[Biosphere Collapse] 420 days of blazin' it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Biosphere Collapse] 420 days of blazin' it

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Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

hobbez posted:

this thread loses me when you start comparing eating tomatoes to being a nazi

anyway, as you were

I'm leaning into this. Yes, I think there is something Nazi-esque to our attitude to non-humans.

The ecocommunist argument is that, for example, agriculture without establishing mutualistic relationships with non-humans is basically an inevitable ecocide that will prove to be more suicidally destructive to both human than non-human life than anything that the Nazis attempted or aspired to. And those mutualistic relationships are impossible within a humanistic belief system that values non-humans only insofar as they resemble humans, serve humans or possess humanlike mental properties.

So the point isn't that eating tomatoes should always be prohibited but that it is ecological suicide to perceive and treat a tomato as something that has no interests of it's own and that the only relevant interest at stake is our own desire to eat them. So either we abandon humanist ideology or we extend it to non-humans.

Mutualistic relationships would be necessary for human survival, and would mean extending normative concepts like rights, laws, morality, justice etc to non-human beings that tradititionally are not seen as deserving of them.

Civil rights for plants and trees, pretty much.

unwantedplatypus posted:

Your mind is going to be blown when you discover what a carrying capacity is and how real-life species interact with those.

Admittedly, when I said that I was describing what happens only before it hits the collapse and die-off phase. Of course it's very different once collapse and degrowth of some form starts happening.

Some humans have responded positively to the threat of collapse in the past and limited their growth, and a few do in the present, but those are the cultures that were/are being colonized and genocided by overshoot cultures and so they're not really the ones who decide what the direction the future will take.

Corsec has issued a correction as of 03:33 on Sep 10, 2022

# ? Sep 10, 2022 03:26

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# ? May 27, 2024 02:52

Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

Like, when Roger Hallam went on german TV and said that climate change is genocide is he was fundamentally correct for reasons that are well established here. Obviously it was provocative and entirely objectionable to their political culture, but he was right.

When you realize that it's not just climate change, but total biosphere collapse...then you reach the conclusion that a lot of things we do, like monoculture, are also a form of genocide and that the ideologies that support and justify it are Nazi-esque.

Human survival requires mutualism and this means that if 'injustice' is the normative metric of grievance and political concern then it has to be extended to other species. Including the ones that you, personally, do not give a gently caress about.

So, yeah, thread title.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 03:53

JAY ZERO SUM GAME: Oct 18, 2005; Walter.
I know you know how to do this.
Get up.

every kitchen a concentration camp

# ? Sep 10, 2022 03:54

Fozzy The Bear: Dec 11, 1999; Nothing much, watching the game, drinking a bud

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1568151062607175681

# ? Sep 10, 2022 03:56

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

zzzz marge, change the climate! zzzzz

# ? Sep 10, 2022 04:01

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

Fozzy The Bear posted:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1568151062607175681

methane isn't real

# ? Sep 10, 2022 04:03

SniperWoreConverse: Mar 20, 2010; Gun Saliva

Corsec posted:

Anything that grows faster will overwhelm, dominate and replace other members of it's species that grow slower. And anything that dominates others will gain the opportunity to grow faster than them. So, it's an evolutionary feedback. It deterministically tends to produce hunter-gatherers in some other environmental/material circumstances, and capitalists in our circumstances.

I don't think you can trust something to self-regulate and completely plan the biosphere as long as it works according to those rules. Anything that was produced by this system can't be trusted to organize it. Benevolence towards the ecological system as a whole is impossible for us because the necessities of thriving within it are, like, the exact opposite of benevolence.

If robot-alien-gods decided to prove their ecological benevolence by horrifically murdering all the capitalists and overshooters I would be 100% OK with that even though noone posting in this thread would survive.

This isn't true. I have a pot of various trees and the fast growing ones were the most damaged by the weather, the slowest growing were fine. Fit doesn't seem to mean what you think it does, and there are many ecological relationships other than dominance.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 04:12

Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

SniperWoreConverse posted:

This isn't true. I have a pot of various trees and the fast growing ones were the most damaged by the weather, the slowest growing were fine. Fit doesn't seem to mean what you think it does, and there are many ecological relationships other than dominance.

I would agree that it's not universal, I was not specific enough in my phrasing and being somewhat hyperbolic. What I said describes the tendancies in human history, it happens because we've been able to appropriate increasing amounts of the energy/resources of other living beings and also to access other sources of energy that aren't ordinarily available like fossil fuels. Like, your plants can't do it because they're mortally dependent upon you, but you can do it because you can exploit plants so successfully.

Dominance relationships have been the paradigm that have humans have increasingly relied upon for success, both within and between species, and that's what is killing us. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that bootstraps itself until it hits external limits, it works only while it can appropriate increasing amounts of energy/resources.

Mutualism exists, but the problem with it is that it has to exist within a biosphere where human dominance relationships have proven to be so successful that the best examples of mutualists were colonized and genocided, and are mostly history now.

tuyop posted:

it�s a bit nonsensical because this schema needs to extend in all directions to avoid the apparent trap of speciesism as described. so like, the bacteria and poo poo that make a habitat of me have equal interests to the organisms that are keeping me alive in the biosphere.

Yes, humans are a colony organism, most of the genes in your body aren't even human but are bacterial. This shows how species is really an empirically unsatisfactory label for actually-existing life, and thus is also suspect as a political label.

In nature, colony organisms like coral are able to successfully balance the interests of their component species because they form mutualistic relationships, inside themselves and also with the external organisms that inhabit the reefs.

So, I think avoiding privilege both in nature and in political practice mean actively selecting in favour of mutualistic relationships and against dominance ones. In this case, political and social selection isn't being applied on the basis of species, as such, but to networks of connected organisms, on the basis of what type of network they form; mutualistic or dominance.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 04:51

unwantedplatypus: Sep 6, 2012

What's the revolutionary potential of the producariat?

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:04

Trabisnikof: Dec 24, 2005

Lol at the idea that ants choose not to convert more of the biomass into ants out of some noble savage fantasy. They would if they could and denying them that agency is part of the classic humanist mistake.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:10

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

I'm vegan, so I ascribe more moral importance to a cow than most people, but I think it's stupid to say that a cow or tomato has the same moral weight as a human being. As an ethical framework, non-interference with as much nature as possible is a better approach than trying to shape the ethical world of animals.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:19

SniperWoreConverse: Mar 20, 2010; Gun Saliva

This is some poo poo, surely it is my own brain which is fully ensmoothened

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:21

Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

Trabisnikof posted:

Lol at the idea that ants choose not to convert more of the biomass into ants out of some noble savage fantasy. They would if they could and denying them that agency is part of the classic humanist mistake.

When species repeatedly suffer from population bottlenecks they often start throttling their own growth because their ancestors who did this were more able to survive the bottleneck.

Some of our ancestors voluntarily limited themselves because they suffered famines within the oral history. But as they approached the present time this became less likely because anyone who did this would be increasingly likely to be abused by anyone who didn't limit themselves.

Like, the colony organisms that make up corals could probably convert the biomass of their symbionts into members of their own species, but they usually don't because while it produces more of their own offspring it's at odds with the interests of the current generations. In this way, mutualistic relationships aren't as prone to catastrophic collapse, because maintaining mutualism is inherently self-limiting.

If we extend this as a model to our own relationships with non-humans, then establishing mutualistic relationships in this way with our own food species would require so fundamentally rewriting our ethical understandings and concerns that there isn't really any way to fit it within a humanistic ideology.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:30

ELTON JOHN: Feb 17, 2014

Fozzy The Bear posted:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1568151062607175681

literally meaningless unless it's per capita

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:36

SniperWoreConverse: Mar 20, 2010; Gun Saliva

I think maybe corals don't do that because they're not capable of doing that. The coal symbiote is as important to it as our own are to us: without them you die. If they don't have their algae they die.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:44

Ferdinand Bardamu: Apr 30, 2013

ELTON JOHN posted:

literally meaningless unless it's per capita

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1568271438368641026

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:51

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

WaryWarren posted:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1568271438368641026

I feel like this guys is really not understanding how to interpret that second graph

The idea that per capita emissions don't matter is also ludicrous and if you're going down that path you better be prepared to defend it to its natural "the west can consume and everyone else can die" endpoint

Paradoxish has issued a correction as of 05:59 on Sep 10, 2022

# ? Sep 10, 2022 05:56

OBAMNA PHONE: Aug 7, 2002

Paradoxish posted:

I feel like this guys is really not understanding how to interpret that second graph

The idea that per capita emissions don't matter is also ludicrous and if you're going down that path you better be prepared to defend it to its natural "the west can consume and everyone else can die" endpoint

noah is a stupid piece of poo poo

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:05

HiroProtagonist: May 7, 2007

BraveUlysses posted:

noah is a stupid piece of poo poo

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:06

Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

Chamale posted:

I'm vegan, so I ascribe more moral importance to a cow than most people, but I think it's stupid to say that a cow or tomato has the same moral weight as a human being. As an ethical framework, non-interference with as much nature as possible is a better approach than trying to shape the ethical world of animals.

You're an animal, living in nature, exercising your own agency in forming moralistic beliefs and practices. There is no non-interference, unless you assume a disembodied objective viewpoint which humans don't possess. Organisms establish their own normativity according to what relationships they form with other living beings. Morality in humans is one form of this normativity and recently is mostly formed according to dominance relationships because dominators keep, uh, dominating everyone else and getting away with it.

Within an anthropocentric moral framework then yeah it follows as stupid and offensive to compare tomatos and cows to humans exactly because anthropocentrism assumes the human privilege that moral worth is to be assigned according to how close something is to resembling a human, mentally or physically. Since cows and tomatoes aren't human, then yeah obviously they can't be equals because humanistic philosophy has already foreclosed it out of legitimate consideration.

A dominance-based culture centers moral concerns on itself as the measure of all other things. Alternatively, some pre-modern cultures had sacred animals, veneration for the instrinsic value of non-humans in a way that doesn't require that they possess the same properties that we would recognize and value in ourselves.

Engaging with other organisms in a mutualistic way means engaging with their own interests, and those interests aren't obviously aligned with our own subjective concerns, like morality, because our morality is formed according to our own particular interests and not theirs.

SniperWoreConverse posted:

I think maybe corals don't do that because they're not capable of doing that. The coal symbiote is as important to it as our own are to us: without them you die. If they don't have their algae they die.

Right, so mutualistic/symbiotic relationships are what prevent runaway growth, because if you kill your symbiont or co-mutual then you die. Whereas the logic of a dominance relationship is to exploit and exhaust everything, because you're mostly competing against other exploiters/dominators and if you don't take it then they will.

Humans didn't self-limit like this because they didn't need mutualism across species only inside their own species. After their first mass extinction event of killing off the megafauna they used their intelligence to switch to horticulture as a substitute. Otherwise they might have had to attempt a mutualistic strategy with the remaining fauna. So, unlike corals, humans have the option of eating their way down the food chain until there is no food chain left. Co-mutuals are locked into a section of the food chain and this is what prevents catastrophe. So I think a survivable ecology for humans is something that is ethically unrecognizable to our culture, and I can't even fully imagine it since I'm a produce of the same culture.

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:25

SniperWoreConverse: Mar 20, 2010; Gun Saliva

I don't think corals have this planned out, so to speak

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:29

Corsec: Apr 17, 2007

SniperWoreConverse posted:

I don't think corals have this planned out, so to speak

We sure as gently caress don't either but we're doing it anyway, until we're not doing anything anymore.

EDIT: Well, actually now that I think about herding and pastoralism is a form of mutualism, and not coincidentally they also venerate non-human animals too because by necessity they can't be wholly anthropocentric.

Corsec has issued a correction as of 06:39 on Sep 10, 2022

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:36

silicone thrills: Jan 9, 2008; I paint things

BraveUlysses posted:

noah is a stupid piece of poo poo

# ? Sep 10, 2022 06:38

AceClown: Sep 11, 2005

this is why the other threads make fun of us

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:18

AceClown: Sep 11, 2005

fuckin tomato concentration camps lmao

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:19

MightyBigMinus: Jan 26, 2020

he's right that the climate doesnt care about per-capita

*we* still should

but only just a bit, if you take per-capita too far you start looking an awful lot like an individual footprint

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:23

kyojin: Jun 15, 2005; I MASHED THE KEYS AND LOOK WHAT I MADE

The climate doesn't care about per capita emissions. It cares about per country emissions though, a lot

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:27

kyojin: Jun 15, 2005; I MASHED THE KEYS AND LOOK WHAT I MADE

Which arbitrary grouping of natural and imaginary boundaries did this snarled the climate

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:28

SniperWoreConverse: Mar 20, 2010; Gun Saliva

ethically unrecognizable ecology? Instructions for a help came out 2008, this has already been refined by some of the most powerful philosophical techniques known to goondom

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:29

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Corsec posted:

You're an animal, living in nature, exercising your own agency in forming moralistic beliefs and practices. There is no non-interference, unless you assume a disembodied objective viewpoint which humans don't possess. Organisms establish their own normativity according to what relationships they form with other living beings. Morality in humans is one form of this normativity and recently is mostly formed according to dominance relationships because dominators keep, uh, dominating everyone else and getting away with it.

Within an anthropocentric moral framework then yeah it follows as stupid and offensive to compare tomatos and cows to humans exactly because anthropocentrism assumes the human privilege that moral worth is to be assigned according to how close something is to resembling a human, mentally or physically. Since cows and tomatoes aren't human, then yeah obviously they can't be equals because humanistic philosophy has already foreclosed it out of legitimate consideration.

A dominance-based culture centers moral concerns on itself as the measure of all other things. Alternatively, some pre-modern cultures had sacred animals, veneration for the instrinsic value of non-humans in a way that doesn't require that they possess the same properties that we would recognize and value in ourselves.

Engaging with other organisms in a mutualistic way means engaging with their own interests, and those interests aren't obviously aligned with our own subjective concerns, like morality, because our morality is formed according to our own particular interests and not theirs.

Right, so mutualistic/symbiotic relationships are what prevent runaway growth, because if you kill your symbiont or co-mutual then you die. Whereas the logic of a dominance relationship is to exploit and exhaust everything, because you're mostly competing against other exploiters/dominators and if you don't take it then they will.

Humans didn't self-limit like this because they didn't need mutualism across species only inside their own species. After their first mass extinction event of killing off the megafauna they used their intelligence to switch to horticulture as a substitute. Otherwise they might have had to attempt a mutualistic strategy with the remaining fauna. So, unlike corals, humans have the option of eating their way down the food chain until there is no food chain left. Co-mutuals are locked into a section of the food chain and this is what prevents catastrophe. So I think a survivable ecology for humans is something that is ethically unrecognizable to our culture, and I can't even fully imagine it since I'm a produce of the same culture.

this is the general problem of industrial and agricultural civilization we're gonna work on after we fix the capitalism problem. no skipping stages. :nono:

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:37

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

first they came for the tomato, and I said nothing because I was not a tomato

# ? Sep 10, 2022 07:42

Microplastics: Jul 6, 2007; It's what's for dinner.

Chamale posted:

I'm vegan, so I ascribe more moral importance to a cow than most people, but I think it's stupid to say that a cow or tomato has the same moral weight as a human being. As an ethical framework, non-interference with as much nature as possible is a better approach than trying to shape the ethical world of animals.

So you're saying all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others? :mad:

# ? Sep 10, 2022 08:09

two-time fee: Jan 13, 2022

No one will know if you don't want to let them know
No one will know 'less it's you that might tell 'em so
Call and they'll come to you covered with dew
Vegetables dream of responding to you
Standing there shiny and proud by your side
Holding your joint while the neighbors decide
Why is a vegetable something to hide...

# ? Sep 10, 2022 08:55

an egg: Nov 17, 2021

Homeless Friend posted:

do you have any idea how much small talk i do at work. posting is small potatoes

what are you irl? i'm guessing either a lawyer or a real estate agent

# ? Sep 10, 2022 10:06

an egg: Nov 17, 2021

kater posted:

road was especially reflective this morning and I started seeing all the life crushed down into asphalt as I was driving just endless mountains and caves and trees and dinosaurs crushed into shiny black flatness spanning out into forever covering the globe like a warm corpse blanket

# ? Sep 10, 2022 10:08

an egg: Nov 17, 2021

no comment on the rest of it

# ? Sep 10, 2022 10:17

HiHo ChiRho: Oct 23, 2010

Eating a salad is committing genocide

# ? Sep 10, 2022 10:25

Mameluke: Aug 2, 2013; by Fluffdaddy

Trabisnikof posted:

here we go with the anthropocentric thinking where humans are special snowflake species elevated from all others because we do something (that a bunch of other species do too)

oh my god i'd like to see a rabbit suffuse the entire biosphere with plastics. who gives one gently caress about what ants would do. we can and are doing exponentially more damage than any other species could.

Mameluke has issued a correction as of 10:57 on Sep 10, 2022

# ? Sep 10, 2022 10:54