Temps up to 40c is concerning? I’ve had to travel to the Northeast US multiple times over the past few years, and from July-August the average temperature has been 38-45c consistently for nearly 2-3 months straight.
It largely depends on whether such temperatures are common or not in a particular area. Places that don't normally experience such temperatures can end up with a lot of problems. For example, everybody turning AC on at the same time can bring down the electric grid.
I love how the weather is getting more extreme at a fast rate yet still people have doubts about climate change happening. Like, it's almost summer but over here it is nothing but rain. Local supermarkets are running out of some types of food (mainly veggies) due to abnormal amounts of rain.
Whether you believe in climate change or not is irrelevant. You WILL notice it fast.
Florida is actually doing the most to combat climate change. Science has proven that simply rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots lowers the global average temperature by 0.0001°C. Putting a "FUCK WOKE" sticker on your truck doubles that effect. There are big carbon offsets from denying construction workers water and shade. I hear there's new research going into the the climate effects of thoughts and prayers too. It's an all-fronts climate action powerhouse!
I've heard saying that houses in at least some colder places tend to be really bad at dealing with heat. Does anyone know how it is around these areas that might be affected?
She's an intellectual giant, I agree with her takes more than any other DC pundit. Her interviews with Norman Finkelstein are brilliant. Getting fired from the hill only reinforces how terrified the establishment are of her persuasiveness. I'm gonna sub twice as hard to bad faith now. And of course Useful Idiots with Katie Halper.
Do you mean Patreon and Substack? That's almost definitely not happening. These platforms exist because they, to a good extent, allow for freedom of expression. Technologically they're nothing to write home about (and Patreon video player is actual dogshit) and could easily be replicated and replaced. So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators' revenues if those were to leave over political differences.
I wouldn't be so sure. I don't know about Substack but afaik Patreon has deplatformed people for political reasons before, including anti-imperialists.
So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators' revenues if those were to leave over political differences.
This is a very naive argument, in a way akin to the liberal notion that the market regulates itself because if corporations behave contrary to what people want they will lose money.
The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it's in their financial interest to do so just doesn't conform with what we observe happening in reality. Oftentimes political pressure placed on platforms by governments, media and powerful lobbying groups is stronger than the economic incentives to resist that pressure.
The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it's in their financial interest to do so just doesn't conform with what we observe happening in reality.
There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others' activity. Creators don't have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn't make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.
Maybe. Though you could make the same argument for big platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others' activity. But because they are so big and that is where most people are, it's hard to make a switch.
At the end of the day you still run into the problem of monopolies. Not just of the platforms themselves but more importantly of the financial institutions that they rely on. Who processes the transactions? As long as the payments still go through the US dominated financial system any platform will be vulnerable to political pressure to have their access to said financial systems cut off if they do not comply.
The only real way to escape is to build structures outside of the West's financial transaction architecture, for platforms to adopt payment systems that go through the kinds of alternatives that Russia and China are trying to build at the moment.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others' activity.
People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they're primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone's content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.
Anyway, I'm not really disagreeing, and it's speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.
I agree with you on Patreon not being worth much of anything beyond the actual user content. But Patreon is not ideologically guided; it's just a lib tech company looking for a way to skim a little money. Whatever notions of Freeze Peach they claim to care about will wither the moment the ADL threatens to call them anti-semetic or funding khkhkhamas. The Patreon C-suite knows that banning a few publicly smeared lefties will cost them less than ending up on an ADL boycott list or getting tiktok'd.
She's not even particularly impressive or interesting as a supposed "left-ish" media figure. She's an ivy league lawyer, has plenty of bad lib takes, and adjunct to the controlled opposition like sanders and aoc. You'd think the dems would maybe see her as useful, but the left edge of the US overton window is a chainsaw.
She's not especially impressive, I just can't help but pity her being continually hung out to dry in increasingly degrading ways by the systems she keeps trying to work within. A person in her position could live an easy and comfortable life like any other DC suit passively toeing the liberal line. She burns all her bridges with the DNC to be Sanders' press secretary after they've already fucked over Sanders once before, and Sanders turns around and disowns her when she doesn't endorse Biden. She can't get work in DC, so she uses some of her only remaining relationships to try to make a living as a podcaster by attaching herself to a Chapo host at the height of their success. The Chapo host gets outed as an alleged sex pest and ghosts her, with the scandal sinking the podcast. She gets a job as a talking head on a DC tabloid rag's pivot-to-video internet talkshow where they make her interview a settler colonist promoting an ongoing genocide. Gray stays professional throughout the interview, and they fire her anyway, not for anything she said, but because they didn't like her alleged facial expression after the settler accused her of being a rape apologist.
Obviously she's a privileged imperial reformist whose politics are nothing special, there's just something surreal about how disproportionately her career seems to keep getting worse every time she fails to seig heil with enough enthusiasm. If anything, she's a living morality play for every DSA-adjascent professional "progressive" reformist: you can do everything "the right way" and this is still the best you can expect.
I agree with you on her being shafted. And yeah, it's sad since she's not a terrible person or a grifter.
I just feel like there are a lot of lessons, particularly those of the black civil rights movement, that she doesn't want to learn from. I guess she thinks she's too smart or professional for radicalism or a material analysis of the fake-left "progressive" movement she want to rise within.
Virgil had no credibility or political purchase, so it was pretty odd to me that they started that podcast. Seems like everyone else had enough sense to ignore him. Tried listening to a little and it was just a whoosh of co2. I half expect she'll join TYT at some point.
In her interview with that zionist, she had a lot of opportunity to absolutely shred that bullshit; Finklestein would have and they've spent enough time together that she should know better. Although I've seen her scowl at Finklestein enough times, too.
There are plenty of people with lame politics so I have trouble deciding why I expect more. Maybe I keep wanting to see a new generation of black panthers, instead of someone who doesn't want to cross the invisible line. Going against the imperial narrative in US media is hazardous to your career, for sure. There's room for her if she wants to move left, but the forces of capital won't let her use their media monopoly to undermine their interests.
In her interview with that zionist, she had a lot of opportunity to absolutely shred that bullshit
Sure she could've, but I'm sure the logic going on in her head was: "If I lose my cool and come off too aggressive, they'll just fire me and replace me with someone more explicitly Zionist. If I stay calm and professional I can ask questions that prompt the settler to expose her own bigotry to the audience without looking like I'm trying to do a debate instead of an interview. I'll get to keep using this platform to reach people and ask questions that others wouldn't." The joke is that it didn't matter at all because in the end they just fired her anyway because they didn't like a black woman's face while she was being slandered by a bigot.
Maybe I keep wanting to see a new generation of black panthers, instead of someone who doesn’t want to cross the invisible line. Going against the imperial narrative in US media is hazardous to your career, for sure. There’s room for her if she wants to move left, but the forces of capital won’t let her use their media monopoly to undermine their interests.
There's ideological room for her on "the left" (the limits there being her own class interest and political education), but lets not pretend there's room for her to have a career "on the left". The Panthers didn't organize a 501c4 to pad their resumes. People like BJG desperately want to believe they can turn meaningfully positive political action into a job that pays the bills, and it always ends up like this. To ideologically move beyond the limits of professional reformism, she'd need to accept that it's almost never going to come with a financially successful career. You can make a living, and you can be a revolutionary, but you can't make a living being a revolutionary in a capitalist framework. The contradictions will always make you choose one over the other, and a person's material conditions will usually end up being the deciding factor.
Better yet, just wait until the then-president pulls a Elensky Special™ and keeps martial law up to remain POTUS indefinitely. I could see either side being driven to do this at this point tbh (to avoid prosecution)
Texas seceding would instantly start rapid balkanization of, if not civil war throughout, the country. And that would cost a lot of people a lot of money. It'll never happen but if it does stock up on beans and bullets.
Texas seceding would instantly start rapid balkanization of, if not civil war throughout, the country, and that would cost a lot of people a lot of money. It’ll never happen, but if it does, stock up on beans and bullets.
Wholly uncritical, unconditional support to the Texans in their attempts to balkanize the Great Satan, just do it already! All these reactionaries are sowing are the seeds for imperialism's demise.
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