• 25 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • but you expanded the example with food availability

    No, the example is always about “moving the problem elsewhere” which is the essence of colonialism, so when coming up with a neat solution, one must always ask “is there a problem I’m moving elsewhere?”. The food needs to be grown somewhere. The land is effectively in permanent use by your stomach. You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist just because it’s somewhere else.

    Are you advocating that houses would be better for farming and animal rearing given the lesser land availability?

    I’m saying apartments do not solve a problem here. Villages have collections of small houses and then some farms. Some of those houses are a bit further out, and some are in a cluster. That’s required because of the different job roles of the individuals in that society. Perhaps we should design with respect to those different job roles and optimise for internalities, bringing our lifestyle in line with our usage.

    that septic tank would need to be routinely emptied somewhere

    You can use it in biofuels and treat it with nature, then turn it into fertiliser. It is a resource. See how that internalises the usage? You are taking the big loops of “I need big government to solve this problem” into a “my community or family can solve this problem?”

    would it be inconceivable for the much greater surrounding land to be co-opted for farming and animals?

    That’s not how it works. It ends up being a wash due to just how much land is used for farming vs just living. I’m not arguing for McMansions here. I’m arguing for single storied, sometimes detached housing in a “community configuration”. Shared gardens and farms, and a mix of earthships and townhouse style developments. Keep the sustainable “loops” small.

    Because land in villages is typically owned by several different families who are unwilling to share it

    Even pre-capitalist and non-capitalist communities have a village like structure. Even nomadic tribes have a village like structure. They know how to share. We don’t need multiple stories.

    Overall, the problem with advocating for higher density is often a statement of denial, similar to the “zero waste” people. Pretending that you are only using the space you sleep in and discounting all the space you use for food, and treating your problems as “waste” which is just thrown away and forgotten or left to some big government to deal with. This is the opposite of Solarpunk.


  • What are you talking about. It’s an island. Where are the animals for the kebabs? Where are the “groceries” coming from? How much power does it take for the “single” sewer line? Who said the houses would have a sewer line and not septic tanks? What roads? I’m not arguing for the thing on the left, I’m saying there’s a reason why we have been building villages in village shapes and not in apartment shapes.


  • If you draw those things, the actual land use becomes apparent, and then you have to draw the infrastructure to bring the food in and take the poop out. Eventually you’ll start to see that there’s an enormous amount of land use just for living, it consumes the island either way, and there’s an argument to be made for living like a village (as they do in actual villages) because of the decentralisation of resources and lowering the land use of infrastructure.





  • Thank you for the awesome analysis. To try and put what you said intuitively, I guess the “strategic” voting is to compromise as early as possible with a group whose “second choice” would be your last choice (and that is also a very popular first choice but only just popular enough to win). Does that sound correct?

    So in your political compass, instead of picking the closest option to you on the compass with a Greens/Labor vote, you would pick a spot closer to the overall vibes of the electorate with a Teal vote to solidify that choice against an even further to the right choice which would win by a narrow margin?



  • Sure, what I have is anecdata, but I will say the study is focused on the teal voters, whereas the people I’m talking about were members or organisers. They did door-knocking or sausage sizzles or similar.

    For this comment, I’ve decided to go to the actual study rather than use the ABC’s interpretation of it.

    Firstly, the analysis is that there are fewer “rusted on” voters, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say. A bunch of rusted on LNP voters have become less rusted on, so to speak. The first half of the analysis broadly agrees with what I’ve been saying.

    I don’t know if ranked choice voting really works with “tactical voting”. Someone would need to draw me a diagram, but overall the way most people vote is to put the candidate they like the most at the top, and the candidates they like the least at the bottom. If they distrust the majors, they put the majors “later”. Basically, if you think the Teals are going to get up, but you want the Greens, you’re still better off putting the Greens on top. There’s a very small corner case where the a bunch of small parties can trade places based on a handful of votes but it’s not common, and if you want the Greens but are happy with Teal, you’d still put them in the order you want. The study does say in the first half that people are way less likely to use HTV cards, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say.

    I think what’s happened is that they’re looking at 2019, the Scomo era. By that era, the voters I’ve been talking about would already have shifted to Labor or the Greens as Option 1, something they would not actually want, they just wanted a Scomo Coalition even less. I think the Teals actually are the first preference here, and a lot of these guys used to vote LNP in maybe 2015.


  • I don’t think that’s a good read of what’s happened given the “teal” voters I know about. Almost to a person, Teal voters are ex-Liberal voters. Pro Hewson, pro Howard, pro Turnbull. A lot of them probably excused Howard’s “Stop the Boats” as the realpolitik of keeping the ONP vote down (something which didn’t really pan out long term).

    However, even at Abbott many were noping out. First because they could see how much trouble Turnbull was having, but also because Abbott really was the jerk they saw Howard pretending to be. The “minister for women” probably also hemorrhaged a bunch of women voters too. That I think would have meant the success of the Teals, but not a landslide, until Morrison.

    The fact that he could just operate a kleptocrat government, no real skill, no real goals, just ill tempered and mean spirited. I think a bunch of Liberals were looking for a new home, and that was in the Teals. Those liberals aren’t coming back because the LNP isn’t going back to being the LNP. The nationals have taken over enough of the agenda that reactionaries are the only ones left in the Liberal party.

    The reactionaries have thoroughly “won” the LNP, all the way over to being the alt-right. Brain-dead “young liberals” will keep the ball rolling over but no serious person is going to care about their stupid ideas. Over time the Liberal part of the coalition will lose votes as the coalition increasingly embodies the National Party agenda. At that point the Nationals might wonder why they are in a coalition with a party which has fewer members than them. What happens to the Nationals at that point is unclear, because Climate Change doesn’t fuck around in 2040.