I was wondering, thank you, this goes way too hard.

I don’t know, thinking more about it, I frankly don’t understand both why on earth you would feel responsible for this, and why do you think that this would ultimately be a lesser harm. It really sounds to me like you are not putting anyone at risk and ALSO that this change of license wouldn’t actually help anyone.

I even understand the argument that copyleft might be detrimental to some projects because of big for-profits contributions, but this reads like a cop-out “for free”. I would understand a change of license to protect your own ass (without advocating for others to do the same), but this is saying “I don’t do copyleft because someone, somewhere, might be hurt by an abusive corporation or state for reasons vaguely related to my choice of license”.

By this logic, knowing that your project benefits the interests of those who jailed innocent workers, shouldn’t you just take your project offline altogether? Aren’t you worried that you’re actually taking agency away from both those workers AND from people trying to offer an alternative to those clearly evil corporations?

I’m sorry it’s not even your decision that’s driving me a bit nuts, it’s your work and you license it however the fuck you want, it’s the logic behind it.

I think the notion of “choice” or “fault” here is a little questionable, I understand your argument broadly (that’s what I tried to do in the last paragraph), so maybe it’s mostly just a language issue (I don’t think saying it is your “fault” or “choice” really means the same thing as saying that it’s “up to you”).

But I believe you’re contradicting yourself when you say that you both have to act and get out of situation such as abuse (not be defeatist) and but also learn to be fine with the situation (which reads like admitting defeat to me). I think this confusion between an actionable scenario (you can change things around you) and a non-actionable scenario (you can only change your outlook) is at the core of it.

Regardless I agree that self-pity is an absolute poison, but I’d tend to believe the way you put it is perhaps more controversial (because of what it implies or leaves out) than the point itself. Choosing not to suffer can also be a form of defeatism.

I fear we might not be worth it yet 🙏

I don’t know what this says cuz I don’t speak the language but I see Waldmeister Götterspeise, so I assume it’s saying (accurately) that this is the second biggest chemical breakthrough of the 20th century?

Purely as a thought experiment, this is mostly just vacuous logic. Sure, you can kill yourself, or kill everything you love or hate, or make sacrifices that are probably infinitely greater than the suffering itself (you could choose to stop caring about human suffering, most would much rather suffer than do that).

In practice however this is even worse than vacuous, it’s just wrong and insane. You can’t choose to not be schizophrenic, physical and psychological pain aren’t two neatly distinct categories, saying it’s “a choice” is just drawing a completely arbitrary border on where choice starts, and no shit people get angry at you because unless you heavily qualify this kind of statement further, anyone would think you’re doing the purest form of bootstrap victim blaming argument possible. Anyone would think of that one time they suffered the most in their lives and you’re saying “you chose that, that’s on you”.

If I try to be as charitable as I possibly can, I would assume this is an attempt at criticizing self-pity, highlighting that we are often our biggest obstacles to healing and that will plays a greater part in our agency than we recognize. I’d agree with all of that, but that’s being really charitable, I don’t think your statement makes that case at all.

I think people are freaking out about very low reproduction rate and aging population in rich countries more than anything, since that’s the demographic trend right now. Also factory farming is not like an inevitability of high population density, that’s just profit and lobbying. (I put the usual land use per kcal graph at the end, it’s not perfect because of the reality of arable land…etc, but still a very good reference)

Also to be fair, one country did try to handle overpopulation (and more broadly the risks of a sudden boom in population) and have been dragged through the mud for it for like 40 years.

That really sucks, but it does seem like just giving this company the win. I imagine it didn’t break those guys out of jail either. Regardless, do you have an article or something on this subject? I’ve never heard of such a case but I’m interested!

No absolutely, I talk about capitalism because that’s the current rule of the world, but this exploitation predates capitalism by millennia, you’re right. The specific aspect of capitalism or feudalism, or any such form of exploitation, is that power doesn’t represent the population’s interest (even though of course we pretend to live in a perfect representative democracy). If the state protects private ownership by law, and that private ownership gives you incredible power itself (being in control of production, but also media and culture more broadly), you end up with the self reaffirming loop of protecting owners, and not the population.

As an individual, you can have power over me if you hold a gun to my head, but it’s virtually impossible to point a gun at an entire nation when it’s that same nation that must hold the gun. Capitalism today is a massive ouija board, where anyone doubting the mystical forces is shamed, ostracized, or worse (of course this was much more literal under God’s mandated monarchs). But at the end of day, this still requires wide consent, even when enforced militarily.

Another way to put it is that while we often center the conversation around the “conflict of interest” that accompanies power, we ignore what that interest is. If exploiters or their defenders are systematically put in power, they expectedly defend exploitation. The scary communist motto of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is about recognizing the origin and importance of power in the short-term, and giving it to those whose interests are emancipation. I fully agree with you, personal gain doesn’t automatically go away if you get rid of profit, but thinking about this not in terms of conflicts of individual interests, but conflict of class interests allows us to dispel the misleading scary and brutal image of power wielded in any other way than the liberal democracy. The goal of course is a real democracy, one where workers, instead, defend their interests. The expected outcome is the dissolution of that exploitation through the dissolution of class, and eventually the dissolution of the state itself.

None of this magically protects you from acts of corruption or abuse, this is why the communist approach is not to flip the table over and bring a new ouija board except this time with “the good spirit” inside, but to create class consciousness, to dispel the lies and manipulations (because we’re not naive and pliable, the manufacturing of consent is a massive global industry), and to continue collectively educating ourselves as we progress so we don’t get fooled when someone brings a tipping table.

I swear I’m trying to be brief 😭

Our economy is organized around exploitation, I understand the point that someone in power might use this power for their own good if unchecked, but in an economy of exploitation like ours, power is organized around said exploitation. The worst of people go to the top not because bad people inherently do (or as you say, because power incentivizes bad action) but because this system is structured around exploitation, being ruthless and clamping down as hard as possible on those below you.

I don’t believe that power generally incentivizes bad action. Outside of the structure of a company or a capitalist state, it’s merely a factor to account for, like any other conflict or human element (and is usually handled fairly expeditiously). In my experience in non profit organizations, usual “human issues” are of course presents, but corruption and power abuse only ever rear their heads when the rubber hit the profit road.

This confusion also isn’t a mistake, it’s a misdirection, perpetually maintained to depict the constant corruption of states and companies worldwide as a mere “unfortunate reality” of human organization, while minimizing scrutiny of the structures this corruption exists in. When Trump, Elon and friends are waging a crusade against corruption, you would think this misdirection is at its absolute stretching limit, but somehow it still holds strong even (and especially) in those critical of them.

Sorry for stupidly long reply, in a word, I think we shouldn’t mistake “profit incentive”, for “power incentive”.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren’t really “corrupt”, because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it’s a total inversion of causality. They don’t “betray” because they got in power, they got in power to “betray”.

On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.