This is the ideal AR form. You may not like it, but this is what peak gun ownership looks like.

[Democrats] questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces.

They’re almost chanting “Homeland, Homeland über alles” on official social media posts.

We’re in hell

The messaging is so bizarre.

It’s signalling to the base but it’s also trying to be edgy and hip but it’s also (badly) targeting a demographic too young to vote and it’s not targeting the actual younger voting demographic in a way that’s gonna resonate with them. Most of it requires a lot of intertextual political knowledge and insider baseball to make sense of the messaging in the attempts at memes.

It feels like all of it is a 40 year old political consultant’s idea of what an undecided 20 year old needs to hear about Kamala through a shoddy attempt at meme formats:

“Who do you trust on abortion?”

“Vance and Trump.”

“Women.”

omg le epic ownage 😏

The messaging is so muddy.

Kamala wasn’t ever strong on her campaign with regards to abortion rights since she was chasing the GOP as they ran further to the right so it’s not like she’s known for being the staunch pro-choice candidate. So who “women” refers to feels so vague and, unless you’re immediately thinking of Kamala Harris at every moment (i.e. avid K-holers who are gonna vote for her no matter what), then undecided people who are political disengaged and swing voters aren’t gonna stare at that “meme” and connect the notion of trusting women to the notion of trusting Kamala to the notion that it’s promising that Kamala will defend women’s right to healthcare.

It’s also really weak willed since it’s Walz, a man, saying to trust women. So within the “diegetic” of the so-called meme, there’s one woman and she’s a journalist asking the question so it feels like she doesn’t really know? It’s just not a good tweet at all.

Even the bio is smug and posturing - “Elon wouldn’t let us have @headquarters”. That comes off as really entitled. It’s not like headquarters is something that feels like KamalaHQ has a justifiable right to. It’s just a vague term. Undecided people aren’t gonna look at that and think “Gee, Elon is mean and Kamala is the victim here” they’re gonna think “Why would you have a right to that Twitter handle just because you decided that your campaign name was going to be called Headquarters and why would anyone be okay with you getting to steal @Headquarters from someone else?” Idk maybe I’m too clouded by my own perspective but I just don’t see a focus group really connecting with the idea that Elon Musk has snubbed the campaign or that there’s injustice at play here, it just feels like entitlement.

Hey, I know that guy - that’s John Antifa!

Solarpunk doesn’t have prescriptions about how things are grown

Yeah, but this is my exact point - it’s not rigorous, it’s just vibes and aesthetics. That’s the whole point of my criticisms.

The comment you were responding to had pictures of both chinampas and agroforestry.

I am aware. Did I not just describe my criticisms of chinampas in the comment you just replied to?

Why do you presume I needed to be informed of this so deep into the replies?

If you’re not talking about that, then you’re arguing against something nebulous and undefined.

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. I wasn’t responding to the use or depiction of chinampas or agroforestry. I’m responding to the lack of political dimensions and the lack of program inherent to the solarpunk movement.

I’m not sure how I could have made that clearer unless I specifically prefaced my first comment with “This is not about the agriculture methods depicted in the images above”.

Is it practical to try to define solarpunk as “anything you want it to be”, or is it more practical to call it “appropriate tech with transparent social structures, and an environment that is scaled to human comprehension”?

That’s a question for people who count themselves as part of the solarpunk movement.

But to me “appropriate” is a floating signifier as much as “in line with ecology” is - if you drill down into the details, all you find is vibes.

Of course the Texcoco style won’t be suitable around the globe.

So what was the point in giving me the cliff notes of chinampas exactly unless you were trying to flex your knowledge and position the discussion as if I had no idea what they are?

You keep on attempting to school me on chinampas for some reason. I don’t get it.

No need to trip over yourself to justify homogenized grain and pulse products

Again, I never said anything like this. I never argued in favor of conventional agriculture nor did I say that it’s justified. You’re tilting at windmills.

and they end up getting wasted at a similar rate anyway around the point of consumption.

I have zero clue what point you’re trying to make here. In comparison to what? Based on what evidence?

The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post

See this is where I take issue with your attitude in these replies. You have approached this discussion as if there are only two options and that any criticism of solarpunk as an aesthetic masquerading as a political program equates to defending conventional agriculture and the typical western diet.

On top of that, instead of actually engaging with my arguments you decided that I don’t know basic terms and that I needed to be told about food production methods like chinampas. Then you sling an insult at me by calling me a debatebro. That’s dismal. If you take issue with debatebro comments then you should reflect on how you’ve approached this exchange with me.

The only rigorous and non-debatebro part of your post is saying that we can’t give everyone a homestead with fields and buffer space.

That was the entire point of what I was saying. The fact that you felt it necessary to gripe about bleached flour and shelf-stable foods and it’s only when this deep into the replies that you finally start discussing the point really illustrates your hypocrisy in calling me a debatebro.

I don’t think anybody is suggesting that solarpunk is anything more than a gateway drug, but if it’s not something that gets eaten up by cottagecore, it ends up orienting toward ecology and accessibility.

Not from what I’ve seen. I just see buzzwords like “appropriate use of technology” being deployed to avoid engaging with matters of implementation. I don’t see any real engagement with ecology.

Just like with what permaculture has become today, so too is solarpunk. I’ve seen people with waterlogged soil making swales that further exacerbate the problems of water management on their land because they only understand form and not function, the same can be said with countless rocket stoves and rocket mass heaters - it’s an utter disregard for any design principles because it has become aestheticized and a rocket mass heater has somehow become a symbol of permaculture. This is the exact same problem inherent to solarpunk except for the fact that solarpunk started as an aesthetic and, for all its problems and all the criticisms of it, at least permaculture was founded on serious agro-ecological design principles. The same cannot be said for the solarpunk movement.

And we could provide for 10x the current population if we shifted agricultural production to wolffia or azolla but that’s not the point. I said this directly after talking about the image of a homestead, hence the term bucolic and talking about it in terms of lifestyle and not in sheer terms of agricultural productivity. The fact of the matter is that there is not enough habitable land to provide a homestead to 8 billion+ people.

I already know that polyculture farming is more productive but chinampas are not a model which is suitable for intensive farming in many places in the world and, like it or not, chinampas do not embody the vision of a oneness with nature that solarpunk promotes; establishing chinampas will require dramatically changing the waterways and thus the local ecology so it’s not some magic bullet that resolves all of these issues. There are plenty of freshwater fish that are endangered around the world that probably wouldn’t survive if we turned all the world’s freshwater waterways into chinampas for food production. It’s four sisters btw.

These especially shelf stable commodities are not essential to our nutrition.

Most foods are not essential to our nutrition. Bleached flour or unbleached flour, it doesn’t change much in regard to if it’s essential to our nutrition and it doesn’t change the demands on arable land except for the fact that the more shelf stable a food is, the less food waste is incurred due to spoilage. I don’t really get what your point is.

Four, conventional farming is depleting our topsoil and our oil resources and our other mineral resources, and it won’t last until the beginning of the next century anyway.

Yes, but it’s not a binary question of maintaining the current system or switching to solarpunk and this framing is disingenuous.

The idea that we need conventional agriculture to survive was planted in our heads by the capitalists, and we need to unlearn it.

This doesn’t come off as being in good faith. I never said that we must maintain our current system of agricultural production or that it’s totally fine. That was never my point and I didn’t argue that whatsoever.

I was reserving this criticism of solarpunk politics but it’s very retrograde in its outlook and I’ve never seen defenders of it beat the allegations that it advocates for a “return to nature” to reconnect with some essentialness of being human. In all honesty it seems to me to be this eclectic, aestheticized pseudopolitics or at its heart it’s anprim ideology with a coat of permaculture-inspired paint to make it more palatable. We can’t just throw chinampas at the problem and call it good; ecologists and agronomists at the top of their fields will tell you that it’s very complex and dependent upon the local conditions and there aren’t many simple solutions.

I get you. I figured that you didn’t mean it that way (although I wasn’t gonna tell you what you meant with your own words), hence why I didn’t litigate a whole argument telling you why I thought your take was the wrong one.

Gabriel Rockhill addresses this somewhat, if I recall correctly, but there are also books on this like Who Paid The Piper? and The Mighty Wurlitzer.

Sorry to just drop titles on you and run like I’m doing here. I’m tired.

Yeah, it really drove it home to me today when I was making some food and I wanted to add in some spring onion. Turns out that I threw a few in a hydroponic setup cobbled together out of a milk jug and a starter pot that one of the fruit trees came maybe a month ago, meaning it cost me a few cents worth of nutrients and a few cents worth of growing medium altogether.

Being able to take two steps from my door and returning to my dish with a fistful of fresh spring onion put all of this into focus for me.

This is a really good response and I wanted to elaborate on it a little but I don’t have much juice left in my battery so it’s gonna be more of a sketch than a fully fleshed out reply like yours:

Solarpunk feels reminiscent of that Marx quote, that it is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Although it’s transposed onto the political realm and urban design rather than the spiritual.)

I think so much of this goes back to the urge that traces its roots to a Thoreauvian desire to “return to nature” and to realign oneself with the “good”, away from the debased reality of society as it exists around us. It’s a way of checking out of society and this urge is endemic in the west, especially in the US, where it seems like every other person longs to check out from their conditions and escape to an alienated, self-sufficient back-to-nature lifestyle on a generous homestead. (Look, I’m gonna be real - I can’t lie and say that this doesn’t hold an allure for me too but the solution to political ills is never and will never be to escape and check out from politics.)

The thing is though that a solarpunk world isn’t one that is a degrowth or sustainable growth society but it’s only possible to achieve this bucolic utopian vision by depopulation; there absolutely is not enough acreage available even if we had multiple earths to provide this lifestyle for everyone while also being sustainable and while having sufficient wild regions that maintain healthy biodiversity and a stable ecology. Strange that the solarpunk vision never seems to have room for wild spaces within its vision, just like how it conspicuously omits labor.

And there’s the rub - it’s really an alienated, deeply consumerist vision of what it’s like to be “back in nature” or whatever from the perspective of an urban or suburban westerner; there are no stables to muck out, no weeds to pull, no battling against the elements and instead fruit drops from the trees into your hands and the crops grow themselves. It’s a very mystified or mythologized post capitalist techno-eden that feels very, very petit-bourgeois in spirit and especially in its view of the world. Yeah, it’s not the same as a European aristocrat’s lavish estate from a few centuries back but it feels like it has a lot more in common with that than it has the people who are producing the coffee to make your morning comfort a reality while you wistfully gaze out at rolling hills with babbling brooks and wind power generation as an electrified bullet train whizzes between the meadows in the background.

The prime minister of which country was a close associate of Epstein?

(Psst! I think this weekly thread is getting a little bit past its due date 🤫)

So all of a sudden I’ve been swept away into gardening, despite myself.

It started with wanting to a little supply of green leaves to munch on when my fridge is running low and I don’t have the energy to leave my enclosure. Really simple. Just one or two plants. Nothing much.

Skip forward a few weeks and suddenly I’ve got about a dozen different edible plants on the go and a friend has asked me to get another edible plant started for them so they can steal my hard work (/s). And I’ve got two fruit trees. And I just inherited a few raised garden beds that I’ve gotten started on.

Somehow, on top of all of that, I’ve just taken the first step to starting a program in my community to provide seedlings and cuttings for free to people living in poverty. I’m starting small but I’m very close to finding someone to act as my agent so they can deal with all the people stuff like communicating and coordinating while I can propagate from cuttings and start seedlings from the spare seeds that I have lying around.

At the moment it’s just going to be free vegetable plants that I’ll be sharing on basically zero budget but, if it gains traction and it’s manageable, the next level that I want to take it to would be by making semi-permanent planters and planting them up with a small variety of vegetable seedlings so they can be distributed to people, that way all they need to do is to find a sunny spot and remember to water the plants. I’ll propagate those trees from cuttings once they’re established too.

I can probably rope about 3 people into this project as suppliers with minimal coercion and I can act as the distribution hub. I guess this is how community networks are built.

You already know which relevant clip fits here

Worth highlighting a point here:

Chomsky is adopting the polar opposite of a prison abolitionist position here. I make this same point about figures like Beau of the Fifth Column.

Yes, they may have served time.

Was is enough time?
What rehabilitation did they undertake during this time served?
What degree of restorative justice was undertaken during the serving of this sentence and what has occurred since?
Have they shown remorse for their crimes or did they seek to minimize and conceal their crimes?
But most importantly - do you agree with the notion that the current bourgeois judicial-carceral system dispenses justice and rehabilitation?

If you believe that the judicial-carceral system dispenses justice and rehabilitation then go burn your leftist credentials because you have absolutely no credibility. I’m 100% sure that Chomsky has written about the injustice of the judicial system and how the carceral system does not provide rehabilitation nor restoration to victims but I’m not gonna go digging to find quotes. Strange how he sings an entirely different tune when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. Almost like he considers him as part of an in-group who gets special treatment? Hm.

Yunk Fink sounds tough

God, he’s gonna be having a hell of a time right now isn’t he?

I mean, compare this to Finkelstein’s appearance in the emails where he said that Dersh and Jeffy both deserve to be strangled.

Finkelstein strikes me as the sort of intellectual that will engage in an exchange with almost anyone and yet even he didn’t feel it necessary to offer counsel and consolation to Epstein so where does that leave us with regards to our position on Chomsky?

(Also check out recent posts on R*ddit’s r/Chomsky to see people running defense for him in realtime)

Chomsky is like:

I never saw any significant number of people claim otherwise.

It’s definitely niche and it seems to be much more of a cul-de-sac for baby leftists, although you see the odd solarpunk person in primarily anarchist spaces just like you do with the odd egoist. There are also works of solarpunk theory, to use that term generously, but idk if anyone aside from the hardcore fans actually take any of it seriously.

I agree with everything else you have said aside from this part:

I’d mark that as equally if not more important to a successful socialist victory.

I’m a staunch materialist so imo the socialist revolution is more important because it’s a necessary precondition and we can work on building the future from that point. [Insert all other the standard boilerplate materialist arguments which I’m not gonna bore you with here]

Yesssss. I’ve been saying this.

I don’t mean to shit on people who are into solarpunk but it’s really just an aesthetic imo. It’s really nice visually but it isn’t anything more than that and talking about it as if it’s a political ideology is doing it, yourself, and political discourse a disservice.

Look, there’s a whole lot of value in imagining a better future especially amongst the doomer malaise of the western left that broadly seems incapable of aspiring to much of anything. I love the aspirational propaganda posters from the USSR and the DPRK and Vietnam etc. They are great. This exercise is valuable. But it’s only valuable insofar as it motivates you to make change and to keep focused on what you are working towards; a bookshelf can have a library of books but that will only ever function as a collection of objects unless you actually pick up those books and read them. Likewise with a solarpunk aesthetic, or something else like that, it’s only a collection of images unless you are working towards bringing about a world that looks and, more importantly, functions like that.

Robert Maxwell pioneered extortionate paywalling of academic articles, Epstein was instrumental in turning gaming into microtransaction/lootbox hell.

There’s a pattern here.