#cow-based economy...........................

[bowise-blog1]

cad wouldve been such hot commodity in early medieval ireland

[probablyasocialecologist]

Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop

AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic

The turn toward massive, data-heavy generative AI is driving a new and dramatic metabolic rift. It’s affecting the environment, patterns of work, supply chains, culture, and visuality itself. And it’s filling information ecosystems with torrents of shit, endless digital detritus which is never properly flushed out. Instead, it is fed back into the system as raw material for the next generation of AI models. This is the basic material cycle of AI’s metabolism: consumption and excretion patterns where AI-generated images have material consequences and consequences for our materials. Now the widespread use of generative interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is supplanting web-based information sources. Why bother going to a news site or Wikipedia if Claude can summarize it for you? This diverts users away from the web as it was, toward AI-mediated information platforms. The labor of choosing between lists of different web sites is supplanted by the convenience of being given a single, synthesized answer. This shift is cannibalizing the markets that sustain online content production. Human content creators face dwindling readership, reduced engagement, and disappearing ad revenue. It’s another metabolic rift, severing the relationships between search companies like Google, advertisers, and the broader content economy. In its place, the slop tide will rise. Cursed domains of fake news, psyops imagery, and synthetic influencers designed to generate rage clicks will multiply and capture the paid sponsorships that once belonged to humans. All this poses a problem for AI companies as well. Multiple studies have shown that AI systems degenerate when they are fed on too much of their own outputs—a phenomenon researchers call MAD (Model Autophagy Disease). In other words, AI will eat itself, then gradually collapse into nonsense and noise. It happens slowly at first, then all at once. The researchers compare it to mad cow disease. The industry is scrambling for solutions: engineering higher-quality synthetic data for their digital feeding operations and supplementing training datasets with content from underpaid human laborers. For humans, a new slop economy is being born. From an infrastructural perspective, the whole cycle is threatening to push past what electrical grids, mines, and water tables can withstand.

September 2025

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Hi, so i writing a book based in the 1800s like the cowboy eras can you please tell me somethings I should keep in mind about the society and stuff also I need a little motivation I have been loosing it all please and thankyou <<<333

Writing Notes: Cowboys

Cowboy

In the western United States: a horseman skilled at handling cattle, an indispensable laborer in the cattle industry of the trans-Mississippi west, and a romantic figure in American folklore.

Pioneers from the United States encountered Mexican vaqueros (Spanish, literally, “cowboys”; English “buckaroos”) on ranches in Texas about 1820, and soon adopted their masterful skills and equipment—the use of lariat, saddle, spurs, and branding iron.

But cattle were only a small part of the economy of Texas until after the Civil War.

The development of a profitable market for beef in northern cities after 1865 prompted many Texans, including many formerly enslaved African Americans, to go into cattle raising. (Though they have been almost entirely excluded from the mythology of the American cowboy, it is estimated that Black cowboys accounted for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century.)

By the late 1800s, the lucrative cattle industry had spread across the Great Plains from Texas to Canada and westward to the Rocky Mountains.

Vaqueros

In 1519, shortly after the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they began to build ranches to raise cattle and other livestock. Horses were imported from Spain and put to work on the ranches.

Mexico’s native cowboys were called vaqueros, which comes from the Spanish word vaca (cow). Vaqueros were hired by ranchers to tend to the livestock and were known for their superior roping, riding and herding skills.

By the early 1700s, ranching made its way to present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and as far south as Argentina. When the California missions started in 1769, livestock practices were introduced to more areas in the West.

During the early 1800s, many English-speaking settlers migrated to the West and adopted aspects of the vaquero culture, including their clothing style and cattle-driving methods.

Cowboys came from diverse backgrounds and included African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans and settlers from the eastern United States and Europe.

Cowboy Life

Cowboys were mostly young men who needed cash. The average cowboy in the West made about $25 to $40 a month.

In addition to herding cattle, they also helped care for horses, repaired fences and buildings, worked cattle drives and in some cases helped establish frontier towns.

Cowboys occasionally developed a bad reputation for being lawless, and some were banned from certain establishments.

They typically wore large hats with wide brims to protect them from the sun, boots to help them ride horses and bandanas to guard them from dust. Some wore chaps on the outsides of their trousers to protect their legs from sharp cactus needles and rocky terrain.

When they lived on a ranch, they shared a bunkhouse with each other. For entertainment, some sang songs, played the guitar or harmonica & wrote poetry.

Cowboys were referred to as cowpokes, buckaroos, cowhands and cowpunchers.

The most experienced cowboy was called the Segundo (Spanish for “second”) and rode squarely with the trail boss.

Everyday work was difficult and laborious for cowboys. Workdays lasted about 15 hours, and much of that time was spent on a horse or doing other physical labor.

Rodeo Cowboys

Some cowboys tested their skills against one another by performing in rodeos—competitions that were based on the daily tasks of a cowboy.

Rodeo activities included bull riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, bareback bronco riding and barrel racing.

The first professional rodeo was held in Prescott, Arizona, in 1888. Since then, rodeos became—and continue to be—popular entertainment events in the United States, Mexico and elsewhere.

Joseph G. McCoy offered the wealthy cattleman's vision of the cowboy. He recorded a reasonably balanced, if slightly condescending, views in his 1874 treatise on the cattle trade.

He lives hard, works hard, has but few comforts and fewer necessities. He has but little, if any, taste for reading. He enjoys a coarse practical joke or a smutty story; loves danger but abhors labor of the common kind; never tires riding, never wants to walk, no matter how short the distance he desires to go. He would rather fight with pistols than pray; loves tobacco, liquor and women better than any other trinity. His life borders nearly upon that of an Indian. If he reads anything, it is in most cases a blood and thunder story of a sensational style. He enjoys his pipe, and relishes a practical joke on his comrades, or a corrupt tale, wherein abounds much vulgarity and animal propensity.

Black Cowboys

African American horsemen who wrangled cattle in the western United States in the late 1800s and beyond.

Though they were almost entirely excluded from the mythology of the American cowboy, it is estimated that Black men accounted for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century.

In the years following the Civil War (1861–65) and emancipation from slavery, a budding ranching industry promised freedom and prosperity unknown to most Black Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved themselves or were the children of enslaved parents.

Texas became part of the United States in 1845, and, by 1860, enslaved people accounted for 30 percent of the state’s population. Among them were some of the first Black cowboys: skilled laborers with experience in breaking horses and herding stock. Many were given the autonomy to work unsupervised, and some even carried guns.

The cowboy lifestyle came into its own in Texas, which had been cattle country since it was colonized by Spain in the 1500s. But cattle farming did not become the bountiful economic and cultural phenomenon recognized today until the late 1800s, when millions of cattle grazed in Texas.

White Americans seeking cheap land—and sometimes evading debt in the United States—began moving to the Spanish (and, later, Mexican) territory of Texas during the first half of the 19th century.

Though the Mexican government opposed slavery, Americans brought slaves with them as they settled the frontier and established cotton farms and cattle ranches.

By 1825, slaves accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population.

By 1860, fifteen years after it became part of the Union, that number had risen to over 30 percent—that year’s census reported 182,566 slaves living in Texas.

As an increasingly significant new slave state, Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861. Though the Civil War hardly reached Texas soil, many white Texans took up arms to fight alongside their brethren in the East.

While Texas ranchers fought in the war, they depended on their slaves to maintain their land and cattle herds.

In doing so, the slaves developed the skills of cattle tending (breaking horses, pulling calves out of mud and releasing longhorns caught in the brush, to name a few) that would render them invaluable to the Texas cattle industry in the post-war era. But with a combination of a lack of effective containment— barbed wire was not yet invented—and too few cowhands, the cattle population ran wild.

Ranchers returning from the war discovered that their herds were lost or out of control. They tried to round up the cattle and rebuild their herds with slave labor, but eventually the Emancipation Proclamation left them without the free workers on which they were so dependent.

Desperate for help rounding up maverick cattle, ranchers were compelled to hire now-free, skilled African-Americans as paid cowhands.

Freed blacks skilled in herding cattle found themselves in even greater demand when ranchers began selling their livestock in northern states, where beef was nearly ten times more valuable than it was in cattle-inundated Texas.

The lack of significant railroads in the state meant that enormous herds of cattle needed to be physically moved to shipping points in Kansas, Colorado and Missouri. Rounding up herds on horseback, cowboys traversed unforgiving trails fraught with harsh environmental conditions and attacks from Native Americans defending their lands.

African-American cowboys faced discrimination in the towns they passed through—they were barred from eating at certain restaurants or staying in certain hotels, for example—but within their crews, they found respect and a level of equality unknown to other African-Americans of the era.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Writing occasionally makes me feel like I'm losing it too! I find that taking a step back can be good. That time away from being a writer can be used to being the reader again, and to research your topic. And when your head's clear enough, you can go back & see if the story flows more freely, armed with information you collected to incorporate in your writing. Hope this helps <3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tariffs and monopolies

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

For all that orthodox economists hate tariffs in all their forms, the question, "do tariffs work?" is a complex one, which can't be answered unless you specify which tariffs, in what context:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

The orthodox case against tariffs goes like this: tariffs raise the price of goods before they reach the market. Sellers will raise the price of goods to recover those costs from buyers, so it's you, the person buying a car, a phone, or a board-game, who will bear that additional cost:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/April_03_2025/Tariffs_Are_Driving_Up_Game_Prices_Now

As is ever the case with economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions. And as is especially the case with neoliberal economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions that are never tested for veracity – indeed, neoliberal economists pride themselves on their reliance on incorrect assumptions:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

The main assumption built into the orthodox case against tariffs is that sellers can't afford to eat the costs of tariffs. In the thought-experiment land of neoliberalism, market competition erodes sellers' profits so that everything being sold is only slightly marked up above the cost of making it, getting it to the store and selling it to you. Companies are said to be making a "competitive" rate of profit, which is tautologically defined as "whatever profit they're making." If Nike pays $20 to make a pair of shoes in Vietnam that it sells in America for $140, that $120 profit is "competitive" – if it wasn't, it would be lower, and it isn't, so it is.

Trump's own explanation for how the tariffs will work is no better. Trump has made a variety of incoherent claims about who will pay the tariffs. On the campaign trail, he insisted that the tariffs would somehow be paid by America's trading partners, either by their governments or by overseas companies. This is literally untrue: when you order something from overseas, the customs broker sends the bill to you, not the company that sold you the goods.

But the smarter elements in the Trump orbit have a slightly more reality-based theory: they claim that importers, faced with tariff costs, will push back on sellers and insist that they discount their products to offset the tariff bill. That's how the costs end up being paid by foreign sellers – and if their governments step in to help pay the bill, that's how foreign governments will pay the bill.

This explanation has the benefit of actually being an explanation, in that it is a series of cause-and-effect relationships that end up with the costs being borne by someone other than stateside buyers. However, this explanation is also founded on (at least) two demonstrably untrue assumptions: first, that buyers have the power to force sellers to lower their prices; and second, that this power comes from the availability of substitute goods that are made (or could be made) in the USA.

It's possible for there to be a market economy in which buyers can force sellers to eat tariff costs. For that to happen, the sellers have to be in real competition with one another. Competition requires competitors: companies that consider themselves rivals, directly attacking one another's margins. But that's not how American big business operates: 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has produced an American economy in which nearly every sector is dominated by a monopoly, a duopoly, or a cartel:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Take Nike: Nike controls 86% of the US athletic shoe market. Nearly all the remaining market share is owned by its main rivals, Adidas and Reebok – companies that merged in 2005. It's clear that Adidas/Reebok would like to get some of Nike's market share, but in 20+ years of duopoly rule over the sector, neither Nike nor Adidas/Reebok have tried a serious discounting strategy to win that market. Instead, the duopoly has found it easy to tacitly collude to rig margins of more than 600%. What's more, the collusion may have been explicit, not tacit – when a sector is dominated by two giant firms, the upper ranks of both companies are dominated by people who've worked at both companies. These people aren't rivals, they're peers. They're executors of one another's estates, godparents to one another's children, members of the same charitable boards and pickup sports leagues. They're lifelong pals. If you think they never explicitly conspire to rig markets – over drinks at someone's wedding or funeral, say – then I envy you your touching faith in humanity.

A market controlled by a handful of firms doesn't have to solve the thorny "collective action problem" of deciding on a regulatory priority and then holding that line as the cartel captures its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

That means that these companies end up with pricing power, because they can maintain solidarity while they raise prices. If everyone hikes prices together, consumers can't exert market discipline by buying from someone less greedy. And the same solidarity that confers pricing power to a cartel also insulates it from regulatory discipline, because all the companies will tell the same lie to regulators about why prices went up.

This was on display for all to see during the covid inflation shocks. Companies like Pepsi boasted to shareholders that "consumers are willing to pay more for our brands," as they hiked prices way above any inflationary rises, meaning that they didn't just force buyers to cover their higher costs, they actually raised prices more than was needed to cover those costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Needless to say, Coke didn't respond by slashing its prices in order to capture Pepsi's customers. They did the opposite: they also raised prices over and above the inflationary costs. Coke and Pepsi might be rivals on paper, but when it comes to questions like, "Should sugar-water have higher margins?" they are the best of friends.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry, another highly concentrated sector with sky-high margins that raised prices over inflation during the covid supply-chain shocks, and boasted about it on investor calls, without facing any regulatory scrutiny:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich

Neoliberal economists have an answer to this kind of thing: "it's fine." In the self-referential world of economism, whatever happens was meant to happen, because markets are efficient, so whatever happens in the market is efficient, and can only be made worse by state intervention. This theory of efficient markets is full of beautiful, self-equilibriating processes that can be precisely modeled using equations, but only because the field discards all the nonquantifiable elements of society, assuming that because you can't do math on these qualitative factors, they must not matter:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Of all the qualitative factors that clearly matter that are treated as if they don't matter, the most obvious, glaring omission is power. Power is hard to measure, but if you try to model a transaction without factoring power in, you end up in very dark places, for example, in systems where people should be allowed to "voluntarily" sell themselves into slavery.

It goes without saying that a theory of economics without a theory of power relationships is a great deal for powerful people. In Careless People, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams's excellent new tell-all memoir about Facebook, Wynn-Williams recounts how shocked and offended Sheryl Sandberg became when she was told that other countries wouldn't allow her to go and buy a kidney for her son, should he ever need one (her kid wasn't sick – she just wanted to know that if he ever did get sick…):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

This is economics without a theory of power: if I offer to buy your son's kidney, and you accept my offer, then we have achieved a voluntary exchange of value that is – tautologically – assumed to be fair. Indeed, this transaction isn't merely a way for kidneys to change hands – it's a way to "discover" the "market price" of a kidney. We're not just buyers and sellers, we're brave explorers of the vast, uncharted space of market prices.

Economics without power relies on tautology: if you assume the market is efficient, then whatever you get is what you were supposed to get. If Nike can charge a 600% markup on a $20 pair of shoes, then that is the "natural" price. Everyone in the chain – the workers who made the shoes, the subcontractors who employed the worker, the freighters who shipped the shoes, the logistics company that brought the shoe to the store, the clerk who rang up the purchase – is making what the market says they should be making. The price you pay? That's the price you should pay.

Perhaps you've heard people say that the most important thing is to "grow the pie," and that it's foolish to argue about how big any given "slice of the pie" is:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/405403/abundance-ezra-klein-building-costs-housing-energy-democrats-polarization

But this doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. If your slice of the pie is way too small to live on, and the pie grows, and your slice doesn't grow with it – or if it does, but not by enough to keep you solvent, then the size of your slice of the pie is the only thing that matters.

Economists call this the "distributional outcome" question, and orthodox economists insist that only fools and ideologues talk about distributional outcomes. They consider distributional outcomes to be a trap that sucks in well-meaning people who back "market-distorting interventions" that end up making everyone else poorer.

But you know who really cares about distributional outcomes? The finance sector. Think of the 2015 American Airlines pilot strike, which ended with a raise for pilots. When the company announced this on an investor call, Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Investors have a lot of power. After all, capital is concentrated into just a few hands, with trillions being wielded by institutional investors – index funds, hedge funds, etc – and they get to elect the board, who have the power to hire and fire corporate executives. A corporate board is like a trade union for wealth, a small committee that wields solidaristic power to threaten companies with dire consequences if their interests aren't given priority over the interests of workers and buyers.

No wonder that corporations are so ardently opposed to other forms of solidaristic power, like trade unions – who might shift value from investors to workers – and regulators – who might shift value from investors to buyers. Without these sources of countervailing power, unified capital will not only pass on any additional costs to workers and shoppers, they'll raise prices over and above any inflationary hikes. This does indeed "grow the pie" – while beggaring both shoppers and workers.

In other words, Nike could eat the tariff costs on its goods, but it won't because it doesn't have to, because it's part of a duopoly that both tacitly and explictly colludes to screw its customers and workers. Indeed, the cartelized big businesses that run the US economy just spent the pandemic years doing greedflation – using the excuse of the pandemic and their monopolistic pricing power to raise the prices of everything, from your rent to a dozen eggs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

If you've got the right kind of especially smooth market-pilled brain, you insist that this is impossible. These giant margins are so tempting that they will inevitably coax "new market entrants" into opening competing businesses. That does happen – sometimes. But not when the dominant companies can figure out how to build Warren Buffett's cherished "moats and walls" around their businesses. For example, if you're Amazon and 90% of middle class US households prepay for their shipping through Prime, you can charge sellers whatever the traffic will bear, because they have to go through your chokepoint in order to reach their best customers. That's how Amazon ended up taking 45-51% out of every dollar platform sellers earn:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

In Trumpland, the point of tariffs is to create friction on imports so that investors back businesses that do their production onshore. There's plenty of reasons to want things to be made in America. Manufacturing key resources in the US creates resiliency against geopolitical events (like wars), environmental disasters (like shipping-disrupting superstorms), and epidemiological events (like pandemics). Moreover, the low cost of overseas manufacturing often comes at the expense of human rights and environmental protection: making things in the US is no guarantee that they'll be made by fairly compensated workers in safe workplaces that don't pollute their environments, but it's a lot easier to enforce those priorities when production is within US borders.

But US investors spent the past 40 years gleefully demolishing the capacity of America to make things. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

[V]ocational expertise is very deep here [in China]. And I give the educational system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even as others were de-emphasizing vocational.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/17/how-much-would-an-iphone-cost-if-apple-were-forced-to-make-it-in-america/

The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/with-high-tariffs-has-trump-ended

Trump's tariffs, weak antitrust and weak consumer regulation are a recipe for shifting billions from the American public to the investors in the largest companies. It's still going to result in a huge economic collapse, but the most profitable companies of today will be best poised to stay on top of the pile after the crash. One hopeful outcome of this is that a bunch of the One Percenters are extremely fucked off about the plan:

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/06/is-the-conservative-crackup-finally-here/

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is a nonprofit impact litigation shop funded by Leonard Leo, the mastermind of the Federalist Society and its takeover of the Supreme Court. They're the ones who got Chevron Deference overturned last year, and now they're suing the Trump administration over the tariffs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/05/trump-tariffs-sink-conservatives-challenge-whether-theyre-legal/

As Corey Robin writes, tariffs have a long history of breaking up conservative coalitions, "the leading edge of political conflict in the 19th century." Robin writes that the conservative movement has spent years shifting tariff power from Congress to the president, never anticipating that someday, a president might preside over a Mad King tariff strategy. Now, Robin says:

The tariff is going to be the major issue that leads the judicial right to confront the empowered executive that they’ve turbo-charged in so many other ways.

Last year, Rick Perlstein pointed out that the true significance of Project 2025 lay in its contradictions, the irreconcilable, mutually exclusive policy prescriptions found in its pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein said that these contradictions were a map of the fracture lines in the Trump coalition. Trump's tariffs clearly represent a major fault-line, and we need to seize this opportunity when it presents itself.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

[himejoshevik]

Neither China nor Russia are imperial powers. They do not pursue national development by actively immiserating other nations (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017). Their relations with Global South countries are also non-hegemonic. Iran and other countries across Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific develop ties with China and Russia while maintaining their independence with respect to domestic and foreign priorities. Whereas Washington sanctions or imposes tariffs on nations that transact with Iran, Russia and China pursue relations even with states inside of the US’s imperial orbit. This calculation is indeed based on self-interest, but it also envisions mutual development. The very structure of the Iranian state therefore precludes it from relying upon anyone else when threatened. In response to criticisms that Russia should have provided greater support during the 12-Day War, one Iranian official explained that Iran did not request assistance. ‘Our relationship is a mutually beneficial one. Besides, the more you ask from someone, the more you have to give back in the future. We do not want to “owe” anyone any favors, as Iran determines its own policies.’ The official added, ‘Iran does not use its allies like a “milking cow” like some Arab monarchies do with the United States’ (DD Geopolitics 2025). Iranian officials, in other words, do not grovel to Russia or China and are not dictated to in the manner that President Donald Trump does with the US’s European allies (Lory 2025). ... National liberation and international solidarity are complementary phenomena. In Iran’s case, its capacity to defend itself progressed over decades and with assistance from friendly countries. Movements that are completely isolated from the outside world are often defeated with ease. The Palestinian liberation struggle has gradually weakened the Zionist entity over two years of unyielding resistance. Likewise, AoR forces in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq systematically eradicated the myth that the Zionist entity is impervious to air attacks. Yemen also enforces an intractable blockade against Israel in the Red Sea, which suffocates the Zionist economy. The Axis of Resistance has therefore unmasked the Zionist entity’s vulnerabilities. Iran leveraged these weaknesses during True Promise III and inflicted unprecedented damage on Israel. Even if Iran did not receive direct support from its regional allies, their resistance subsidized its efforts. Iran did not go it alone. Yet national liberation also means that a country exercises full self-determination. At all times, Iran makes decisions in its best interest. This is similarly true of the resistance forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Palestine, and of China and Russia at the global level. Sovereign countries determine the shape of their own historical development. As the world witnesses the resurgence of anti-imperialist struggles, it becomes crucial to understand these core tenets of national liberation. In West Africa, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso – support each other toward mutually beneficial development after enduring decades of imperial domination. The AES countries also receive significant assistance from China, Russia, and other friendly countries in the economic and security sectors (Al Jazeera 2024, 2025b; Nyabiage 2025). Nonetheless, each country determines its own national and regional policy while working doggedly to rid their nations of invasive Western influence. Each stands upright in the face of imperialism. Iran and the broader Axis of Resistance follow the same model. Without decisional independence, the struggle that each country wages against imperialism becomes contradictory and thus moot. As a doctrine, self-reliance propels each country forward and will ultimately liberate West Asia from Zionism and US imperialism. Toward that end, Iran’s 12-Day War of national resistance elevated the region’s struggle for liberation.

Navid Farnia, "Iran's 12-Day War of Resistance: National Liberation as Self-Reliance"

[pseudotsugas]

like. if pushed to take a stance i guess i'd say i am not personally vegan; even though i share the goal of a world less cruel & exploitative toward nonhuman beings i ultimately don't think becoming personally vegan in my consumption choices would be an especially effective or direct use of my time & energy toward that goal; i think an idealistic vision of a less ecologically & ethically destructive global food system that actually meets everyone's needs probably would still include some (radically different) forms of both animal agriculture & hunting in the regions suitable to it; in ideal circumstances i am generally pretty pro-leather for all the usually cited reasons of durability, safety, it being a byproduct rather than a primary driver of animal agriculture, et cetera.

but! at this point i do view anyone taking a vocally & aggressively anti-vegan stance, on environmental or anti-imperialist grounds of all things, as fundamentally either self-serving & gullible or an outright shill. whatever your leftist credentials, you have fallen for decades of concerted propaganda from one of the most rapacious & destructive industries in existence - toward the planet, toward animals, and toward human workers. the environmental case for a widespread reduction in industrial-scale meat production & consumption particularly in the imperial core seems incredibly convincing, and i have yet to see a single argument against it that holds water & doesn't completely rely on constructing false binaries.

like - if we are taking seriously the idea of consumer choices as political actions (which, no matter any arguments about relative effectiveness, i think it's fair to say they are) - as prev post is getting at, the choice facing the average imperial-core consumer does not look like "fast-fashion microplastic-laden pleather shittily constructed in a sweatshop" vs "reliable traditionally-made leather made by well-compensated craftsmen", it looks like "fast-fashion microplastic-laden pleather shittily constructed in a sweatshop" vs "fast-fashion slightly-less-microplastic-laden leather shittily constructed in a sweatshop". it doesn't look like "industrial monoculture quinoa plantations destroying the rainforest & traditional livelihoods & local economies for the profits of american multinationals" vs "cows freely & sustainably grazed on land ecologically unsuitable for plants-only agriculture" (<- insanely loaded construction. which landscapes? which systems of plant agriculture?), it's "industrial monoculture quinoa plantations destroying the rainforest & traditional livelihoods & local economies for the profits of american multinationals" vs "industrial monoculture cattle farms destroying the rainforest & traditional livelihoods & local economies, which are themselves reliant on vast industrial monoculture corn & soybean farms destroying the rainforest & traditional livelihoods & local economies, for the profits of american multinationals".

& like. have i encountered vegans for whom their consumption-based activism becomes a thought-terminating cliche, an excuse to feel righteous while ignoring other oppression & exploitation & economic realities beyond those of white PNWers? sure, absolutely (although in most such cases i've gotten the distinct sense that if they ate animals they'd be just as racist abt the human cost of animal ag). But on average, in my experience, someone who is already thinking about one type of violence implicated in the commodities they buy is much less likely than the average person to be wilfully blind to the other types of violence involved, not moreso.

[reasonsforhope]

Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating, study finds

Global adoption of diet low in meat would aid health, land and food systems as well as reducing emissions, researchers say

"A global shift to a mostly plant-based “flexitarian” diet could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help restrict global heating to 1.5C, a new study shows.

Previous research has warned how emissions from food alone at current rates will propel the world past this key international target.

But the new research, published in the Science Advances journal, shows how that could be prevented by widespread adoption of a flexitarian diet based around reducing meat consumption and adding more plant-based food.

“A shift toward healthy diets would not only benefit the people, the land and food systems,” said Florian Humpenöder, a study author and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “but also would have an impact on the total economy in terms of how fast emissions need to be reduced.” ...

The researchers found that adopting a flexitarian diet could lower methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture and lower the impacts of food production on water, nitrogen and biodiversity. This in turn could reduce the economic costs related to human health and ecosystem degradation and cut GHG emissions pricing, or what it costs to mitigate carbon, by 43% in 2050.

The dietary shift models also show limiting peak warming to about 1.5C can be achieved by 2045 with less carbon dioxide removal, compared with if we maintain our current diets.

“It’s important to stress that flexitarian is not vegetarian and not vegan,” Humpenöder says. “It’s less livestock products, especially in high-income regions, and the diet is based on what would be the best diet for human health.”

In the US, agriculture accounts for more than 10% of total GHG emissions. Most of it comes from livestock. Reducing meat consumption can free up agricultural land used for livestock production, which in turn can lower methane emissions. A potent greenhouse gas, methane is mainly expelled from cows and other animals raised for livestock. Animal production is the primary contributor to air quality-related health impacts from US food systems.

“This paper further confirms what other studies have shown, which is that if we change our diets to a more flexitarian type, we can greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jason Hill, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s department of bioproducts and biosystems engineering.

According to the study authors, one way to achieve a shift toward healthier diets is through price-based incentives, such as putting taxes on the highest-emitting animal products, including beef and lamb. Another option is informing consumers about environmental consequences of high meat consumption."

-via The Guardian, March 27, 2024

[yurucamp]

I agree that it's important for us to reduce our meat consumption. It's frustrating that tumblr users claim to be anti capitalist and leftist, yet they act as though the modern day farming industry isn't harmful at all. We all use petrol but you wouldn't see anyone on here defending the petrol industry, so why do people defend some of the horrible practices in animal agriculture. Honestly you don't even have to be vegan, vegetarian or pescatarian to simply acknowledge that the industry needs to change 😔

yes, i agree completely!

it's always irked me to see people trot out statistics about how resource-intensive it is to grow almonds, or something similar, as if anyone thinks that plant-based diets are magically free of the exploitation inherent in mass capitalist economies-- the point is that, comparatively, getting protein from plant sources will always be more sustainable because you're not going through the intermediate energy-wasting livestock step. i mean, cows/sheep/pigs/chickens all need to eat, they aren't just building body mass from thin air! :-P

er, but i think that the focus on dogma and purity (even when it's imagined) pushes a lot of people away from veganism/vegetarianism- it's better for everyone to reduce the amount of meat they eat rather than a smaller group forsaking it entirely