https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1418989538748293122?s=20
when we solve climate change
I’d understand this level of optimism ten years ago. I’d even understand it five years ago. But now? Now this is just pure delusion.
We aren’t gonna “solve” climate change. That battle is over. We lost. The climate is changing and it’s gonna continue changing faster and harsher each year.
What we need to do is fucking adapt and make sure we can stave off the worst of the crises that are to come. I have near zero hopes of that happening, especially under the current capitalist framework.
Counterpoint. We shoot the capitalists in the face in the next decade and start bootstrapping FALGSC.
See, I'm pretty sure it would just take one to kick off a wave of them once everyone's reminded that being rich isn't the same as being immortal, but that's "bourgeois adventurism" or whatever. Because, obviously, you can't stop a never ending carnival of abject horror with the targeted redaction of a dozen or so individuals. That would imply that such a deed might have some kind of propaganda value, which is obviously absurd. :anarchist-occult:
While I'm opposed to Stochastic violence (and honestly not a huge fan of killing anyone we don't have to, which is going to be a long list as it is) I sometimes think the Anarchist assassinations and some of the RSDLP expropriation tactics really did weaken the system over decades, despite the short term PR issues.
Like if you can rob banks, or kill major politicians, then the state can't protect its own ruling class.
Even if it is "fixed," it will likely have caused or contributed to countless deaths. To even pretend that you could make this a triumph of capitalism when climate-related emergencies have directly killed hundreds in the past month, is a bizarre sick fantasy.
I'm going to print out this tweet and have it framed. Then, when the average global temperature has gone up 15° and no one remembers what trees looked like, and Matt Yglesias is about to succumb to combined skin and lung cancer, I'm going to find him and smash it over his head.
You, an idiot: 'The market efficiently killed 4.5 billion people and most were in the global south - thus misogynists/anti-semites. Sorry, not sorry. #LeopardsAteMyFace'.
Me, an intellectual: 'The subsidies that the Johnson/Fuentes (D) administration gave to Disney to make 30% of the mascot costumes bio-degradable by 2080 means that wasn't true capitalism'
I say we put him on a planet with a billion clones of himself
See how that turns out
Nah, I want him to become a productive member of society, not sure how tho cuz he's so useless that he doesn't even qualify for gulag re-education.
What if we just assigned him to literal dunk take duty down at the pier until his takes improve?
Reminds me of a David Brooks article fantasizing about how the left will react when Iraq totally stabilizes
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.
And later he's saying
Nonetheless, I didn't expect a year after liberation, hostile militias would be taking over cities or that it wouldn't be safe to walk around Baghdad. Most of all, I misunderstood how normal Iraqis would react to our occupation. I knew they'd resent us. But
Shout-out to the blowback podcast for mentioning these, liberals love just making shit up and fantasizing how mad the left will be when it's proven true
That first article is amazing, a true masterpiece. It's mere existence is an encapsulation of everything wrong with Capitalism. If the system worked even a tenth like they claim it does David Brooks would have come to two ends 1) Honorably killing himself for his failures or 2) Cleaning toilets at some fast food chain in Florida with his tongue.
Yeah, it's crazy that you can be completely wrong about extremely important topics, and 20 years later everyone who accurately predicted how things would play out is still a crackpot and you're still a reasonable adult expert.
Denial is the first stage of grief
Good luck with those carbon tax credits Matty boy
Love seeing Matty here writing checks that there's no way capitalism will be able to cash.
Absolutely deranged, completely removed from reality. No government is taking climate change seriously or even taking serious incremental steps to fighting it.
quite literally countless because we never found them or documented them and destroyed their corpses and ecosystems so we can never find them now.
I long to belong to a species extinct and defiled by careless explorers, forgotten for eternity. Sounds tight.
i love to make arguments that if i am wrong it means that i fucked up the whole world and the people who were right can't do anything anymore
My one true ounce of hope is that when the climate finally ends all life on the planet, all the capitalists will be dead.
what's going to be great is when everyone starts to realize +4C of climate change is fundamentally incompatible with human existence at these population levels.
Fuck holy shit. I mean, so it's geoengineering or the end of humanity right? At what point do we start building the giant satellite transported umbrella to shade the earth or whatever?
As soon as possible. Slowing the feedback loops, even to a slower rate, will mean the ecosystems will adjust better.
We actually can have a situation less catastrophic than this, with 2-3 degrees warming, but it basically means zero carbon by 2030 and spending the next 200 years scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2 as hard as possible.
That map is wrong, a lot of the areas around the equator will get more rain not less. Canada fanboy map.
Thank you for sharing though it's helped me realize that 4°C will be apocalyptic.
Much of the equatorial area is uninhabitable due to Wet bulb temperatures, and for the most part I think the map shows that a brown. It does show increased rainfall around the Sahel for example.
I do agree a more precise version would be good.