Not to get into a conversation with myself or anything but I didn't wanna needlessly extend the update post, so I'm putting this here:

I just wanna bring attention to Jonathan Shaw's comments about "Western nations should prepare their peoples for a long-term drop in living standards if their standoff with Russia continues". It's so fucking infuriating because, like... okay, so, there's an increasing movement for conservatives to shift from outright climate change denial or "it's not as bad as people are making it out to be, it's just fearmongering" to "okay, it's real, but the climate change rich intellectuals are asking the poor working class to cover the costs!".

Which is obviously ridiculous before it even gets off the starting block, because I'm pretty sure that your wealthiness inversely correlates to your willingness to change the system (which made you rich in the first place), but it's used as a justification to reduce all arguments to mitigate climate change to "Oh, you hate poor people then?" when in reality fixing climate change would require redistribution downwards and would also solve a ton of other problems with society, it wouldn't really negatively affect working-class people other than maybe making some treats more expensive, but it would very strongly affect rich people who currently essentially control human civilization (which is the point of the deflection).

But now that argument has been completely thrown out the window because now the working class should apparently be expected to shoulder these costs. The western imperial alliance has essentially sanctioned their own citizenry, and not even for some ultimately admirable aim like ending climate change (though that would be unnecessary as I've previously stated), but to save neo-Nazis in Ukraine. And it's not even as if these sanctions will "bring Russia to the table" - sure, they're not looking amazing, but Russia will come out of this looking a lot better than Europe will. So it's just absolutely infuriating that this is the cause worth sacrificing ourselves for.