#pesticide not required

[sexhaver]

i've been playing a bunch of Pesticide Not Required recently and might do a more in-depth writeup soon going over the characters and weapons, but this game is fucking infuriating if you don't figure out the objectively correct strategy so im posting this to hopefully save someone some stress:

NEVER BUILD INTO CRITS. Crit Chance and Crit Damage sound good on paper but unfortunately due to human nature it works out that you actually get a way better build by picking every single levelup perk "balanced" out by reducing your crit damage/chance. there are like three perks and one weapon that maybe justify a crit build and none of them will get you past the massive difficulty spike on day 6 or 7 in higher difficulties

mine a few ores during the first day so you go into the first shop with around 600-800 gold

your top priority with shopping during the first few days is to fill out all 5 of your weapon slots so you'll only see those weapons in the shop (making upgrades easier). this is basically the only thing you'll ever need the rerolls for so don't be shy with them

although some weapons are better than others, all of them can be viabahahahahaha im just fucking with you! half of the weapons are straight up useless and should never be picked. when rerolling, you're looking for the following weapons in this order:

weed whacker. S-tier, unquestionably the best weapon in the game, you cannot get past day 6 on higher difficulties without this. like all other weapons that spin around you (i.e. the next two) this benefits highly from projectile speed and attack duration: faster spinning + spinning for longer = more hits per activation

scythe. "weed whacker at home". A-tier, hits the same area as weed whacker to keep enemies off your back while weed whacker is on cooldown. i know im making it sound boring but "slightly worse weed whacker" is still far and away the second best weapon in the game

sprinkler/water sprayer. "weed whacker but big". doesn't really hit its stride until level 4 or 5 but is essential in the late game to soften enemies up before they get in range of weed whacker + scythes. ALWAYS take the +4 amount upgrade on the left for level 5, ignore all of the buffs on the right side, shooting 8 beams out at once is the reason you took this weapon

toad oil. very mediocre early on but once you hit level 5 you can have pretty much the entire screen as a damage-dealing area

DO NOT BUILD CRIT. I MEAN IT. YOU WILL UNLOCK THE CRIT CHARACTER AND THINK "OH MAYBE THIS GUY CAN MAKE IT WORK" AND YOU WILL GO INTO WINTER 3 AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOUR BUILD AND THEN THE DAY 6 WAVE WILL TURN YOUR ASS INSIDE OUT EVERY SINGLE TIME WITHOUT FAIL BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING BUT DAMAGE AND EVEN THAT DAMAGE STILL ISN'T ENOUGH. THIS IS A PSA.

[kurogamu]

Cuttest Bullet Heaven? - Pesticide Not Required Gameplay

[coolocgod]

So i have a new favorite game

Yep, its called pesticide not required and its way to fun XD, idk what else to say i just wanted to say my new obsession

[tea-withnofixinsplease]

Just read the weirdest thread on my suggestions,

A.V. : Oh so now Cattle is a danger to the planet? Well riddle me THIS "VEGUNS" (they mean like, the U.N. but whatever), Replace All those grazing livestock with a Soy Field Monocrop and what will you have?? 40 years from now, it'll be the same if not W0rse! You want Pesticide drenched, Toxic sludged, Water Draining, Small Rodent killing harvesting PLANT FARMS is that what you want?!

Me: ....im hopin for a hydroponic farm in a gutted out building near the grocery store?

[goinggoats]

I went to my union meeting for the first time. They refer to everyone as Brother or Sister [name] and start the meeting with the pledge of allegiance. They approved motions to donate about $300, gave away hundreds of dollars in gift cards as door prizes, and said that they had over $5000 in credit card processing fees to pay. Is this how unions usually operate

[multifandomhoodies]

seven hours of pesticide seminar today. truck buddy and i suffered together for a majority of it. our review? truck buddy "my buttcheeks hurt" (from sitting in shitty chairs) and mine "holy fuck" several times over. good thing it's three years till the next one

[headspace-hotel]

data about where carbon emissions are coming from is so frustrating cause there's all kinds of huge, sprawling, just fucking vast breakdowns of What Causes The Most Carbon Emissions Out Of All Everything In The Entire World, but those are aggregations of numerous smaller but still vast aggregations of data, which are processed and polished from various aggregations of crunched numbers, which are patched and pieced together from various studies, estimates and calculations, which are sieved out of numbers crunched from various measurements, estimates and records, which have been collected, estimated or otherwise conceived through an unspeakably huge variety of methodologies with unspeakably huge variety in limitations, reliability and margins of error.

Even if some of the data was very fine-grained at the beginning, it was filtered through some very coarse number-crunching techniques for the sake of the coarse data, so the results are only as good as the wrongest thing you did in any part of this process, but the plans of action are getting thought up from the top down, which makes the whole thing a hot fucking mess.

For example. And I just made this example up. Say you want to know whether apples or potatoes have a worse impact on climate change. So you look at one of these huge ass infographic things. And it says that potatoes are bad, whereas apples are REALLY good, the BEST crop actually. So it's better to eat apples than potatoes, you think to yourself. Actually we should find a way to replace potatoes with apples! We should fund genetic engineering of apples so they have more starch and can replace potatoes. Great idea. Time to get some investors to put $5 billion towards it.

But actually. Where'd they get that conclusion about apples? Well there's this review right here of the carbon footprint of all different fruits, seems legit. Where'd that data come from? Well it's citing this study right here saying that tree-grown crops are better because they sequester carbon, and this study right here about the distance that different fruits get transported, and this study right here where different fertilization systems are compared in terms of their carbon footprint, and this study over here that sampled 300 apple, peach, and orange farmers comparing their irrigation practices and rates of tree mortality, and this study...wow, okay, seems really reliable...

...what's the first study citing? oh, okay, here's a study about mycorrhizal networks in orchards in Oregon, saying that there's a super high density of fungal mycelium in the 16 orchards that they sampled. And here's a study about leaf litter decay rates in Switzerland under different pesticide regimes, and...okay...relationship of tree spacing to below ground vs. aboveground biomass...a review of above and below-ground biomass in semi-intensively managed orchard plots...

...That one cites "Relationship between biomass and CO2 requirements...carbon immobilization in soil of various tree species...mycorrhizal fungi impact on carbon storage...

...wait a second, none of these are talking about apples, they're about boreal forests...and orange trees...and peanut farms! They're just speculating on roughly applying the non-apple data to apples. You have to go backwards...

Yes! "A review of belowground carbon storage in orchard cropping systems!" Seems like overall the studies find potentially high carbon storage in orchard environments! Walnuts...pears...oranges... intercropping walnuts and wheat... intercropping apples and wheat... wait a second, what about orchards with only apples?

Time for you to go back again...

"New method of mulching in apple orchards can lower irrigation and pesticide needs..." okay but if it's new, most farmers aren't doing it. "Orchards with high density interplanted with annual crops show way more mycorrhizal fungus activity..." "Mycorrhizal associations with trees in the genus Malus..."

...And pretty soon you've spent Five Fucking Hours investigating apples and you've got yourself in this tangled web of citations that demonstrate that some orchard crops (not necessarily apples) store a lot of long-lasting biomass in their trunks and roots really well—and some apple orchards (not necessarily typical ones) have high amounts of mycorrhizal fungi—and some techniques of mulching in orchards (not necessarily the ones apple farmers use) experience less erosion—and some apple trees (not necessarily productive agricultural apples) have really deep root systems—

—and some environments with trees, compared with some conventional agricultural fields, store more carbon and experience less erosion, but not apple orchards because that data wasn't collected in apple orchards.

And you figure out eventually that there is no direct evidence anywhere in the inputs that singles out apples as The Best Crop For Fighting Climate Change, or suggests that conventional apple farming has a much smaller carbon footprint than anything else.

The data just spit out "apples" after an unholy writhing mass of Processes that involved 1) observing some tree-grown crops and deciding it applies closely enough to all tree grown crops 2) observing some apple orchards and deciding its applicable enough to all apple orchards 3) observing some tree-including environments and deciding its close enough to all tree-including environments 4) observing some farming methods and deciding it applies closely enough to all farming methods

And any one of these steps individually would be fine and totally unavoidable, but when strung together repeatedly they distort the original data into A Puddle of Goo.

And it wouldn't be that bad even to string them together, if trees didn't vary that much, and farming didn't vary that much, and soil didn't vary that much, and mycorrhizal networks didn't vary that much, and regions that grow apples didn't vary that much, and pre-conversion-to-apple-orchard states of apple orchards didn't vary that much, and economic incentives controlling apple farming didn't vary that much, but all of these things DO vary, a Fuck Ton, and if the full range of variation were taken into account—nay, intentionally optimized—the distinction between apples and potatoes might turn out to be be MEANINGLESS GOO.

anyway big size piles of data about Farming, In General, make me so bitchy

[cognitivejustice]

Agroecology—a science, practice, and movement that seeks social, political, economic, and environmental sustainability in the global food system—is gaining momentum in the U.S., according to a new Dartmouth-led commentary in Nature Food. As the co-authors report, the approach requires coordination among scientists, farmers, and activists.

"Agroecology is different, as it strives to achieve both ecological and social sustainability of food systems without sacrificing one for the other. We cannot save biodiversity and ecosystem integrity without also preserving farmer livelihoods and ensuring that the food systems we create provide food that is culturally relevant to local communities, and not simply meeting a calorie quota," says Ong.

Supporters of agroecology say the U.S. food system is dominated by industrial agriculture, which is characterized by monoculture production, reliance on agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, and advanced technology and machinery that depend heavily on fossil fuels.

Prior research has found that challenges facing global food systems—which include food insecurity, public health crises, biodiversity loss, and climate change—are perpetuated in part by the U.S. food system and the political influence of its big players.

//Granny's comment: Agroecology is solarpunk AF

[herpsandbirds]

Rusty Patched Bumble bee? I'm kinda bummed that they havent been seen in my area for over two decades

ENDANGERED BUMBLEBEE:

Rusty -patched Bumblebee (Bombus affinis), family Apidae, found in the eastern U.S.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

Massive population declines ar due to overuse of pesticides, habitat degradation and loss, and pathogens.

This large bumblebee requires 3 different habitats for different life stages: nesting, foraging, and hibernation.

Relatively cold tolerant, and sometimes found at higher elevations.

photographs: Larry Reis, Heather Holm, & Barbara C. Williams

[anipgarden]

Un-Actions, or Restriction of Activities

This is my first post in a series I’ll be making on how to increase biodiversity on a budget! I’m not an expert--just an enthusiast--but I hope something you find here helps! 

There’s a good handful of ways you can help increase biodiversity in your yard that don’t require buying things--in fact, these may actually help you save money in the long run! They may seem small and simple, but every bit counts! Whether you can do these in totality, or just limit how often you do these actions, it’ll make a difference.

Not Mowing, or Mowing Less Often

Turf grass lawns are considered a monoculture, meaning they don’t provide much opportunity for insects to find habitat--so few other creatures find them enjoyable either. An expanse of turf grass is, in many ways, a barren wasteland in the eyes of wildlife--too exposed to cross, with few to no opportunities for food or shelter, leaving them exposed to blazing hot sun, freezing cold, or any predators that may be lurking nearby. A place to be avoided. The simple act of letting your grass grow unbothered gives a chance for wildflowers to grow, and for your grass to grow taller--providing more habitat for insects, which then provides more habitat to birds and other creatures that feed on said insects. Wildlife want nothing more than to skirt by unnoticed, so even leaving the grass tall along the edges of a fence or yard can help a little. Even restricting mowing to every other week, or at a higher blade setting, can be a huge help. If HOAs or city ordinances are fussy about lawn length in the front yard, you can likely still keep grass higher in the backyard. Or, you can create a ‘feature’ where grass is allowed to grow long in a specific area. If it looks purposeful, people are more likely to accept it. Not mowing under trees or close to shrubs not only leaves space for wildflowers to grow, but also means you don’t have to deal with mowing over bumpy roots and other difficulties. Cutting different areas at different times can be an option for letting grass grow long in some areas while still having available places for play and entertainment. I’ve seen some people plant flower bulbs when pulling up weeds, so in the future they'll bloom in early spring before mowing is usually necessary. This could be another fun way of adding biodiversity to a lawn without--or before you--begin mowing in spring.

Not worrying about mowing, or doing it less often, saves you in time, money, and energy. You won’t have to buy as much gasoline for your mower, and Saturday afternoons can be free to be enjoyed in other ways aside from being sticky and sweaty and covered in grass stains. In addition, you’ll likely be lowering your own carbon emissions!

If you do have to mow your lawn, I’ve got ways you can use your grass clippings to boost biodiversity later in the post series!

Not using pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.

One of the next-biggest non-actions you can do asides from not mowing is using fewer fewer to no herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides in your yard. This’ll easily allow for more biodiversity. Allowing more insects and a wide array of plants to thrive will feed back into the entire food chain in your area. In addition, these types of chemicals have been tied to algae blooms, death of beneficial insects, harm to birds, fish, and even humans. Soil is supposed to be full of fungi, especially fungal mycelium that essentially acts as a network for plants to communicate, share nutrients, and support each other--fungicide kills that, and typically makes all other lawn problems even worse in a negative feedback loop. It may take awhile to see the benefits of avoiding these chemicals, but once you see it, it really is astounding.

However! I can’t lie and say that there haven’t been points where I needed to use pesticides at some points in my gardening journey. In these cases, try to use products that are organic--like diatomaceous earth, neem oil, etc--and use them accurately, correctly, and sparingly. Follow instructions on how to apply them safely and responsibly--for example, on non-windy days and during times when bees and other pollinators aren’t likely to be out and about. With some pests (read: oleander aphids, in my experience), a simple jetstream of water is enough to force them off the plant where they’ll be too weak to get back. Eventually, you should have a balanced enough ecosystem that no one insect pest causes a major issue with the work you’re doing to boost biodiversity.

If you can bear to, try handling pests manually. Squishing pest bugs in your hand is a pretty foolproof way to get rid of some problems, or spraying them with a mix of soap and water can do the trick on some insects. Alternatively, picking them off your plants and into a bucket of soapy water is also a valid option. You’ve heard of baptism by fire, now get ready for… baptism by soap?

But also! Try reconsidering what you consider a pest! Tomato hornworms are hated by gardeners, for devouring the foliage of beloved tomato, pepper, and potato plants. But killing the tomato and tobacco hornworm means getting rid of sphinx moths, also known as hummingbird or hawk moths! Hawk moths are vital to the survival of many native plants, and are sometimes even the only species that pollinates them. If you can bear to, consider sacrificing a few tomato plants, or growing a few extras, so we can continue having these beautiful moths for years to come. After all, they may not even do significant damage to the plants!

With that in mind, be friendly to your natural pest managers! Lacewings, ladybugs, praying mantises, wasps, birds, bats, and more will help manage pest populations in your environment! Encourage them by planting things they like, providing habitat, and leaving them be to do their work! Avoiding pesticides helps make your garden a livable environment for them, too!

Letting Weeds Grow

Many of the plants we know as 'weeds' are actually secondary succession species and native wildflowers. Milkweed was regarded as a noxious, annoying weed for a long time, and now people are actively trying to plant them after learning about the important role they play in our environments! Weeds are adapted to take over areas that have been cleared out of other plants after a disaster, so they're doing much of the initial work in making a habitat for other creatures. In fact, many of them will simply die back as the environment repairs itself.

An important thing to note is to please make sure that your ‘weeds’ are not invasive species. Work on learning how to identify native and invasive species in your area, and pull out what’s harmful to leave room for what’s good!

Don’t Rake (Or At Least Don’t Bag Your Leaves)

Many insects overwinter in piles of leaves that we often rake away and bag up in the fall and winter. By doing this, we are actively throwing away the biodiversity of our neighborhoods! If you can, leave the leaves where they fall! 

If you do need to rake, put the leaves in places wildlife can still access it instead of bagging it up. Move your leaves into garden beds to serve as mulch, or along the edge of fences to rest while keeping egg cases and hiding bugs intact and free to release come spring.

Leave Snags Where They Are

Snags are dead trees/dead branches on living trees. They provide an important wildlife habitat--many birds nest in them, or use them to seek cover from rain, and many insects will also live in snags (making them an additional food source for birds and other creatures). Tree cavities are used as nests by hundreds of bird species in the US, and many mammals use them as well, such as bats, squirrels, raccoons, and sometimes even bears. Some trees form cavities while they’re still alive, but in conifers they’re more likely to form after death. Crevices between the trunk of a dead tree and its peeling bark provide sun protection for bats and amphibians, and leafless branches make great perching areas for birds of prey to hunt from above. The decaying wood is home to insects and fungi, who then feed birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles.  Do check on the snags regularly to ensure they don’t serve a threat to any nearby structures, but whenever possible, leave them be! 

Keep Your Cat Inside

If you have an outdoor cat, consider making the adjustments to have it be an indoor cat. If you have an indoor cat, keep it as an indoor cat. Free ranging cats impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition for resources, disease, and more. Keeping little Mittens inside does a lot more to help than it may seem from the outside.

That’s the end of this post! My next one’s gonna be on things you can add to your space that aren’t directly related to growing plants. For now, I hope this advice helps! Feel free to reply with any questions, success stories, or anything you think I may have forgotten to add in! 

[she-is-ovarit]

Heads up for those of you who don't know this. Heavy metals such as arsenic and lead were found in popular protein powder brands, and 55% of the brands tested contained BPA pesticides, and other contaminants (over 150 contaminants in all!!!).

Plant based protein powders had the highest amounts of contamination in comparison to whey or egg based protein powders—it's assumed that this is because the plants directly bioabsorb the contaminants whereas the digestive system of animals might reduce it a little. More specifically, they had higher levels of heavy metals.

It didn't matter whether the product was marked as organic or not. Organic products actually had higher concentrations of heavy metals than non organic protein powders.

The most contaminated products were Garden of Life, Nature's Best, Quest, 360Cut, and Vega. Only Garden of Life responded when the researchers reached out, and their response was declining to comment.

Also, as this article describes, like protein powders even FDA approved supplements are loosely regulated. There really isn't enforcement on the manufacturing processes or what goes into these products. The manufacturers aren't required to prove they're safe. This is important to know considering some manufacturers of protein powders also make vegan and vegetarian supplements.

[bogleech]

With most insects and things I can understand that they have a place in the ecosystem, but I have trouble understanding the same thing with bed bugs. Are they just like. Kind of domesticated ticks? How did they end up almost solely indoors (to my understanding)? I had them in my apartment a while back and it was a pretty traumatizing experience. I know they don’t carry diseases like mosquitos and are really more mentally/emotionally harmful than physically harmful.

I saw your post about how we should be thankful the world isn’t so sterile that there’s no living thing left to harm or inconvenience us. And I do agree! But I think bedbugs are the one thing that I have trouble fully grasping that concept with. It’s harder to see the bigger picture with something that occurs in such a small and personal space, I suppose.

I can't find the post where I launched into this before but tiny bloodsucking animals ("micropredator" is growing as the preferred term over lumping them in with "parasites" per se!) exert a lot of important pressures on their host animals; everyone knows predators change how animals eat, sleep, mate, nest together and migrate, but so do the things that just "annoy" them, like having fleas! Additionally "micropredators" work together with predators and diseases in regulating population balance, and by taking nutrients non-lethally from their hosts, they help redistribute energy back into circulation! A little flea or tick or bed bug collects a little blood protein from a bear, it gets eaten by a spider or it dies and rots, and now that bear's protein energy is back in the food web well before the bear has passed on! All throughout that bear's life, its blood is "becoming" all these little pesky bugs that then become food for other things! When it comes to bed bugs, which are closely related to stinkbugs, assassin bugs, aphids and other "true bugs," they adapted to live in bird's nests, bat caves, rodent dents, anywhere juice-filled vertebrates come home to and rest, and the ones that feed on us are so closely related to a bat-specialized species you can only barely tell them apart:

The "bat bug," however, can't utilize human blood well enough to maintain an infestation on human hosts alone! They fully require bats!

We aren't sure when some bat bugs branched off and started traveling with humans, but we do know that they used to be MUCH MUCH EASIER to deal with. Perfectly ordinary pesticides used to clear up a bed bug problem just fine. That changed when we invented DDT and tried to use it to wipe them out altogether. It's one of the harshest synthetic poisons ever developed, and it kills through just an ion channel in the animal's nervous system. By drenching North America in DDT for years on end, we "seemingly" wiped out bed bugs and a few other things, but really all we did was give a few generations of human beings a bunch of new chronic illnesses and give a few generations of insects a mutation that makes them resistant to not just DDT but lots and lots of other poisons.

Bed bugs basically destroy people's lives but never naturally evolved to be that good at it; it's just another result of capitalism ignoring the warnings of the scientific community. People died rich off DDT before they ever had to care about its after effects.

[ca-dmv-bot]

Customer: PERSCRIPTION FOR POISON DMV: LD50-"An LD50 is a standard measurement of acute toxicity that is stated in milligrams (mg) of pesticide per kilogram (kg) of body weight. An LD50 represents the individual dose required to kill 50 percent of a population of test animals (e.g., rats, fish, mice, cockroaches)" Verdict: DENIED

[bowelfly]

Honest question from someone who also dislikes "invasive species control that amounts to kill on sight": what do you suggest as an alternative control effort should I encounter say a spotted lanternfly or a spongy moth? I really hate just killing bugs for being in the wrong place. Thanks!

i honestly don't think there is much that any individual person can do. like in general once an exotic species has established in an area there's almost nothing short of a fast and concerted multimillion dollar years-long eradication program that even stands a chance of actually removing them entirely. and this is a rant for another day but generally nobody wants to pay for the kind of program that stands an actual chance of being successful. it doesn't matter how many concerned citizens you convince to go around smashing animals, if even a handful get missed, and many many more than a handful will get missed, the survivors can lay enough eggs and rapidly enough that the population will have no trouble rebounding. the way to eradicate an invasive species, when it's even possible, is through very strategic and large-scale application of pesticides, environmental control, parasitoids, and other integrated pest management strategies.

and that's not even mentioning that the whole smash-on-sight thing requires people to recognize the target and not just smash every bug they see which is also another rant for another day because you would not fucking believe how bad people are at identifying insects like i've had fucking crane flies reported as "murder hornets" (another rant). i genuinely believe that entomology should be a core primary and secondary education subject alongside history and math. the world is mostly bugs and it's important to know at least a little about them. without mass knowledge, the whole campaign just engenders a further generalized fear and disgust and violence towards all insects which is fucking nasty to me.

anyway i'm getting distracted. back to your question, what should you do if you encounter a spotted lanternfly or spongy moth or japanese beetle or whatever? report it to your state's department of agriculture if you live in the united states, or to whatever the equivalent is if you live elsewhere. chances are they're already aware of the infestation in your area but there's always the chance that they're not. with any luck they're one of the few ones that actually has the funding to operate a large-scale control program and are working on it already. again i'm very fatalistic about these things and don't think that eradication is possible in most cases by the time the exotic insect is discovered but at the very least it is often possible to keep the populations in check to the point that they're not an ecological/economic catastrophe using the IPM methods mentioned above--with enough funding. you can kill the bug if you want but smashing one bug or a dozen or a hundred or a thousand isn't going to do shit in the long run or the large scale and it's not the bug's fault that it is where it is.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the turn of the millennium, the prices of crude oil and food have evolved almost in sync. This can be put down to the high energy input required for the production of agricultural commodities such as synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides. In addition, a huge amount of fossil fuel energy is needed to manufacture and operate farm machinery and to process, package, distribute and prepare food. Food systems consume 15% of the fossil fuel energy used globally, according to estimates. The production of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers is particularly energy-intensive, requiring around 4% of global gas consumption.

Public Food Stocks for Price Stabilisation and their Contribution to the Transformation of Food Systems

[evilsoup]

an older comrade once said in response to me saying some edgelord shit takes from here that "well, we're the decent people, you know". And at the end of the day that's right. I look around at the centre of my city when there's some food festival or some music at the waterfront or whatever, just people milling around having a normal good time, and really that's the core of my politics: a world where everyone gets that, where there aren't farm labourers giving birth to infants with no limbs due to the pesticides sprayed over the fields where they work, where there aren't children in gaza writing their names in permanent marker on their arms and legs so their scattered remains can be identified and buried when the bomb hits them, where there aren't refugees getting raped by smugglers on every continent and refugees drowning in dinghies while those few people in the rich countries who try to save them from the ocean face criminal prosecution, where there are no children working in sweatshops or mines. I'm not talking heaven on earth here, but we have the collective capacity to ensure a pretty good life for everyone.

The slogan of the 1917 russian revolution was "bread, land, peace", you know? And the imperial governments of the world countered this revolution with invasion and the sponsorship of pogromists in civil war. And Salvadore Allende's peaceful reformist path met the same kind of brutal resistance in 1973. The enemies of decency, the destroyers of families, make a peaceful path to a decent society impossible. In 1917 there was a rebellion of army offcer cadets in russia; they were quickly surrounded and surrendered; the workers of moscow allowed them to go free with the promise that they would not take up arms against the revolution; these cadets went on to form the officer corp of the counter-revolutionary white army in the civil war. It would have been better, but also less decent, for the workers to have shot these cadets; the creation of an decent society will require indecent acts. This is what we call "dialectics".