that buzzing noise in the distance

Human Rights Watch reported recently on the Israeli military torturing health care workers. I won't describe it. It's the worst and most detestable level of human capability for cruelty. They were trying to force the doctors to confess to being part of Hamas and in some cases threatened to do horrible things to the doctors' families.

I don't understand the reaction of people that still support Israel. They think the attack by Hamas was terrible and unjustifiable—Yes, I understand that part

But we have reliable reports from numerous news and human rights organizations that the Israeli military is doing all of the same stuff and worse.

People say "I think what Hamas did is unacceptable", but supporting the actions of the Israeli military means they think those things are acceptable. If killing massive numbers of innocent civilians and torturing and raping prisoners for being "maybe" associated with the enemy is okay, why the hell would Hamas make you upset.

If this "Has To" happen or is "unavoidable" or "just the way war is," why are we, like, alive? Why be alive, if not in defiance of that?

If you think that thousands of human beings, who hope, love, and suffer, must die in agony in order for other people to be "safe," why even want to be "safe?" Why value safety?

Its just. What? A world without torture and genocide is not worth imagining—and you're just, here? Walking around? Living? With that idea existing in your fucking skull? The idea that, the life of a person will always be at the expense of other people's, and the best any human can possibly aspire to is to stand on top of a pyramid made of the murder and torture of other human beings?

Now I can say it (because before this my NDA was still holding me back): Chrome’s incognito mode still tracks you, just at a slightly broader level with some data anonymization. It has been this way for years, and building the feature this way was a deliberate business decision to deceive users into thinking their browsing was private in order to make more money from advertising.

(Meanwhile, while running their own private businesses and investments, they are quite comfortable with the idea of spending a little money to get a lot more money. They’re quite familiar with it, because that’s the most common way get more money than you can acquire with your basic human labor. You spend money to get even more of it. That’s how investments work.)

Bear that in mind when you see conservatives attack plans to improve infrastructure. They’ll complain about raised taxes, the lack of a magical money tree, the fact that some left-leaning people have not spent money well, the fact that all of these (potholes/unhoused people/crime/crumbling windows/closed-down libraries) indicates that THERE IS NO EXTRA MONEY AND PEOPLE ARE POOR AND THOSE NASTY LEFTIES WANT TO STEAL EVEN MORE FROM YOU.

It is vitally important to the operation of conservative power that everyone be in a scarcity mindset. Everything from Sam vimes boot theory on how The Poors have to buy things, to how The Poors expect our tax money to be administered, is beneficial to conservative power; therefore it is of great benefit to them that everything The Poors want has to be framed, first, in the idea that “we are too poor and can afford nothing.” In fact, it would be perfect for the conservative governments of the world if The Poors agree on being too poor and self-absorbed in our collective poverty to invest in anything at all - not education, not trains, not clean water or safe air or a stable climate or pretty wild birds - those things are nice to have, we already agree, but we really can’t afford them: and are distrustful of anyone so unrealistically rich that they think we can. The self-imposed austerity mindset is perfect for a secure power conservative base. All they have to do is regularly remind The Poors that we can’t afford anything, and we’ll do the rest of the work.

This solar panel story is great because it has a clear trajectory from beginning to end. The school gathered supporters and funds; they spent some money (and time, and research, and faith, and trust) on solar panels, and ended up making a profit. In fact they made so much money that they could spend it on other things. You can take two seconds to look at the story and agree: infrastructure usually pays its dividends. Infrastructure, in fact, is an investment.

Bear in mind that there are many delightful projects, actively happening around you right now, that will be killed at the moment their parents start trying to gather money and supporters for them. The cry will go up “we can’t afford that.” “We aren’t made of money.”

Where possible, I advise: take the two minutes of attention that you spend on the satisfaction of the solar panel story. Take those two minutes to unpick whether the project is actually an investment. Many budgets can afford investments. Most budgets appreciate having assets even more.

i'm reading this book The Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks

and even from the beginning i was getting this weird feeling from it. I'm always really wary of books that are broad overviews of history that claim to explore big theory-of-everything explanations for very broad phenomena, because history is unbelievably complex and there is so much disagreement between historians about everything.

But anyway I come to this section (in the first chapter)

This writer's opinion is that the Americas seemed so abundant when English settlers first arrived because the Native Americans had been mostly killed, and as a result, the wildlife increased greatly in numbers and forests overtook the farms, creating what appeared to be a natural paradise.

I'm immediately suspicious of this paragraph because arguing that the mass death of Native Americans was good for nature seems really contradictory to the research I've explored, on top of being just...disgusting.

But it doesn't sound right in regards to how ecosystems work either. If populations of animals had recently exploded after millennia of being limited by a major predator, it would cause the plants to be overwhelmed by the herbivore populations. The land would be stripped barren and eroded, and soon the animals would be weak and starving.

So I thought to myself, huh, a citation. I will look at the citation and see what it says.

It's a book called Changes in the Land by William Cronon, who seems to be one of the most important and respected guys in his field. I thought, I have to find this book. So I did, I found the book, and spent like an hour reading through it.

And what I discovered, is that Cronon's book directly contradicts what Marks says in the paragraph that cites Cronon?!

So basically this entire book, Changes in the Land, is a detailed exploration of how the arrival of English settlers, the decline of Native American populations, and the slow transition to European farming and land use practices caused increasing degradation to the ecosystem, beginning very early on in colonization.

Changes in the Land quotes a great array of documents from the colonial period where settlers observed the soil becoming depleted, animals disappearing, and the climate itself becoming more hostile even in the 1600's. It's actually a really fascinating book.

Cronon tells us that Native Americans created lush and abundant conditions for wild animals by causing a "mosaic" of habitats, with different areas representing various stages of ecological succession. With this great diversity in habitats, and lots of transitional "edges" between them, the prosperity of the animal life was maximized. This was intentional, and really a type of farming.

The book essentially explains how European settlers couldn't recognize Native American life ways as "agriculture," they thought the land was just supernaturally abundant all by itself because of its inherent nature, and yet almost immediately after settlers came, the abundance of the land degraded and vanished. The settlers cut down vast amounts of trees, which caused erosion, which destroyed the river and stream ecosystems and starved the soil of nutrients. Destruction of forest caused less rain, and more extreme temperatures. It became a vicious cycle where the settlers had to abuse the land more and more just to survive.

The spiral pulled in Native American communities too, forcing them to turn to more exploitative means of survival like the fur trade, (which depleted the beaver population, which caused the decline of beaver ponds, which harmed the whole forest). It describes how the changing ecosystems left Native Americans with no choice but to turn to European practices for survival, which in turn depleted the land even further.

Even I was surprised to learn just how early on environmental disaster set in, and the incredible extent of it. English farming practices literally reshaped the map of New Haven between the 17th and 18th centuries:

To return to Marks, though...Marks' statement in the excerpt, where he says the "abundance" of animals continued throughout the 19th century, is blatantly false according to the source HE CITES.

Deer were becoming scarce in New England by the 1690's. It was so bad by 1718 that deer hunting was forbidden for 3 years at that time, and by 1800, deer were almost extirpated from New England. The book explains on another page that wild turkeys became so rare that a farmer's manual from the time said their domesticated turkeys were from Turkey—settlers had no opportunity to see a wild turkey and no idea they existed.

Marks is supporting his statement using a source entirely dedicated to contradicting the exact thing he's saying! It's unbelievable.

How does this happen? Did Marks just have his own opinion and insert a famous book that seemed to be on the subject as support, without reading it?