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Paradoxish posted:You can address real suffering and want and poverty without everyone living some idealized version of a middle-class Western life. There are lifestyle tradeoffs that can be made to allow for a more sustainable society without making everyone on the planet impoverished and miserable. Made by who? Over the next 50 years china and india are going to have almost 3 billion people waking up and asking "why don't we have a middle class?" and the sacrifices you've decided you would be willing for them to make will literally not matter. When they decide they want tvs and cars and college educations the only solution possible is to have the good cars and tvs all ready so they want those or some equivalent they like better. If that technology is impossible then too bad, they will just use the regular old cars and tvs and either the world will die or we will adapt or whatever, a bunch of ideals about self sacrifice won't come into it at all.
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Nov 5, 2018 21:16
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Nevvy Z posted:So you are telling me they have a bunch of nuclear material and need to desalinate large quantities of water. I feel really unclear what the goon approved apocolypse fanfiction even is on this one. Pakistan is having a water crisis that is going to get way worse but like, is the idea they are going to nuke then occupy india? Are they going to get real poor then india is going to nuke them? Is the idea just they are both savage animal countries so if things go vaguely wrong they will just mash their face into the nuke buttons?
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Nov 6, 2018 02:57
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Paradoxish posted:This thread can be hyperbolic from time to time, but that's mostly because it's just now penetrating people's consciousness that things are going to probably be noticeably worse for you (yes, you, the wealthy Westerner) within your lifetime. We're going to see resource scarcities and internal and external climate migrations and political upheavals and none of it will clearly end the world or anything but it's also probably not going to be the future that most people were sold a decade or two ago. I think a lot of it is people not wanting to let go of the future they were promised for decades but in the opposite direction where people absolutely will not engage with the effects of climate change except in mapping it 1:1 on cold war apocalypse fiction. Nuclear war makes a cool and instant cathartic end, and people don't like to engage in that, so need to make up additional elements to mash it into that model. Where the effects of climate change are way sadder but slower and more depressing instead of ever being one exciting thing that happens. It's the first half hour of mad max 1 but people want it to be the first half hour of mad max 2
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Nov 9, 2018 13:41
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The Dipshit posted:"The last thing we de-carbonize is airline flights" is probably the shortest summary. That being said, it is going to be one hell of a ride, yeah. vindicated at last!
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Nov 16, 2018 01:37
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TACD posted:I haven’t read the book but I’d argue that people use the ‘collective afterlife’ as a mental crutch for dealing with their own mortality and thus never really come to terms with the fact that everything ends eventually. If your life is given meaning by future humanity and humanity is given meaning by some imaginary endless march through time and space then you’re going to feel pretty raw when faced with the plain fact that they will both stop someday. People love the end of the world and have been cheering for it for as long as there has been history. Tons of people want time to wrap up around the time their life does, the idea there is going to be people after we die is repellent to people. Global warming is real and bad and will kill millions or even billions of people, but people really really want it to turn off the game or at least simplify it down so the whole world is one thing forever. The idea that there will be a world just as complex as there is now after us is super scary to a lot of people.
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Nov 16, 2018 13:08
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