• FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    I can see how that’s bad, but what relationship is there between these extreme weather events and the companies putting billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere? You’re taking it out on the wrong person, we’re all in this together.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        If enough data centers are built, the data regurgitating magic mirrors on the wall might come up with a tech magic solution to the problems made worse by more data centers being built morshupls

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            5 days ago

            That bazinga take pops up here on Hexbear sometimes, too. It’s often bundled with “but China also uses this” as if that is a blank check for all the panopticon corporate surveillance state shit and the “replace workers no matter how bad an idea it is” hype drive to make the mostly sunk-cost venture capital investments seem less like a sunk cost.

            • a phrase i use in this is ‘Automated industry, not artificial intelligence’

              as in that the best focus is to enrich productivity and make life easier for the average worker, not some future tech nonsense to take their jobs away

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                5 days ago

                China is using the technology for purposes that remove toil and improve quality of life.

                The western dragon-chasing is in pursuit of “singularity” fantasies and fueled by contempt for workers.

                • the socialist reforms in china have done well, but they need to advance. Youth unemployment, Private healthcare, no right to strike, export focus economy, and such are areas where socialist reforms are necessary. But i have hope that china will do so, they have capital back under them, and perhaps they can re-stabilize the ownership of the dictatorship of the working class back on china.

                  But yeah the west is fucked to hell, can’t wait to see it fall

    • badlotus@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      What do you say to corporate apologists or climate change deniers? It’s a similar dynamic to unions and scabs. We’re all in this together but scabs undermine the union by providing a workforce to undermine the solidarity of the union in a strike. This isn’t a rhetorical question. What can we say to reach people that don’t believe or don’t care about the consequences of corporate greed?

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        4 days ago

        I think that in any political conversation you ought to keep the material base that undergirds people’s attitudes on a subject in view. Why don’t westerners care more about climate change?

        • (Gen X and older) The major effects of climate collapse will come for their children, not themselves
        • Stability and comfort are threatened by the radical change necessary to shift out of the fossil economy
        • Alienation generally wards people against wanting to take radical actions because they do not perceive themselves to belong to a social group to which they have any responsibility of action
        • Imperialism as a whole benefits from wrecking the Global South

        Are people actually aware of all these material conditions? Not necessarily. But the fact that they are the base on which the propaganda of the western climate movement is built has already limited what it can say. You have to navigate these points, you have to acknowledge that there are reasons for a self-interested westerner to conclude they simply do not want to be invested in an environmentalist movement because climate collapse is not a big deal to them. In a way, your scab comparison is not a great analogy, because scabs are people that would otherwise benefit from the long term gains of organized labor. As the situation stands, a significant number of ordinary people in the west have more skin in the fossil fuel game than the humanity surviving the 21st century game.