Earthling Liberation notes

What is the Californian ideology?

The Californian Ideology

The Broligarchs Are Trying to Have Their Way - The Atlantic

To paraphrase a famous old book character,

Those who live by hierarchy, die by the hierarchy.

What few people seem to observe and critique is the role of optimism in this culture of generating dystopias. Optimism bias:

Optimism bias or optimistic bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. It is common and transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age.[1] Autistic people are less susceptible to this kind of bias.[2] It has also been reported in other animals, such as rats and birds.[3]

Video description:

America feels broken—but how did we get here? In this video, we break down three of the biggest flaws driving modern conservative ideology and how they’ve contributed to the country’s ongoing decline. From anti-intellectualism and distrust in public institutions to the abandonment of the working class, we explore how media literacy, neoliberalism, and identity politics intersect in shaping today’s political chaos.

We take a closer look at the contradictions within conservative thinking: how calls for “Make America Great Again” ignore the reality that the golden era many long for was built on progressive policies, strong unions, and high taxes on the wealthy. We also examine how the influence of right-wing media—from Fox News to figures like Joe Rogan—fuels fear, misinformation, and reactionary politics, despite many conservatives having real, lived experiences that contradict what they’re being told.

If you’re frustrated by the current state of American politics, confused by the hypocrisy of MAGA populism, or just want a deeper understanding of how we ended up with such stark political divides, this video unpacks the economic and cultural forces at play.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe if you want more videos on American politics, conservative contradictions, and the battle over the future of the country.

TIME STAMPS:

00:00 Introduction

00:55 Psychological Basis for Conservatism

05:21 Symptoms Not the Cause

12:34 Anti-Intellectualism

16:29 No Empathy

19:12 MAGA?

22:01 Don't Be a Bootlicker

No summary, the video is only 17 minutes long.

Not sure why the automatic preview text is not in English.

One of the purposes of religions like the Abrahamic ones.

Note that climate models have a history of underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution:

Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? (2025)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27369670

I know, not all omnis. But this is based on personal experience.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26874488

Capitalism is a scam, and a part of a broader scam culture, a scam tradition.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26551891

Our patriarchal culture animalizes women and sexualizes animals, and without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, joins us. Highlights include:

• How Carol got started on her personal journey to veganism;

• Why patriarchal cultures associate masculinity with meat-eating and how women and animals become ‘absent referents’;

• Why feminism and veganism have a long history of deep interconnection;

• How sexism persists in the animals rights movement;

• Why a vegan diet is a daily act of anti-oppressive resistance.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26074492

Everybody and their grandpa is fascinated by fascism- how it takes root, builds to power, and causes so much damage along the way. But we so rarely talk about the uncomfortable connection it has with beloved European pastime colonialism. Let’s get into it!

Collective cognition is often mentioned as one of the advantages of group living. But which factors actually facilitate group smarts? To answer this, we compared how individuals and groups of either ants or people tackle an identical geometrical puzzle. We find that when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly. Groups of people do not show such improvement and, when their communication is restricted, even display deteriorated performances. What is the source of such differences? An ant’s simplicity prevents her from solving the puzzle on her own but facilitates effective cooperation with nest-mates. A single person is cognitively sophisticated and solves the problem efficiently but this leads to interpersonal variation that stands in the way of efficient group performance.

Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of group cognition. Testing whether collective cognition exceeds that of the individual is often impractical since different organizational scales tend to face disjoint problems. One exception is the problem of navigating large loads through complex environments and toward a given target. People and ants stand out in their ability to efficiently perform this task not just individually but also as a group. This provides a rare opportunity to empirically compare problem-solving skills and cognitive traits across species and group sizes. Here, we challenge people and ants with the same “piano-movers” load maneuvering puzzle and show that while ants perform more efficiently in larger groups, the opposite is true for humans. We find that although individual ants cannot grasp the global nature of the puzzle, their collective motion translates into emergent cognitive skills. They encode short-term memory in their internally ordered state and this allows for enhanced group performance. People comprehend the puzzle in a way that allows them to explore a reduced search space and, on average, outperform ants. However, when communication is restricted, groups of people resort to the most obvious maneuvers to facilitate consensus. This is reminiscent of ant behavior, and negatively impacts their performance. Our results exemplify how simple minds can easily enjoy scalability while complex brains require extensive communication to cooperate efficiently.

"Fifteen Minutes of Fascism"

1. Definition: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-one-what-is-ecofascism

2. The pseudo-ethics of forest protection: https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-two-fascists-speak-for-the-trees-kinda

3. More overviews https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-four-ecofascism-today-and-tomorrow

4. Ecofascism & pronatalism https://soundcloud.com/user-627234964/ecofascism-episode-three-fascism-gender-and-the-environment-with-diana-garvin

'The Turning Point' explores climate change, the destruction of the environment and species extinction from a different perspective.

Music by Wantaways

Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists result in an autocatalytic process, which pressures both nomadic and farming polities to scale up polity size, and thus military power. The model suggests that location near a steppe frontier should correlate with the frequency of imperiogenesis. A worldwide survey supports this prediction: over 90% of mega-empires arose within or next to the Old World’s arid belt, running from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert. Specific case studies are also plausibly explained by this model. There are, however, other possible mechanisms for generating empires, of which a few are discussed at the end of the article.

No article to link, so let me explain:

Turchin, who studies history in a more data-science way, found that empires in the past 4000 years seem to pop up in pairs, likely as a result of the escalating arms race between agriculturalists and pastoralists. Pastoralists are used to mobility and trade (using animals for transport); agriculturalists use less land, but still have the tendency to expand for land and to secure trade routes. Obviously, expanding trade means more capital accumulation, and that applies to both. Pastoralists tend to rely on trade as they don't live off a "carnivore diet", but raise the "living stocks" as capital to grow wealth via trade.

The conflict is ancient and ongoing in many parts of the world, usually found as "farmer-herder conflict" in the literature.

Unrelated to the article, this is how I'm interpreting the ongoing war in Sudan, for example.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25314740

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08057 Abstract: SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities. However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI's impact on environmental humanities, this paper introduces Fermi paradox as a speculative tool to probe possible trajectories of planetary history, and especially the "Sustainability Solution" proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum. This solution suggests that sustainable coupling between extraterrestrial intelligences and their planetary environments is the major factor in the possibility of their successful detection by remote observation. By positing that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern, this solution rules out space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or galaxies. This paper elaborates on Haqq-Misra's and Baum's arguments, and discusses speculative implications of the Sustainability Solution, thus rethinking three concepts in environmental humanities: technosphere, planetary history, and sustainability. The paper advocates that (1) technosphere is a transitory layer that shall fold back into biosphere; (2) planetary history must be understood in a generic perspective that abstracts from terrestrial particularities; and (3) sustainability is not sufficient vector of viable human inhabitation of the Earth, suggesting instead habitability and genesity as better candidates.