Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx

Tick populations explode because tick hunting animals like porcupines and voles need tall grass to avoid being hunted themselves. And because cars run them over and cats murder them.

Nice, saves money on rat poison.

Okay. Let’s go through Umberto Eco’s checklist for recognizing fascism.

The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

True for lawn maintenance. Home Owner Associations often rigorously pin down the expected state of lawns and do not allow changes to procedure. Lawns derive from English manor houses and colonial homesteading. NIMBY-ism, grandfathered-in rights, always looking back to what people have earned because of how things used to be.

“The rejection of modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

True for lawn maintenance. Modern concepts like biodiversity, mulching, avoiding soil pollution, etc. are woke disruptions to the right to have an English manor-style grassy desert. Superficial technological advancement in the form of lawn robots and high-tech mowers is allowed.

“The cult of action for action’s sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

True for lawn maintenance. Mowing the lawn is treated like an inherent virtue and privilege. Hiring people to spend their entire lives making lawns boring environmental catastrophes is considered a reasonable way to spend time. And again, scientific concepts like biodiversity, water shortages, and avoiding soil pollution are hated because it interferes with the right to have a pointless symbol of pointless labor.

“Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

True for lawn maintenance. Whether through HOAs or through simple social pressure from neighbors, it is considered treason against the neighborhood not to make your lawn look dead. With regards to the lawn itself, people are willing to spend a lot of money to hammer their soil into submission.

“Fear of difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

True for lawn maintenance. On top of viewing it as social treason, those with lawns will typically be terrified that an unkempt plot of land will harbor all manner of dangerous pests that could spread across the neighborhood. Every infestation will be blamed on the non-lawn, regardless of justification. With regards to the lawn itself, it is always made homogeneous both internally and with respect to the neighborhood.

“Appeal to a frustrated middle class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns will be seen as a blight on the neighborhood, lowering property values, and being a signal of incoming undesirables. With regards to the lawn itself, weeds and most animals are treated like a dangerous infectant to be removed out of fear.

“Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns are often tied to ideological threats - hippies, commies, woke liberals, etc. - and folded into general conservative xenophobia. With regards to the lawn itself, obsession with weeds that are hard to root out.

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

True for lawn maintenance. Those with unkempt lawns are simultaneously lazy and attempting to destroy the fiber of the neighborhood. Weeds are simultaneously unfit for keeping the lawn healthy and so suited for the environment that they’re a constant threat.

“Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

True for lawn maintenance. Lawns as a concept exist for the sake of fighting weeds forever. Giving gardens any shape that doesn’t involve constant maintenance is frowned upon.

“Contempt for the weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

True for lawn maintenance. Those who can’t maintain their lawns are treated with contempt, regardless of why. They should hire a gardener if they can’t do it themselves, and if they can’t afford it then they are gross and lower class. With regard to the lawn itself, nature is subjugated even as that subjugation causes ecocide and tremendous long-term damage to society. Anything that could live on the lawn is beneath notice even if it costs us.

“Everybody is educated to become a hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

I honestly think Eco is being a bit sexist here with his use of “everybody”. In fascism, women are not educated to become heroes and die, they are trained to be heroes by producing many sons, metaphorically ‘dying’ by subjugating themselves to their husband, their culture, and their state. Likewise, in lawn maintenance, people aren’t trained to die per se, but to treat their unpaid pointless labor as a necessary submission to the public good. Thus, gardeners also “die” metaphorically for the sake of their neighborhood, their culture, and their state.

“Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.

This is a specific expression of fascism in the field of sexuality, just like lawns are a specific expression of fascism in the field of gardening. Sometimes a hoe is just a hoe.

“Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.

True for lawn maintenance. Lawns are treated as inherently American, regardless of the individual opinions of those who would rather have unkempt lawns. With regards to lawn maintenance, someone who mows the lawn will typically conceive of a lawn as “healthy” if it meets the predefined standard, regardless of the actual health of the plants or the environment.

“Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

A fait accompli in lawn maintenance. Before the industrial revolution, home gardens used to be a lot better understood and a lot better kept by the general population. Gardeners had tons of knowledge - almanacs, oral traditions, hands-on experience, etc. Over the course of the 20th century, the rise of lawns and the commodification of nutrition lead to garden maintenance simplifying to “eliminate everything that isn’t grass”.

So yeah, the cultural concept of lawn maintenance is fascist, both with regards to society and with regards to nature.

It’s strictly less work to let empty land become wild and have a diversity of flora and fauna. Why would someone spend dozens of hours per month keeping a lawn pristine just because they bought a house with empty land around it?

A) They actively prefer a lawn that nothing can live in over a space where unknown and unvetted species dwell. Your argument is invalid.

B) They would get fined or ostracized if they do not keep the lawn dead. Their HOA/neighborhood is fascist, and they choose to submit themselves to fascism rather than look for a house that isn’t located in a fascist neighborhood. Your argument may be valid if they didn’t have a reachable alternative, but OP still has a point that the lawn is dead because of fascistic demands.

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Nuclear war would actually cool the oceans. All nuclear bombs combined contain about the same energy as Hurricane Katrina or a small supervolcano eruption. There would be a small fraction of a degree of temporary increase in global atmospheric temperatures, quickly overwhelmed by the nuclear winter as ash and dust in the upper atmosphere reduce global temperatures by several degrees for several years.

The only way I see humanity boiling the oceans is by deliberately releasing global-industrial quantities of super-effective greenhouse gases, actively designed to make the Earth as well-insulated as possible.

If the EU won’t consider themselves to be at war when the part of the EU defensive pact zone that is called Greenland is invaded, they’re losing all credibility both internally and externally. Why would the EU defend Finland or the Baltics or Cyprus? Why would the EU organize against foreign powers funding violent rebellions inside EU territory (similar to how Russia funded Transnistria or the US funded the contras in Nicaragua)?

There is no better red line for France to launch their nukes than the invasion of Greenland. As seen with Russia, any grace given to cult of personality dictators only emboldens them and their worshipers. The only fair response to madman theory is to call the ‘insane’ administration’s bluff and let the people who don’t want them and their families to become radioactive piles of ash take the responsibility of defying insane orders.

Drawn and halved.

That still wouldn’t excuse him from accusing others of lying.

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model.

That’s… obviously incorrect? Most important software is open source that was made for free. Most data centers run on freeware. And even with mass consumer facing software like youtube browsers the best options are freeware like Revanced. In academia, the whole concept of academic tenure is based on the empirical proof that professors do their job best when they don’t have any obligations and they can just get a basic income to do whatever.

The best way to organize the tech industry is to make copyright and patents illegal and to give everyone a universal basic income.

Hope and positivity are two different things. Hope dissociates from the present and the future, externalizing your care into an imagined future you can not affect. Empirically, people with hope fare worse psychologically than those without hope, because those with hope have no coping mechanisms when their hopes get dashed.

What we need is not positive news, but a positive life. Sit in a meadow, share meals with friends, be kind and generous, work at things that mean something to you, make art with passion, and rage during political protests.

When so much of the world’s news and media are pushing a narrative of unending consumerism and growth, it is good to keep reminding ourselves with factual news that this world will collapse sooner rather than later.

If it helps, all life ends in misery, be it decreptitude, disease, ecosystems collapse, or all of the above. Life has never been about how it ends, it is about what we do while delaying the end. Everything we do for the future, we do for the future that will actually be, not for the future that gives us comfort to imagine.

The fact that Republicans wouldn’t do that doesn’t change the fact that there are undecided voters that would do that. If you think non-whites aren’t capable of being as conservative as republicans, you’re going to be disappointed time and time again.

That’s correct - I’m not arguing for a blanket ban on invective, just its widespread and inappropriate use. Persuasive argument has better long-term results than peer pressure.

I would say that is empirically incorrect, at least in our current world. Many activist movements have seen far better results when they forgo reason and started inconveniencing others.

Evaporative cooling is a contributor to people leaving a movement, but empirically people also get drawn to movements and people when they act provocatively. This is a public forum, this conversation is also a play to anonymous lurkers, and I hope there are people who are surprised and intrigued by the notion that it is so natural for children not to defer to parents’ authority that accepting parental abuse is dumb.

Those people that get drawn to a movement are often unaware or disagree with its tenets, sparking more discussion and re-evaluation, re-heating the mixture. If you try to go for mass appeal, people will walk away disillusioned that nobody here seems to actually believe the punk in solarpunk. Similar to how Clinton lost voters by seeming to take politically disgruntled people that voted for Obama for granted.

I disagree that it is abuse, though, and I would not want to abuse people for the sake of popularity or ideological pursuasion. If you’re not arguing for a blanket ban on invectives, then I’m curious what makes you draw the line that this is abusive when other invectives wouldn’t be.

The argument you’re responding to sounds very similar to Bakunin’s […] distinction between types of authority.

This is a quote from another comment by the same OP under this post:

But if people are free to leave a community and suffer no consequences for it, and staying in the community does have a consequence - accepting abusive behavior by other community members, for instance - people will leave. It’s normal, it’s understandable, and it inevitably breaks down communities. And that’s why I don’t think the authors’ understanding of community is at all wrong. In the long run everybody finds themselves in situations where they have to submit to their community’s authority in order to remain in the community. And when people leave instead of submitting, that breaks community, and everyone, especially the children, suffer for it.

It is literally arguing for accepting abusive behavior from group authorities for the sake of group cohesion. That is the sort of authority they want parents to have over children and elders over parents. Accept abuse so you don’t rock the boat. Stay with abusive parents because they deserve to raise you even if they are abusive. Stay with abusive community leaders because the community deserves to persist so it can abuse more people into the future.

That is not Bakunin.

We exclude fascists, but I don’t want to encourage a particular anarchist orthodoxy, or even an anarchist orthodoxy on this instance.

I am not an admin or a mod. Treating my comment like an acceptable part of the discourse does not mean encouraging (a particular) anarchist orthodoxy, as long as similar discourse is accepted from people with different political leanings. I wouldn’t describe myself as orthodox either, I just don’t like abusive relationships. It is not my intention or expectation to scare them off, just to get them to re-evaluate deeply held beliefs.

We’re openly welcoming to liberals here. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and the problems we face are large enough that we need large coalitions to fight them. Practicing disagreement without dissolution means both our ideas become more potent and our movements grow larger.

I honestly blame the current unpopularity of the left (the proper left) as a political movement among the general public on this attitude. Being willing to water down your supposedly deeply held philosophical convictions for the sake of appealing to centrists makes it look like the convictions are just a charade, and that any promise you make, no matter how ideologically driven, can be traded off for just a little more influence. As labor parties in the UK, Netherlands, and elsewhere were happy to demonstrate in 1980-2018.

Disagreement without dissolution can be a useful skill when you’re making practical decisions under time pressure, such as in a coalition government or a friend group deciding what movie to go to. As a user posting here out of my own urge for politically meaningful conversation, I am not under time pressure. If this thread ended, I would find another. I can disagree without dissolution, it’s just not what I’m here for. If you happen to know anywhere that does encourage discussion that seeks to dissolve disagreement, I would love to know about it.

And if you do want this to be a safe haven for liberals, then I wish you luck 7½ years from now when you’re asked to please not say that library economies are a fundamental part of solarpunk because it would scare off moderates and reduce AOC’s chances in the Democratic primaries. Solarpunk is already being co-opted as the new cyberpunk - an aesthetic with a vague ‘rebellious’ tween attitude engaging in ‘green’ consumerism and YIMBY-ing state-subsidized corporate greenwashing with all their might.

You would be right, an openly solarpunk Democratic senator and primary candidate would be very potent and indicate a very large movement compared to what solarpunk is today. And maybe you would have practiced disagreement without dissolution so much that you would even be proud and happy to see the movement grow so far.

I guess the main thing is that if you’re going to argue for something very unpopular, rather than arguing for the sake of your opponent as they are today, argue for the sake of uncommitted onlookers and for the sake of the opponent a week from now after they’ve had time to calm down and reprocess. Respond to their arguments, of course, but do it in a way that illustrates to less polarized people that you’ve got a point, rather than trying to convince your opponent or finding specific errors in the opponent’s reasoning/self-justification.

When an issue is as polarized as this, people very rarely switch sides publicly (unless they’re shilling and they didn’t hold the original position to begin with), but people can cringe from the side making bad arguments, quietly distancing themselves, and a few months or years later show up on a different side.

If you want that side to be your side, it’s nice to present a pipeline that does that. People who cringe from bottom-of-the-barrel leftist discourse can fall into alt-right pipelines, which you presumably don’t want, so ideally you would want to have examples of (leftist) influencers whose takes you find reasonable, ideally on the case itself. For example, LegalEagle (“it is plausible that the jury was right that murder under Wisconsin law was not proven beyond reasonable doubt”).

The hate is not really avoidable except by forgoing this venue or not arguing your point, but like with the hate thrown towards peaceful climate activists, it is not a sign that you’re doing a bad job.

Your original comment is passive-aggressive. You decry that people aren’t doing their due dilligence but don’t actually provide your perspective on the story or give any indication that you’ve put in any effort of your own. Unless you believe that legal definitions and jury trials are simply right, in which case, wow, you’re such a leftist.

If you want to have a fact based conversation, it would be nice if you came with facts instead of just claiming they exist.

If you want to discuss about what kind of killing is worth calling murder, it would be nice if you explained your position.

Your original comment is incredibly passive-aggressive.

I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it’s not perfect, but the difference is obvious.

Your mistake is seeing them as Democrat voters. Maybe if the Republicans had a brown candidate they would vote for them instead.

tl;dr: Peer pressure is a normal and healthy part of communication. You use it in this comment and it is baked into this website through the karma system. Using it for disagreement and not just conformity is important to keep groups attached to meaningful values. I don’t think “What the fuck is wrong with you” is unfriending, and I think that sort of harsh peer pressure can be and was justified by its context. I think you’re mistakenly arguing against peer pressure in general and absolute terms when your issue is specific and one of degrees.

Indeed it is a poor tool for determining whether the intended goals are worthy. That’s what the entire rest of the comment that people have been systematically ignoring is for. Condemnation is the sledgehammer in a suite of construction tools, itself unable to tell whether it is in the right place doing the right thing, but justified (or not) by it context.

And, like I said, upvote karma is peer pressure. People can see at a glance how many people will see something and how many people agree with it in a way that becomes a self-fulfilling Keynesian Beauty Contest. If you truly believe peer pressure is wrong, then the lemmy architecture is fundamentally hostile to you. If an invective adds toxicity to the soil, then the soil here is full of lead already.

But the reason civil debate between neutral people has so little part in progress is because nobody is truly neutral, not because so few people choose to be civil. Marxism works well as a model for society because people are by nature hypocritical. Philosophy, culture, and social groups are a layer of topsoil, vegetation, and human structures covering the mountains of what we think benefits us personally over the course of our lives. Argumentation can redirect superficial flows, which occasionally allows for a key watershed moment where your way of life is redirected onto another plausible course, and that course over time changes the geography. Sometimes that redirection means taking a sledgehammer to a wall.

I agree that it is easy to cooperate with people when you only care about liking and trusting them. That’s how you get social groups and movements that are entirely detached from reality, a bog of stagnant water. If you want a social group to have sensible, actionable beliefs rather than descend into circlejerk, you need the members of your group to be systematically willing to cause offense when it improves the group’s ability to interact with the outside world. And for them to be systematically willing, you need to react positively to them doing so. Otherwise, over time, the detritus and resistance builds up in that channel and it clogs up, and the flow becomes stagnant or goes elsewhere.

When you ask me to choose people liking and trusting each other over processing disagreement, you are not opting out of peer pressure. You’re simply using (soft) peer pressure to enforce group norms that are about cameraderie rather than beliefs.

I do not consider the application of peer pressure to be outside the scope of good faith argument, otherwise I would not be on this website with its karma system, I would not reply to you when you talk about whether or not people will like me, and in fact I would not be able to communicate with anyone. I don’t feel like @solo is an enemy or an unfriend, just someone who needed a wake-up call.

I don’t see saying “what the fuck is wrong with you” after someone says something horrendous as abusive. I would personally genuinely appreciate that kind of clarity if I said something that revealed a fucked up underlying attitude, when accompanied with a sensible explanation. It’s an emotive way of saying that you’re noticing something deeply wrong with someone’s worldview, and opens up the talk in that context. And honestly, I doubt you or others on here are unfamiliar with that sort of usage and don’t partake in good-faith invectives yourselves on occasion.

Honestly, I think that maybe y’all have talked yourselves into a corner arguing against peer pressure and invectives in general when you really only disagree with how (and whether) it was applied in this instance. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.