Notices by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social), page 3

PS: Here's an example. A thread by someone saying that farmers are going to revolt against Trump because of economic concerns brings up the cancellation of USAID, which buys aid from US farmers and sends it abroad. Then:

Reply: "Putin will love this. It is the destruction of US soft power that's leaves counties better able to resist Soviet/Russian power projection."

OP: "Right?"

On no not the menace of Soviet/Russian power projection.

1/2

We can't replace the party of fascism with a party of imperial great power competition. People may not have control over energy use, but they do influence ideas and how they themselves and other people think. Don't let the party of empire become the opposition that wins out.

/fin

It's frightening to American middle class people to consider a world in which our country doesn't have the power to alter events globally. This is, of course, how people in most countries have lived during the time of superpower competition -- wondering whether US and USSR people in a bunker somewhere would start a nuclear war that they could do nothing about.

That world is not good, and was never good.

Americans have been taught that we are the world heroes and defenders and that progress has to come from us. That if we lose capability or leadership, the world is doomed because only we can supply it.

Please grow up.

So what can you do as an individual to help this process along? Individual decisions about energy consumption are meaningless.

You can help by speaking out against jingoism and xenophobia. There was and is a tendency to go to great power competition as a respectable alternative to fascism. Trump resisters routinely add something about how China will win or how we have to hold back China.

But a group of countries can not really stand against a change in the world technological base. As countries that don't have domestic fossil fuels convert, a point will be reached where not only their domestic power is cheaper but the products they make with that power will be cheaper and they will only want to buy things that use that power.

So what will speed up this transition? What will do it is the destruction of the neoliberal world system, which protects the power of oil producing countries, along with the destruction of US influence. And again -- we appear to be in the middle of a resounding success!

Countries can delay a transition based purely on economics by:
* paying expensive subsidies to their own extractive industries
* putting up tariff barriers on renewable products made elsewhere to try to defeat installations in their country
* using military and diplomatic power to sabotage trade

The US was doing this, and was always going to do this no matter who was in charge. Both Biden and Trump put tariffs on Chinese renewable equipment in place.

Luckily, one becoming cheaper than the other has pretty much already happened. There are some battery improvements yet to be made but they are already in the pipeline. OK, success! Success done almost completely by China, with some initial help from Germany.

But it matters very much how *fast* this happens. For it to happen more quickly, countries that are large fossil fuel producers with a lot of political power have to lose that power.

The post I wrote in 2011 goes through the so-far accurate reasons why technocrats can't disguise a governmental decision as an economic one through carbon taxes or tradable permits. Geoengineering is so far a fantasy and the more we learn about it the less effective it seems like it will be.

So the path left is conversion to renewable power based only on renewable power plus batteries becoming cheaper than fossil in straightforward market terms.

As mentioned in this post, converting to renewable power is really a communal decision, and governments like them or not are how our societies make communal decisions. Ideally, the conversion would go: people pressure -> governments decide -> command-and-control replacement.

That didn't happen because our governments are in fact not responsive to people pressure. By now it's clear that this will never happen.

So what are the alternate paths?

Hopescrolling, #climate edition

What's likely to happen now that the US has completely discredited itself on climate? That makes it more likely that there will be significant climate progress, not less, because the only credible remaining mode of progress is conversion driven by direct economic cost.

First, a post I wrote in 2011, probably the most accurate prediction I ever made:

http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2011/07/infrastructuralism.html

It's clear that no matter what party is in power, the US will send arms for genocide. Reducing our economic capacity to send those weapons is apparently the only way to get us to stop.

When people defend good government and the US administrative state, they point out, correctly, that it saves lives -- within the US. It also kills more people than that outside the US.

What can we do to help the #Palestinian people. given Trump's stated intentions?

The first thing is to realize that the US does not have infinite power to carry out its aims. Guerrilla wars and protracted low-tech resistance have handed the US defeats in one war after another.

These wars are horrible for the people doing the resisting and should be avoided if at all possible. Probably the best way to help prevent that would be for the US economy to crash.

1/n

Someone at @proscience just accused me of being a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian bot. As I just wrote, jingoism and xenophobia are not an effective defense against fascism and Blue MAGA's turn towards them is not good.

Or Kropotkin:

"Need we add, that after pitching into the wastepaper basket the teachings of their fathers, and burning all systems of morality, the nihilist youth developed in their midst a nucleus of moral customs, infinitely superior to anything that their fathers had practiced under the control of the “Gospel,” of the “Conscience,” of the “Categoric Imperative,” or of the “Recognized Advantage” of the utilitarian. "

Not only is "chaos" enjoying another bad-word upsurge as what every fascist is supposed to be causing or knowingly seeking, nihilism has started to as well, generally presented as leading to violence or defeatism or just plain not believing in liberalism. I wonder what Bakunin said:

"Let us therefore trust the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion too!"

What they want you to think harm reduction means: not putting explosives in shells when you are forced to work in a factory for the Nazis

What they in every other context mean by harm reduction: voting uselessly for the liberal party that just helped with genocide

Whenever I see a liberal (or worse, leftist) opinion piece being touted here and the link ends up going to Substack, it's an indication of unseriousness. People want to change society materially and can't even do the first basic thing: to get off platforms that actively work against us.

Liberals: leftists have to work with us!

Liberals: defend the FBI, defend the CIA, defend the NSA