot of the effortless to get access to resources, the top quality of our power information is actually dropping. Reviewed to a handful of many years ago, our team need to have to input a lot more electricity for every unit of power our company produce. While the power price of renewables is actually dropping, vast increases in consumption merely help make the change to renewables harder, as well as are going to put a massive extra burden on our already at risk power devices.

To get through the high information demands of their thought of futures, ecomodernist as well as left behind accelerationist visions count on fairytale technologies that do certainly not exist. The future sight of Totally Automated Deluxe Collectivism (FALC) vends guarantees of asteroid mining to deal with source lacks on Planet.

Our company do certainly not understand if low-carbon room trip is feasible. Ecological crises are actually happening now. We require to take action right now. Searching for low-carbon area trip takes focus as well as resources far from social modifications that we understand can easily operate.

Go through a lot more: Work less to save the earth? Exactly how to see to it a four-day full week actually cuts exhausts

FALC's vision has actually been actually allowed uncritically in popular media outlets such as The Big Apple Moments as well as The Guardian, regardless of being completely busted through ecological academics.

This distracts from the hard however required work of altering the electricity unit now. Provided the risks offered through environment break down over 1.5 ℃ of global home heating-- perhaps simply a years or even two away-- our team can certainly not manage to back potential visions that perform not prioritise quick and also massive reduces in greenhouse fuel emissions.

Very same errors

Even more effectively, the suggestions underlying technofix futures probably may not be far coming from the type of presuming that produced the environment as well as environmental dilemmas initially. They imagine luxurious as greatly located in component intake-- as writer of FALC's statement of belief Aaron Bastani states: "Cartier for everybody, MontBlanc for the masses and Chloe for all."

Because of this, they usually tend to neglect and devalue facets of our planet that are much less definitely connected with luxurious: the organic setting, well-maintained air, creature lifestyle, opportunity devoted with friends and family, nearby areas. These things might certainly not offer material luxurious, but they do create life worth residing-- and also carry out certainly not necessarily must consume our limited energy as well as product resources.

Where FALC tries to give for all making use of the thought of high-end, feminist and ecologically-oriented business analysts and concept thinkers look to different strategies to create abundance. Our team recommend a redesign of future ways of residing located on different market values: the values of treatment, regrowing nature, as well as distributing its advantages relatively.

Cooperatives, time-banks and community-owned renewable resource units are actually currently placing these values into strategy. These organisational models produce cultural and also distributive systems sustaining wealth for all, as well as taking care of environment breakdown concurrently.

Naturally, these alternate futures are going to demand our team to primarily enhance our society and also our economic situation. Clearly technofix futures are actually more eye-catching options for a lot of those that are not on the frontlines of environment disarray-- as well as who could be capable to proceed residing high-consumption lifestyles for a many years or even two more.

But nothing at all besides remarkable societal transformation will definitely suffice to stay clear of disastrous weather modification for the large a large number of the world's population-- and also at some point, every person. It might seem overwhelming, yet declining the ecologically dangerous expectations on which our lifestyle is presently created deals us an unique odds to build a far healthier and fairer globe.

Click here to register for our environment action bulletin. Climate modification is unavoidable. Our reaction to it isn't.

Joanna Boehnert obtains backing coming from the ESRC for the research study task Powering Performance: Mapping Power, Wellbeing as well as Performance.

Simon Mair gets backing from the ESRC.

This content was originally published here.

[whispersinthewires]

January 23rd, 2018

i want to talk about what i believe in here, because i don’t know what i believe in anymore. writing has been cathartic, for sure, but it’s also been eye opening. 

i guess i should start with what i don’t believe in. recently, i’ve realized that i don’t believe in ghosts. i don’t believe in aliens. i don’t believe in bigfoot. i spent my whole life being afraid of the paranormal, but my only fear now is that i’m wrong. i don’t believe in them, but i’ve been wrong about everything at least once in my life, and i don’t want to find out that i’m wrong once my house is haunted or my cat is possessed or some shit. to dust off a joke that’s now (fuck) five years old, i have a crisis of confidence. i’m scared of my own weakness. 

i’ve been weak for a very long time. i thought that it was just physical. i thought that it was me against the world and i had to toughen up. i was was half right. i need to toughen up, both physically and mentally. the world doesn’t care enough to be against me. i think maturity is coming to terms with the fact that you’re not the protagonist of the story. you’re not the antagonist either. you probably won’t even be a side character. we know a handful of people from history, but we forget about millions (billions?) of others. i just googled it. 108 billion. though i’m not sure how much i trust the site, because it says that humans started from just two, and that seems weirdly bibley to me. the world doesn’t celebrate your birth, and it won’t remember your death. i don’t believe in god or an afterlife, so that’s it. you live for a while, and then you disappear. and that’s fine. it will happen to everyone, and it’s important to enjoy every moment, because the cut to black will be bleak. i think i probably would have been suicidal if i believed that there was an afterlife, even if it was hell and torture. at least i would continue to be. death terrifies me. i’m so scared that i’ll never be able to make the progress that i wanted to make. i’m scared that i’ll be forgotten. i’m scared that i’ll... i don’t know. i’m scared of not being me. of not existing anymore. i don’t care if i’m mourned, and i don’t care if i’m remembered, but not being me is more terrifying than anything else i can imagine. 

the left is obsessed with labels. the right only has a few. you’re a republican, or you’re alt-right, neo-nazi... there aren’t a lot of options. there are less for libertarians, who circlejerk over ayn rand and all espouse the same bullshit 24/7. the left is immense. not center left. if you’re a democrat or a liberal, that’s it, you get your box and you get to hang out in it. fuck them, by the way. at least the fucking fascists stand for something. the liberal agenda with their horseshoe theory and their “both sides are wrong” mentality are the reason that we’re where we are in politics currently. they allowed hillary to ascend to what she thought was her birthright, and the left didn’t end up showing up. they didn’t buy her bullshit, and i’m proud of that on some level. i sure as fuck didn’t vote for her. i didn’t like jill stein that much, but at least her platform would have gotten us somewhere. bernie should have taken her offer to take the green party ticket. i’m not sure that he would have won, but i think he might have. imagine if he did. i think that we’d definitely be better off. that said, i don’t want him to run in 2020. i don’t want him to be president anymore. the opportunity for him presented itself, and we ignored him. we got what we deserved. we got donald trump. this country will burn to the ground, and it will tear itself apart. i don’t know that the left even has to do anything. i think if we just let the republicans keep running shit for a couple more years, there won’t be anything left to manage. either that, or people will become radicalized enough to tear it down. the issue is that if the dems get back house and senate, they’ll push back toward status quo. spineless fucking money hungry garbage people. back to normal is while we were failing in the first place. trump was able to win because people believed that america wasn’t great, but could be. regardless of other issues, the biggest being race, the american populous didn’t feel like normal was good enough. and they’re right. we’re a cancer on a global scale at this point. our prisons are designed to create slave labor, and that slave labor goes to making military uniforms. police uniforms. then we’re making the police more like a military. we’re in a bunch of countries where we shouldn’t have been in the first place. we love our guns. we love our crime. we love our troops. fuck education though. 

so i guess at the core i’m an accelerationist. i think that if we push forward and just let things keep getting worse and worse and worse, eventually we’ll be able to make the left more powerful. am i an anarchist? am i a communist? i believe that government inherently is flawed and doesn’t allow for people’s best interests to come through. even the best representations of democracy allow for monsters to take power. that said, i think that a lack of government would allow for the same issue. i sincerely believe that most people are good. most people want to live their lives and prosper. under anarchism, i believe that those people would flourish. there’s a handful of people that would ruin it for everyone though. the kind of people who enlist in the military for the power. the kind of people who join the police force with no intention of actually protecting citizens. the people who took gym class way too seriously. those people would only make things difficult. under a perfect anarchist society, those people would be left alive, to leech off others and to generate conflict. fuck them. i believe in the wall. i believe in lining every single fascist up and executing them all one by one. this is by no means a threat or letter of intent (sorry nsa) but it’s a value that i hold deep in my soul. i think that the only way to create a society worth living in is to execute all of the people who make society unlivable. but i don’t trust people to make the call on who to kill. mob mentality is dangerous, and vendettas are a great way to start a witch hunt. it’s a shame, but no matter how much i believe in people, i know that we as a species become less and less competent when we’re in groups. look at kitty genevese. look at salem. look at mccarthy. army ants are able to march in perfect lines and find and distribute food. they’re able to divide labor and work accordingly. if you put a single army ant on a table, it will wander around the table until it eventually dies. people are the opposite. they are much smarter, and much more resourceful on their own. they have to be. so there has to be some sort of system in place to determine who is a problem, and who isn’t a problem. i’m confident that people like that exist, but i have no idea how one would go about appointing them. voting is out of the question. and if it’s as simple as handing it down, there’s too much room for corruption. who would even get to make that decision? in a society where power is truly equal, i don’t know how we’d manage to appoint any sort of governance. communism doesn’t feel right though. communism is too state-focused, and that’s something that i very strongly don’t believe in. i guess for now it’s important to know this. to know that i trust people enough to manage, but i don’t trust people enough to determine who is worth killing. there needs to be a state for the sole purpose of execution. maybe we need to harken back to the old west with hangmen. maybe we need to have traveling judge, jury, and executioners to come to town, address the issue, and leave. impartiality is key. 

again, i’m believing in less and less as time goes on. the world is chaos, and we’re lucky to be here, but assigning any kind of reason to it is naive. i envy people with faith. i wish that i could believe that strongly in anything. that’s not the person that i am though. i wasn’t made to be a believer. that’s okay though.