Conservative apologists for the status quo often stigmatize their opponents as “utopian.” But socialists and feminists shouldn’t be afraid of the term, since utopian thought can play an important role in helping us develop practical alternatives.
[...]
Today’s conservatives do not merely resist change. Project 2025, for instance, is in many ways a textbook example of utopian thought, with an ethical vision that grounds its specific policy proposals and touches on every aspect of society, from family to trade, from gender to taxes. This imagined world is one they want to produce, not preserve, even if it’s wrapped up in traditionalist ideology.
The Left needs its own counterproposals: rich accounts of a transformed society that both help us decide what steps we should take now and keep us motivated for the long haul. I’m not suggesting all leftists should unite around one utopia but rather that debate and experimentation around ambitious aims for social transformation is an urgent political project rather than a matter of merely academic concern. Pace Marx and Engels, utopia’s radical potential has not yet been exhausted.
At this point, "we should install more solar panels and waste less food" is seen as crazy hippy delusion by the American right.
If anything, the American Democratic Party has swung too far in the other direction, portraying itself as defenders of the status quo - even being willing to move further right - in order to avoid being seen as "crazy hippies".
Meanwhile, MAGA is a utopian movement - it wants to completely transform America in the image of an idealized Christian conservative past, and doesn't care what laws it has to break in the process.
The Democrats haven't been able to effectively challenge MAGA's utopian vision, because all they offer is a return to the status quo under Biden, and Americans are sick of that status quo. And the American left outside the Democratic Party has been so marginalized (mostly by the Democratic Party) that even mild "let's do things a little bit better" leftists like Bernie Sanders have no real voice in American politics.
It's not about being crazy hippies. It's about having a vision for a better America, a plan to carry it out, and the courage to fight for that plan even when people call you a crazy hippie.
I feel like wasting less food is a non-starter. Here in the UK they got rid of expiry dates on fruit and veg a while back to supposedly reduce food waste (read: sell shittier produce) and it's such an assault on the psyche.
Now I just assume they're all single use and toss em if I haven't just bought em, probably throwing away way more than I ever have before.
Are you talking about fresh fruit and vegetables? That sounds like you're wasting a lot - in terms of money, not just in terms of food. It's pretty easy to tell whether fresh fruit and vegetables are going bad (getting rotten, getting moldy, and so on), and if they're not going bad they're fine to use, whether there's an expiration date or not.
Which is to say, I don't think reducing food waste is a non-starter, but I do think it's a matter of bottom-up education and practice (for you, I think that would mean learning how to tell when fruits and vegetables are going bad, and being confident enough in your knowledge that you can feel secure eating fruit and vegetables you didn't buy recently) as much as it is top-down changes in policy.
Idk if they're "fresh" or not or what you even mean by that, they come from the supermarket? Not like a farmers bazaar or w/e.
I am simply not going to risk my health and well-being on guesstimates, I want expiry dates, so I can be safe in the knowledge that there's liability on the corpo that makes them that I can sue.
Any losses in money just aren't worth the health risk for me, I don't want to die from thinking maybe the onion smells just like an onion and not slightly stronger which is how I'm meant to know it's expired.
Plenty of stories of people who's judgement was good until it wasn't and confidence was high.
I will not, and cannot be """educated""" out of this because I'm well aware of what to look for for spoiled signs and my mind will not change. I used to have safety and comfort of outsourcing liability and now I don't, I will not accept that as a good or positive.
The only way I can be convinced is if you tell me why it's a good thing for me and more broadly the (marxist sense) working class as a whole, even so, in any environmental campaign it would be a non-priority compared to waste and emissions caused by the rich.
No amount of gaslighting by the rich and their useful idiot environmentalists will make me buy into this personal responsibility organic bullshit, nor agree to this downgrade of my living standards for no fucking reason at all. I'm not gonna pay for plastic bags to subsidize the wealthy bailouts so they can fly on private jets either. I take them and I use them once. Fuck the rich and their fucking oceans.
If we burn - and I say we absolutely should - we burn together, that's justice.
The cultural divide between you and I is so great that I don't even know where to begin to respond. I appreciate you sharing your point of view, at least.
Yeah I think there's no point in attempting discourse if you find it so alien. Thanks for being honest though, I do appreciate you just saying that instead of twisting my words or giving some half assed nonsense replh attacking aesthetics as so many do both here and on reddit.