The Arcane Tag Is So Funny Right Now

altered.substack.com

People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people)

How charisma feels

This is a fascinating read that does not tell you what you should make of the author's observations:

Interactions with [charismatic people] come with the least number of strings attached. It feels like they are just having fun, lightly playing with possibilities. They are not holding love hostage when you don't act in accordance with their desires. They respect your autonomy and intuition. They approach your presence with gratitude, but don't demand you stay forever. There is no hint of scarcity. They live in the realm of what is possible and abundant. There is little tension in their attentional field. Because they are in a fluid and spacious yet highly receptive and responsive state, they can meet you exactly where you are and entertain whatever comes up. They can flirt, joke around, dream, and love without restraint. They are not afraid of what happens, because no matter what happens, they know it will be fundamentally okay. I've noticed they don't leave what feels like a sticky "trace" after they are gone. I certainly remember them more vividly and am more deeply touched by them than others, but it lacks the feeling of molasses. This impression of sticky traces is very personal so I should probably illustrate what I mean with examples: I get the sticky traces when people guilt me, are passive aggressive, pedestalize me, ask things of me I don't believe are what they truly want and if I gave it to them anyway it's like feeding a hungry ghost. Every interaction with them feels like they are saying, "please love me" or "please make me feel okay" or "please give me a chance" or "I need you." This makes engaging with them complicated, not because I don't care about them, but because engaging with them is a bit of a foolish game where it won't really get you what you want and will also hurt me in the process, and this keeps me from wanting to get close. I can tell they have a series of tough knots, and they are haunted by them, but I cannot unknot it for them. I can only watch compassionately and try to point them to how they can unknot themselves, and also be present to the stickiness, because it is there. The stickiness accumulates like gunk that I then have to meditate, journal about, or otherwise process. It solidifies and reifies experience, convincing us the set of infinite possibilities is anything but infinite and boundless. It suffocates. Charismatic people are like empty vessels. They receive and pass on sensations without resistance. They are usually the one with the most regulated nervous system in the room, which allows them to encounter other people's ego/attentional structures and dance with them no matter what the exact configuration is, which is why charismatic people are charismatic to a wide variety of people—they literally fit better together with people in general! Contrast this with someone who has very rigid expectations or ideas of what kind of experience they *should* be having and fighting off what is arising if it conflicts with what they want. If a person with a very particular and rigid structure encounters a wide swath of people, the percentage of people their shape "fits" well with is a lot slimmer.

Daily reminder to please PLEASE don’t just read headlines, even if you think the headline tells you everything you need to know, there’s always more to learn about a situation then what can be conveyed in a single catchy sentence.

Foreign Policy

No, It’s Not Too Late to Save the Planet

Doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis.

Climate denial may be on the decline, but a phenomenon at least as injurious to the cause of climate protection has blossomed beside it: doomism, or the belief that there’s no way to halt the Earth’s ascendant temperatures. Burgeoning ranks of doomers throw up their hands, crying that it’s too late, too hard, too costly to save humanity from near-future extinction.

There are numerous strands of doomism. The followers of ecologist Guy McPherson, for example, gravitate to wild conspiracy theories that claim humanity won’t last another decade. Many young people, understandably overwhelmed by negative climate headlines and TikTok videos, are convinced that all engagement is for naught. Even the Guardian, which boasts superlative climate coverage, sometimes publishes alarmist articles and headlines that exaggerate grim climate projections.

This gloom-and-doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis. As a writer on climate and energy, I am convinced that we have everything we require to go carbon neutral by 2050: the science, the technology, the policy proposals, and the money, as well as an international agreement in which nearly 200 countries have pledged to contain the crisis. We don’t need a miracle or exorbitantly expensive nuclear energy to stave off the worst. The Gordian knot before us is figuring out how to use the resources we already have in order to make that happen.

One particularly insidious form of doomism is exhibited in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, originally published in 2020 and translated from Japanese into English this year. In his unlikely international bestseller, Saito, a Marxist philosopher, puts forth the familiar thesis that economic growth and decarbonization are inherently at odds. He goes further, though, and speculates that the climate crisis can only be curbed in a classless, commons-based society. Capitalism, he writes, seeks to “use all the world’s resources and labor power, opening new markets and never passing up even the slightest chance to make more money.”

Capitalism’s record is indeed damning. The United States and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s emissions since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, yet the global south suffers most egregiously from climate breakdown. Today, the richest tenth of the world’s population—living overwhelmingly in the global north and China—is responsible for half of global emissions. If the super-rich alone cut their footprints down to the size of the average European, global emissions would fall by a third, Saito writes.

Saito’s self-stated goals aren’t that distinct from mine: a more egalitarian, sustainable, and just society. One doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist to find the gaping disparities in global income grotesque or to see the restructuring of the economy as a way to address both climate breakdown and social injustice. But his central argument—that climate justice can’t happen within a market economy of any kind—is flawed. In fact, it serves next to no purpose because more-radical-than-thou theories remove it from the nuts-and-bolts debate about the way forward.

We already possess a host of mechanisms and policies that can redistribute the burdens of climate breakdown and forge a path to climate neutrality. They include carbon pricing, wealth and global transaction taxes, debt cancellation, climate reparations, and disaster risk reduction, among others. Economies regulated by these policies are a distant cry from neoliberal capitalism—and some, particularly in Europe, have already chalked up marked accomplishments in reducing emissions.

Saito himself acknowledges that between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s GDP increased by 27 percent while emissions fell by 9 percent and that Germany and Denmark also logged decoupling. He writes off this trend as exclusively the upshot of economic stagnation following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. However, U.K. emissions have continued to fall, plummeting from 959 million to 582 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2007 and 2020. The secret to Britain’s success, which Saito doesn’t mention, was the creation of a booming wind power sector and trailblazing carbon pricing system that forced coal-fired plants out of the market practically overnight. Nor does Saito consider that from 1990 to 2022, the European Union reduced its emissions by 31 percent while its economy grew by 66 percent.

Climate protection has to make strides where it can, when it can, and experts acknowledge that it’s hard to change consumption patterns—let alone entire economic systems—rapidly. Progress means scaling back the most harmful types of consumption and energy production. It is possible to do this in stages, but it needs to be implemented much faster than the current plodding pace.

This is why Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, is infinitely more pertinent to the public discourse on climate than Saito’s esoteric work. Ritchie’s book is a noble attempt to illustrate that environmental protection to date boasts impressive feats that can be built on, even as the world faces what she concedes is an epic battle to contain greenhouse gases.

Ritchie underscores two environmental afflictions that humankind solved through a mixture of science, smart policy, and international cooperation: acid rain and ozone depletion. I’m old enough to remember the mid-1980s, when factories and power plants spewed out sulfurous and nitric emissions and acid rain blighted forests from the northeastern United States to Eastern Europe. Acidic precipitation in the Adirondacks, my stomping grounds at the time, decimated pine forests and mountain lakes, leaving ghostly swaths of dead timber. Then, scientists pinpointed the industries responsible, and policymakers designed a cap-and-trade system that put a price on their emissions, which forced industry into action; for example, power plants had to fit scrubbers on their flue stacks. The harmful pollutants dropped by 80 percent by the end of the decade, and forests grew back.

The campaign to reverse the thinning of the ozone layer also bore fruit. An international team of scientists deduced that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and aerosol cans were to blame. Despite fierce industry pushback, more than 40 countries came together in Montreal in 1987 to introduce a staggered ban on CFCs. Since then, more countries joined the Montreal Protocol, and CFCs are now largely a relic of the past. As Ritchie points out, this was the first international pact of any kind to win the participation of every nation in the world.

While these cases instill inspiration, Ritchie’s assessment of our current crisis is a little too pat and can veer into the Panglossian. The climate crisis is many sizes larger in scope than the scourges of the 1980s, and its antidote—to Saito’s credit—entails revamping society and economy on a global scale, though not with the absolutist end goal of degrowth communism.

Ritchie doesn’t quite acknowledge that a thoroughgoing restructuring is necessary. Although she does not invoke the term, she is an acolyte of “green growth.” She maintains that tweaks to the world’s current economic system can improve the living standards of the world’s poorest, maintain the global north’s level of comfort, and achieve global net zero by 2050. “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact,” she writes. For her, the big question is whether the world can decouple growth and emissions in time to stave off the darkest scenarios.

Ritchie approaches today’s environmental disasters—air pollution, deforestation, carbon-intensive food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing—as problems solvable in ways similar to the crises of the 1980s. Like CFCs and acid rain, so too can major pollutants such as black carbon and carbon monoxide be reined in. Ritchie writes that the “solution to air pollution … follows just one basic principle: stop burning stuff.” As she points out, smart policy has already enhanced air quality in cities such as Beijing (Warsaw, too, as a recent visit convinced me), and renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power globally. What we have to do, she argues, is roll renewables out en masse.

The devil is in making it happen. Ritchie admits that environmental reforms must be accelerated many times over, but she doesn’t address how to achieve this or how to counter growing pushback against green policies. Just consider the mass demonstrations across Europe in recent months as farmers have revolted against the very measures for which Ritchie (correctly) advocates, such as cutting subsidies to diesel gas, requiring crop rotation, eliminating toxic pesticides, and phasing down meat production. Already, the farmers’ vehemence has led the EU to dilute important legislation on agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity.

Ritchie’s admonishes us to walk more, take public transit, and eat less beef. Undertaken individually, this won’t change anything. But she acknowledges that sound policy is key—chiefly, economic incentives to steer markets and consumer behavior. Getting the right parties into office, she writes, should be voters’ priority.

Yet the parties fully behind Ritchie’s agenda tend to be the Green parties, which are largely in Northern Europe and usually garner little more than 10 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe, environmentalism is badmouthed by center-right and far-right politicos, many of whom lead or participate in governments, as in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. And while she argues that all major economies must adopt carbon pricing like the EU’s cap-and-trade system, she doesn’t address how to get the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, to introduce this nationwide or even expand its two carbon markets currently operating regionally—one encompassing 12 states on the East Coast, the other in California.

History shows that the best way to make progress in the battle to rescue our planet is to work with what we have and build on it. The EU has a record of exceeding and revising its emissions reduction targets. In the 1990s, the bloc had the modest goal of sinking greenhouse gases to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12; by 2012, it had slashed them by an estimated 18 percent. More recently, the 2021 European Climate Law adjusted the bloc’s target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from 40 percent to at least 55 percent by 2030, and the European Commission is considering setting the 2040 target to 90 percent below 1990 levels.

This process can’t be exclusively top down. By far the best way for everyday citizens to counter climate doomism is to become active beyond individual lifestyle choices—whether that’s by bettering neighborhood recycling programs, investing in clean tech equities, or becoming involved in innovative clean energy projects.

Take, for example, “community energy,” which Saito considers briefly and Ritchie misses entirely. In the 1980s, Northern Europeans started to cobble together do-it-yourself cooperatives, in which citizens pooled money to set up renewable energy generation facilities. Many of the now more than 9,000 collectives across the EU are relatively small—the idea is to stay local and decentralized—but larger co-ops illustrate that this kind of enterprise can function at scale. For example, Belgium’s Ecopower, which forgoes profit and reinvests in new energy efficiency and renewables projects, provides 65,000 members with zero-carbon energy at a reduced price.

Grassroots groups and municipalities are now investing in nonprofit clean energy generation in the United States, particularly in California and Minnesota. This takes many forms, including solar fields; small wind parks; electricity grids; and rooftop photovoltaic arrays bolted to schools, parking lots, and other public buildings. Just as important as co-ownership—in contrast to mega-companies’ domination of the fossil fuel market—is democratic decision-making. These start-ups, usually undertaken by ordinary citizens, pry the means of generation out of the hands of the big utilities, which only grudgingly alter their business models.

Around the world, the transition is in progress—and ideally, could involve all of us. The armchair prophets of doom should either join in or, at the least, sit on the sidelines quietly. The last thing we need is more people sowing desperation and angst. They play straight into the court of the fossil fuel industry.

so what's the take on epstein 5 years out. did he really do it?

Also, the other reason it feels weird to me when people do the whole leftist talking point thing about how something like punishment or prison is always bad but THEN clearly think some people deserve the book thrown at them is, like…

When I did social services type pf work, i found it really difficult to work with people I knew had abused kids. Especially the ones who said things like, “you’re only wincing at that because you’re white, it’s so cute” or even worse, the ones who said “Look. My son is DISABLED. I can’t reason with him. I have to hit him, because nothing else works. And I have to use my belt, because he doesn’t respond to less pain than that. The courts are just wrong.” (Yes, I’ve heard that one repeatedly.)

If I could I’d ask other people tp handle these cases. But I couldn’t always, and sometimes I felt like askin* would mean having to disclose my own history to the coworker I was asking t9 take this stuff on when I didn’t want to.

So in some cases, repeating to myself “she’s a person, all persons should be fed, therefore I will help her to apply for food stamps and then run to the bathroom to clean myself because I feel dirty” was the only thing that kept me from saying no.

Which… I shouldn’t be unfair to people who haven’t experienced this thing. But it still troubles me when People spout “human rights are universal!” but then are like “shoot abusers dead on sight.”

Because like… you’re conveniently defining “human” to not include people you hate, there.

“Once you accept that Nazis, or pedophiles, or other evil people are subhuman, your definition of “Nazi” can be expanded.” Was literally just thinking about that. I’m hanging onto that quote.

Some common leftist beliefs

I've been seeing some peculiar beliefs in leftist spaces recently.

• Nazis are literally subhuman and deserve to die.

• Zionism is a Nazi movement

• All Jews are secretly zionists

To an outside observer, these beliefs can look innocent (I am far too guilty of number 1, honestly) but the problem is a lot of people believe all three. By the transitive property, they believe that all Jews are subhuman and deserve to die. That is a very familiar and terrifying sentiment to us Jews.

Be careful dehumanizing literally anyone. Once you accept that Nazis, or pedophiles, or other evil people are subhuman, your definition of "Nazi" can be expanded. It can even be expanded to include groups that were originally targeted in the Holocaust. Do better.

I want to die in Gaza. I'm not very interested in my life, but please don't let me see my sisters and brothers die in front of me. Please help us evacuate them from Gaza. There isn't much money left to evacuate them. Please donate and share the campaign..

gofundme.com

Donate to Save Maliha family: Urgent Evacuation Fund, organized by Dina Maliha

Hello, I am Nora Maliha from the devastated Gaza Strip. I am 24 years old, stud… Dina Maliha needs your support for Save Maliha family: Urge

I know I've been posting more about politics lately, and it's caused me to lose a chunk of followers.

But I'm a queer person with a degree in political science and its an election year. I'm old friends with several of my city council members. I've been to trainings on how to run elections. I spent my college years working for nonprofits (and being the world's worst canvasser). I'm close with more than one person who works for unions, and I have family members who work for government agencies.

I think about politics in a very pragmatic "I know how the sausage is made" kind of way. We're in a vice press, and there's only one way to release the pressure.

The revolution ain't coming. There is no one to save us but us.

So yeah, I'm going to be pissed if your answer is "let them tighten the vice -- there's no way out of the vice, it doesn't matter if they loosen or tighten it."

There's a difference, and anyone telling you otherwise is likely a psyop or someone who fell for a psyop. This literally happened before, and it's happening again.

Stop falling for it.