Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.
This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like...
> Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.
Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change).
Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary.
[1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.
Being properly represented in a democratic system is not the same as being able to vote for someone.
Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary. A lot of people died as a result. England would have potentially ended slavery decades earlier if the US was still a colony. Canada and Australia wound up in roughly the same spot without a revolution (though possibly as a second order effect of the American revolution).
This underscores the problem with generalities. I know of some applications that would be considered high-speed (both literally and figuratively, since they are related to rocket testing) that still rely on FORTRAN. So I think your statement needs some qualifies (what kinds of jobs?)
Don't forget: the status quo is what got us into our various pickles in the first place.
The word means two different things, depending on your side of the spectrum.
Are you aware of some mainstream liberalism that didn't kick off with guillotines or muskets? Then make it clear.
Not all violent extremists are focused on tearing down the modern technological order. ISIS, for instance, is only interested in the end of modern morality, but (evidently, based on their PR/recruiting arm) have no special qualms with modern media technology, industrialization, etc. The Red Army Faction was only opposed to the modern (at the time) government of Germany and a poorly defined concept of capitalism. But there is a specific kind of violent extremist who thinks that computers and mass production and factory farming are the problem. And I understood the GP to be referring to them.
It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.
The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric".
We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position.
We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part.
[1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my guess.
(Yes, good faith/charitable interpretation can lead to misunderstandings when some things are left unsaid. No, I don't think maximum nitpickiness is the answer to that.)
If you think I'm talking about the Israel / Palestine thing. It was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the US specifically but it also applies to other nations with strong personal freedoms, rule of law, and general economic prosperity. Advocating for revolution in such places is very dumb.
> Extremist violent rhetoric encompasses communists and fascists and anyone else willing to kill people to tear the system down.
It seems that at the end of the day you are not against anyone willing to kill people to tear the system down.
The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of Americans are farmers.
Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.
Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex.
If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.
It's a classic leftist narrative that gets very foggy on the facts when you dig closer to details. Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires and while extraction of non-renewable resources is still big in the modern global economy, it applies to the needs of all states and societies, not just the apparently evil capitalist west. Or do you think the USSR and its socialist cousins along with the majority of countries that used to be European colonies all live in harmony with nature, eschewing all possible attempts to modernize through resource use?
As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries and by what mechanisms to make it so "insanely profitable"?
> Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires
All the wealth and resources plundered from colonies over centuries enabled the European powers to maintain power and more easily develop technologies on which this modern prosperity so relies. One entire continent, unimaginably wealthy in a broad variety of resources, was taken over just in the most recent history.
> As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries
Mostly the US today, benefitting primarily the US, and by proxy many of her allies. War is extremely profitable: taxpayer dollars pay for materiel which you immediately destroy, the demand/supply ratio is fantastic. The sustained violence guarantees access to the energy resources required to continue this strategy -- the rotten mess in the ME over the past near-century being just one of the more glaring examples.
People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.
It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.
Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.
Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.
Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.
Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.
Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!
Food just tastes better in other countries.
This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.
Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.
Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.
Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought
You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."
I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.
Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.
Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.
Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.
Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost.
The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen spent on something else.
The great thing about a free market is that if you think resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that. Your labor is your resource.
I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to them.
We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.
Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.
Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves.
You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.
It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them.
The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.
Look at the price to ship something.
The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the shipping cost, and it is probably much less.
* the cost of cleaning up all the carbon we’ve spewed out
* the cost of fossil fuel subsidies
* the political cost of doing business with oil producing countries, many of which seem to be fairly hostile