thedivinecommaarbitrage

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borders between countries aren't real btw we just made them up. there's no such thing as an "immigrant" we're all just people moving around on the same planet that we've always moved around on

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The Devil loved too much and She is weeping.

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The piece I did for @hieronzine . I had a lot of fun working on it, and I'm pretty glad with how it turned out.

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occasionally an anticommunist will say something to you to the effect of "wow believing all this must make you miserable" which is funny bc 1. that doesn't make it not true and 2. i think the exact same shit happening but being unable to understand it and believing this is the best possible world and there's no alternative is a lot more miserable, as evidenced by how 3. liberals don't seem very happy right now, a lot of them seem to be always miserable in fact

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Yay yippee @hieronzine posting day! It was so fun working on this big cool thing with all of you!

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my haters become potaters in the farm of life

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lamb of tartary and rebirth

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[ID:

a wiki screenshot showing the Adventure Zone episode "Moonlighting: Chapter Two" was released February 26th, 2015.

a tumblr textpost reading: "ppl who celebrate fictional character birthdays are annoying pass it on" with a reblog edited to read: "fuck this post and happy birthday lucretia adventurezones".

End ID.]

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constantly shocking to me how the destruction of The Family and the liberation of children are considered even in many "left-leaning" spaces* as a "fringe" position. despite, in my mind, being one of the clearest and most critical points of necessary and militant struggle.

*(incoherent term ik but whatever im sorry im trying to use a flawed shorthand)

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To have the highest incarceration per capita rate in the world, Vatican City would need to imprison 13 people.

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"Violence only leads to more violence" TRUE! The thing is tho, a lot of people in power seem to think the start of the violence was the CEO getting shot, but they're wrong. The start of the violence was that very CEO running a company that turns immense, endless human suffering into money.

Violence did lead to more violence, decades of needless death and suffering willfully enacted by millionaires so they can make just a little bit more money, that was the start of the violence. If they didn't want it to escalate eventually, they should have maybe not made killing people the core functionality their entire company hinges on.

The people being tortured and killed by the health insurance industry are not the ones who started the violence, and tbh I don't really think it's on them to end the violence, either.

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my favorite thing about hunter x hunter is during the chimera ant arc when gon and killua are at the fever pitch of their childhood-best-friendship-turned-obsessive-preteen-pseudo-romance and there’ll be a super tense and emotionally charged moment or exchange between them or from them to an adult and all the adults present just stand there awkwardly not knowing what the FUCK to do

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some more of the colourways I made of my timewar pattern!

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Against Permaculture

For those of you unfamiliar, permaculture is "a sustainable design system that seeks to mimic natural ecosystems to create self-sufficient, regenerative, and productive environments for human habitation and agriculture." In practice it's a hodge-podge of gardening and building techniques. After spending a lot of time reading about permaculture and working those ideas into my own garden, I've become convinced it's not a usable set of principles for farming at almost any scale, and is much more of an spiritual/aesthetic orientation, with significant drawbacks.

Industrial agriculture is actively destructive, but permaculture is not a system capable of addressing those large-scale issues. (IMO, the vast majority of people who have an interest in 'permaculture' actually have an interest in sustainable agriculture, but just aren't familiar enough with the details to articulate the difference.) Permaculture is a design philosophy that self-perpetuates through teaching expensive certificate courses, not through creating successful farms and gardens.

Some of my qualms against permaculture:

Most permaculture techniques decrease yield without materially increasing biodiversity. The ideas of permaculture self-contradict: in a garden you want a consistent amount of edible plant matter. In a natural ecosystem, all the plants compete against each other, and seed/fruit production varies wildly year to year. Food forests seem like a great idea: grow shade-tolerant crops under fruit trees, double your harvest. But the truth is, there's extremely few crops that will grow under fruit trees. Most (garlic scapes, anybody?) aren't really stuff you want in quantity. Co-planting decreases yields for both crops and makes weeding far more labor intensive. For the average North American backyard gardener, once you get two or three mature fruit trees, you have more apples than you know what to do with, and a food forest is overkill. (Caveat: this is for temperate agriculture. Tropics & subtropics are a different ball game.) Or take permaculture's anti-tilling stance. No-till agriculture is great for industrial farming where erosion is catastrophic. But it's done in a mechanized way that kills weeds and aerates the soil at the same time. A home gardener, with a container garden on the balcony or a converted lawn, is in no danger of tilling up so much area to lose topsoil from wind or rain. And if you don't till, the weeds are going to be choking the life out of the garden. I cannot overstate how much weeds decrease yield, far more than any benefit you might get from preserving soil biodiversity. "Well, I don't care about having champion yields." Putting in tons of labor and then getting three peas is depressing, leads to people burning out on gardening, and is counter-productive to the goal of actually feeding yourself sustainably. If you want biodiversity, grow native plants. Dedicating a smaller amount of space to intensive gardening so that other other areas can be natural is the best way to increase biodiversity, not trying to preserve weeds.

Permaculture is incredibly labor intensive and doesn't scale up. One great example is the much-touted herb spiral: you build a stone spiral structure that has rosemary & other Mediterranean herbs up top because they need more sun and better drainage, and parsley & chives at the base where it's shadier and wetter. It integrates the biological requirements of the plants and is a beautiful design! And it's totally unnecessary. You can just put those herbs in pots on your deck, water them when they need water and end up with more herbs than you know what to do with. It's far cheaper, very little work, and less work to maintain, too. (It also lets you overwinter the herbs in a cold climate, or move them if you're renting. More importantly, there is no "self-sufficient, regenerative" way to grow a saleable amount of produce. In the more than 50 years permaculture has been articulated as a design philosophy, there is not a single successful commercial farm or market garden in the US that uses permaculture techniques. Permaculture farms make their money from education, not produce sales. Almost all permaculture techniques are incredibly labor intensive and thus must exploit volunteer labor to be profitable. Take hugels: raised gardening heaps built on rotting wood. The benefits of hugels (water retention, vertical space, fertilization) might be real. But there's absolutely no way to plant, weed or harvest them except by hand. So they are not viable to your average family farmer who has a labor force of one or two people. What does that matter to a home gardener or someone who organizes a gardening co-op? Labor still matters. If you're on year five of your garden, and the novelty has worn off, you are more likely to keep gardening if it's easy. Likewise, if you organize a community garden, it's far easier to rent a tiller for one weekend and clear the beds than it is to get 20 people to sign up to weed for days--which makes it more sustainable to maintain in the long run.

The backbone of permaculture, the Permaculture Design Certificate, operates more like a MLM than a farmer training course. PDCs are 72 hour courses (essentially the same length as a semester-long college course) on the basics of permaculture. But that single course certifies you not to apply permaculture principles to your farm or garden, but to design for other people and teach PDC courses yourself. This is a ludicrously small amount of training to be certified as a practitioner and instructor for such a huge, varied topic. It functionally serves as a pyramid scheme where you make your money back not from farming, but from charging others to get their PDC from you.

Permaculture, as a design philosophy, has not proven open to criticism or change. I don't want to get into this too deeply, but it's a danger sign when thought leaders start to reject empirical data. Permaculture has been around for decades. It's made big promises about radically changing the way we live and eat, none of which have come true. Some permaculture leaders have distinctly cult-like followings. (Google 'Paul Wheaton criticism' for an example.)

Many of the sustainable farming and building techniques promoted by permaculture are not their invention. Co-cropping and crop rotation. Seed saving. Raised beds. Manure heating. Using biochar. Walipinis. Building with thermal mass. All of these were around before some white guys in the 70s decided to write books about revolutionizing agriculture. It's great that permaculture has popularized some of these things again, but you should really take them piece by piece and see what works for where you are & what you want to do. (Caveat: rocket mass heaters are mainly a permaculture idea and genuinely seem to be an efficient wood heating method. Unfortunately they're not something most renters or even homeowners can easily incorporate into their housing.)

In conclusion: home gardening is great. You can meaningfully supplement your diet, lower your carbon footprint, have a healthy outdoor hobby, learn about food production and your climate, and connect to your community. I also am a huge fan of pollinator gardens and planting native plants instead of lawn monoculture.

But the best way to get into gardening, IMO, is not through permaculture. Go to your local cooperative extension and stock up on pamphlets. They probably have seminars and master gardener classes and tons of resources specific to your region. Look into indigenous agriculture techniques for your region and see if any of those are doable for your space. Read some permaculture books if you want, but spending months of your life and thousands of dollars studying at some Certified Permaculture Institute (tm) is not going to be valuable for the vast majority of people.