Apparently I'm "cynical" for thinking new technology under capitalism is not likely to solve the problems capitalism created.

The five people you meet on mastodon:

1)Cats
2)Moss
3)Fungus and lichens
4)sentient shit-posts trying to conjure physical form and experience love for the first time
5)John Mastodon

@cstross @stavvers @rererere Americans are the ones who are weird about gun ownership.

Man, someone just boosted into my home feed a sentiment that *Palestinians need to pay for their crimes* and fuck off right now with that bullshit apartheid apologia all the way the fuck outta here.

When people say "extreme leftist" I imagine a person who extremely wants everyone to have good food, clean water, shelter that's safe and accommodating, health care, community, and meaning, all in a diverse and thriving ecosystem, and will do almost anything - including changing economic and political systems - to get it.

Is that what they mean by extreme leftist? :P

@chrisshaw @TobiWanKenobi @hollybrigstocke @MarkRNay @breadandcircuses I see your "all wildlife is brutal" and raise you all the youtube videos of animals getting along. Also, lichen.

@MarkRNay @TobiWanKenobi @breadandcircuses A recent book I read that deals with some of these ideas is The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow that assembles discoveries made in archaeology, sociology, history to argue that early human societies were far more sophisticated than we give them credit for, they were self-aware of their social organization, and the book suggests we ask the wrong question when we say "why did capitalism/the west succeed" and instead we should be asking "why did we get *stuck* on this failing system, when our shared history is one of repeated experimentation and diversity.

@MarkRNay @TobiWanKenobi @breadandcircuses humans have been around 200,000 to 2 million years, it's naive to think those humans weren't as sophisticated, curious, and perceptive as we modern folk are. Thousands of cultures have experimented with different ways of organizing their societies, and lifeways other than capitalism have been tried and found to be successful. Capitalism has been around for about 500 years more or less. Wanna guess how long some Indigenous folks in North America were organizing their economies, before colonization came?

Don't make the mistake of "might makes right", that just because one culture can violently supplant another culture, that this is "human nature" and "survival of the fittest". Species and cultures disappear, and we are in the middle of one heck of a big disappearance that we won't survive without drastic change.

And keep in mind, right now capitalism is only "working" for the rich. Billions of humans and trillions of animals, plants, life, etc, are not finding "success" under capitalism.

@MarkRNay @TobiWanKenobi @breadandcircuses You are so incredibly wrong, lol.