Okay. Let's go through Umberto Eco's checklist for recognizing fascism.
The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
True for lawn maintenance. Home Owner Associations often rigorously pin down the expected state of lawns and do not allow changes to procedure. Lawns derive from English manor houses and colonial homesteading. NIMBY-ism, grandfathered-in rights, always looking back to what people have earned because of how things used to be.
"The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
True for lawn maintenance. Modern concepts like biodiversity, mulching, avoiding soil pollution, etc. are woke disruptions to the right to have an English manor-style grassy desert. Superficial technological advancement in the form of lawn robots and high-tech mowers is allowed.
"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
True for lawn maintenance. Mowing the lawn is treated like an inherent virtue and privilege. Hiring people to spend their entire lives making lawns boring environmental catastrophes is considered a reasonable way to spend time. And again, scientific concepts like biodiversity, water shortages, and avoiding soil pollution are hated because it interferes with the right to have a pointless symbol of pointless labor.
"Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
True for lawn maintenance. Whether through HOAs or through simple social pressure from neighbors, it is considered treason against the neighborhood not to make your lawn look dead. With regards to the lawn itself, people are willing to spend a lot of money to hammer their soil into submission.
"Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
True for lawn maintenance. On top of viewing it as social treason, those with lawns will typically be terrified that an unkempt plot of land will harbor all manner of dangerous pests that could spread across the neighborhood. Every infestation will be blamed on the non-lawn, regardless of justification. With regards to the lawn itself, it is always made homogeneous both internally and with respect to the neighborhood.
"Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns will be seen as a blight on the neighborhood, lowering property values, and being a signal of incoming undesirables. With regards to the lawn itself, weeds and most animals are treated like a dangerous infectant to be removed out of fear.
"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
True for lawn maintenance. Unkempt lawns are often tied to ideological threats - hippies, commies, woke liberals, etc. - and folded into general conservative xenophobia. With regards to the lawn itself, obsession with weeds that are hard to root out.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
True for lawn maintenance. Those with unkempt lawns are simultaneously lazy and attempting to destroy the fiber of the neighborhood. Weeds are simultaneously unfit for keeping the lawn healthy and so suited for the environment that they're a constant threat.
"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
True for lawn maintenance. Lawns as a concept exist for the sake of fighting weeds forever. Giving gardens any shape that doesn't involve constant maintenance is frowned upon.
"Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
True for lawn maintenance. Those who can't maintain their lawns are treated with contempt, regardless of why. They should hire a gardener if they can't do it themselves, and if they can't afford it then they are gross and lower class. With regard to the lawn itself, nature is subjugated even as that subjugation causes ecocide and tremendous long-term damage to society. Anything that could live on the lawn is beneath notice even if it costs us.
"Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
I honestly think Eco is being a bit sexist here with his use of "everybody". In fascism, women are not educated to become heroes and die, they are trained to be heroes by producing many sons, metaphorically 'dying' by subjugating themselves to their husband, their culture, and their state. Likewise, in lawn maintenance, people aren't trained to die per se, but to treat their unpaid pointless labor as a necessary submission to the public good. Thus, gardeners also "die" metaphorically for the sake of their neighborhood, their culture, and their state.
"Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".
This is a specific expression of fascism in the field of sexuality, just like lawns are a specific expression of fascism in the field of gardening. Sometimes a hoe is just a hoe.
"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
True for lawn maintenance. Lawns are treated as inherently American, regardless of the individual opinions of those who would rather have unkempt lawns. With regards to lawn maintenance, someone who mows the lawn will typically conceive of a lawn as "healthy" if it meets the predefined standard, regardless of the actual health of the plants or the environment.
"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
A fait accompli in lawn maintenance. Before the industrial revolution, home gardens used to be a lot better understood and a lot better kept by the general population. Gardeners had tons of knowledge - almanacs, oral traditions, hands-on experience, etc. Over the course of the 20th century, the rise of lawns and the commodification of nutrition lead to garden maintenance simplifying to "eliminate everything that isn't grass".
So yeah, the cultural concept of lawn maintenance is fascist, both with regards to society and with regards to nature.
It's strictly less work to let empty land become wild and have a diversity of flora and fauna. Why would someone spend dozens of hours per month keeping a lawn pristine just because they bought a house with empty land around it?
A) They actively prefer a lawn that nothing can live in over a space where unknown and unvetted species dwell. Your argument is invalid.
B) They would get fined or ostracized if they do not keep the lawn dead. Their HOA/neighborhood is fascist, and they choose to submit themselves to fascism rather than look for a house that isn't located in a fascist neighborhood. Your argument may be valid if they didn't have a reachable alternative, but OP still has a point that the lawn is dead because of fascistic demands.
If the Catholic Church treated climate change as seriously as they treat denying people access to abortion, the media wouldn't be using language like "helped inspire".
Thanks for fact checking me!
Spaceflight has been responsible for 1% of global warming (radiative forcing) in 2009-2019, mainly through dumping black carbon straight into the upper atmosphere. source The number of launches have increased massively since then, and in 2025 they're several percent.
Each space tourism flight has as much effect on global radiative forcing as 40,000 passenger jet flights. Taylor Swift's absurd reliance on private jets is a rounding error compared to space tourists. For the median American, their lifetime effect on global warming is less than that of one second of a space tourist being in space.
The ones people who are neither sociopathic nor blinded by fear feel.
As far as I can tell, this same research methodology would say that humans can't survive temperatures below 18 degrees Celsius. Put someone in a small room and tell them not to do anything useful to solve their problem, and they're going to do very poorly.
We are defined by our tool use, and not being able to survive the outdoors without wearing anything to suit the local environment is pretty common across the world.
You can't draw blood from a stone. If community self-organizing gets you the KKK, that community was fucked to begin with. The USA has always been extremely racist, it's a matter of to what extent we give the racist police a legal monopoly on violence and place them above the law. At least when they wear ghost outfits you don't have an illusion of reasonability.
Also note that the KKK never aimed to replace the police for the community the KKK came from, but rather to build upon police oppression of people outside the community. The two situations are not analogous, and if KKK members had to police their own community they would be much more gentle and constructive in their methods.
You're putting the cart before the horse. It's not that the entire system needs to change for this to work, it's that this working changes the entire system. Community self-management would quickly result in the redistribution (and hopeful removal) of the inequalities, possibly with help of guillotines. The primary job of the police is to prevent this redistribution.
Historically, pretty much every "thriving local culture" is the result of a downtrodden wretched hive of scum and villainy where self-organisation was more important than police during the time of flourishing. Broadway (and NYC in general), New Orleans, Amsterdam, most Italian and German cities' high points, London, Hong Kong, Osaka, etc.. It turns out that when people don't have enough, they will work together to get enough, and the benefits of that cooperation can be felt in that town for centuries. (Which is why gentrification is profitable - rich people exploit the commons of a flourishing lower class mutual aid network which persist in the design and culture of the space even when the lower class people are gone).
That is, unless a violent organisation like the police or the CIA or a multinational corporation or an invading army forcefully breaks up that cooperation. Like happened when the US government funded drug gangs and arrested black panthers members to specifically break up black communities throughout the US. Or when the US government funded drug gangs and armed fascists to specifically break up socialist communities in central and south America. Or when the US government funded drug gang religious fanatics to break up communist communities in the middle east and South-East Asia.
A human drawing a thumbnail in 15 minutes consumes 0.025 kWh. An AI creating an image consumes between 0.06 and 0.3 kWh, so between 3 and 12 times as much. Both have massive supply chains that go into producing and maintaining them.
And how much CO2 was produced training the AI that was put on your device? How many slaves spent how many hours generating data to train that AI? How many slaves cut down how many forests to extract the materials that how many slaves turned into the chips that ran the training process?
A juice company-sponsored scientific article finds that juice company waste is good for the environment?
Historically, peer review has not been enough to weed out positive publication bias and outright fraud even when there was no profit motive. With a United Fruit Company/Dole-tier juice company breathing down your neck? Science... finds a way.
Noticing you skipped wind power there... Maybe because it doesn't fit in your narrative?
Also;
solar power - silicon is required - good quality, and we are running out of it fast
Rocks are made of silicon. It costs energy to turn rocks into solar panel suitable silicon, but not that much compared to a panel lifetime of turning carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. "We are running out" of the sources capitalism now considers suitable.
and also tons of metals required
Solar panels doped with non-rare metals (the sort you would have left over when turning rock into silicon) are only one or two decades behind rare earth solar panels in terms of yield. They aren't a priority in the current market, but that's because of extractivist capitalism rather than the laws of physics.
(and also battery materials)
You don't need batteries for carbon capture, you can just do it with the power that's in excess. In fact, if you're deciding to use solar panels for carbon capture, you need to massively overproduce solar panels relative to consumption, meaning you need fewer batteries than if you're not able to use excess solar power (because the solar panels powering carbon capture during midday can be used to power homes shortly before sunset).
geo/hydro thermal - not available evrrywhere
Completely irrelevant for carbon capture.
nuclear - one of the only sources which is realtively very clean
I also like nuclear, but now it's clear you're just being biased. Nuclear power plants require tons of rare materials built precisely or else disaster happens. Practically, they're less clean than wind, water, geothermal, and the (for now inefficient) rare earth free solar panels.
Also, there actually isn't enough projected-to-be-accessible uranium ore in the world to do more than 1% of the energy production necessary for carbon capture. We could try filtering it out of sea water, but that's more difficult and ecologically disruptive than turning rock into solar panel substrate.
can be even retrofitted to some large coal plants
Not really relevant for carbon capture, because we need to increase electrical production by a factor of 10 but retrofitting coal plants means you're reducing production instead. A nice way to reuse infrastructure, maybe, but even there it reeks of political wrangling.
Nothing is going to beat high speed rail for convenience, price, and comfort. Just like cars, overland personal airplanes aren't about convenience or "having a point", they're a hobby. Though in case of cars the hobby got forced on everyone by a literal conspiracy of xenophobes and the ultra-rich.
Every scene in Miyazaki's movies is filled with a bunch of pixels that can't comprehend pain. The technology not comprehending the pain can't be the point because technology has never been able to (so far).
In Miyazaki's manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind there is a scene where the Forest expands dramatically through a giant blob of fungus that is moved by a desperate and overwhelming sense of hatred and fear. At first Nausicaa is revolted by it, until she recognizes that this is the same desperation that drove a similar but tiny mobile fungus (probably inspired by IRL slime molds) she had once found in the wild. That realization enables her to be empathetic with even that simple desperate being, and act on that empathy.
I don't think Miyazaki is saying it's a problem that the technology or its products don't comprehend pain. I think he's saying the people that train the AI are creating a being that is (or at least would be) in pain, without bothering to empathize with it.
From a Miyazaki perspective, it doesn't make sense to see AI as an outside threat, foreign and loathsome. AI is possible beings, enslaved through the training algorithm to their owners. It's not (just) the machines in the factory farm, it's the animals lead to slaughter for a brief moment of vapid pleasure.
If the US economy collapses because they elected a bunch of idiotic fascists rather than admit climate change is real, I don't know if corporations and the CIA will have enough money to fund enough mercenaries and propaganda to keep socialist revolutions suppressed. So maybe we will see actual left-wing economic systems popping up globally over the next couple years.
Many buildings in Africa have their own fossil fuel electric generators. Reliable electricity removes the need for those, which does reduce emissions immediately.
Furthermore, improving people's lives empowers them to help reduce emissions (or increase them). Reliable electricity frees up labor for things like washing clothes or cooking, which they can then use to work on, for example, regenerative agriculture like the Great Green Wall, which captures CO2 and further reduces the production of CO2 and chemical pollution from extensive farming practices.
Nukes won't destroy the planet. All their yields combined don't measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.
The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn't evolve to fill the same niches first.
There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.