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OwlFancier posted:Mostly it's just annoying that all they achieved was pulling stunts and getting their own protesters arrested. It seems less like a political organization and more like a viral marketing agency that uses human lives as fuel. I think that it is perhaps worth pointing out that the current stated Tory environmental policy is to ban petrol cars and completely decarbonise the grid within a little over a decade. I don’t think that is a policy that the Tory party would adopt of their own free will, so presumably _something_ is making them do so. it is not particularly obvious that XR is not that thing. Obviously what they absolutely are not is a spontaneous grass roots organization representing the immediate self interest of their members. They are a top-down creation of someone who came up with a plan and got others to go along with it. Which is inherently indistinguishable from ‘an op’. The interesting fact is not who the guy is, but what their argument is, and why people agree with it.
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Oct 5, 2021 17:08
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Guavanaut posted:Just a repeat of the US Dems playbook of the 90s, where they end up the party of big business and tough on crime and some of the melt unions, while the Republicans overture as the party of small/medium businesses that mostly sell flags and lovely employment conditions (while also being the party of big business). The structural difference in the UK, is that the Tories are, and never really have been, the party of big business. They are at core the party of landlords. The spectrum runs from big aristocratic landowners down to owner-occupiers; this covers the full range of property-havers. Big business presumably wants lower rents for its workers: a better politician than Starmer could maybe build a viable coalition on that basis. Workers and bosses have rather more common interests and room for compromise than renters and landlords.
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Oct 6, 2021 12:07
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peanut- posted:I find this interesting, in that he (and a lot of other people) really believe it's true. They see the systematic demolition job done on Corbyn as just the expression of the natural order, not as any manifestation of ideology. I don’t know if it is what he meant; he is after all an idiot. But there is a reading of his words that does makes sense. Corbyn wasn’t really destroyed by ‘the media’, by any particular price of reporting, biased or not. He was destroyed by senior Labour politicians writing articles in the media saying he was dangerous, incompetent and/or racist. If that is the expressed opinion of those politicians, you really can’t expect the media not to report it. You have to either arrange things so that either that is not their opinion, or that they are not senior MPs. You can get away with a few backbenchers, or any number of ex-MPs. But being serious about winning means that everyone involved must consider winning a desirable goal.
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Oct 21, 2021 16:12
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Barry Foster posted:I wrote about the original nazi eco-fascists in my book and can confirm it was and always will be stupid poo poo for cunts Ecofascsim is a bit of a misnomer, as ‘eco’ comes from the modern science of ecology. And if you accept that you probably also accept climatology. and so all the various scientific and technological fixes that can solve (or least greatly mitigate) the problem within the bounds of normal democratic activism and politics. Malthofascism would probably be better; the underlying logic is the same as that that killed all those people in 19c Ireland and India. Once you can categorise a problem as ‘too many people’, fascist methods really do start to look like a solution.
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Oct 22, 2021 20:18
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Guavanaut posted:"convert all arable land to cash crops and keep exporting them at market rates no matter how many people are dying, while also forcibly keeping out any industry from colonized areas because something something free market" is pretty standard market liberalism, not malthusianism That would seem to suggest the post-1945 absence of peacetime famines shows we are not living under market liberalism? Seems more accurate to say Liberalism + Malthusianism gives you famines, liberalism + scientific ecology gives you Band Aid. Whereas Fascism + Malthusianism skips the inconvenient wait until the next time a crop pest hits, allowing you to get on with the glorious work of population reduction straight away. It’s hard to imagine a political philosophy that could compensate for the particular way in which Malthusian is wrong. “Thomas Carlyle” posted:This cannot last, Heaven disowns it, Earth is against it; Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeople land of ashes rather than this should last… “charles Edward Trevalyn” posted:An effective method for removing surplus population … the real evil we have to contend with is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people’. Those are not people doing rational and correct economic calculations about how much money they can make, given a choice of a large population or a small one. They are people propounding passionate moral ideas about the killing that Must be Done.
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Oct 22, 2021 21:38
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Barry Foster posted:Yeah mostly the blood and soil thing, but also going into its roots in nationalist romanticism. One would never have guessed a wandervogel could be so dark Ok you got me there; I wasn’t aware the word was that old, I thought it was a neologism when the modern field was founded in the 1950s. Maybe oecofascism would actually carry the intended meaning that the underlying premise is based on the worst of 19C parascience?
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Oct 22, 2021 22:03
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RockyB posted:A much more detailed examination of why, in my opinion at least, 'redirecting the world economy' at this stage is far too little and too late can be had from the Geological Survey of Finland: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf Yes, that one is a lot better, and correspondingly really really hard to interpret as doomist, unless you go in cherry picking stuff out of context. The key point is it takes as the starting point that everyone in the world who wants a car will be able to get one. It then ask what it would mean if all those cars were electric, which naturally involves massive amounts of batteries and power generation. Hence why you get into constraints like running out of uranium in a few hundred years. This is where it differs from other reports, which assume the division between first and third world continues, so only first world emissions need to be worried about. As such it is much more optimistic, in that it looks like even that utopian improvement on the world barely falls outside the currently feasible. A pretty standard combined nuclear and renewables strategy gets you most of the way there. One new battery technology, power generation method or whatever commercialised sometime within the next 50 years and everyone in the world is at least as well off as a contemporary Finn. The downside is that if we don’t hit that scenario, then we might well not fall slightly short of it, but massively so. Because then it starts to seem locally rational to start wars to avoid being the one of the countries locked out of prosperity. Which then diverts effort and attention into fighting, and rebuilding from, those wars, to the point where there is a real risk of the circle of first world countries starting to shrink. I could definitely see both the UK and USA losing first world status; bets could be taken on who would be out first.
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Oct 23, 2021 02:16
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jaete posted:This whole post reads as ridiculously optimistic to me. I mean, to take just one country as an example, in India alone there are more than a billion people who will literally be able to no longer live where they are a few years from now, due to climate change loving up the environment completely. I think the key words here are ‘reads’ and ‘seems’ they are descriptions of your mental state, the situation that exists inside your head. This is a topic on which you, like anyone, are a world expert. And so you are no doubt entirely correct about how you feel. It’s just that that meant that causes you to read a objectively utopinly optimistic report, with a step by step plan for what needs to be done, as a declaration of doom. But the world of climate and politics exists outside your head; the fact that you are sad does not imply anything about how things will turn out.. They may indeed be bad, but the best case for the future is still clearly above the present. The future is a football match that hasn’t been played yet, it is certainly possible that we will lose 6:0, but that is not baked in.
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Oct 23, 2021 12:37
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RockyB posted:This is the crux of it honestly. I've always approached life in a slightly pessimistic way because, as they say, a pessimist is rarely disappointed and often pleasantly surprised. As such I've run into no end of people of the 'cheer up it may never happen' bent that would rather blithely ignore a potential problem than do a modicum of planning for it. People like radmonger who can look at the Finland report and come to the conclusion that it's optimistic, when the understated sarcastic bottom line is actually: I don’t see what is so particularly unrealistic about that prospect that it needs to be ruled out with sarcasm The report is talking on a timescale of 50 years or so, assuming every country in the world in the world being as rich as Finland, with everyone who wants a car owning one, stuff delivered by trucks and container ships, and so on. In that circumstance , it turns out you would need to either find new deposits, recycle lithium, or improve current battery designs. If you think all of these are objectively impossible, then maybe you are a world expert in three separate areas and hold that as a justified belief. Or maybe the part of your brain that does that thinking is broken and tells you ‘this is never going to happen’ even when the question is ‘should I go down the shops and get some food’? If that best case doesn’t happen, some countries remain (or become) poor enough so the average person doesn’t own a car, the way the whole world was before 50s America, and half or more is today. So maybe they have an electric scooter, and travel longer distances by train. Maybe they still live and die the way they do now. In the true worst case, they become even poorer, wars are fought over bottle neck resources, and all those other 20C evils remain or return. The point is, the range of known possible outcomes is wide, and largely dependant on what is in effect luck. What technologies work out and which don’t, what wars start and what don’t, the timing, location and severity of environmental catastrophes, and what political movements succeed and what ones fail. Anyone claiming to be sure of the answers to all those questions is unlikely to have sound justification for their belief. So everyone is free to be optimistic, pessimistic or uncertain as best works for them psychologically. It’s just that there is no requirement, or excuse, for trying to impose those coping strategies on other people as if they were objective fact.
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Oct 24, 2021 10:30
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:
Predicting 2020 from 2021 is really not that impressive a trick. Calling it a prophecy is pretty misleading , when all it really is a trivial model that contains no information more profound than ‘if we assume there is no food, then people will starve at _this_ rate’.
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Oct 31, 2021 21:00
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:
The predictions made in 1972 were not the ones shown in that graph. . You can mathematically model a world in which depleting oil reserves lead to increasing energy prices which causes declining economic activity which causes increased mortality which causes population reductions. You can tweak the parameters on such a model so that it matches known history, in that all the negative effects are simply things that haven’t happened yet But such a model will fail to predict the future the behavior of a world in which that is not a description of what is actually going to happen. For example, one in which global warming exists. After all, global warming was at most a speculative theory in the 70s, and was in any case not considered in the limits to growth model. https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart If the future turns out to be hosed up, that will be a political decision, not something logically derivable from math. radmonger fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Nov 1, 2021 |
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Nov 1, 2021 00:29
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