Walter Ostanek
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Posts posted by Walter Ostanek
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1 hour ago, ignatius said:
but it's been said many times, that making climate change the problem of the individual is the result of a media campaign by the people who have caused the problem.
Individualising the issue is a way of attacking activism but is also the source of the profits in the first place especially re transport. This is also why the focus on the industry side (if they're not outright funding climate denial) is to push for electric cars over electrified public transport, WFH for those who can, etc - it solves the fossil fuel problem but keeps the rest of the paradigm intact - the O&G guys lose out but the car lobby, the construction industries allied to car-centric infrastructure, the downstream raw material providers - they all still win
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9 hours ago, hoggy said:
Plastic has been incredibly instrumental in human development,
Obviously we misuse it and overuse it in myriad ways but plastic, as a material, is an absolute blessing. The real outrage is thinking that we pump this amazingly useful building material out of the ground only to burn most of it, and waste half of the rest.
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I read Stevenson's Termination Shock recently. Decent stuff, though he doesn't seem to know how to tie it up at the end, as often seems to happen with him. Nor did it really delve into the problem that gave the book it's name. I assume it's just a matter of time before some Muskian ubermensch decides to crack on with some maverick geoengineering scheme. That might bring improvements but then lock us into a deadly dependence on said techno-fix, whereby a dearth of funds, sabotage or a logistical cock-up could spell death for millions and possibly the condemnation of vast areas to permanent uninhabitability. Is anyone putting serious thought into those kind of situations?
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Turn: Washington's Spies
Half-watched a few eps years ago but putting the effort in now. My partner's a history buff and has Loyalist ancestry so it's right up her alley, especially the scenes with Simcoe who also happens to be one of the most underappreciated tv villains
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There's an interesting phenomenon called the "Wagner Gap" where, if you trawl through the multitude of reddit moron accounts, you'll find that lots of them went dark for a couple of days during the Wagner coup attempt. Their paymasters weren't sure who to back, so they weren't being given any orders about what to post, so they just stopped. Good evidence that they were troll farm accounts
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RIP Voyager 2 -
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what a thread
also
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On 3/17/2023 at 4:03 PM, Squee said:
something about that guy's muffin top just makes this clip
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On 3/17/2023 at 12:41 PM, zlemflolia said:
if only ukraine had just accepted putins original terms of surrender and allowed independence of the regions they had been perpetrating civil wars against for a decade then there wouldn't have been this massive war. but of course people will attack this statement with vulgar nationalistic pride in the ukrainian borders, or something, which were only drawn a few decades ago in some of those regions for administative reasons in the USSR. these imaginary borders are more important than ukrainian and russian lives apparently. and people will attack me for saying it when the only goal of the statement is minimization of death, apparently something people urging on ukraine to keep fighting don't care about. if the ukrainian people wanted to fight this war they wouldn't need to be drafting everyone from young boys to transgender women into the war
Yeah, those Ukes should just accept a brutal murderous occupation, a total lack of basic civil rights, and gangster justice meted out in basements. So that we can minimize deaths amirite?
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Honestly haven't really given any of his stuff a chance since Iradelphic, I'll give this one a propa listen
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On 2/19/2023 at 11:32 PM, luke viia said:
new random thought:
say your mailbox has no red flag -- i've got them in abundance personally, but they don't adorn my postbox -- how do you all let the carrier know you've got something to be sent out? leave the mail hanging out? clothes pin? booby trap? burning flag? blood soaked rag?
bro just email it
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Haven't listened to it yet since I'm frightened that I'll hate it
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I always imagined (hoped?) that as the bullshit on twitter etc reached saturation level, that people would just write-off social media as an information source, and revert back to conventional news or even community word-of-mouth.
But no, seems like we're doomed to sleepwalk into a world where you end up against the wall for denying that the sky is orange
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Project Orion was this bonkers 1950s plan to power space vehicles with nuclear bombs. I'd read about it years ago and the idea has been recycled in various sci-fi novels. Didn't realise that Auntie Beeb did a documentary about it, nor did I know that in the late 50s they built a working model, and recorded test launches that show that it would actually work. Mad shit
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On 1/31/2023 at 2:13 PM, Milwaukeeeee said:
that album cover had me in legit stiches, how i didn't across this lot in my infected mushroom boy racer wanker days i'll never know
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edit: forgot this banger of an album
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This guy did a handful of decent videos on the architecture of the Putin regime, the one below covers the ideologic underpinnings, which are full-on fascist.
There are other vids by him somewhere (I think?) about the structural, material underpinnings that incentivise the invasion, some of them being:
- Russia and Ukraine's political developments have diverged massively since 1991, Russia being far more medieval hierarchical (perhaps matching Marx's "asiatic mode" with the economy entirely slaved to the needs of state power: oligarchs = boyars) with Ukraine retaining a far more politically active citizenry. The latter's existence (and corresponding russophone media environment) is a direct, existential threat to the Putin regime - Russians might think: look how these guys live next door, maybe we can have that here too?
- Oligarchs, whom the Russian political-economic architecture pits against eachother, seeing initial opportunities to "get ahead" of their rivals by snapping up Ukrainian assets first (oligarch-insigated asset-stripping is partly what drove the 2014 crusade to set up the "separatist republics" in Ukraine's industrial heartland - that plus genuine fascist nuttery)
- Strategic concerns around Ukrainian natural resources (oil, gas, iron & alloy metals especially - in Donbas, Poltava and Kryvbas) - capture them now to prevent them falling into "Europe-friendly" hands and thus being used to undermine Europe's dependence on Russian gas. Curiously, the old "Novorossiya" colonialist project lines up quite well with Ukraine's main natural resource areas
Thanks to all the refugees in my area I've got to know quite a few people from the infamous Donbas, and the picture they paint is pretty bloody scary. The supposed civil war/resistance that smoldered there for nearly a decade - they paint it as a massive astroturf job. Ultranationalist adventurers from Russia teaming up with local lumpen crims to help Russian oligarchs pilfer factory equipment back to Russia, and bump off any workers who complain about not being paid because all the money has been stolen. And this is all cheered on by western Stalin-fetishists
The thought that anyone, especially leftists, would actually defend this shit, such a fundamental betrayal of anything socialist - is gut punchingly horrifying
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If you don't think ambient is ultraviolent then you're not listening to it properly. Eno is a prayer to violence, Biosphere an ode to destructive nihilism, SAW II a glorification of senseless brutality
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8 minutes ago, J3FF3R00 said:
That is the only track I ever listen to from that record and it is a stone cold banger.
#DoTheNeuroticShouldHaveBeenOnInvisibleTouch
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What ever happened to Venetian Snares?
in Music Discussion
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is he still hiding from the taxman?