Yeah, not a lot of discussion in the community :/

I can’t find !abc – I guess it overlaps with another community like !abolition so you can’t mouse-over it.

Article link - Video footage appears to show Russians killing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers

From what I could understand, it sounds like a really good introduction to the genre and the movement. I was surprised all of the reference books were in English - I would have expected an article for German-speaking audiences to be familiar with more German contributions to the genre.

you really only disagree with how (and whether) it was applied in this instance.

That’s correct - I’m not arguing for a blanket ban on invective, just its widespread and inappropriate use. Persuasive argument has better long-term results than peer pressure.

Peer pressure through abuse is exclusionary - you may get compliance, but more often you simply turn people away from your group or cause. This creates the group phenonmenon of ‘evaporative cooling’ where more moderate members of a group leave and the group becomes smaller and more insular, which harms the group’s ability to interact with the outside world.

The argument you’re responding to sounds very similar to Bakunin’s “In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker” distinction between types of authority. Your disagreement with them also seems semantic rather than substantive. I don’t want to get into the weeds of your argument, only to point out that it appears to be a minor disagreement between people with similar values.

We exclude fascists, but I don’t want to encourage a particular anarchist orthodoxy, or even an anarchist orthodoxy on this instance. We’re openly welcoming to liberals here. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and the problems we face are large enough that we need large coalitions to fight them. Practicing disagreement without dissolution means both our ideas become more potent and our movements grow larger.

I was recently reading Emma Goldman’s account of her travels in post-revolutionary Russia. Something that stood out to me was her experience at a meeting where Bolsheviks dominated, and a non-Bolshevik asked for the floor.

Immediately pandemonium broke loose. Yells of “Traitor!” “Kolchak!” “Counter-Revolutionist!” came from all parts of the audience and even from the platform. It looked to me like an unworthy proceeding for a revolutionary assembly.

I think your intuitions about peer pressure are invariably true - it is a powerful tool for social and political change. But it is a very poor tool for ensuring that the achieved goals are worthy. I often wish civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than was the case.

I don’t expect you to engage in good faith debates with transphobes or politely protest oil companies, but @solo is neither of those things. If you consider their post and comment history, I think you’ll find you have a lot more in common with them than you might expect. One of our goals here is to grow great things through cooperation, but each act of verbal abuse adds to the toxicity of the soil. When it comes to cooperation, often it is less important that people agree with you than it is that they like you and trust you - and being able to disagree with someone without unfriending them is a powerful skill to develop.

How would you fix the title?

In the first pilot project 2024, the funding is only available to students of the Technische Hochschule Augsburg in the MSc program

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@ProdigalFrog and I run a documentary channel on PeerTube in collaboration with Kolektiva.Media

The Yippies had a huge historical impact, one that deserves re-examination as another Chicago DNC approaches.

My ‘assumptions’ are that you work in machine learning and AI. We’ve shared this platform for a while. If you didn’t announce it almost as much as you announce your anti-capitalism, I could correctly assume it from the pages of patronizing apologia you’ve written about it.

And while I’m happy to ‘antagonize’ you on behalf of all the other people you’ve belittled and spoken over, I don’t think you’re the enemy. I appreciate the pushback to my ideas occasional adversarial scholarship provides. I hope your ego eventually softens to appreciate what I’m trying to achieve here.

complaining about me giving sources.

I’ve taken the graphs and numbers you’ve given me in gratitude, and used them to debunk your ideological position. Everyone makes reading comprehension mistakes occasionally, but it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently. I’m reminded of the Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And this is tragic, because while it may benefit your short term feelings of privilege and stability to trivialize the need for drastic degrowth while engaged in an extremely energy intensive industry, you are also a victim. Your near term future is going to be impacted just like everyone else’s by the widespread inability of many people like you to meaningfully grapple with the difficult but necessary steps required to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe.

Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.

I’d love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don’t back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn’t explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect ‘noise’ large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.

Some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?

The standard explanation I’m aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.

You can’t claim ‘coal has been replaced’ when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the ‘Bounce-Back’ effect?

Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you’ve provided.

Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a ‘virtuous’ cycle.

The more granular recent data also contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis.

From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.

I didn’t expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.

Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States’ stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will ‘bounce-back’ and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.

If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven’t convinced you that the ‘replacement’ hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?

Pop Media Literacy Quiz!

Here is a graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?

a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing

b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms

c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas. The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.

Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?

a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives

b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years

c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.

This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?

a) Coal is being phased out, never to return as a source of energy generation in the United States

b) Desire for clean energy overwhelms market forces when it comes to using coal as fuel

c) Coal use is projected to increase more than it decreases, and will rise to be the second most prevalent energy source behind natural gas in 2021.

Let’s disregard all of the other misapprehensions you’ve made and focus on one thing. This is the second time you’ve repeated it:

Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.

Are coal power plants and wind farms mutually exclusive? Does one existing prevent the other from existing simultaneously? Is it possible to run both at the same time?

I see you’re aware of Jevons Paradox by name. I posted about it 10 days ago.

I don’t appreciate your tone. It’s typical of STEM people who are rigid structural thinkers, and mistake that for rationality. It’s easy to find an engineer who thinks he has a more profound understanding of a specialty he’s considered for five minutes than a non-engineer who has studied it her entire life. Despite rapid technological development, both fossil fuel use and renewable energy use has increased apace (except for a brief dip during the pandemic.) All three of your bullet points are also non-sequiturs. This may be due to a language barrier - I appreciate you holding this dialogue in my native language.

In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use. Lights are part of a larger system so long as fungible energy is used to power them. The electrical power conserved by LEDs results in lowered energy prices, and increased energy use elsewhere. To escape Jevon’s Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.

People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before. You assert that the people who tightened their belts and grew victory gardens to defeat the nazis are not real humans. Your assertion that people like me and many of the other members of this server are less real humans than meat-heavy oversized SUV driving MAGA hats is revealing. I consider this cynicism towards human nature alarmingly inconsistent with reality and a form of climate change doomerism.

I encourage to you reflect on what you’re implying here. I appreciate that you consider yourself anti-capitalist, and I would advise you to conserve your venom for people to the right of you, rather than lecturing the left on how to be more respectable. Many of us have taken moral stances that prevent us from easily prospering in a capitalist system, but in so doing we’ve shifted the discourse left enough that your toothless anti-capitalism is considered part of the mainstream, and you face no discrimination in employment. We culture-jam, ride bikes, and occupy so that you can ride your EV to a cushy white-collar job and daydream about “changing the system from the inside” in your copious leisure time.

Maybe take that gift in gratitude, and if you’d like to give us something back, let it not be more half-baked essays on how those on the left are irresponsible, irrational, and inferior to you. If you truly want this exchange to end, you can concede my points. I regret that this discussion has become personal, but I feel your statements about facts deserved a rebuttal.