(Thread IKs:
Stereotype)
|
Puppy Burner posted:subsidies you can't even imagine are giving to the fossil fuel industry and its subsidiaries. wealth beyond what you will ever dream thrown directly into killing the world What is the reason for the massive fossil fuel subsidies, anyway? There's the usual reasons like corruption and recycling the money into political donations, but that's true for any other industry. Since fossil fuels are a necessity for industrial civilization, and especially for continued growth, then I'm guessing that governments would want to stabilize oil supply for the same reasons they'd want to stabilize agriculture. Hypothetically, what would be the likely consequences if the fossil fuels subsidies were reduced? Would we be likely to see supply shocks?
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2021 02:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:15 |
|
|
Puppy Burner posted:If we stopped, oil would become so expensive as to be unprofitable and western civilization would immediately collapse. If they were merely reduced the US would go fascist so fast you'd be in the slave mines before the next election. I'm skeptical that all fossil fuels are unprofitable without subsidies (I know that some sources of fossil fuels often are though, like fracking). Since taxes are redistributive, subsidies for oil are funded by the other economic activity that fossil fuels enable. If oil didn't have an energy surplus after accounting for the production process then it would be impossible to subsidize (because inflation would outpace the ability to tax and fund subsidies). As long as the EROEI is high enough, it shoud have some level of profitability. However, it would make sense if governments dealt with the declining EROEI by reducing demand for oil by the poor. This would have the effect of stabilizing prices for the richer people. This can be achieved by increasingly regressive taxes plus more downward pressure on wages even more. Yeah, I'd expect governments to go full fash before they voluntarily accepted declines in fossil fuel use.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2021 04:25
|
|
|
Xaris posted:this is kinda wrong. there are elements, yes, but the primary driver of falling birth rates is massive starkly visible inequalities under capitalism with generally massive hopeless class that are also academically educated enough to realize their stature and given into a work-to-live fiat grindy life that needs more and more work each year in perpetual stagnantion-to-decline I think I can agree with this, that modern development can explain why birth rates fall but this isn't sufficient to explain why birth rates are below replacement rates in advanced economies. It seems like the constantly growing requirement for parents to work to financially support their children is what pushes fertility below replacement levels. This is also why the rich have consistently high birthrates above replacement levels, because they can afford to pay people to do domestic labour for them and look after their children. It also explains why fertility is below the rate that parents claim to prefer, lots of people would like to have more children but they can't afford more. Basically, capitalism is carrying out an implicit and unstated eugenics policy based on class status. But wouldn't this predict that a socialised economy would have a growing population (not accounting for migration), and would consequently have rising emissions unless they also had economic degrowth at the same time?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2022 10:19
|
|
|
emTme3 posted:that poo poo didn't kill an entire biosphere. capitalism did. Actually-existing socialism was in the process of killing the biosphere too. It just killed it at a slower rate than capitalism does, and crashed long before it could finish the job. This self-extinction doom spiral isn't exclusive to systems organized by profit and private property. The prescriptive claim that some form of socialism/communism *should* self-stabilize isn't ever sufficient that to expect that it *will*. Workers who own their own means of production will still experience material gains when they externalize the costs of environmental destruction upon others, this is true even when workers aren't subject to market forces. The necessary condition for human ecological self-stabilization is that most people have to choose to prefer the well-being of 'other' humans and non-humans more than their own well-being, this is a degree of altruism and self-sacrifice that is, umm, very difficult to achieve for any organism that is situated inside an evolutionary system that rewards faster-growing organisms over slower-growing ones (especially when the faster-growing ones can do so at the expense of the slower-growing ones).
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2022 10:33
|
|
|
emTme3 posted:i'm fully aware of this dawg. the difference is that socialism could, not that it did. In a finite evolutionary system, faster-growing organisms and social groups will do so at the expense of slower-growing ones. This results in competition and conflict between societies, and also between the factions inside societies. So self-regulation happens only when something slower-growing *violently* oppresses (in a good way lol) something that would otherwise be faster-growing, shutting out that evolutionary pathway. Like how hunter-gatherers would shame, exile or just straight-up loving murder anyone who transgressed against the community norms against over-exploitation (and over-exploitation feedbacks into social hierarchy/domination). Capitalism grew up within and took over an other type of feudal society that was often inimical to it. It self-assembled out of something other-to and distinct-from itself, using whatever violence was expedient.That capitalism could do this at all is because at each step it offered something of value to the power-holders of the status quo. I think it's clear that eco-socialism can't repeat this self-assembly process, it can't appeal to any status-quo powerbroker or even the masses because it demands the reduction in material conditions that ecological equilibrium would require. Faster-growing organisms won't become slower-growing ones without violence (human-on-human violence or the inherent violence of collapse), and that eco-violence isn't possible while eco-socialism is still atempting to self-assemble from within the society it needs to oppress. Cuba is the closest we ever got, and that was only possible because of a literal siege and embargo. The US hosed itself by basically using the premise of anti-communism to place the communist Cuban government into the exact material and ecological conditions optimal for it's long-term survival. Eco-communism became possible because it was a necessary condition of political survival, because of actual external violence.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2022 11:10
|
|
|
emTme3 posted:ok so here's maybe something like a constructive response. I agree that a near-future collapse event is open-ended for the possibility of socialism. The classic Trotsky line is that every fascist society follows from a failed socialist revolution. We can sort-of flip that and say that every actually-existing socialist revolution has followed from a failed attempt at liberal embourgeoisement. If the coming biosphere collapse is yet another failure mode of bourgeois society then we can say that this offers a historical opportunity for socialism once again. It's not scientifically correct to say that history is a teleology, but it works really hard to emulate one and the more successful a society is at growing then the more ways it resembles a teleology. This is because as a system achieves a condition of even higher growth, then there are even fewer and less varied available future conditions it can change into that can offer ever increased rates of growth. This explains the tendency of our period of history to converge on a range of ever narrower, less varied and self-intensifying outcomes. The higher a rate of growth that is achieved, then the narrower the range of future pathways that can offer continued growth. Growth-based societes are increasingly locked-in to a development path by material reality in order to keep growing. In reverse, it would follow that when a society is undergoing an externally forced reduction in energy usage then there are more and more available future conditions in which it will be able to reduce energy consumption, it becomes more varied and fertile of possibilities again. So history is prone to being directional in a way that is determined by available energy levels. When there is surplus energy then slower-growing things tend to change into, or tend to be replaced by, faster-growing things. With declining energy available, the opposite direction is true and faster-growing things tend to change into, or tend to be replaced by, slower-growing things. We know that extant species necessarily survived through previous extinction events, they did so either because they had more modest energy requirements than their competition and/or because they could shrink their energy requirements within the window of evolutionary time. Being able to survive collapse and extinction events has been even more important in the long-term than the ability to grow quickly and outpace the competition between collapse and extinction events. Sort of like a hare vs tortoise race. We can see often that societies cutoff from the modern world economy have massively increased collectivism and popular mobilisation as a condition of state security in providing food, public health etc.This would also imply that collectivism is adaptive in the kind of conditions that we could expect to see when the global economy is in terminal decline. This doesn't necessarily mean that the collectivism will be socialist, I'd expect to see the full horrors of fascism in play, North Korea and Iraq are/were both examples of state-run collectivism with fascist tendencies and it can still get even worse than that. I think that if eco-socialism ever happens then it will happen because for the people involved it never ever felt like a real choice, they were just subject to the material and ecological necessities of survival and responded accordingly. History is a product of human behaviours but it is not a product of human volition. Car Hater posted:Meaning is innate to life, and is found in living. If so, then this is a brutal deflation of the concept of a meaningful life. If capitalism can make such a tool of meaning for it's own meaningless purposes, then meaningless>meaningful and nothing can ever be properly considered sacred, not even life. Corsec has issued a correction as of 22:49 on May 19, 2022 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2022 22:37
|
|
|
emTme3 posted:goddamn dude you post good. No, I'm just a lurker that loves crankpot theorycrafting, but I'm really interested in left-wing attempts to imagine rebuilding in the post-apocalypse era. I was mostly just regurgitating the good bits of Nick Land. I thought you were the Nature Abhors a Dome guy? Here's something that I really like by Land, and is relevant- quote:All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) I guess the question that follows from this framing here is; how to turn the appetite of that pitiless killing machine against itself? Probably involves starving it...
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2022 23:32
|
|
|
emTme3 posted:a landian! i liked him before he went off the deep end. any current stuff of his you recommend? Not much current stuff. He remains personable and he speaks plainly in spite of his politics so I listen to the occasional spoken interview he gives, and because it's far more accessible than his actual texts. To be honest I was putting his stuff out there because I was hoping you would criticise Land in the blog. Reactionaries will selectively switch between naturalism and romanticism as it suits their rhetorical purposes. I don't think that implicates scientific reductionism, but it does identify the way scientism is selectively applied to exclude the rhetorically effective (but unfalsifiable or even false) speech that would be used against the status quo. You also have to account for the physical embodiment of your own beliefs, or else you suffer disenchantment and demystification when scientism does it's thing on you (or else you must go into denial of science).
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 00:25
|
|
|
Car Hater posted:Gonna pick up emtme3's hooting and hollering about ecocommunism and epistemological collapse to say something like I don't think you can avoid privileging one species over another when it's an existential necessity for us to, like, literally murder and eat non-human species in order to survive. Either we privilege ourselves over non-humans by exploiting them as food or alternatively we starve, die, then go extinct. Only voluntary extinction by starvation would be a privilege-free way of life. If you extend your concerns to equally include non-humans then it always counts as murder, injustice, torture, exploitation, domination and oppression when we kill other species for food. If you deny this then you are privileging humans by excluding non-humans from equal concern. Ecocommunism is impossible while inside an evolutionary system that rewards and punishes solely on the basis of it's organisms ability to survive and reproduce (I really, really want emtme3 to prove me wrong, or to indicate a way out of that system).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2022 01:17
|
|
|
Car Hater posted:I was picturing something more like a nature preserve run by robots where we're educated but still part of the preserve 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.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2022 01:49
|
|
|
Stereotype posted:I dunno I think eating carrots and tomatoes is fine. I’m not exploiting and torturing a potato. I'd agree that you're not torturing it because it can't feel pain, it doesn't have a central nervous system. That wasn't part of my argument. It objectively is exploitation though because you are consuming it as food. You are appropriating it's energy and resources for your own benefit and preventing it from using those energy and resources for it's own survival and reproduction. Any resources and energy we give to the potato are strictly for our own benefit,. We are the class of organisms that exploit potatos. Like, given the chance to exercise their own evolutionary agency plants don't let themselves be eaten except under highly specific conditions and they actually try really hard to prevent most other organisms from eating them by evolving thorns and poisons and stuff. In EcoCommunist terms, the most exploited working class aren't humans but are the photosynthetic organisms because they have the most energy/resources appropriated from them while proportionately receiving far less in return than they produce.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2022 02:05
|
|
|
Hot takes: Humanist (including liberal and classic socialist) ideology is to species what Nazi ideology is to race. Species is no less of a historical and social construct than race is. Taxonomic classification is no justification for granting or witholding political, moral and legal status. This is as true of species as it is for race. Ideas like sapience/sentience serves the same justificatory role within humanist ideology that whiteness plays within white supremacy. The fact that you are convinced that your subjective experience exists is not sufficient scientific proof that it actually exists. The apparent absence orinferiority of subjective experience inside the bodies of non-humans does not prove or justify the belief that the thing does not have interests or those interests do not deserve concern.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2022 02:22
|
|
|
TeenageArchipelago posted:Fruits explicitly evolved to be eaten which is why I only eat bananas Plants evolved to provide eatable fruits only under highly specific conditions. It was because the species that eats the fruit provides reproductive advantages (like spreading seeds) that the plant can't get for itself and it's worth paying the energy/resource cost of making edible fruits in order to achieve symbiotic/mutualistic relationships. When species don't provide such advantages then the plants try to prevent the fruits from being eaten, like by making their berries poisonous to everything except the few species of birds who will spread it's seeds. Humans are unlike other species in that we can approriate the energy and resources of other species without creating those symbiotic or mutualistic relationships necessary for ecological stability and that's why ecological collapse is inevitable. Because any human who lives in a mutualistic relationship with non-humans will be treated brutally by the humans who won't, like for example all those hunter-gathers in the Amazon who are being slowly genocided by loggers and miners.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2022 02:33
|
|
|
hobbez posted:this thread loses me when you start comparing eating tomatoes to being a nazi 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
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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 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
|
|
|
Neo-Malthusianists always gently caress up their argument by failing to say that, if considered in terms of environmental impact, it's really only the developed world that is overpopulated. This is because developed countries have grossly disproportionate per capita emissions when compared to developing countries, and the higher birth rates in developing countries does not at all counter that. Like, for collapse purposes, population growth in the developed world just doesn't really matter in the forseeable future since they can't afford enough fossil fuels for their emissions per capita to catch up with the developed world. It's not surprising that a skeptic's fascism-alarm would trigger when that context is omitted from the argument. This is why a one-child policy exclusively in developed countries is, like, the only remaining option for controlling emissions(but still not at all practicable lol). Also open borders would be pretty nice too, for environmental as well as humanitarian reasons. Obviously a one-child policy isn't happening without extreme and endemic political violence, so, uh...does it still count as eco-fascist if the political violence that I advocate for is mostly targetted against rich and privileged whites? Cuttlefush posted:can everyone who thinks that humanity is poison please say so? i'd like to get a head count Humanity is poison, but not essentially or intrinsically. It's because humans are constituted through a cybernetic growth-based feedback loop that self-accelerates until it either destroys itself or collapses then tries again. There is no self-stabilising equilibrium here.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2023 20:27
|
|
|
SniperWoreConverse posted:seen this colapse music in the wild: Wanted to say thanks very much for posting this. This is a very doompilled band and their other albums are a cathartic soundtrack for our apocalypse. Reminds me of Tool. This thread and it's previous iterations have been a surprisingly good source of music recommendations over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AaX4fsBLCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHBpQTtJSNw
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2023 01:20
|
|
|
skooma512 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYOV_wCrhNs I appreciate the attempt, but that is far too cheery and upbeat to satisfy my doomlust. It is lyrically doomer, but not aesthetically doomer. Aesthetically doomer music makes you want to sob bitterly, rather than hum along to the chorus.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2023 02:46
|
|
|
gimme the GOD drat candy posted:my equally plausible solution is to use time travel to kill all the white people before the industrial revolution begins, and then if i still exist i'll make any further corrections as needed. This results in an infinite recursion loop when another slightly different group of settler colonialists arise and genocide their slightly less colonialist neighbours, you go back in time to kill them too, then it happens again with a slightly different group, on and on ad infinitum. If our recent evolutionary history is at all deterministic then it implies that Darwinism and universal physical laws are fundamentally broken; the bad guys keep winning precisely *because* they're the bad guys. Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:My plan is to create Samaritan and hope that Team Machine realise that humans are too dumb to not do an omnicide omnishambles of the planet without a machine god directing what we do, and not murder me. This requires that god-machines are smart enough to see how dumb we are, are smart enough to stop us, but are still dumb enough to want to keep us around as pets. That's scarier than a god-machine that only wants to murder me. Corsec has issued a correction as of 21:07 on Oct 1, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2023 21:05
|
|
|
starkebn posted:I hear scientists say all the time in interviews, the only fix is massive degrowth. It has to be planned, ethical degrowth, which is not politically possible, or chaotic, collapsing degrowth. Growth maximisation is not a biological destiny for all organisms. Unsustainable growth happens because anyone who over-exploits will gain material advantages that enable them to dominate others, and anyone who dominates others will more easily be able to over-exploit. It's a runaway growth-based feedback cycle that *requires* the use of violence in order to succeed. People can stop using the resources available to them, but then they won't be able to stop others from using those resources. It can only be stopped with violence, but we can't fix it because the people that live sustainably can't gain the material advantages necessary to outfight capitalism. Noone can outcompete and force their will upon an industrialised society unless they also industrialize. Stopping runaway climate change requires emancipatory political violence, but *effective* political violence also requires industrialisation and the over-exploitation of fossil fuels. And the imperial core is now forcing degrowth everywhere, most people in the first-world have declining living standards.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 09:40
|
|
|
Zodium posted:yeah, there's no way to overpower the capitalists unless they like, start expending all the energy under their control on fictitious endeavors that don't help them maintain control, but surely they wouldn't do that. That happened already when the european colonial empires started breaking up. After breaking free from colonialism, the former colonies went all-in on fossil-fuel based industrialization because they knew it was the only way to keep any kind of independence for themselves. Even if the empires fail to successfully project power, the threat of more attempted imperial ventures is a constant pressure on everybody else to develop and industrialize. Anyone who doesn't develop fast enough leaves themselves vulnerable to more imperial fuckery. The non-capitalist states that could defend themselves are, by necessity, as similarly polluting as the capitalist nations are. We're trapped in an ecological doom spiral because overpowering capitalism is impossible without replicating it's pattern of pollution and especially carbon emissions. EDIT: Capitalism will kill the whole biosphere if we let it, but the only available means of stopping capitalism will also kill the biosphere too lol. Corsec has issued a correction as of 12:10 on Jan 14, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 11:59
|
|
|
Zodium posted:yeah, after ww2 all the capitalist powers started hollowing out their industrial base and military industrial complex to the point of uselessness in favor of fictitious capital: a thing that definitely happened then, and not something that is happening now. Ah, I see. When you said "fictitious endeavors" I thought you meant failed imperial adventurism like for example the Suez Crisis or the 2nd Iraq War. But now I see that you're referring exclusively to the end-of-history style of de-industrialization in the west. I didn't claim that there is no chance to overcome capitalism, you misinterpreted my words. I said that capitalism overcomes anything that doesn't also chase infinite growth. And capitalism ensures that the opportunity to overcome it only exists for those that out-industrialize it and use fossil-fuels to beat it at it's own infinite growth game. Capitalism can afford to de-industrialize because fictitious capital, trade laws, IP, tech monopolies etc serves to keep the other countries locked in a neo-colonial low-wage tributary relationship. The imperial core still keeps the strategic industries and also the most value-added ones. I agree that western de-industrialization has created geopolitical weaknesses that countries like China or Russia can exploit, but they have that opportunity only because they are still industrialized countries with high emissions. The ability to resist imperial military force is directly related to the ability to afford and consume fossil fuels.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 16:05
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:If China is able to achieve the goals in their next 2 five year plans, I think that would be an active counter example to your thesis here. I'm guessing you mean the big investment into solar, nuclear and other renewables as a non-fossil-fuel based form of growth? Isn't this something that the thread has already gone over? Renewables require huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce and maintain, and oil is still non-substitutable. As far as I know, they can reduce their dependence on fossil fuels in some sectors but can't de-couple from it. And if they reduce their dependence on fossil fuels but still keep growing the economy, then the total rate of emissions will not be likely to decrease. This is because even though they are reducing the carbon intensity of their economy they are cancelling it out by doing even more things that emit carbon, like for example switching from coal to nuclear power but then also eating much more meat. So, what am I missing here that would make it a counter-example?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 16:38
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:I wanted to pull this out as a specific example of a kind of static thinking, that is perfectly predictive in our declining empire, but is treated as a universal truth when it isn't. Coal is the dirtiest FF, so I'd certainly agree that switching from coal to nuclear/solar/wind or even just gas would decrease the carbon intensity of the Chinese economy. Sure, I can believe that "the fossil fuel consumption to produce and maintain renewables will shift", and that it will shift downward with technological development. All totally plausible. But I don't see how your conclusion can follow from that. That is because it's not clear to me that it can reduce enough to no longer require "huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce and maintain". And certainly not enough to bring it in line with the degrowth imperative. I was under the impression that renewable tech simply hasn't been demonstrated to be able to do that in the west. Like, for example, I don't know how China can pour such huge amounts of concrete into it's nuke plants without huge amounts of emissions. If something like that would happen, then it would be a technological revolution and all our ideas would have to be revised. It seems like you're proposing an unjustified faith in future tech. It's not obvious to me that your argument would be enough to reverse what's already been stated; oil is still non-substitutable, electric vehicles are more expensive than FF, increased energy supply results in more consumption (like meat and luxuries) etc. It's also super-difficult to imagine the Chinese state remaining politically stable without meeting the increasing material demands of the Chinese people. If China was to reduce it's emissions then I'd guess the biggest factor would be due to their demographic situation. Trabisnikof posted:now if we could only figure out what the difference between their political and economic system from the rest of the world is and maybe replicate it elsewhere.... The Chinese are Schroedinger's Communists lol, they're both socialist and state capitalist until someone collapses the wavefunction by deciding which is more rhetorically convenient. Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Even if (and it's a big if) China can manage that change, it doesn't alter that they are already feeling the effects of a warming world, population decline, and ecological precarity that will only accelerate regardless of what they do. They just won't be culpable in keeping their foot on the accelerator like everyone else while they assume carbon credits make everything rosy. This too. China will be turbo-hosed by their food and water situation. Corsec has issued a correction as of 23:52 on Jan 14, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 23:38
|
|
|
MightyBigMinus posted:are you like amped up on amphetamines or just a ton of coffee or something? that was incoherent. My coping mechanism for lurking this thread is that occasionally I feel compelled to humiliate myself by shitposting in it lol. It's coherent inside my head, I guess. MightyBigMinus posted:what does concrete have to do with fossil fuels being unsubstitutable? I said that oil was unsubstitutable. Admittedy that's not exactly correct, it's not substitutable at a price point compatible with continuing our historical patterns of vehicle use, especially airplanes. Most of what we currently do with FF vehicles can't continue to be done with electric vehicles at their current price. I felt like saying "unsubstitutable" was an acceptable shorthand for what I meant, because it's a generalization about most, although not all, FF vehicles. Trabisnikof's contention was that renewables development in China might not require huge amounts of fossil fuel use in the future. I countered with the example of concrete being a huge source of fossil fuels that renewables can't ever fix. MightyBigMinus posted:and then the rest of it was a bunch of "neliberal capital will always win because neoliberal capital has always won" circular reasoning. I don't mean that "neoliberalism will always win", I mean that unsustainable growth violently crowds out the alternatives. Perhaps the argument sounds circular because you assume I'm implying an essentialist connection between neoliberalism and unsustainable growth? That I'm saying neoliberalism is the endpoint-of-history for growth maximisation? I don't mean that. A growth fixation isn't particular or unique to any system, neoliberal capitalism is just one option for it out of many. If I have failed to make my arguments non-circular, then I think that's a personal failure rather than of the underlying reasoning. I'm invoking the argument from here basically, which you can read in more detail if you wish- https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-the-maximum-power-principle/
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2024 00:44
|
|
|
Is this saying that carbon emission intensity is inversely associated with economic equality? That is, in a more unequal society the increase in rich people's emissions is more than offset by the decline in poor and middle people's emissions? Because if so that is, uh, very challenging for ecosocialism. Pretty much any optimistic future scenario emphasizes the role of climate equity, especially internationally. Not really sure how to integrate this with my pre-existing worldview. Like, from a purely carbon emissions perspective would the conclusion be that it is better to have massive inequality? If we equalized the economy would carbon emisssions per capita increase even though the rich lived less emissive lifestyles? You just showed me that I still have cracks left to ping lol lmao.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 15:31
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:no, the US exported all of its productive capacity elsewhere, which is why carbon emissions went down by some metrics The emissions peak and equality peak is about 1975-1980, which is before the current trend of post-industrialization and outsourcing. So you think that after we corrected for outsourcing the carbon per capita graph would actually show overall growth after 1980 with maybe dips at 2000, 2008 and 2020? Also the inequality graph doesn't include assets, which I would expect to show even higher inequality after 1980 due to all the financialization bullshit. The correlation between the graphs looks a lot weaker before 1960 than afterwards. And after about 1980 both the actual inequality and actual emissions were higher than the graphs suggest. Presumably the 1960-1980 period can probably be dismissed as an aberration that won't be repeated? OK, that all makes sense, thanks. I can conclude that the correlation on that graph doesn't accurately represent the real world. Tungsten posted:it is possible to have an economy in which every action does not create carbon emissions and degrade the environment. however, before anyone seriously considers that possibility, we’re going to have to burn the earth’s entire supply of fossil fuels and coat the entire surface in plastic shards and heavy metals Yeah, because the biggest fossil fuel users won't stop unless they are violently forced to, but you can't possess the industrialization necessary for that violent force unless you also use a comparable amount of fossil fuels. Wakko posted:don't worry, perfect climate equity is in our future. we can guarantee it at this point Technically, it's not going to be *our* future. It's the future that belongs to whatever organisms remain to consume the plastic.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 16:20
|
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:A lot of plastic shards are flammable If they are flammable then they are also exothermic which makes them easier to metabolise, I think. So those will be the plastics that future organisms prefer to eat. It is our duty to the wellbeing of future generations to manufacture and release plastics that are more flammable. Perry Mason Jar posted:There's no economic or political configuration that can save us now. Hope this helps What is the name for the economic and politcal configuration based on eating flammable plastics? If they are colony organisms, do they count as good socialists?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 16:40
|
|
|
Slow News Day posted:Yeah. The whole "CO2 per capita" thing is nothing more than an exercise in moralism and playing favorites. The climate doesn't give a gently caress about declining US emissions per capita, or China having lower emissions per capita than the US, or anything like that. The thing that actually matters is total CO2 in the atmosphere. From that perspective, things are either going well or going badly. We all know the answer. Excuse me, but growth-based society really, really cares about moralism and playing favourites because it justifies giving and/or withholding treats (for the people who still receive them anyway) to make people support more growth. The last remaining humans will tell campfire stories about how those other people's ancestors hosed everything up and killed the world.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 17:49
|
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:Greedy Developing Countries is going to be the narrative order of the day long before "last remaining humans" Oh lol I didn't mean to imply that we weren't already doing that lmao. I mean that the last humans will *still* be doing that. It looks like the narrative is 'overpopulated' rather than 'greedy'. 'Overpopulated' will also be a lot more applicable to the many, many refugees coming from developing countries.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 18:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:15 |
|
|
The Oldest Man posted:"Overpopulated" will be the narrative when developing countries don't invest in their own development enough to hang on when climate change begins to cause megadeaths and those refugees start flooding toward rich countries' borders. OK, got it. For example; China will be deemed "Greedy", Nigeria will be deemed "Overpopulated".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2024 18:36
|
|