Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

Reminds me of that short story, The Machine Stops. "Man is the measure"

The Machine Stops posted:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend — glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

“Where are you?” she sobbed.
His voice in the darkness said, “Here.”
“Is there any hope, Kuno?”
“None for us.”

Nocturtle posted:

Personally went through a phase looking into and working out as much as possible for myself what was actually required to achieve gigaton-scale negative emissions and concluded we've already hit this stage. Believe that phase is usually called "bargaining".

Rime posted:

A joint research team at the Division of Biotechnology, DGIST, confirmed that microplastics(MPs) ingested orally accumulate in the brain and act as neurotoxic substances.

Microglial phagocytosis of polystyrene microplastics results in immune alteration and apoptosis in vitro and in vivo





I mean, OP from this morning is probably correct that Atmospheric Rivers won't be the cause of our demise in the west. Just as likely loving absurdly incorrect that the mountain of poo poo we've created isn't rapidly coming back to bite us in the rear end, tho. HTH, behold the Great Leveler.

We know Microplastics weakening the adhesive abilities of muscles.
We know they are impairing the cognitive ability of hermit crabs
We know they are causing aneurysms and reproductive changes in fish via disruption to the endocrine & hormone systems.
We know they can alter the shape of human lung cells.

Now we know they are going straight to the brain less than a week after ingestion and inducing immediate broad-spectrum neurotoxic effects.

We ingest an estimated 52,000 microplastic particles a year, depending on lifestyle.

Kick back, pop on that tune, and take a moment to consider the ramifications of this.

actionjackson posted:

what's the counterargument to someone who says that the supply chain issues only started due to covid, and since worldwide pandemics are rare, you can't really blame the current system? i.e. once covid is "resolved" (lmao) things will be back to normal

Samuel Glompers posted:

The thing about "too late" is it only exists if you give it a specific definition. Too late for our current societal expectations of normal life? Absolutely. There's no saving the current model of north American living, mother earth will have her righteous vengeance on our stupid, selfish, destructive society. But there really isn't any moment that justifies not trying, because there's always a chance to have less people die, less species be wiped out, less damage, etc.

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect I'm not alone in feeling a deep depression and sadness that it's "too late" for a world that I think I could survive in or want to be a part of, and I try to turn that to "It's too late to do anything" so that I can justify sitting on my rear end being sad and eating poisonous bonbons from the terrible treat machine which I am a part of, however unwillingly. It just isn't true. Anything and everything should be done and must be done, and I think part of the sadness that permeates this thread is how hollow and unsatisfying it is to try and soothe yourself with lies about hopelessness. I am sad because I am weak. So far I cannot find a contribution I can make to resisting this awful, awful system, and I am ashamed of my own inaction. I suspect a lot of people feel the same way, whether they admit it or not.

Besides that, there is the fact that it being too late for the current way of life makes it feel like it is too late for me, personally. I am a creature of this ridiculous way of life. I hardly know how to cook, my body is nothing but sedentary aches and pains, I have no survival skills, little physical strength... what world is there for me when X happens and this all falls apart? When industrial agriculture fails, seemingly incredibly soon? Not much of one as far as I can tell. So is it too late for me? Well, saying so is a way to excuse not doing anything about my problems. If it is too late I can just kick back, keep getting baked on a daily basis, wait until that moment of societal collapse comes, and then pick my [satirical method of choice] and [parody myself.]

But I don't want to do that anymore. I've tried to give up and it doesn't loving work! I doubt it will work for you either. I am going to try, if only to say that I did and find some peace with myself in making an effort. I urge you to do the same. A Better End Of The World Is Possible!

Rime posted:

This does a good job of summarizing a thought I've been having, and that is that virtually all of the "Existential Dread" being experienced in Millennial / Zoomer Society, and which is constantly being articled up in the media nowadays, is not about the collapse of the biosphere or the extinction of vast swathes of life on earth.

It's about spoiled brats having to come to grips that their way of life, and associated utterly insane rate of consumption, is going to abruptly end - and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it. It is beyond their control. Since society has been indoctrinated into this high-consumption lifestyle from birth for two generations now, and fed a lie about their personal manifest destiny and freedom at the same time, people are fundamentally unable to reconcile this blossoming future reality and it is Breaking Their loving Brains.

More and more I am realizing that when people talk about being depressed by matters of "collapse", they are using it as an allegory to actually discuss being depressed by the end of their lifestyles, and that the imminent end of their species from multiple vectors is still not clicking yet.

It's equal parts more depressing and infuriating than the actual poo poo which is going down, in some ways, knowing that the bulk of society will piss and moan about the imminent lack of tendies and weed - right up until the day they're unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave.

If they're lucky enough to die early enough that mass graves are still a thing we bother with.

Trabisnikof posted:

lol im talking more about the economic concept of discount rate in relation to the "time value of money"

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp

and with that little "core principle of finance" it makes it impossible for the future to ever be financially worth saving

God Hole posted:

ngl these arguments about george carlin has me more worried about the people in this thread than all the past debates about malthus or the void or whatever

splifyphus posted:

the semantic apocalypse in full swing - get you some.

Cold on a Cob posted:

i've been super nice and chill with people in my personal and professional life since i crossed over into acceptance. everyone has noticed and wants to know my secret.

lol. lmao.

petit choux posted:

I (re)submit that when Chomsky gave up writing on structuralism and decided the only course forward was activism, he was right.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

What do you mean much removed? Are you saying Marx alone is sufficient? He's not, no. Minimally you would need to read Lenin in addition to Marx and even then you're probably not going to be an effective Marxist if you leave out the following [checks notes] 100 some odd years of Marxist elaboration/addition/explication.

I don't think you've met college leftists or been in a commie party if you think that's effective activism to be honest with you.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Marx developed his theory in conversation with his contemporaries and owes a lot to them and his predecessors (e.g., HEGEL!!) so no not really.

petit choux posted:

you only have so much time and I'm really sorry about that.

Wakko posted:

the most backward take. humanity stands at the cusp of realizing its grand destiny. tens of thousands of years of consumption have brought us here, and you whine? imagine a tuberculosis bacterium mewling like this as the host's lungs start to fill with fluid. generations have stood on the shoulders of one another, all working together to bring us here. its is only now, at the great dying, that we realize true meaning.

Tabletops posted:

do what thing

Milo and POTUS posted:

Can't wait to live cyclonopedia although we probably have for a while I don't know I couldn't make heads or tails of it

Rime posted:

Bathtub Cheese posted:

yeah for what it's worth, i do think some of what the left says about how the world works isn't lost on most people but it's just not perceived as immediately useful, so it's easily set aside and forgotten. which from the individual standpoint can be a psychologically healthy thing to do but utterly catastrophic for the species and planet as a whole. effective propaganda bypasses that hurdle entirely. Also even the dumbest adults have very complex relationships with perceptions and ideas and don't relinquish their beliefs easily at all (especially ones that justify things they think they have to do).

leftists seem to often be people who feel like they can take responsibility for problems at a scale at which an individual can't act effectively at all. This is as much of a positive trait as it is a psychological flaw, depending on how you look at things. I think anxiety can create a need to understand an environment so that all sources of anxiety can at least theoretically be controlled (even if that's practically impossible) and if that isn't your hangup even simple curiosity can lead you down some dark paths all on its own.

quote:

One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.

CODChimera posted:

so like what is the plastic inside of us doing to us?

what if it's changing us? and we end up with mutants running around. could get to tick off another apocalypse type though.

why is this not more of a big deal

petit choux posted:

hosts for intelligence.

The Oldest Man posted:

I re-watched The Big Short the other day and had something of an epiphany about this and maybe why our society is so catastrophically bad at undervaluing risk and overvaluing optimism.

When you 'go long' on a stock (or buy into/espouse/act in accordance with) the notion that something will be better in the future you are effectively making yourself a prophet of good news. This thing is good, and specifically, I (and you!) can benefit from my foresight on this subject. There are many ways that prophetic foresight manifests social value, like "buy these stocks and you'll make money" or "buy a house, you'll have a secure future" etc. but the basic premise remains the same: I know something is going to be good, and I can use that foreknowledge to profit myself by joining that venture and by sharing my insight so that others join as well. The social utility of people who display this behavior is obvious; you don't have much of a community or society without people banding together for common benefit.

When you 'go short,' the premise is inverted: you are making yourself a prophet of bad news. This thing is bad, you shouldn't participate in it, you should bet against it, you should avoid it. The thing is, this isn't symmetrically valuable to being the bringer of good news. There's no immediately obvious way that others can profit from a forecast of a bad outcome the way that they can from a forecast of a good outcome. So what's the value of the bad news bringer to the community? If everyone listens to them, and the thing they are warning about doesn't happen/bad outcome avoided, the obvious value is zero. Even if they were clearly, obviously correct (and that often isn't the case), you don't profit by listening to the guy who says the '08 housing bond market is hosed or who says the barn being raised is going to collapse (I'll get to short-selling in a sec) and staying out of it, you simply avoided some potential hypothetical losses - but the people tied to those endeavors are pissed because you kept others from supporting you. If no one listens and the event happens, everyone is pissed at you anyway because you knew and didn't stop them.

In the financial markets they had to specifically legalize short selling equities in the 30s because there was no incentive to step up and publicize even a very accurate forecast of bad news. Sure, you could avoid losses and maybe help others avoid losses, but avoiding losses is not a symmetrical incentive to gaining profits. Legalizing shorts helped balance that out by creating a financial vehicle for people to make huge piles of money if they were right (according to the market, in the future) that something was not going to work out. But there's something interesting about the way short sales are structured (partially fixed by options trading) that I think speaks to the asymmetry of optimism and pessimism in our society: if you go long, your gains are potentially unlimited but your losses are capped. If you go short, your gains are capped, but your losses are potentially unlimited. Betting a good outcome will occur is structurally less risky than betting a bad outcome will occur.

Now apply the same exact lens to poo poo like COVID or climate change. Where is the social or economic penalty for being wrong over and over and over on the side of optimism? It's extremely limited. Now look at the other side: you err on the side of caution (or hell, don't even make any errors but just talk about it a little too much) and you're a doomer, a chicken little, etc. Bottom line is, you can prognosticate incorrectly many many more times on the side of optimism and get away with it because we are socially conditioned to treat 'going long' and being optimistic as both more inherently valuable and less risky than 'going short' and being pessimistic. And when you can consistently profit from pathological optimism without suffering the consequences of your rosy view of the world, regardless of the actual outcomes, you can leverage that profit into greater and greater influence on the rules of the game - you can protect your bets by making it harder to bet against you. The status quo of our economic system is pathological optimists making pathologically optimistic bets and hiring other pathological optimists to run the optimist betting machinery, do PR for the bets being made, and write that no one could have predicted a bad outcome in the charred aftermath when those bets fail.
Pathological optimism at some point stops being the most profitable strategy and becomes the only acceptable strategy.

So what's the value of any of this navel-gazing?

In the 08 market collapse, the big optimistic betters almost all got cover from the government first to unwind their bets and then to sell off the crap they couldn't unwind when they turned out to be catastrophically wrong because our entire social and economic order is based on optimism being the default correct stance. Think about this for a second: we have baked in the correctness of pathological optimism into our culture to such a radical extent that even when we knew it was wrong to a degree that put the entire country's financial system in jeopardy of total collapse, the response was to pause the whole machine, change the rules, and make sure we protected the pathological (even fraudulently pathological) optimists from the consequences of their own terrible wagers before we started the machine up again.

That was in a system where the outcomes could be rigged to protect the gamblers when they were on the 'right' side. So what the gently caress happens when the system is the global climate or a pandemic and you can't bully it or cheat it or rig it so that the pathological optimist bet always pays out the way our society needs it to? In this society, anyone who says "things are going to get worse" becomes the equivalent of a crazed doom-saying prophet on the street corner because our society is no longer equipped to deal with the possibility of optimism being wrong. The prediction of the possibility (or likelihood) of a bad outcome is automatically apocalyptic because we can no longer prepare for or fix bad outcomes.

So don't be a doomer, you're really harshing everyone's vibe.

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Been saying "the great filter is capitalism" for multiple threads now and this is the first time someone's finally agreed with me

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Rime posted:

Is it? Non-capitalist societies existed and proliferated for all of human history, many of them persisting in stability for hundreds or thousands of years before dissolving. Capitalism, in the way we understand it, is younger than most of the nations practicing it. This is an ideology and social structure barely 300 years old. An eyeblink. It’s a mental pandemic rapidly burning itself out, along with its hosts, while a few pockets of independent thought continue to struggle through.

The rest of this is just the classic “inevitability” rhetoric which has been hammered into your head by a lifetime of being exposed to the propaganda used to prop up and perpetuate these systems. Darwinian evolution does not apply to societies of conscious individuals.

SKULL.GIF posted:

capitalism is inimical to all life

bedpan posted:

genius economist said that whatever happens outside the door of my climate controlled home or office is utterly irrelevant.

And they are right! On a personal level. Extend that thinking to an entire planet, like they did, and the problems quickly become apparent. That is, if you think there exists any value, any necessity, any resource outside of aristocrats sitting around polished table in an air-conditioned office.

Every experience of their life has proven their conceptions of society to be correct. Every aspect of the world around them, the risk/reward mechanisms, consequences good or bad, laws, or social norms, etc. again and again and again show the person who dismisses climate change as the outdoor temperature gaining a few degrees, and nothing more, is the smart and sensible one.

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

sure, human beings are notoriously bad at dealing with issues that get imperceptibly worse in the short term but have drastic long terms consequences and massive momentum. also they're bad at dealing with things that don't have an obvious cause/effect relationship which can be directly observed by individuals, and which have low probabilities of occurring for any given individual and only become significant in aggregate. and sure the globally dominant socio-economic system is geared towards exponential growth at all costs and maximizing externalities to offload costs, and will destroy any individual entity which doesn't operate in this way

and sure covid which operates on a far shorter timescale and has far more direct cause/relationship and can be observed directly by individuals and where mitigations measure have relatively minor economic cost in the short term was dealt in a way which was an abject failure by just about every conceivable metric

but we've got to be optimistic!

Wakko posted:

humanity stands at the cusp of realizing its grand destiny. tens of thousands of years of consumption have brought us here, and you whine? imagine a tuberculosis bacterium mewling like this as the host's lungs start to fill with fluid. generations have stood on the shoulders of one another, all working together to bring us here. its is only now, at the great dying, that we realize true meaning.

AceClown posted:

Stereotype posted:

the purpose of life is to increase entropy, and we are doing a great job by burning everything we can find. we are just the final stage of the very long and very complex reaction chain for solar photons, transforming them from short wavelength optical to long wavelength infrared and increasing total entropy in the process. sure we humans pretend that we decrease entropy; sorting things and ordering information randomness to become patterns like books and computers; but that's just a accidental reaction product. once humans are done burning all the hydroxylated carbon dioxide we can find we will vanish, our purpose fulfilled, as other life begins the process anew, amassing vast amounts of complex hydrocarbons that can later be burned to further increase entropy. it's all just a big complex reaction. the universe is layer upon layer upon layer of complex processes fighting to create a perfect completely stable system with maximum entropy.

Stereotype posted:

at first my nihilism was just a useful rhetorical posting tool to avoid depression but recently it's just how i feel about everything, so overall i'd say things are fine. because nothing matters you see