actionjackson posted:

Soggy Muffin posted:

This thread is not the same now that brother Tony is no longer with us. But I’m hopeful someone will deliver unhinged and rambling drunken doom monologues in his footsteps

Homeless Friend posted:

actionjackson posted:

hahahaha

A Bad King posted:

Yes. They also will not relinquish that power. When it is threatened they will straight up throw away any and all pretenses of nice, take off the mask, and do what deeds are required to secure it for another hundred years.

Vote!

emgeejay posted:

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/7258717032194084123

actionjackson posted:

hahahaha

quote:

Is it just me noticing a lack of Insects so far this year

I'm in North Eastern IND close to Ohio , And there not that many flies and have not seen one mosquito so far , A few lightning bugs but nothing like normal pretty strange .

Not seen a grasshopper or the foliage being eaten by critters I can sit outside and nothing is dive bombing my wine just find it strange I'm usually chasing flies like crazy out of the house .

I wonder if those vaccines have something to do with the lack of biting bugs like Fleas and Mosquitos

Soggy Muffin posted:

This thread is not the same now that brother Tony is no longer with us. But I’m hopeful someone will deliver unhinged and rambling drunken doom monologues in his footsteps

Jel Shaker posted:

just kinda wondering how financially a tourist island is going to fare now things are burning down, especially since they’re back up to max capacity, and beyond the numbers of tourists since before covid

obviously insurance will get more expensive, but often tourists need to be redirected to other hotels if there’s a fire but what if they’ve fully booked? it’s a closed system and insurance won’t help much, although i’m sure something expensive will get sorted out

guess i’m just wondering if mass tourism will soon become unaffordable in the next few years

Soggy Muffin posted:

Always with the “technology will save us, don’t worry! stay tuned and subscribe/buy my book to find out which ex machina tech I am hazily referring to!” cliff hanger with these hope grifters. Pretty sure this guy is a YouTuber and isn’t even a scientist but a programmer that used to write for Mental Floss

Hubbert posted:

SniperWoreConverse posted:

He also has some rare cancer

RIP Syndrome posted:

Probably not, but I think someone went over it in this thread and concluded that there isn't necessarily enough time for life to recover, as the ecosystem took a long time to build up the last time around, and the sun is getting older and stops being life supporting a long time before its own death.

Leaving behind a completely smooth sphere would be kind of cool, and I guess as meaningful in the long run as any other art project.

Gravid Topiary posted:

this is the biosphere collapse thread in a few months/weeks, we'll most of us be fighting to be The Fool probably

Puppy Burner posted:

Recover to what? The arbitrary conditions we prefer? Shits not going on pause and earth has been waaaaaay more hostile than we're making it.

cash crab posted:

i will take the ring into mordor

tuyop posted:

ah I see.

capitalism: the landlord fucks you

cybernetic capitalism: capital fucks you and the landlord right after it destroys your shared reality?

I do think there’s something missing in your analysis of like, surveillance and the distinct properties of the data we produce on the nature of extraction, but it does really bring the effect of the epistemological crisis forward.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

My understanding of cybernetic capitalism (once I understood no one was talking about cyborgs; very disappointing) is that it creates social systems and institutions that feel immutable because the path of least resistance for people is to go along with those systems, and changing anything means fighting them. Given the size, people, and power of those institutions, anyone trying to fight them pretty much always loses. The group psychological biases of people mean that overall, far more people end up reinforcing the systems of oppression, extraction, etc. than combating it. It's the way that, say, the Democratic party just eats activists, turning movements for change into ash or absorbing organizers into teams of useless but very expensive consultants.

...

In important ways, President Obama didn't feel like he had the power to make change. That, I think, epitomizes the different between capitalism and cybernetic capitalism. That the status quo is so heavily reinforced by various social systems, institutions, and actors working within them, that even the President of the United States feels powerless to make certain changes. Naturally, the changes that would be hardest to make would be the ones that upset the status quo; sending troops to go bomb some country or giving handouts to corporations takes no effort at all.

Demon Of The Fall posted:

went to a truck and tractor pull last night and watched them all endlessly belting thick black smoke into the air, uninterrupted for hours. had a good crack ping moment sitting there sweating my rear end off while everyone was hooting and hollering around me

SniperWoreConverse posted:

the primary thing would be to either preserve some elements of our current culture and biosophere so that there is some continuity beyond the carcass of the last living organism that felt emotions. yeah no poo poo the "arbitrary" conditions we prefer, who gives a gently caress if nothing past a lovely paramecium makes it

it doesn't matter if the world exists if there's nobody there to live in it and consider it

SniperWoreConverse posted:

it doesn't matter if the world exists if there's nobody there to live in it and consider it

Uranium Phoenix posted:

I think one important point to reinforce about climate change is that:
As long as people continue to not take action, it will get progressively worse.

Right now, we're locked in for a way worse time than most people realize. And given how perfidious and nasty cybernetic capitalism is, it does seem completely impossible to combat. As Mark Fisher points out in Capitalist Realism, Capitalism fucks up people's mental health on an industrial scale. Industries with trillions of dollars on the line have every motivation to prevent action, and at their disposal is a massive security state. Change at the local level feels (and is) woefully insufficient.

However, as this thread has discovered, I don't think it's particularly useful to despair, but I do think it's important to act in the ways that you can. One thing that I think is hopeful is that materialism is real, and people will break away from propaganda as they see it bend further and further from the reality they observe and experience. Materialism also tells us it will be hardest to convince those people who live generally comfortable lives--those with the resources to just crank up the AC, or move, or they just touch computers in an office all day, but over time, the vast majority of people will have had experiences that definitively contradict what they have been told.

Cybernetic capitalism also, I think, means that the people who run the system no longer have the faintest clue as to how or why it all works. Therefore, they don't know how to sustain it through crises. Their solution to COVID was just "manufacture consent harder", and that seems to be the case for the Ukraine/Russia war and basically any problem. So in international realm, we can see a lot of countries breaking with US financial domination and moving away from the dollar, and the idiots in charge don't seem to know what to do about that except demonize those nations harder. Coups haven't been working as well in South America. The US lost the war in Afghanistan. Other places will be breaking away from this systemic control, and that's reason for hope too.

I think it's still useful to spend time talking to people about climate change and socialism and explaining what is needed. I think it's useful to take action where and when you can, whether that's elections or communities or movement building--or just consuming less useless junk. Obviously, one shouldn't fall for the greenwashing horseshit that overstates what an individual can accomplish, and we should keep the blame where it firmly lies, but given that climate change will just get worse and worse if left alone, we should do what we can to lay the groundwork for the kind of movement that might eventually stop it all from getting worse.

Fell Mood posted:

Are you saying nature and it's living things have no value if humans aren't around to observe it?

Fell Mood posted:

Are you saying nature and it's living things have no value if humans aren't around to observe it?

RIP Syndrome posted:

I think this is just a slightly more general version of "nothing matters after I'm gone"

mags posted:

as far as the human concept of value, would that mean a lack of humans to assign value means it no longer exists?

I’m not going to pretend that animals can understand value as a concept, maybe they can, maybe some that can similar to us will be much later down the evolutionary road. maybe that’s when the biosphere will be hosed again who knows

SniperWoreConverse posted:

That value will be unperceived without anyone to perceive it. Until ufos land that's it it's just humans and whatever might arise that can understand

SniperWoreConverse posted:

Consider the infinite value of epsilon iridni d

Wait we can't because I just made that poo poo up on the fly I don't even know if it's a real place

Fell Mood posted:

Perhaps you can say that our conscious minds are observing a possible future. But the idea that an entire world wouldn't natter if no one was around to see it strikes me as deeply wrong on an inhuman level.