Ginger Snap

In this video from the Washington Post on the horrific situation in Charlottesville, white nationalist Sean Patrick Nielsen said that in addition to “standing up for local white identity” and “the free market,” his top value as a Republican was killing Jews:

“Right? You don’t see me fuckin’ goin’ into your shitty man-stables and tellin’ you how to milk horses, do ya? So instead you come down here, disrespect me, disrespect my pa, and how ‘bout you stop fuckin’ disrespectin’ the Great Fuckin’ Tree that grew whens’t the world was young and carries all our fates ‘n its boughs, okay?

“I said, ‘okay?’

“Aw, honey, bless yer heart. Yer tellin’ me that little thing there is yer final form? Why, it ain’t no bigger than that dragon we fought that time in Abracamden! You remember that, Harlan?”

On women’s anger

so basically: instead of saying “can i ask you a question?” and sending just that (which, as a person with an anxiety disorder, makes my anxiety go into hyperdrive) go “can i ask you a question about ___?”

Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.

The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.

Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.

And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.

These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served.

While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

There are other problems with relying on market forces to drive a “renewable revolution.” One of those was highlighted in a recent issue of the Economist, under the tantalizing headline: “Clean energy’s dirty secret.”

This wasn’t, as you might think, a form of clickbait for coal industry executives or Australian politicians looking for a “dirty” centerfold spread on how wind farms and solar panels are bad for the environment. As a mouthpiece for the liberal wing of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie, the Economist is prepared to admit the benefits of moving toward a decarbonized global economy.

The “dirty secret” is that renewables are too cheap. “It is no longer far-fetched,” the magazine says, “to think that the world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and cheap power.” There is, however, “a $20 trillion hitch”:

To get from here to there requires huge amounts of investment over the next few decades…Normally investors like putting their money into electricity because it offers reliable returns. Yet green energy has a dirty secret. The more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source.

Here’s a secret: it’s not OUR JOB to adapt to the market. It’s not OUR JOB to buy napkins and golf clubs and drive to the mall on the other side of town to make sure it doesn’t go out of business.

Did previous generations kill the horse and wagons after the car was invited? Did those lazy citizens kill the town crier by buying into that newfangled newspaper business?

What people want and are ready to spend their money on will change over time. Today we have different goals and different standards - like I will invite my friends over for dinner and instead of napkins I’ll put a roll of paper towels on the table. And my friends won’t clutch their pearls and hiss “you uncultured swine” at me, because we value that paper towels are cheap and efficient! Napkins may be pretty but some of them end up being unused, and I’ll have to throw them away after the dinner and it’s a fucking waste.

Did your mall end up as an empty husk outside of town because those pesky millennials buy all their clothes online now? You lucky son of a gun. Now you get to use your ~*IMAGINATION*~ and repurpose that ugly windowless box into something actually useful. Why not a nice office space? (x)

Or how about you make the old stores into cute micro apartments? I WOULD LOVE TO LIVE IN ONE OF THESE! (x)

Are the stores fine but the parking lot empty because those cheap hipsters would rather take a bus or bike to the mall instead of buying a car like regular people? Do like they did in Seattle and turn it into a fucking beautiful water treatment facility and park. (x)

This thing collects storm-water runoff to create and provide nutrients to small pools and green areas. It works like a natural creek that ALSO filters out pollutants that would damage the salmon population! AS A MILLENNIAL I CAN SAY THAT THIS IS SO FUCKING UP MY ALLEY YOU HAVE NO IDEA. I WOULD GO TO THAT MALL, BUY A COFFEE AND GO OUT TO LOOK AT THE BIRDS.

Actual fucking plovers. When was the last time a parking lot did something for the environment except gathering upp more roadkill for the scavengers?

I could also go into why no-one is watching shitty sitcoms or boring movies because we have access to so much media that we can filter out the generic stuff that doesn’t appeal to us, but that is an essay in itself. We are extremely capable on spending it on media that speaks to us though (hey this is unrelated but did you know that Wonder Woman has passed 570M$ worldwide?)

TLDR: Market powers are entitled and used to people spending an ever-increasing amount of money on their shitty products. When this trend turns they are too unimaginative and lazy to do something about it so instead they’ll whine about how their former customers are “killing” them.