Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

Essentially, Israel is the UK’s “not quite final solution” to the “problem” of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that’s terrible if you’re an antisemite.

But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you’re doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the “antisemitic” label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don’t look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. “Socialism for the rich” is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

Golden parachutes, positions for each other’s nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives’ pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don’t eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

Surprise - it’s white supremacists again. It’s Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

It’s not a cabal, it’s a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn’t a nefarious grand scheme, it’s just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it’s easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn’t directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

So that’s the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.

Yes, I’m sure that when the Oil Manufacturers Cooperative murders climate activists and spreads propaganda to prevent the adoption of sustainable alternatives, humanity will be much better off…

Capitalism in any form is unsustainable, any system that treats the world as fungible is. What we need is fundamental, structural change.

We need a system that naturally incentivizes degrowth and makes the filling of power vacuums by corrupt, greedy, or opportunistic people or systems impossible.

That’s not capitalism, it’s not syndicalism, it’s not state communism. It’s something in the realm of anarchocommunism. Societies that are prosperous because nobody in them is trying to screw people over: ones without capital accumulation or exertion of power, that are nevertheless resistant to power over them.

Source?

Why do you think it’s odd?

If there’s anything you should learn from Trump, it’s that it doesn’t matter one iota what most people think. Most people will consider the status quo natural and anything outside of it laughable, regardless of how ideas and people move across that boundary. If we make leftism reality, centrists will become leftists without us ever needing to actively convince them.

What matters is the rate at which people learn good ideas and the rate at which people give up on trying to make those good ideas a reality. A small group of people learning great ideas is more valuable than millions learning a populist version of those same ideas. It’s better to fascinate a thousand and weird out a million than to have a million people vaguely agree with you.

If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?

Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.

So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.

So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.

So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.

Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.

Borders did not save Afghanistan from NATO sending over a million soliders who got all settled in before carrying out the rest of their orders. Nevertheless, 20 years later, NATO left with their tail between their legs because Afghans just wouldn’t stop fighting a guerilla against the occupation.

Borders did not save German Jews from Nazis radicalizing over a million people who got all settled in before carrying ot the rest of their orders. Unfortunately, they had trusted their state’s monopoly on violence and without the ability to defend themselves most did not survive.

Borders did not save Ukraine from Russia invading with over a million soldiers who, despite not getting to settle in, occupied a large amount of land and killed tens of thousands. However, those borders do prevent Ukraine sympathizers from retaliating against Russia with their full might, because despite Russia just flat out sending in an army to subjugate random people without justification, that border means they supposedly didn’t attack the likes of us.

Without borders, the Russian state is an organization. You can only be part of the organization or not. If you are not part of the organization, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Melitopol or New York City, inexcusable violence against one is inexcusable violence against all. So if Russia were to attack, you only have two choices: sign up to be part of the Russian state or be one of their potential targets.

Now, it’s a valid choice to let yourself be subjugated and hope they don’t kill you to save on integration paperwork. It’s a valid choice to put your head in the sand and wait for another Russia to pop up closer to you to subjugate you with nobody to help you. But if you like being a free person, the only option is to defend anyone who comes under attack as you would want them to defend you.

I, personally, live under the aegis of nuclear-powered mutually assured destruction. A foreign state attacking me likely isn’t possible without a volley of nuclear weapons laying waste to that state. It seems fair if Ukrainians had the same, though perhaps guerilla or conventional military action would be better from a geopolitical de-escalation standpoint. Either way, anyone who doesn’t want to be the victim of genocide would have to treat a Russian invasion of Ukraine as an attack on their neighbor, and retaliate proportionally. The combined might of everyone in Europe and North America and everywhere else that respects human rights would be comparable to that of NATO and would come to the defense of the ones attacked.

So the Russian state and its leadership would likely not survive, and they would know this for a fact when deciding whether to attack anyone. So what would be stopping Russian leadership from committing any acts of violence? Basic self-preservation.

And sure, those soldiers getting a nice beach head might make destroying the Russian state a bit more costly. But that doesn’t make Putin any less dead by the end of it.

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn’t change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn’t bad people, it’s the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it’s also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

Through it runs my AC ducts which are insulated pretty poorly from what I can tell

If that includes the warm duct, that’s an electric space heater with extra steps. So not surprising it would get hot in there.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that permanently shading the roof and leaving an air gap above it would not improve things in addition to the presence of insulation and the attic itself

The question is whether it would improve the situation more or less than spending an equal amount of value on building houses with taller roofs and thicker insulation, or insulating the AC ducts, or allowing the hot air to cycle out at night, or something else. If you only compare it to not having it, of course it will have some benefit.

That’s called an attic. And yes, attics do help the floors below get less warm.

When you have an attic, you can go further by insulating the roof - this keeps the warm day air out, and during the night you can open windows to let the cool night air in. Historically roof insulation was done with thick layers of thatch, though light-weight synthetic alternatives are more common in modern construction. A well-insulated roof won’t let through any appreciable amount of heat.

Then as things get hotter, build the roof taller, allow for natural air flow to dissipate the heat, and finally put the building on stilts so air can flow under it.

Retrofitting existing buildings to have space for good insulation is expensive, especially with the atrocities the US has been building in suburbs for the past 80 years.