I know y'all are quoting System of a Down, so I want to share a country song about exactly this...because the difference in the musical styles is neat. One of my favorites by Steve Earle: Rich Man's War.

It's a song I've always loved for the direct message of rich people using poor folks as soldiers in wars...but also the way it weaves in a larger economic picture about the decisions by the rich that put people in the very desperate positions that they later exploit.

That's entirely my point though: we can't reason with a deadly virus, but we can with most humans. Or at least some humans. OK maybe a few. The point is, I don't think it's logical to throw in the towel.

That isn't human exceptionalism in my view, either: because I don't believe we're inherently special animals when it comes to how we treat the environment. My point is that most animals inherently exploit resources, and drive others to extinction. We just managed to make guns and power tools and propaganda. Once humans are gone, we have no reason to think that any species that manages to start some technologically advanced civilization will be any better. So either we eradicate all biological life to ensure that it doesn't eradicate biological life...or we try to improve humanity, because despite things, we can often be reasoned with. Humanity has gotten better, even though it hasn't improved enough, when looking at human civilization over the last few thousand years. That's my point: not that we don't deserve calamity, but that we can - if we fight hard enough - try to steer our own species toward a better future for everyone.

Who knows though, maybe if humanity is gone the bonobos will rise up to take our place. They're pretty chill, all things considered.

That's the easy way out. Please stick around and help the rest of us try to steer humanity in the right direction. Help the moral arc of the universe bend a little faster. It's hard work, and most of us won't see much of a return. But long-term, let's hope that humanity can.

To clarify: I'm a biologist. The perspective you've taken is basically "Noble Savage" but for animals. Animals are pushed to extinction all the time. Yes, we're incredibly good at it, and we're good at coming up with highfalutin reasons for killing things, but look at chimps, ants, dolphins...nature is brutal. It sucks to be most animals. Say a habitat changes, and a species "needs" to move into an adjacent similar habitat that's already occupied by one or more species exploiting those resources? Extinction of something is pretty likely. That's all very much an oversimplification, of course, but this is a lemmy comment.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111310 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-it-comes-waging-war-ants-humans-have-lot-common-180972169/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

The hope I have is our intelligence. The fact that you recognize this existential threat is more than a badger is capable of.

You're joking, but the covfefe thing was almost more ridiculous, given they pretended it was intentional and claimed that an inside group knew exactly what he meant.

The solutions I've seen require a fundamental rethinking of the way housing works in the USA (and most places), where renting just turns into another way to build some amount of equity, and the property managers are under more democratic control. More of the process subsidized by the local government, in the same way that water treatment is.

Arguably it's renting by another name, but the central point is to strip the profit motive out of it (some salaries are needed, but in a system with more regulatory oversight) and to allow the renter to get some financial benefit so they aren't simply pissing money away.

Apologies in advance for that vague response: I'm not an economist or real estate expert, so I can't back up that general idea with any kind of details or evidence it's feasible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo&t=559s

There is a good visualization in this video (These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us by Not Just Bikes) at the timestamp I linked (roughly 9 minutes 19 seconds), cited from KidsAndCars.org

Water is tangible though. Clean, safe drinking water isn't cheaply and widely available (in the USA, anyway) by accident: it's a huge endeavor that requires tax money to maintain public infrastructure. See the ongoing crises in places with tainted water to see how challenging it is to maintain.

Housing is harder than water, but public water and sanitation systems are incredibly expensive, so I wonder what the comparison would be like against more public housing.

To reply to myself, because it merits its own giant text box: for anarchist-minded folks like myself, I'd highly recommend reading Homage to Catalonia, because it gives some glimpse of how things might work in a less-hierarchical military (in the cases like in Trek's Starfleet that weapons are sometimes unfortunately needed).

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111.txt

The main sections I want to quote are:

The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war.

But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type? It was what everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it was also unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not have been much better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had waited until it had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been resisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot--were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common. In four or five months in the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men deserting, and two of those were fairly certainly spies who had enlisted to obtain information. At the beginning the apparent chaos, the general lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five minutes before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better troops than one had any right to expect.

Sorry, I took a more international route with the terminology: I meant state as in The State, not an individual state in the USA. Federal laws restricting the purchase of a firearm is IMHO the State interfering with the Second Amendment, if you're taking a severely strict interpretation of it.

So that's my question: is it OK to have the Federal restrictions on what you can buy (e.g. requiring a permit!), and from disallowing Felons? I'm a gun owner myself, but if you go back to what I opened with: the discrepancy between "The state can’t then come through and require a permit to own a gun" and seemingly OK with some Federal oversight is a hangup for a lot of us. If a handful of laws are common sense (no felons), why can't we enact other common sense laws?

I struggle to find what to say, because I'm just some random schmuck on the internet. Plenty of people post vile comments, so I'm going to post a saccharine one, in honor of your friend.

Others have said it already, but I'll say it again because why not: your voice online has been a pleasure.

Grief is terrible, and I'm sorry you lost a loved one. I'm lucky enough to have a friend like the one you describe. We're a big part of each others' support system, and a lot of what we talk about winds up being Trek. I say that only to let you know that your grief will help me remember why I should cherish my friend, while we're both around. Maybe that doesn't do you any good, hopefully it doesn't come across as selfish/insensitive on my part (if so, you have my apology in advance), but maybe it's some consolation that you and your buddy are inspiring others who have never even met you. We all have an effect on people's lives, whether we know when it happens or not. Just being some kind of role model, even in a small way, will influence people for the better. That's my hope, anyway. So you and your buddy have clearly been doing this for a lot of us, here. I'm sure elsewhere. You don't owe any of us anything, but I know seeing your positivity makes me smile.

I had read your initial comment as insinuating the previous commenter was supporting hamas, and when someone directly challenged you on it, you didn't reject that accusation.

So if you just wanted to point out the irony, consider my comment as much a non sequitor as your comment on its irony, which is - I suppose - at least irony-adjacent in itself.

Precisely. I voted today and it took a few minutes of my time. There was still plenty of time in the morning to keep working on the things I think will make more of an impact re: improving things somewhat. Mutual aid and anything else in the bucket of "resisting tyrannical government" is much easier when it's only +1 more evil rather than +10.