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Latest Posts by angrykeese - Page 4
one of the best ways i’ve found to combat that inherent depressive pessimism without veering into toxic positivity territory is simply the phrase “i’m open to the possibility”
this particularly works with anything negative i’ve forecasted. “i woke up feeling like shit today, so my day is gonna suck” isn’t a particularly helpful thought, but “it’s a great day to be alive!!!!!” feels hollow and insincere when i have a pounding headache & am running on three hours of sleep
instead i’ll tell myself, “i really don’t feel good right now, but i’m open to the possibility that coffee and breakfast might perk me up a bit.” or “i’m in a lot of pain today, but i’m open to the possibility that my workday might still have fun parts despite that”
sometimes, when your impulse is to slam the door on anything good, but you’re not exactly up to going out & hunting it down yourself, leaving the door open just a crack makes all the difference
I'm so serious about being kind above all else. it has genuinely changed the way I interact with the world on a fundamental level and has made me so so much happier.
In a bit of a Slay the Princess Mood.
Full uncensored art (and more close ups) is under 👇 read more 👇
❗️Trigger warning : blood, gore, body horror
New megadrawing 🎉yuppie🎉
I attempted to draw every princess in the game (at this point of time) 👸
Most likely missed a few, but tried my best to catch them all™️
✨👀 @blacktabbygames
Sometimes I feel like the only one who never bought for a second that Gertrude was this doddering old lady who was starting to go senile. She’s the previous archivist, our protagonists predecessor in the Magnus Institute, and only eleven episodes in, we were being told that Gertrude faced a horrible end. I never saw the archives being a mess as her being really disorganized and going all “Oh silly me”, I saw it as Jon walking in on her room-wide pin and thread conspiracy board without context.
TMA is so hilarious for introducing Gertrude from the perspective of someone who never knew her, letting us assume she was a confused, old lady losing her touch, only to then reveal she was a morally fucked up arsonist that tried to burn down her workplace, killed like two of her assistants, was an active menace to society and nuisance to all the Avatars, and arguably one of the most badass characters in the series.
Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.
" The key " Milky Way. Rocca Calascio Castle. Abruzzo , Italy .
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.
@blacktabbygames You seen this one before?
Hi,
I hope this message finds you well. My friend's @bilalhammadsblog family in Gaza is facing an incredibly difficult time, having lost everything due to the ongoing conflict. They are in urgent need of basic necessities
We've set up a GoFundMe to support them, and it would mean the world to me if you could help by sharing this link with your friends and family
Thank you so much for your support.
https://gofund.me/491b6f98
Bilal’s gofundme is legit. They are at €32,909/€70,000 donations so far
hi ibtisam i’m glad you had a good day :)
also if you want some good news: I’m running a small art fundraiser that’s raised over $200 in less than two weeks! the gofundme we’re donating to has a goal of 30k usd, so $200 might not be that much compared to the end goal, I’m still glad we’re able to help in whatever small way we can.
oh and here is the gofundme if anyone else wants to donate! https://gofund.me/6c6d2ccd
That’s great news! No amount is too small for donating <3 here is a clickable link for anyone who wants to donate
They're quite close to their goals, please boost!
This is potentially life saving information everyone should know.
I mean Susie does get all of the development and is arguably the real hero of the story.
have either of you played deltarune if so who is your favorite character?
susie for both of us no contest
hello please look at our daughter
VERIFIED AS REAL
PLEASE READ AND REBLOG🇵🇸
HELP Muhammad evacuate his family out of GAZA
I know that all of you may feel bored with me constantly sharing the campaign here, but I assure you I have no other choice in order to save my family from annihilation and the difficulties we are living through,Please donate, share and spread the word.
Dear friends and kind strangers,I urgently need your support to help me raise funds to evacuate my family out of Gaza. This is the only way to help them survive. It breaks my heart that it has come to this, but this fundraiser is my last window of hope to secure the necessary funds to evacuate them. My father and my two brothers urgently require medical attention, and time is of the essence. I am Eman Abu Hayya. I have survived four Israeli assaults on Gaza before leaving to pursue my studies in Philosophy in Doha, Qatar, back in 2017. While I reside in Qatar, my entire family remains in the Gaza Strip, trapped amidst the cruel and harrowing reality of ongoing genocide. My aim is to facilitate the evacuation of my loved ones from Gaza to ensure they receive the critical medical care they urgently need and to shield them from the constant threat of Israeli bombings and the dire scarcity of clean water, food, and healthcare. My family consists of 11 members: my mother Najat (49), my father Akram (60), three brothers Ahmed, Yahya and Zakaria (30, 27, and 22), one sister Shaima (24), two sisters-in-law Wafa and Hana (25 and 24), and three young nieces and nephews Najat, Hayat and Gaith (aged 1, 2, and 5). They deserve the chance to live full lives, and I cannot bear the thought of losing any of them. My two little nieces’ names mean Life and Survival (Hayat and Najat), respectively. Let’s help make these two names a living reality through your kind donations.
Please help Eman. Donations have slowed down but my family's situation remains dire. Her family's house was destroyed. One of her brothers sustained a serious injury during the bombing which requires surgery while another has a serious medical conditions requiring immediate medical intervention. On top of all of that her father has diabetes. Not to mention the two children above.
Please please donate. Share if you can't
Any support to my family in Palestine
Guys this family has been raising funds since May 10th and they've only received €30 out of 40,000
Khalil and his wife Amal have 4 kids.
Mohammed, 10, who you can see lost weight due to the genocide, famine and displacements
Sara, 16 years old, Ibrahim, 14, Karim, 12
The family is currently trapped in Rafah and they need our help to rebuild their lives. Donate. Boost if you can't
PLEASE DON’T SCROLL ☹️
I only raised $240 out of $10,000💔
Please guys support me so I can complete my education 😔
Please Boost my link 🥺
@90-ghost @fairuzfan @ibtisams @fallahifag @vakarians-babe @sar-soor @plomegranate @nabulsi @el-shab-hussein
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.
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.
WAA shenanigens
I don't think a lot of people realize how addictive outrage can be. You do get a dopamine hit from feeling and expressing outrage, so your own biology rewards you for it.
I feel like I see it more on facebook these days, but it is on every social media website that you're getting posts meant to inspire outrage thrown into your feed or dash or whatever. And so many people really are addicted to scrolling and looking at videos and posts that inspire outrage in them and getting more dopamine from expressing their outrage in the comments.
Being addicted to outrage on the internet is only going to make you miserable. If you find yourself scrolling and looking for things to express your outrage at and getting a little high from feeling and expressing that outrage, maybe it's time to take a step back. I promise you will feel happier if you stop spending all your time outraged at silly posts on the internet.
Israeli army shells reach us. They saved the lives of me and my wife, by making a financial donation through my PayPal wallet.
there is something horrifically grim to it, but illustrations for gaza and palestinians tend to catch more mass attention that actual photos of people. this made me feel incredibly helpless for a long while, seeing both how people would rather look at a neat drawing of red black green and white than look a human in the eyes, and how online platforms would rather push a viral drawing while suppressing those begging for help at the same time.
a way to cope with this feeling has been taking advantage of it to directly guide people to helping palestinians.
if art gets better traction, then there’s an incredible amount of good that can be done by creating art that immediately links to fundraisers. creating art of the many images of those who are asking for help.
within hours of posting my drawing, there has been jumps in the thousands for bashar from gaza’s fundraiser. it’s a small effort in the grand scheme of things. it’s not a fix it. but it’s something good. please take care of each other and do what you can. i think this could help a lot of people if a lot of people did it.
here is bashar. i’ve drawn him, spoken to him, and known him now for a few months. any shares help, any art helps. draw who you see, draw what you see. thanks all
Due to arguments about how to fansub this line, I have determined this should be a nice middle ground.