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Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

Here's an article about his appointment to director of HIV/AIDS prevention from February 2021. Look at his career: he's been working in HIV/AIDS nearly his entire adult life and career. He's been working on increasing public health within stigmatized populations by focusing on harm reduction that entire time. Hell, this is someone with the institutional memory to remember Anthony Fauci's piss poor treatment of HIV during the Reagan administration and carry a grudge because the man didn't go far enough.

By the way, this is absolutely an example of harm reduction in terms of exercising your right to vote: there is zero chance that an advocate like Daskalakis would have been appointed under a Trump administration, but the incoming Biden administration installed him in the previous director position (which he still holds, as he adds monkeypox to his case load) as early as late 2020, before Biden was even properly inaugurated. That doesn't mean this administration is perfect or that we can't continue to agitate for better change, but it does mean that things are better and fewer people are going to die. That's basic harm reduction in action: you focus on survival for the most people as your metric, you take the route that results in the best outcome for the situation you have, and you do not ever let the imaginary perfect become the enemy of the tangible better.

Like no we're not going to just throw you out, or put you in camps, or any of that shit. We just want to be able to take care of our ancestral land and be the ones in charge of protecting it.

Like I know these people were raised with a colonial mindset but after a while I just start to lose sympathy.

What will change for you, Whitey McWhiterson, if LandBack takes place?

Not a whole fucking lot.

You might be incentivized to switch to less-polluting modes of transportation, such as biking. Gas might be discouraged.

The environment might be prioritized.

You might become a citizen of, say, Mi'kma'ki instead of the USA.

Your kids might be taught an Indigenous language in schools.

History class would be a lot more up front.

But your day to day life? Very little will change. You're not gonna be kicked out if your house. You're not gonna be rounded up and put into a camp. You might be required to have the minimum basic decency towards the environment. It will be the Sovreign Peoples running the show.

But you, Joe Shmoe, will be left alone to live your life.

Wildflower meadows are beautiful; so beautiful in fact that a village in Britain has found they act as natural speed traps from motorists slowing down to look at them.

The village of Long Newnton in Gloucestershire has a problem with fast moving through-traffic between nearby towns. Almost all drivers moving through areas they frequent will break posted speed limits, and neither a 30 mile per hour limit, nor warning signs made any difference.

Officials first planted flowers along the roadside during the pandemic to help improve biodiversity.

Gettin real tired of this idea that by critiquing liberalism and Democrats, and by saying we need a more qualitatively leftist transformation of society that goes beyond the status quo, that we're saying "don't vote". Yes, vote, get Trump and Republicans out of office. I 100% support this. But that doesn't mean it should be our end goal. The above meme wants you to just put up with whatever Democrats represent, regardless of how neoliberal and imperialist they are. Yes, reform comes before revolution, but Democrats so very rarely even scrape the threshold of reform. Sure, vote for them in opposition to conservatives, but recognize their limitations and explore ideas beyond them.

Alex Steffen

Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.