I see your argument, but I disagree with it.

First, “science” does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.

“Science”, as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can’t. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can’t afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can’t afford the new technologies can’t sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.

Every scientific “advancement” by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can’t afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.

And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn’t matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.

And if you were arguing “this is bad, but it’s not as bad as a bunch of other stuff” I would be more likely to agree.

But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.

Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is “one of the good ones”. That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.

And I think, if we think about what NASA’s budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of “science”, we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.

I had a theory about multiple accounts being connected to the same person and how they’d use that to hide their insider trading, but I did some digging, and in this case the trader is a single anonymous account which has a pattern of making winning bets - 16 of them - based on things Trump does:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/309527584561937

https://x.com/Mrminick_/status/2041170962368844105

So, yeah, you could make money by following this account and doing what it does, presuming you knew it had insider information, and presuming it doesn’t shut down now that people know it has insider information. After all, you want people to bet against you, and nobody wants to bet against the person with insider info, right?

Also, here’s an article with examples of apparent insider trading on oil futures, and explaining some of the ways multiple accounts can be connected to the same (anonymous) people:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/insider-trading-claims-after-stock-and-oil-futures-surged-minutes-before-trump-s-iran-post

For one, some people don’t know it’s rigged, while others think they can guess how it’s rigged and profit off it. I saw it a lot when I followed cryptocurrency scams - thousands of people bought into obvious pump and dump schemes because they thought they could time the dump and cash out before it hit. And even during the old analog days, tens of thousands of people bought into obvious pyramid schemes because they thought they were early enough to make a profit before the scheme collapsed.

The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” has a lot of truth to it, and degenerate gamblers are gonna gamble degenerately.

And for the prediction markets and the insider trading, it’s because people can’t. The online stuff uses anonymous throwaway accounts, and the more traditional insider stock trading only gets noticed when (if) the insider publicly reports their stock trades months or years later.

If there’s one benefit to the rise of AI slop, it’ll be pushing people away from mass social media and back to IRL meetups where you can mostly guarantee you’re talking to a real person.

My bad, I misremembered the connections between the Trump crime family and the prediction markets.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/us-iran-war-prediction-markets-benefit-who-owns-donald-trump-jr-leading-prediction-firms-polymarket-kalshi-nyt-report-11772336769064.html

I’ll change my title 😆

That’s correct. I don’t.

As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.

The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID’s defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world’s poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.

And it’s happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don’t even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an “apolitical triumph of the human species”.

All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.

So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it’s more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.

I found the Tumblr post I got it from and there’s no source there either. Sorry. Lots of dank memes tho.

Sorry, it was a random Tumblr meme I saved a while back and I’m not sure who shared it. I’ll try to find the original but no promises.

Y’all insisting this is a joke making fun of Trump are, one, correct. And two, need to remember conservatives use jokes to push the Overton Window and protect themselves from criticism.

For example, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein and their vile brood promoting racist and sexist “jokes” online (I still can’t believe fucking Epstein funded 4chan. Who’s writing this season?) in order to turn “edgy” American teens into actual racists - because the more you joke about something, the more normal it seems to talk about it, and that gives people who actually take it seriously room to debate and persuade.

Or take the White House, which routinely posts viciously, explicitly racist memes, and, when criticized, responds with “it’s just a joke, you’re stupid to be offended”. Conservatives are extraordinarily effective at using humor to promote hateful, bigoted ideologies, and because they refuse to defend or debate those messages, and call people stupid for expecting them to, they effectively silence their critics and prevent criticism of their hateful, bigoted ideologies.

Redeeming Bush Jr is certainly a hateful, bigoted act. And Newsom, whatever else he is, is clearly a conservative.

And on the gripping hand, remember the ratchet effect. It’s easy for modern Democrats to praise Bush Jr because, in a lot of ways, Bush Jr defined the modern Democratic Party. Obama followed the Bush Doctrine to the letter in terms of foreign policy, and Biden carried on his work. Cheney didn’t endorse Harris for nothing. There’s no daylight between the Republican Party of 2004 and the Democratic Party of 2024 when it comes to foreign relations or economic policy.

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How so?

Besides all the vegans, vegetarians, and people who can’t afford or don’t have access to beef, there are roughly 1.2 billion Hindus in the world, most of whom don’t eat beef for religious reasons.

I don’t see how beef can be irreplaceable when literally billions of people don’t eat beef and are perfectly healthy without it.

One more Winstanley quote that goes hard:

And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”

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I agree. I think Miller and his dweeb crew have “flooded the zone” - done so much outrageous and horrible shit as quickly as possible - so effectively that protesting over specific issues just doesn’t work right now. It’s not that little Donnie has done one or more specific bad things that we want him to change policies on. Little Donnie is going out of his way to do as many bad things as possible, and by the time we organize a protest about bad thing number 67, he’s already moved on to bad things number 69, 88, and 108. “Go back to Epstein Island and put the adults back in charge” is the only rational message for a mass protest right now.

We don’t shift the Overton Window by dismissing valid criticisms and facts we don’t like.

Except that is precisely how the Overton Window shifts.

The Overton Window is a range of socially acceptable facts, beliefs, criticisms, and opinions. Anything outside that range is socially unacceptable even if it’s valid.

The Overton Window isn’t about what criticisms and facts are valid. It’s about what criticisms and facts we are allowed to debate the validity of.

(For example, the internment of Japanese during World War II. It’s possible to debate the validity of that internment based on various historical facts. But no decent person would have that debate in the first place. It’s outside the Overton Window of decency. Which is why I expect Fox News to platform Michelle Malkin again shortly.)

The American media establishment has shifted the Overton Window in America, Europe, and Australia, further and further to the right over the last decades. They didn’t do it by considering all valid critiques. They did it by platforming and discussing right-wing critiques of society and the facts they were based on - even the invalid ones - and insisting left-wing critiques of society and the fact they were based on - even the valid ones - were unacceptable to discuss in public.

If we insist on giving right-wing ideas the same fair consideration we give left-wing ideas, we are accepting those right-wing ideas into our conception of what the Overton Window should be. And in the battle to control that window, we are disarming ourselves.

I would say trees growing in neat rows in an industrial monoculture orchard, or squeezed into a 3-ft strip of otherwise barren land next to a sidewalk slowly choking to death on concrete and pollution, have been destroyed in almost every way that matters. They physically still exist, yes, but trees are part of an ecosystem; capitalism kills the ecosystem and raises the tree as a zombie servant. It forces the tree to perform its profitable function, and nothing else, and destroys everything about it and everything around it that doesn’t serve that function.

Zombie trees may be alive, but they aren’t really living.

Or maybe we’re overthinking and the poster is talking about logging and not about absolutely everything in the world that people might use a tree for.

Strangely, I think this article gives Musk too much credit for good intentions. It assumes he honestly wanted to make government more efficient and fucked it up.

I think he wanted to, one, eliminate the dozens of DOJ investigations into his companies and delete the evidence they’d collected; two, sabotage every government agency that might possibly interfere with his companies in future, doing so much damage that it would be decades before they could return to even their pathetic Biden-era level of effectiveness; and three, collect all the US government’s information about us in one place so he could steal it for his surveillance machines.

Musk accomplished all of that brilliantly, and then fucked off to enjoy his trillion-dollar victory lap.

In fact recent famines in Iran and Afghanistan were the result of overproduction of cash crops like Saffron

Do you have sources for this? I’ma be honest: when a country is laboring under brutal sanctions - sanctions designed to create famine conditions, to make ordinary citizens desperate enough to overthrow their government - claiming that the famines are really caused by that government making farmers grow the wrong crops… I’m willing to be proven wrong but that doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

It’s the opposite. More aerodynamic modern cars are more likely to hit insects on the road than the older blockier ones. They’re not hitting insects because there aren’t any insects to hit.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

Have you ever lived in a HOA?