It’s hard to do worse than elections that install fascism. Representative democracy kind of hits the bottom of the scale there. And that’s the fancy representative democracies with careful attention to separation of powers and all that.

And that’s not to mention that every representative democracy in human history has resulted in policy that is contributing to the destruction of the Earth’s capacity to sustain human life.

Compared to that, the mere potential to be a failure is hardly something to shy away from. At the very least you should look at the failure risk of versions of sordition that are actually under consideration - ones that have checks and balances - rather than the worst potential.

As with the Hamas attack on October 7th and Al Qaeda’s on 9/11, as with John Brown’s murder or slave owners on the eve of the US civil war, as with the Indian independence movement outside of Gandhi, as with suffragette terror bombings in the early 20th century, as with unionist terror bombings in Europe in the 19th century, it’s important to put terrorism in the context of the times.

Terrorism is bad, but it usually only exists in the context of far greater evils. Genocide, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, child labor, systeming oppression of women, and yes, climate change.

Of all of these, climate change will be the most deadly (though colonialism probably still has it beat for genocide). Entire nations are already being wiped off the map, and dozens more will follow. Hundreds of millions will die violently, with the people of Berlin as a group killing thousands of them though their present-day emissions.

In that context, focusing on condemning a couple of radicals who didn’t even kill anyone is denying the gravity of the situation.

Every terrorist group was condemned at the time of the events. Many are now considered good in the eyes of history, and most of those have had their actions whitewashed by educational institutes dedicated to the status quo, or have had their results attributed to their pacifist compatriots.

I’m not saying anyone should engage in violence. There are plenty of people who need no encouragement if only you stop condemning and sanctioning them. Diversity of tactics has historically almost always been more effective than pacifism. So let us do our best in the way we like and let them do their best in the way they like.

And before anyone cites Chenoweth at me, read their paper and their later comments about how the paper is being misused to argue for pacifism. Then if you’re surprised, maybe add Gelderloos’ The Failure of Nonviolence to your reading list.

The US is dependent on international trade. If they’re the only ones emitting too much, the rest of the world could sanction them, reducing their emissions by collapsing their economy.

With the US making moves on Greenland with no sign of being satisfied after, the EU would probably be up for those sanctions at some point.

One of the issues with dictators is that they reflect the people that put them in power. Every dictator Americans have put in power so far has been a fascist who was bad for the local economy.

European governments and companies want to smelt it in Europe. But due to capitalism Europe does not have incentive structures where the companies profit from doing that, so the companies are not doing the work their shareholders, the government, and their employees want them to do.

So the companies are calling on lawmakers to design a different incentive structure that will result in European private companies performing the desired behavior.

Meanwhile, China wants the industry so it builds the industry and the industry does what China wants.

There is no difference in quality between recycled aluminium and freshly mined and processed aluminium as long as they are the same alloy. If Chinese companies sold a certain alloy as a different alloy, that would be corporate fraud and people wouldn’t be gormlessly complaining about it.

So no, this is just neoliberal capitalists complaining that another economic system is more efficient and begging the government to take more money from the poor to make up for the difference.

“Positivity” is a weird thing. You can be rich and sad because your neighbor is more rich. You can be working yourself ragged and happy because it’s a competition on a topic that you love.

You can be Caribbean pirates dancing with death fighting for life and liberty against cartoonishly evil empires and you can be suffering from depression in safety with people you love.

You can live in the shadow of a toxic chemical plant treasuring every moment you spend with your family or you can have a private island and prosperous family and feel hollow.

Climate change will almost certainly lead to violent clashes between groups and states unwilling to give up unsustainable wealth and privilege and also between them and people just trying to survive, on a scale never before seen on Earth. Nuclear, biological, and mass autonomous weapons may be used. Over a billion violent deaths next century seems likely, and over seven billion violent deaths is very possible.

But that doesn’t mean we have to feel negative all the time while living through that. That depends on what we do and what we’re working for. Building anarchist spaces, I haven’t felt this alive since I was a child. People are facing the risk of permanent injury, prison, and worse, but they look more alive than 99% of wage workers.

We have a chance to build a better world with our own hands as the old one burns, for however many millions of people will be alive in the 22nd century if not for ourselves. Every thing we do matters to us, to our friends, to our comrades, and to the world. Maybe we’ll end up in a place where despair is appropriate, but it is not now.

I don’t know if this counts as a “positive imagined future”, but it is the one we are heading towards and I am happy.

Slightly longer tl;dr: “Pay me or other influencers to attend a conference where we can muse about whether we truly cannot”

I am curious what you mean. Wilderness tends to be quite affordable, a couple months’ cost of living in a western country. If you want you can get a mortgage for something else and use that to buy wilderness in a country with no extradition treaty. Hell, there are places on Earth you can just be and no-one will find you to tell you you don’t own it.

But you haven’t done that, so presumably you want some level of survivability, social protection, social services, and perhaps even social interaction. So what is it that draws you to the dream? What do you want, and is something like that more feasible?

Could you be happy subsistence farming? Living in a commune? Living in a town but within biking distance of a nature reserve? Living off donations in a society that has mendicant monks? All of these are already possible.

Or do you want post-scarcity communism that still gives you stuff even if you don’t help others and live remotely because it’s post-scarcity?

Because even if we have a good communism, we’ll have to see how much we can make post-scarcity while the consequences of capitalism are coming due. If there are a billion people migrating away from deadly wet bulb temperatures and failing crops, people may be too busy helping them find a place to help someone who won’t help others.

Gen Z has D&D, cunnilingus, and bisexuality. Nerds, freaks, and queers. Interracial couples, women in positions of power, and people talking openly on mental health and neurodiversity. Violent political action, vtubers, and rudeness.

They don’t have a stricter moral code than previous generations, just a better one.

Half the western descent into fascism is older generations seeing western culture progress out of their moral overton window and losing their minds trying to resecure a cultural legacy they can be proud of.

Why aren’t you going by China’s approach? Because you don’t like the answer?

Anyway, capitalist liberal democracy did exactly what you said in the 1960s to 1990s. US congress discussed climate change in the 60s, and the fossil fuel lobby prompted them to bury it.

So capitalism and communism are equally bad at this first part. The reason nuclear power plants are treated with such suspicion in most of the west is that they are an alternative to fossil fuel, not because they are dangerous.

Because, including Chernobyl, nuclear power is safer than fossil fuels. The difference is that nuclear power isn’t as fun for rich people because it involves optimizing safety rather than neocolonial extraction. And capitalism will always choose inefficiency if it means more fun for the rich.

But back to the topic, the next question is what communism would do after the cat is out of the bag. Thankfully, despite the collapse of the USSR, we have another analogy we can make: China’s response to covid and to climate change.

First, climate change. China is clearly building for the future. It used fossil fuels to catch up to NATO, and now it is quickly surpassing NATO it is investing hard in green tech. The fossil fuel lobby is not as important as the Party, and the Party wants stability.

Covid gives us another useful data point because it confirms how China behaves in face of a national Prisoner’s Dilemma like climate change without as strong penalties for its rivals choosing selfiahness. It shows how China would handle climate change if it was a global hegemon in the way the US was in the 1990s-2000s.

At first, China covered it up, like Russia and the US. But when the cat was out of the bag, it enforced quarantines with an iron fist, i.e. actually efficiently enough to suppress the pandemic in a statist society. China had the lowest death rate from covid of all countries it spread into the general population of. Including the clear bump of deaths when the strict policy lifted that shows it wasn’t just propaganda.

Translated to climate change, this means China - and by extension state communism - would simply force its citizens to consume in ways that lead to zero emissions, even if it means a hit to their quality of life. The only limiting factor is the risk of revolt, unlike in capitalist democracy where there is carbon-emission lobbyists and private propaganda and election losses.

So yeah, in the long run Chinese state communism will handle climate change better than the capitalist USA or EU.

And real communism? Or better yet, anarcho-communism? You wouldn’t believe how well a decentralized responsibility for justice works at preventing the existence of overly polluting industries.

Half of the examples on this page seem dystopic as fuck; Active attempts to capture and monetize even offline friendships and socialization. The other half seem to be getting you to pay up-front for hollow promises of a social media platform that Doesn’t Suck™.

One of their examples gives people kickbacks if they convince their friends to buy a product from them or help the product go viral. If they get their way, you will not be able to trust whether your friends recommend stuff to you because they think you’ll like it or because they’re getting paid for it.

I think capitalism has noticed that “Social Media Refugees” are a hot new market to capitalize on. Mozilla is clearly in the process of being assimilated, and the tendrils of capital are winding their way through the rest of the “better alternative” network.

Fair point, but during all that time information was centralized. You couldn’t talk to people from the next city-state over, you couldn’t read the holy text, you would never see the consequences of slavery, you wouldn’t hear another country’s public radio use car ownership as the premise of a joke, you couldn’t see the victims of genocide livestream their slaughter.

With the free internet, every day is an experience that we have more in common with people across the world than with capital owners.

Why would they be resorting to something as self-destructive as fascism if they weren’t desperate? Do you think billionaires like kissing Trump’s ring and losing billions on protectionism? They just prefer it over equality.

About as strange as a country not requiring its police to be beholden to the law when that is one of the foundations holding up the monopoly on violence.

About as strange as a country not forbidding its farmers from pumping up an unusustainable amount of ground water when that is one of the foundations holding up the country’s long-term agricultural capacity.

Which is to say, chalk it up as yet another time when liberal theory only exists to whitewash the greed and oppressiveness of the bourgeoisie.

Storms increase in intensity and frequency with climate change, increasing rates of erosion. Most homes built to survive any weather except the worst storm of the past 10,000 years will not survive this century.

They are aware, which is why they’re pouring billions into AI and fascism. They’re desperate for unquestioningly loyal goons.

The meat industry is bigger than both, so let’s kill that too.

The trick is they come from higher uphill.

Or, alternatively, they are mudslides, rockslides, sinkholes, and erosion that carry you downhill along with them.

Oh no, the water is flowing quickly and not getting absorbed by the dry soil, let us build a giant smooth ramp of completely impermeable material, that will fix things! Now every time it rains people get swept up it, yay!

You know what helps slow down floods, improve soil water absorption, and reduce desertification? Wetlands and lakes. You know why Los Angeles was colonized by the Spanish rather than any other place in its stretch of its very dry coastline? Wetlands and lakes.

The LA river has the same story as its highways and its public transit: elitists destroying anything that does not acknowledge their superiority, actively ignoring if not outright pursuing the suffering of those they believe to be below them.

In this case, real estate developers wanted to replace the low population density wetlands with suburbia to sell houses on the cheap, and when this meant the water had nowhere to go and the city got flooded because they built it wrong, they bullt the concrete chute as a kludge.

Any sane desert city treats water as a precious commodity, not something to flush into the sea at the highest speeds possible. But that would require rebuilding the city right, often in places inhabited by poor people because of the floods urban designers caused.

Could you explain what you think the benefits of a smart city are, compared to a dumb city built for humans rather than for cars or capital?

However, there are things within people’s control that doesn’t change. At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

Does solving that problem threaten their access to food and housing? Capitalism doesn’t care about negotiating the most profitable deals, it cares about maintaining power dynamics, so the company cares more about keeping employees in a servant role than improving their bottom line, so employees are often unable to make their life better without threatening their own livelihood and those of their colleagues.

Capitalism has existed alongside people with good intentions for centuries now. It has many ways of bending kindness into accumulation of power for the rich. Helping people out means people will be less likely to riot when social services get cut, so the rich are more likely to cut social services and lower taxes. So it takes almost no work at all for the system to turn charity into a wealth transfer from the charitable to the rich.

If you want to improve the world, you have to be clever about it. You have to choose things that the rich can’t just leverage into exploitation - things that they would pay to get rid of, not things they would pay to exist. Mutual aid networks, labor unions and other unions, exchange of anarchist ideas and skills, blockades and sabotage, decreasing the number of hours people work at things capitalists would have paid for them to do, etc.

There are people who are cynical to a fault, who have more faith in capitalism’s ability to exploit you than your ability to circumvent undermine it. But realistic cynical skepticism is warranted, and you need to be careful that your good intentions actually produce good outcomes.