Huh. I thought that’d be about that “Lay Flat” movement among certain teens in China. Guess not.

All that headline accomplished for me is getting Miley Cyrus stuck in my head… :/

We can reduce our emissions, and we will. We just can’t make everyone else reduce theirs too. Which is why we will need multiple approaches, not just one or two.

Fuckin A, why do people insist on writing like this? Trying to pad a word count, or just like wasting people’s time with extra, pointless paragraphs out of some love of trolling or something?

Regardless, just remember that the scientific method relies on evidence, not believing random dumbasses on the internet. Which does not constitute evidence.

I’m not sure I agree, as that would turn it into an exclusively science news community. A more general science discussion forum is admittedly much more demanding to moderate, but also opens things up for more activity.

Like, what if someone finds a funny clip from some flat earther or something, and wants to post it here for general amusement value, knowing it’d probably not do any actual harm here?

I agree, but it’s this or nothing, as of the past couple years. Halting emissions in a world where major petroleum producers are engaged in warfighting, alongside the rise of fascism, is untenable.

Fascists see not just hydrocarbons, but humans as a resource, to be used. You better believe they give no fucks about climate. Pain and suffering are considered good things. And besides, would global warming really hurt Russia’s long term prospects?

If that’s madness, I’d point out that sanity by our standards is not the direction of very recent times.

Think like a gambler. What are the odds of winning a higher sum if you play the game, vs taking the guaranteed tax savings? It’ll vary case-to-case, and is ultimately a subjective decision. That said, they have a very large dataset of historical examples to draw from to inform their decisions on the likely outcomes. They don’t need to make wild guesses like a bunch of amateurs on the internet would.

Also, sometimes you want your money today, and not five years down the road. Corporate structure itself does not necessarily place a strong incentive on long-term success, since ownership of shares of corporations can be so fluid and rapidly changing. If you have no strong attachment to owning part of a company in five years, you have no real reason to care about it’s long term health, and you’ll naturally start to prefer $5 today over $10 tomorrow.

This is the main reason corporations end up as such a pain in the ass, and require oversight from multiple directions, from consumers in the market on up to regulatory agencies that are supposed to be independent of them. Their structures do not naturally incentivize much long-term thinking beyond what might be necessary.

So, thinking they are automatically lying is even worse than thinking they must be telling the truth. The position you need to hold is between the two.

The reason to hold it consistently is to take advantage of habit building and using how your brain works to your own advantage. You can try to calculate an independent “likelihood” for every claim if you want, but you’ll frequently be wrong, just because you can’t take everything into account. And it’s a massive waste of energy.

As to why, it varies. Humans are very different from each other, so the reasons will be many and varied. But the important thing to remember is just how easy the lie is, and how there’s really no consequences if someone does.

You should not believe firsthand accounts you find on the internet anyway. People are here for recreation, for starters, which does not set a high bar for accuracy.

For instance, if I said I tried a dragonfruit the other day and it tasted amazing, you would be somewhat foolish to assume that I actually did try a dragonfruit the other day.

If you follow the general rule of holding reasonable doubt about all firsthand accounts you read online, you will not fall into this trap. Note that the doubt does not need to be complete, just partial. This is sometimes described as taking things with “a grain of salt”, and honestly, is a good idea irl as well.

You absolutely do not want to be one of those people that just believes everyone. That is extremely unhealthy, and will result in you being misled and/or scammed.

A good example would be user reviews, which are highly corruptible. If you go onto amazon, you will find a number of low quality, garbage products that are full of glowing reviews that have likely been solicited by the seller, in one way or another.

The words In this way are doing some incredibly heavy lifting down there at the end. I am thoroughly impressed.

I personally use “queer folks” as a general catch-all. It used to be a pejorative, but has largely been reclaimed with the whole “we’re here, we’re queer” type messages.

They’re pretty unpredictable when it comes to sides.

I think Germany and Japan are going to have to re-militarize and conquer everyone back into a civil democracy.

No one wants this war, or wishes it on anyone,” said Tal Beeri of the Alma Research and Education Center

Bit naive imo. Netanyahu is a bit of a strongman that catastrophically failed to keep his people safe, which betrays the most foundational appeal of such a figure. His approval rating demonstrates this, and he’s facing criminal charges to boot.

He has one route forward for personal preservation–more war.

Try on a longer, larger view. For instance, we say “witch hunt, witch hunt” these days, mostly disingenuously, but when was the last time we actually burned one like we used to?

It’s tempting to wish for the world to be made perfect, it’s certainly nowhere near close. But focusing in on only the problems, like a propagandist might want, makes it harder to see the things that are actually good and getting better, and on our ability to actually genuinely change things, or sometimes die trying.

There is no quick, magical solution though. People will always be people, for the foreseeable future.

While it can feel good to cut loose, down this path lies madness. Try to remember, people trying to hurt you want you to feel backed into a corner, that perception causes you to disregard some of your real options.

You are not actually backed into a real corner, though. That perception is an illusion to try to make you lash out and hurt yourself in the long-run. It’s a propaganda technique.

If the truth is really on your side, you can use words to spread it, and convince others to help. The actual truth has to be on your side for this to work though, not just feelings and emotions.

Sorry, but if rules are not consistent then they aren’t any good.

… maybe just don’t call for other people’s deaths. And incidentally, the guillotine is centuries old, and in the modern day would be completely ineffective in the face of offshore bank accounts and private jets.

Liberal in the traditional sense, as in, believing in liberty, I’m being technical. Not meaning “leftist” the way the word has been rebranded by right-leaners. So, their adoption of “no rules” is ultra-liberal, or libertarian perhaps.

And all social consequences are social. Drawing a distinction between legal and social is arbitrary. Suffering is suffering, and employing it to control dissenting voices is fundamentally illiberal. If you can prevent certain messages from appearing on your platform, you have successfully executed a form of control.

Thus, their ultra-liberty is an illusion. It’s not real.

If our government is too paralyzed to help fund their defense, there are ways to bypass that.

A lot of the pro-Ukrainian youtube celebrities, guys like Artur Rehi, organize nonprofit fundraisers to buy necessary military equipment for them, and then dude goes and drives it there himself from his home in Estonia. And videos the whole thing and publishes it on his youtube, so people can see what their donations bought. Transparently.

What they need most is drones capable of carrying a weaponized payload, and those don’t require a full-on military-industrial complex to supply. A person can just buy 50 from normal commercial suppliers and send them, and that is very directly helpful assistance.

We may need Uncle Sam to help out with the Bradleys and F-16s and such, but so much of this war has been and continues to be waged by light infantry using whatever they can get their hands on.