…There are lots of cultural phenomena where this plays out. Where the attachment to a thing or a set of ideas far outweighs any appeal to first principles or science or logic. Because we’re a social species.
Such things are socially rational and highly impervious to logic. The entire ad industry exploits this. And political parties too
For decades, people have been sold car ownership as a key indicator of their status, and in the case of men, a key marker of their virility. There are car owners whose dads and granddads have been inducted into that bullshit. It runs deep.
The price of ownership and fuelling will have to become extremely painful before they give themself a frontal carbotomy.
It is one of the most perniciously stupid aspects of modernity
…I fkn hate what cars have done to us. And EVs fix none of that.
Shiny metal boxes will drive us off the cliff
…Along the way, I had the temerity to carefully pull out to go past traffic slowing to become stationary in front of me. As I did so the guy in the car behind me revved his engine in disapproval or trying to scare me.
He wasn’t coming alongside me, he was behind me and had nowhere to go.
And earlier a driver had decided the advanced green light for cyclists was a green light for him and just drove straight through a red light.
But it’s always the cyclists’ fault :/
…People are clueless. I don’t know what we do about that
Up until about 9 years ago I was regularly cycling in rush hour traffic several times a week.
I hardly ever do so now but did today, along what has been one of Portsmouth’s most congested roads.
Nearly a decade on, and with well over 300,000,000,000 more tonnes of CO2 in the air, it still is as congested as it ever has been.
*Nothing* has changed.
FFS
I would like for just one mainstream broadcast journalist who is genned up on the Earth crisis to press a prominent government minister on how distant their policy positions are from safety and material reality.
To do this calmly and coherently and assertively.
More than one journalist, more than once, to more than one government minister would be great.
But let’s start with one. I’ve been waiting a long time for just one
“France’s schools were not built for the hotter world the students have inherited after generations of fossil fuel use have warped the climate. Many buildings were designed to hold onto heat; air conditioning is rare. As classrooms recorded temperature peaks above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38°C) this spring, schools reported incidents from fainting to nosebleeds.”
https://mas.to/@therightarticle/117461195252271904
In this article shared by @PoLaRobs are 2 videos. Both are worth watching.
The first is a 4-minute interview with Andrew Shepherd of Leeds => Northumbria University about the acceleration of Antarctic ice melt.
The second is a 3-minute piece on glacier retreat In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where some glaciers are said to be retreating by as much as 16m per year and over 300 glacial lakes are considered primed to breach (similar to Nepal)
…So we learn that AI worms will ‘infect’ ovens and fridges and TVs and lawnmowers, but not planes or cars, I guess?
How strange
Another reason,
as if one were needed,
to not fly
Heard a BBC Radio 4 trailer for ‘The Future of Farming’ and because of its content found myself muttering FFS
…Wanting better leaders starts with being better ancestors
Trump’s latest pool of geopolitical vomit re Russia/Ukraine is mind-numbingly awful, but if we don’t drastically rein in our personal fossil fuel use, then we’re going to see a lot more war criminals doing deals with other war criminals to secure critical supplies like diesel.
The surface level political fuckery is directly fuelled by the fuckery of hydrocarbon consumption
Just did something I should have done aaaaages ago. I’ve been procrastinating about how to wean myself off of the expectation of others that I am on WhatsApp and realised there’s no way to do that.
So have just deleted my account and deleted the app. Cold turkey is the only way
…Piling nihilistic shit on nihilism cannot end well.
So it won’t.
When I read
“I've been experimenting with Claude Code recently”
I impute something like
“I’ve added another layer of not giving a shit about consequences to my cultural practice of not giving a shit about consequences”
I would have posted the original post where I discovered this but there was no image description, so…
- - -
The Onion 6 months ago imagined
“DOJ To Bring Back Firing Squad As Means Of Entertainment”
https://theonion.com/doj-to-bring-back-firing-squad-as-means-of-entertainment/
…At some point, I hope, we begin to engage en masse with where we actually are. But that seems quite a way off.
The latest TGS episode gets into where we’re going and how Hormuz is giving us a mighty shove:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/237-art-berman
…The endless growth of throughput is broadly understood to be the game we’re all supposed to be signed up to.
What is not broadly understood is that there is a 20th-century-embedded structural expectation that the *rate* of growth increases too.
But the rate of growth has been slipping and slipping. I could update the Chancellor in the graphic below but it doesn’t really matter who it is. Any party that’s electable is pushing the same fantasy https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113998114844279545