Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

Ok, explain how it is true that every human purely by being born is equally culpable, and that human society isn’t at issue? And then you can explain why this doesn’t apply to you and your family.

It is absolutely not a fact. There is nothing inherent about any human being that causes damage to the environment. It’s what human society as we organize it does, and a very small number of people do an incredibly outsized proportion of the damage. Focusing on things like birth control and overpopulation is a major part of ecofascist rhetoric. It is also very much about punishing a distant other because after all, if you really believed that all human births were inherently damaging to the environment, we wouldn’t be having this conversation as you would have already undone the damage caused by your own parents. But you haven’t, and nor should you for many good reasons! Those reasons also apply to everyone else too.

That’s ecofascism.

Yay, happy hail Satan day everyone. I remember when Intel chickened out and rounded up their 666 megahertz pentium 3 processors to report as being 667 megahertz. Absolute cowards, no wonder China is kicking their ass.

Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.

To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.

Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.

Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.

Even more than it used to be. Canadian foreign policy regarding Iraq, Vietnam, and Cuba took a very different position to the US and was on the whole quite good (for a western country). But that was all decades ago. Practically speaking, Canada no longer has its own independent foreign policy.

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

Yeah, and telling people to just pay for a VPN isn’t a great answer either - that’s just another fucking pay-forever subscription with the price rises of Netflix plus the added jank and nonsense that comes with being a copyright infringement hobbyist.

Maybe I’ll just cancel everything and do totally offline ripping of borrowed physical media from the public library, like some kind of pirate hermit.

Yeah, also the TikTok clones on YouTube and Instagram, and Musk’s plan to make Twitter/X a WeChat clone. The Americans have been stealing tech from China for a long time now.

Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union

In the sense of “liberal” as used in political philosophy or how the word is applied to party names in most countries around the world, yes Bush was a liberal. Americans tend to use the word differently though, since both major US parties are pro-business liberal parties, of a sort. This maybe applies a bit less to the Republicans today than in did in GHW Bush’s day, although by how much is still up for debate.

Yes it absolutely does.

Copyright infringement is absolutely the moral thing to do in quite a lot of cases. For example, for the preservation of cultural works. Corporations aren’t exactly spending their money on proper archives and the people to curate them. Quite the opposite! For example, if some or all of the lawsuits against sites like archive.org are successful then the result could be a mass erasure of cultural works on the scale of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.