The Bradford pear was considered sterile. Until it wasn't.

It's modeled after the Texas abortion law which allowed anyone to sue anyone else who "aided or abetted" a prohibited abortion - so if you were a doctor, a nurse, a driver taking a woman to a clinic, a family member who helped pay for the abortion, any random Texan who knew about the abortion could sue you and get a bounty for doing it.

That law became irrelevant after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, of course. But I believe that strategy - giving ordinary citizens the power to file weaponized lawsuits against your political enemies, giving them a financial incentive to do so, and then turning them loose - is going to be seen as transformative in American politics. It's one of the greatest Republican legal innovations in the last two decades. It gives those tiny radical conservative special interest groups, populated by Quiverfull homeschooled kids who went to law school and joined the Heritage Foundation to fight for God in the courtroom, an enormous amount of power - and it means, if you're doing something Republicans don't like, you have an enormous potential liability, because anyone could sue you at any time. And since you're guaranteed to have a conservative judge in most jurisdictions in the United States, very few organizations are going to take that risk.

Conservatives spent the last two generations fighting to capture the judicial branch. And they succeeded. And now they're trying to funnel more and more power away from other branches of government and to the judicial system so they can exploit that power. And they're doing it very, very, effectively.

Literally. That's why the United States didn't ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Recognizing the rights of children would have limited the rights of parents to control their children. It would have made parents less free to do whatever they want to their kids. And we can't have that.

(Edit: also the freedom of states to execute juvenile offenders. Forgot about that. The freedom to kill kids is vital to American culture.)

Dude would have been a great president, and having him at the helm instead of Bush would have drastically change global politics to this very day.

People keep saying that and they keep being wrong.

There was no daylight between Bush and Gore on foreign policy, and very little daylight between Bush and Gore on domestic policy.

A hypothetical Gore administration would have invaded Afghanistan. It would have invaded Iraq. It would have implemented the Patriot Act and instituted the policy of destabilizing Muslim countries to honeypot terrorist groups into civil war (the so-called "Bush Doctrine"), all the vicious realpolitik warmongering that Kissenger taught Clinton and Bush and Obama to do so well.

Understand: we have lived under the Kissinger Administration from 1972 to the present day. Anybody who thinks a different President would have made a difference in global politics is fooling themselves.

That's why you have multiple security teams, each reporting to you through a different chain of command, so that disloyalty in one group won't spread to others and one leader can't win the loyalty of all your forces.

And that's why you have additional security teams whose job is to spy on the others and report disloyalty back to you.

And that's why your security teams are not deployed where their families live, so if one team stages a coup their families will be elsewhere, in the hands of other, hopefully loyal, security forces.

Oh hey you just reinvented government.

Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don't give a shit about the environment personally, because they're going to be dead before things get really bad. They don't give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don't talk about it. Shocker.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I'm frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they'd lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates' obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.

And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.

I've heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it's modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I'm not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle... it's a little too on the nose.

So here's how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they're so fundamentally repulsive.

You're homeless. Let's say you just got evicted and you're broke so you're sleeping in your car.

A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.

You can't pay the fine, because you have no money, because you're homeless.

The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don't get, because you have no mailing address, because you're homeless.

When you don't show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.

You get arrested and thrown in jail.

The prison charges you $50 a night.

When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can't, because you're homeless.

Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can't pay, because you're homeless.

And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.

And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn't help you at all.

And ultimately you go from "temporarily financially unstable" to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal "gratuities", so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn't be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.

And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you'll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.

And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.

Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.

what is normal folk supposed to do? Turn into serfs again?

That's the goal of the 1%, yes.

So here's the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift's private jet.

And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.

And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it's an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it's an attack on you personally.

Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they're trying to shake up and motivate.

Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don't get off our asses and fight climate change we won't have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.

The essence of white Berkeley liberalism.

How naive. True change doesn't come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won't harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.

Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.

That's the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.

Am I still being too subtle?

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

Wait, do you really expect British citizens to fly to the US or China in order to commit vandalism?

What do you think they'd put on their visa application? "Purpose of travel: throw paint on the Statue of Liberty"?

In a world full of bad faith "I support your cause but not your methods" attacks on environmental activism, this is one of the most ridiculous ones I've ever heard.

We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.

When people hear about their tactics, ask why they're going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it's archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you're describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it's because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

The fact you think "off brand" is garbage is painful. And telling.

I didn't find one, someone else might have better luck.

Libraries have free books. That takes profit from Amazon.

Libraries have free Internet. That takes profit from ISPs.

Libraries have free research tools and expert guidance from librarians. That takes profit from all sorts of companies that profit off your ignorance.

And worst of all, that stuff is all publicly funded, so when you look at a library you see government helping people. And there's nothing conservatives hate more than government that helps people.