happybadger [he/him]

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

MLK’s perspective on centrists is perennial. They’re Judas goats.

No worries at all! I like Scott’s work a lot. Weapons of The Weak is one of the books that got me into peasant studies and changed my whole urbanism outlook.

I’ve suspected a dyscalculia diagnosis for a while. Everything up to elementary algebra clicks with me in some fundamental way where I can intuitively do a four digit multiplication table in my head or a pharmacological weight calculation in an ambulance. It’s just like any other knowledge base to me. But then everything after that, at least through the high-level trigonometry and general calculus classes I took along with the sciences that are equation-heavy like chemistry/physics, feels like I’m illiterate no matter how much I read. Meanwhile classmates in those labs were doing the same work as intuitively as the practical side of medicine comes to me.

Applied science is definitely the route for me to take either way. I like doing anti-Cartesian science with a sense of praxis to it. I’d be shitty at the level of programming or biochemistry it takes to be a good research horticulturist, but I can interpret those studies and use them as best practices while turning my city into a living lab for my politics.

:yea:

me: “I would have job stability if I studied a harder physical science, but there’s no way I could do all that maths. I should study plants. I can touch them, so surely they aren’t just maths.”

plants: exist in fucking calculus

Marxist ecology/Marxist geography are what I’m trying to go all the way to a PhD with but there are very few avenues for it. The work of theorists like Richard Lewontin, James O’Connor, David Harvey, Paul Burkett, Kohei Saito, and especially John Bellamy Foster is exactly the kind of stuff I want to do in applied science. Urban greenspace is one of those ultimate interdisciplinary subjects that demands being as radical as reality itself.

Luckily it meshed well with my other interests and politics so it was just one more piece in the Manmade Horrors Beyond Comprehension Puzzle. I can deal with the rest as an absurdist and absurdism lends itself beautifully to a field like horticulture.

:yea: Whenever I’m working next to a turf lawn, I always take the time to remind whoever I’m speaking to that living within 1.6km/1mi of a golf course increases your risk of Parkinson’s Disease by 126% and that sharing a water supply with them in our drought-stressed region increases the risk by 96%: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/golf-courses . Whenever a suburbanite reaches Peak American Psychosis and gleefully describes how they murder any wildlife that touches their property, I start going into cascading impacts and zoonotic disease. If I wasn’t a communist, the socioecological side of horticulture would force me to become a communist or a prepper. When you can see the world ecologically it’s just a world full of slow motion car crashes with all the drivers cheering at each other.

I can’t look at something like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and see “natural processes”. This was the divine work of Willy Wonka.

I can’t pinpoint the exact unit, but that’s an A-37B Dragonfly on the patch. It’d be sometime between the 70s and 80s.

Thankfully it hasn’t made it into my workplace yet. We have a quarterly newsletter that someone tried to submit ChatGPT slop to. It was immediately identified and rejected by the rest of the horticulturists. My bosses are the kind of people who only talk about plants in Latin so there’s a big institutional focus on getting the right information from primary sources and then using multiple layers of expert review.

However, we’re facing massive budget shortfalls over the next few years and I doubt that will get any better if the economy crashes. Outside of installing/maintaining plants, the bulk of the job is intellectual and creative labour that the public isn’t even aware of. I can absolutely see my workplace hollowing out the job and not hiring based on expertise. Instead of five people with scientific degrees debating a space for an hour, at some point it’s going to be someone who hasn’t seen that space feeding words they can’t pronounce into an LLM that doesn’t understand what space is. On paper it will look great for the metrics admins and other departments track. In practice it will immediately ratfuck everything that makes our urban forest function and drive away the really rare pool of overqualified people we have.

This appears to be supported by the findings of a 2022 paper, in which scientists describe the results of taking C. sphaerospermum into space and strapping it to the exterior of the ISS, exposing it to the full brunt of cosmic radiation.

There, sensors placed beneath the petri dish showed that a smaller amount of radiation penetrated through the fungi than through an agar-only control.

The aim of that paper was not to demonstrate or investigate radiosynthesis, but to explore the fungus’s potential as a radiation shield for space missions, which is a cool idea. But, as of that paper, we still don’t know what the fungus is actually doing.

That’s where it seems really cool to me. If we have nuclear spacecraft or even just passive cosmic radiation exposure, what’s otherwise a waste/threat could become a factory. Reinforcing the hull with a regenerative radiation shield, genetically engineering it like E. coli to biosynthesise needed compounds, mass producing it as food for something we can eat- it’d be so useful to have something like that in space where you’re surrounded by energy you can’t use.

Certified Anubis Moment. Straight to The Devourer with you.

Poors drink water. I need emotional support water that costs $10 per bottle. Prestige water.

Healthy slop

Start by sauteing a mirepoix. If you’re doing meat or mushrooms, saute those until browned as well. Then anything healthy goes in the slow cooker with some stock until it’s slop. If it’s something that gets sweeter when roasted, it’s roasted first. I season it with a bay leaf, mushroom powder, onion/garlic salt, black pepper, and whatever works for the protein. I like my soups/stews very earthy and comforting, with healthy slop ending up being like a non-acidic borscht or thicker chankonabe.

Yeah but it looks cool as hell when I do it.

I mean, the guy didn’t know that water and ice are the same thing.

What was his logic here? I still believe that but I’m curious to hear a scientific reason why.

I wish I had been born into the era of science where I’m smart enough to discover things. I can’t code. I can’t do calculus. I would have thrived in the 19th century where I could invent washing my hands and be considered a world-class doctor.

A cargo ebike. No insurance (very cheap anti-theft insurance if you want), no registration fees, $20/year in electricity. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving but that’s no longer stressful. Instead of being stuck in traffic and dealing with road raging drivers, I get to zoom along nature paths with the strength of an Olympic athlete. My commute feels liberating instead of like the first and final insult of my day. It’s the first thing I’ve purchased since a smartphone that feels like it’s a foundational 21st century technology. Most of my problems with 20th century development go out the window with it.

Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.

I mean the period of heat death beyond that. The black holes have to be fed and eventually that matter will dry up. The universe will keep expanding and chasing thermodynamic equilibrium until some maximum point of entropy where every particle is spread out over increasingly vast distances, with such a total loss of interactions between them that temperature across the universe is 0 K. We’d be doing the Alpha Centauri generation ship thing but to find the next electron.