Something I feared all along once Covid shut down a lot of the economy.
Quite a depressing read for me.
I feel obligated to say that I was among those who argued in favor of an ACist utopia for a time.
I was thinking just the other day, amazing how the world is able to at least have a go at mobilising to control this but getting anything done about climate change is a non starter. It partly has to do with how the effects are right in front of you, but partly it’s a final “fuck you” salvo from the Boomers, who having dismantled the social system that brought them the prosperity they enjoy, now demand that we cop a 10% drop in world gross product for the sake of prolonging their nursing home existences for a few more years. Do anything about climate change, though? Too expensive, sorry. Climate change is going to kill more people and it’s not even close. Younger people, too.
I briefly considered running as a candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party here probably 17 years ago, I’m vaguely friendly with the guy who founded it. It got pretty much immediately taken over by the Shooters’ Party, who were like “yes yes gays and drugs, fine, but we get guns, right?”. I was never a doctrinaire libertarian but the vague idea of people being left alone was appealing, until I started to spot the problems.
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Yeah, it was the natural progression for me, too, as I was swinging away from my religious neo-con upbringing. But just like you, I began to see the problems with libertarianism and a capitalist dominated society.
It’s an everything looks like a nail to a guy with a hammer thing. To guys like us who are good with our minds, we start to see every problem in the world as being the result of insufficient application of reason. We think you can always defeat bullshit emotional appeals with hard logic, this is exacerbated by becoming a gambling pro. While libertarianism can be undone with logic, the more mature path is to realise the human damage done by constantly having people compete against each other and making everything transactional.
I know I’m derailing again here, but fuck it, I mean the climate is doomed. Lock the thread.
In my case, it was more a lack of awareness about how the world worked for other people. I’m an athletic, personable white guy from a “good” family that wasn’t poor. The world I grew up in treated me with respect and dignity and I got the benefit of the doubt more than I probably should have. I was like, yeah, in this world we are all making it on our merits and let the best person win! But I was relatively sheltered and it took me a while to realize that my perception was horribly biased and that the world didn’t operate for me in the same way it did for others, and I guess of all the religious indoctrination I was subjected to, the golden rule stuck for me, and that’s when my views really started to change. Interestingly, it was learning to play poker that really opened the door for me to see how my perception was often clouded by my emotions and helped me to listen to the experiences of others and the evidence that the world was actually really biased in my favor.
Yeah, it takes a long time. Like I guess I was vaguely aware in high school that not everyone had the same kind of home life that I did, but it took a long time for me to realise how deep the consequences of that ran. I think it takes until well into your 30s, at least if you’re a more thinking-oriented than feeling-oriented person the way I am.
I think this is something that almost all of us have in common here on UnStuck. We’re a buncha ex-poker players. You can’t take poker seriously, or even be a poker player for long, if you play: feelings >>> thinking.
The conservatives love claiming that those relatively to the left are all about feelings, and those relatively to the right are all about thinking. The whole “I don’t care about your feelings” spew is part of their shared identity.
But they’re forgetting that the neo-fascists are relatively to the right of them… making themselves the “feelings” wing, and the neo-fascists the “thinking” wing, of the entire right-of-center. LMFAO @ them.
LMFAO at trying to correlate any such personality quirks (feelings, pragmatism etc/etc) with left/right-ness in general, to begin with. Aren’t we… a buncha left-of-center ex-poker players… living proof of the absolute vacuity of such ‘reasoning’?
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If the government doesn’t ban zip lock bags, how can I possibly stop using them?
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This in particular cracks me up. It goes hand-n-hand with red-state -vs-blue-state -ism. Put the two together, and you got… astrology, flat out. The only two things that matter in life are when & where you are born.
I reality, 99.9% of the peeps in any arbitrary age cohort, and 99.9% of the peeps in any arbitrary regional cohort… haven’t been in a position to make substantive decisions regarding anything ever.
Cliffs: anyone carrying on about Gen-X,Y,Z, Boomers, Greatest, Tweeners, and all that other blah-blah-blah… are spewing foolishness.
Of course not. Capitalism cannot be reformed.
The problems are caused by hierarchy and absentee ownership. Full stop. The only path towards sustainability is bottom up community control. People don’t generally shit in their own nest. Note: bottom up community control is a necessary condition… that doesn’t mean it’s a sufficient condition.
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I think this is pretty spot on. One of the dogmas that has been advanced by capitalists is the so called tragedy of the commons. When in actuality the biggest threats to our ecology are coming from the extraction and exploitation of resources for private profit and ensuing environmental degradation.
When we consider the steps that need to be taken and the policies that would need to be enacted to pull ourselves back from the genocidal nose-dive of the Anthropocene era, we could do a quick analysis of each of those policies and determine in which direction they are moving us on this spectrum:
(Bottom-Up/Community Control)<----------------------->(Absentee Ownership/Hierarchy)
AFAICT, the policies that steer us away from environmental collapse move us towards BU/CC and away from AO/H.
There are no legitimate scientists or experts in the field who are saying, you know what would mitigate climate change? If Exxon had more control over more resources, and we lowered their taxes so that their shareholders could bank more profits.
This is where the “I’m happy with compromise, you folks are not” folks aren’t following the conversation. We’re hippy happy with compromise that moves us towards BU/CC. As long as it doesn’t lock things in there. For a while. Until we can move things farther still towards BU/CC.
For them however, they are blind to the underlying issues. All compromises are equally the same to them… towards BU/CC, away from BU/CC, those that “lock in”, those that don’t. They have no concept of “dual purpose”… that both short term gains -and- systemic change must both be advanced simultaneously. They generally reject systemic change flat out anyways.
For them there is only short-term gain.
I’m guessing China has a few ideas on the matter.
Now where have I seen this idea before?
Either way, CA leads the way again.
https://twitter.com/jakeclevine/status/1309233140561567746?s=20
By 2035 California will be uninhabitable and it won’t matter but thanks for the meaningless gesture that has no chance of ever working anyway, newsom.
I think the bigger issue is that even if everyone stops buying zip lock bags industrial polluters are still gonna wreck the planet. Climate change isn’t going to be solved by billions of consumer choices it would take coordinated regulatory action.
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Of course not. It’s insane to imagine it ever could.
If no one is buying, they will not be producing. And you have a lot more power to affect what is produced with what you buy then you do with how you vote.
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There is no way this is true. Your boycott is far more meaningless than your vote.
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