[She] ran Stanford Effective Altruism during college.
That made my eyes twitch. For some reason - she has a Wikipedia page: Kelsey Piper. She must have made it herself.
At Stanford she became a member of Giving What We Can, pledging to donate 30% of her lifetime income to charity.
What is that crap for somebody in her position? The page doesn't mention her background or who her parents are. I call bullshit.
Ninja edit
Yup.
This seems to be her daddy...
S&P Global Market Intelligence
Steve Piper U.S. Power and Coal Markets, Renewables
Has extensive knowledge of electric power markets as well as developments in upstream oil, natural gas, and coal industries domestically and internationally.
lmao, my dad gutted this planet and the wealth he extracted paid for my lib-approved education where i can tut-tut down on the rest of you to STOP CRYING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN EVERY TIME :nkrumah-baffled:
At first I wondered if Vox did this intentionally - like an editor gave it to her because her dad is directly involved in oil and gas. The editor hoped people would find out because controversy generates engagement and page views.
But then I had a different thought. How many Vox writers are ghouls and have no principles? It's probably close to 100% if not 100%. Maybe the article was her idea, she pitched it to an editor, they liked it, and then she wrote the article and - oops - she entirely forgot to mention her conflict of interest.
Can you imagine if Vox did that for every article?
"The Military industrial Complex Is Good Actually" is written by Mike Neo-Lib son of Evily Neo-Lib the founder and CEO of Evil Military Enterprises. Mike Neo-Lib is giving 30% of his income to charity but it must be said that his father gifted him $27 million dollars on his 21 first birthday.
Holy shit, I usually cringe at people being like "EVERYBODY SPAM THIS" but right now I'll jump on the grenade and be that guy, everybody spam this
I often google ghouls out of curiosity and I get nowhere.
But this was painfully simple. I couldn't believe she had a Wikipedia page and the "30% of her lifetime income to charity" text minus any mention of her parents screamed that not only was she a ghoul but she was a super ghoul. And then it took ~3 minutes for me to figure out who her dad was.
“sacrifice everything to the robot god of the future, and by everything, we mean the poor.”
They never hesitate and they are always so very brave to make such sacrifices.
Always this compassionate capitalist shit with: "I'll donate my income!" "I am a good billionaire, I take a 0 dollar salary!" "Income tax on the 1% should be higher!"
motherfucker I don't want your income, I want your wealth! I want those juicy means of production you've been hiding from me, I want collective ownership of capital!
Also, weasel words.
Based on the internet sleuthing others here have done, her family is loaded and she's probably got a trust fund already and/or a seven figure inheritance lined up. So her journalist "income" is just folding money, and she's only giving a portion of that. Ask her if she's giving 30% of her trust fund or inheritance, and watch her spin...
Also the "$0 salary" thing is a smokescreen , like, of course you'd opt to pay no taxes on your income if you could live off the interest on your interest-bearing assets, do they take us for fools? (Yes)
Don’t tell kids there is no future, that’s not true! I have a future!
She didn't write the page, the page is mostly authored by a weird ass tech bro, which Wikipedia has several.
my brain went to last airbender instead of the cameron movie lol. it took me 5 full seconds to realize what you meant
Basically a whole article to convince people that everything is fine so she doesn't have to feel guilt over her generational wealth created through destroying the future.
She had a burger with Biden that was so good, it should’ve been illegal
It actually reminds me of an apocryphal (?) conversation someone had with Lu Xun, a leftist author in 20th century China famous for his relentless social criticisms. The person supposedly asked Lu Xun: “We all live in a giant prison and there is no way we can break the bars. If everyone falls asleep, then they will never have to realize what miserable condition they live under. In that way they’d be happier than if they were awake. So why bother wake them up?”
Lu Xun supposedly said, “if everyone wakes up and binds their forces together, who is to say that they can’t break out of this prison?”
Another win for that Cushbomb quote I half-remember about liberals in general and conservatives in particular having no response to "I reject your premise"
Kids: "Climate change will destroy the world, please do something about it"
Liberals: "Stop telling kids that climate change will ruin the world!"
Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world. It already has.
"As many are telling us" means they just pulled this out of their arse.
Or the wars that result from them. No one ever takes the wars in to account
Oh my god some people are totally delusional. Yes it's scary to confront >4C of warming but that's what we're on pace for and just pretending we'll magically hold it to 1.5C with magic tech isn't going to make childrens' lives better.
The world has objectively gotten worse for the vast majority of humans, even in the imperial core let alone the periphery, over the past 40 years. You need to doctor the data pretty hard to hide this fact.
The fall of the Soviet Union and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.
You’ll live in a cubicle but in the meta verse you’ll live in a larger cubical!
Where are the climate scientists saying “the world is a better place to live in… than it has ever been and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950”? Is Steven Pinker a climate scientist now? Why would climate scientists even chime in to make such a broad unfalsifiable social science claim outside of their discipline, and why would they have the authority to do so? Climate Scientists aren’t trained in historical material conditions and those specifics. The ideology here is so overpowering
"The mass migrations will ensure a plentiful supply of Soylent Green herding itself to our borders, where processing plants will create quality jobs for the white working class!"
When I was a kid, we were told it was supposed to be our job to fix these problems. But we were told this by the same people that refused to step aside and go live in their big fancy houses and have dinner parties with other people who live in big fancy houses.
You see johnny when we pass this will all be yours
Charles. I need more adrenachrome!
Genie:
You are granted one wish, make it a good one.
Kids:
Genie, grant me the power to solve Climate Change
A gun? What am I supposed to do with this?
Genie:
[Redacted]
We once had smallpox and now we don't. Ok, but I must have missed the part where the pro smallpox industry insinuated itself into absolutely every worker's life and all the levers of government
We once had smallpox and now we don’t
:monke-kawaii::covid-cool: whoops
You think this piece is bad? Check out its primary source for the claim that the world won't be rendered uninhabitable.
But if climate change is in fact like an asteroid zooming toward the earth, you wouldn’t know it from the actions and prescriptions of those who hold this view. The Green New Deal remains more slogan than policy proposal. But based on what little its proponents have said, it seems unlikely that anyone is actually seriously proposing the sort of draconian measures that a true climate emergency would ostensibly demand.
Green New Deal proponents appear to have no plans to ban meat or air travel, as some right-wing critics have suggested. Many reject nuclear energy and carbon capture technology, despite strong evidence that both will be necessary to deeply cut global emissions.
:agony-acid: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
What climate catastrophists are actually willing to propose are the sorts of things you do in response to planetary diabetes, not a climate asteroid. After spilling several thousand words about why alarmism about looming climate catastrophe was warranted in a New York Times Sunday Review article entitled “Time to Panic,” Wallace Wells could only offer higher fuel efficiency standards, high speed rail, and mandatory requirements to feed cattle seaweed as the path forward. This is hardly the stuff of asteroids and emergencies.
What climate hawks and Green New Deal advocates actually have in mind is politics, not the suspension of politics in the face of looming catastrophe. The talk of climate apocalypse is in service of long-standing policy goals, not an all hands on deck response to a climate emergency.
:agony-immense: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
For these reasons, staking out a more catastrophist and progressive position in Congress is unlikely to either raise the ambitions of climate policy or improve its prospects of passage. Getting enough of the political spectrum to have sufficient climate ambition to avoid, under the best of circumstances, the watered-down fate of climate policy efforts during the Obama years will require something different: namely, demonstrating that the environmental movement is something more than an ideological special interest.
Doing so will require environmentalists to stop imploring Americans to bear down and take their environmental medicine and, instead, to swallow hard and take some hard medicine themselves, by embracing things that they have historically found distasteful, such as adaptation, natural gas, carbon capture, and nuclear energy.
That won’t get the United States — much less the rest of the world — to zero emissions in the next 12 years. But Wallace Wells is right that by almost every measure, a two-degree future will be better than a three-degree future and a three-degree future better than a four-degree future. Moreover, practically, nothing that Green New Deal advocates appear willing to seriously propose will actually cut US emissions at a scale or pace consistent with stabilizing emissions below two degrees, much less 1.5. Making the best of our chronic condition, rather, will require a climate movement that is less catastrophist about the problem and more ecumenical about its solutions.
:agony-limitless:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Moreover, practically, nothing that Green New Deal advocates appear willing to seriously propose will actually cut US emissions at a scale or pace consistent with stabilizing emissions below two degrees
If they want climate Stalin I'll fucking give them climate Stalin
We're gonna need the newest spoon technology for this :amerikkka: 🥄🥄🥄 :stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
Wait, so it sounds like she's saying "The GND and liberal politicians aren't actually treating this like an existential threat"... which I agree with! But then she says, because they're not, it isn't a threat? Fucking lol.
I mean in some sense I agree, there is no political solution to climate change under capitalism and the GND won't do it, but the answer to that is socialism...
It's a separate piece by a couple of obnoxious neolib white guys. Here's the relevant bit:
The problem for the climate movement is that the technocratic requirements necessary to massively decarbonize the global economy conflict with the egalitarian catastrophism that the movement’s mobilization strategies demand. McKibben has privately acknowledged as much to several people, explaining that he hasn’t publicly recognized the need for nuclear energy because he believes doing so would “split this movement in half.”
Implicit in these sorts of political calculations is the assumption that once advocates have amassed sufficient political power, the necessary concessions to the practical exigencies of deeply reducing carbon emissions will then become possible. But the army you raise ultimately shapes the sorts of battles you are able to wage, and it is not clear that the army of egalitarian millenarians that the climate movement is mobilizing will be willing to sign on to the necessary compromises — politically, economically, and technologically — that would be necessary to actually address the problem. Anyone who doubts this need only direct their gaze toward the other side of the political spectrum, where conservatives and Republicans are now entirely captive to the nativist forces they have unleashed over the last decade in their battles with Obama-era progressives.
And:
Under the best of circumstances, with a Democratic president and Congress after 2020, environmentalists will be faced with a Democratic coalition dependent on vulnerable members representing swing states that share neither progressives’ enthusiasm for redistributive social programs nor environmentalists’ fear of climate change. This is the reason that senior Democratic members of Congress, such as Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, have been so tepid about the Green New Deal. They have both, twice during the course of their careers in Congress, watched Democrats lose control of both houses of Congress after proposing major climate and health care legislation.
Meanwhile, the polarizing catastrophism of the environmental left — tied to “this changes everything” demands for 100 percent renewables, mandatory vegetarianism, and the end of extractivism and capitalism — has virtually excised moderate and explicit climate policy as an option for Republicans, a problem that will likely be exacerbated in the event of another wave election favoring Democrats. Already, several of the most prominent Republicans still willing to acknowledge climate change lost their seats in 2018. Those remaining are likely to be high on Democratic target lists in 2020 for the simple reason that Republican districts that can presently sustain some level of climate policy advocacy are also districts that Democrats have a shot at representing.
The coming disaster won't destroy their world, it will create it. :posadist-nuke:
oh boy, another opportunity to plug one of citations neededs best episodes (and one of the best introductory episodes for libs): the neoliberal optimism industry
not specifically about the climate stuff (though still very relevant to it) but all the other ideological shit in it of everything getting better for everyone through the magic of neoliberalism and the washington consensus, and how thats bullshit and stephen pinker and bill gates and other epstein pals are full of shit (and then sneakily segues into a really great introduction to modern neo-imperialism)
Maybe instead of just yelling at children to be more optimistic they could like, idk, actually do something to give the youth hope for the future. Y'know like actually do something to stop climate change
That requires action, and dramatic, bold, immediate action.
Yelling at children and trying not to think too hard about it doesn't, and if you can convince yourself that climate change isn't very serious, your own life probably gets much less stressful and guilt filled.
Don't worry about this shit, child! Some great man will invent the technology to save us. If someone else would just write a suitably inspiring children's book that I could buy, then maybe that great man will even be you!
i think zoomers are a lot more radical bc the contradictions of the system were more explicit as we were growing up compared to other gens upbringings. the inaction of the gov on behalf of the peoples concerns is pretty blatant in the past few decades. from personal experience, zoomers are either some form of socialist or :frothingfash:
unfortunately there is a lot of zoomer bashing on this site but i see a ton of zoomers protesting/joining orgs/making agitprop. i would say the # of zoomer socialists far outnumber zoomers who are outright fash, but libs ultimately cater to the fash so we are still outnumbered.
it just seems like anyone of my gen i talk to its p much 50/50 whether they think capitalism is flawed and will/should be replaced with socialism
edit: also wanted to add that gen z liberals seem to care less about airing out their fascist tendencies
What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.
:pinker:
“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told Ezra Klein in his column this week about overcoming climate despair.
Broke: Climate Scientist at Columbia telling first-world children to be optimistic
Woke: Colombian Leftist Guerrilla and current Presidential front-runner telling children in the global south that he plans to halt all new oil exploration and perform sweeping land reforms to direct the value of the land to public benefit.
“You see children saying things like ‘The world’s going to burn up, we’re all going to be dead in 20 years,’ and that’s pretty unlikely,” Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies how climate change affects mental health, told National Geographic in an article about kids and climate anxiety.
Don't worry, just turn up the air conditioning. Everything's going to be fi- power sputters during historic heat wave
Are they just this stupid or do they think we're this stupid? I mean slaves were relatively happy in that they knew no other alternative. They didn't know you could spend Saturdays working in a fast food restaurant or climate controlled retail store. They didn't know you could only work 10-12 hours a day instead of 16. They didn't know you could have a modest bed and a flat screen TV and an iphone. They didn't know you could go to a store and buy cheap snacks full of fat, salt, and, sugar. As long as they didn't know that there was anything better, by what would they gauge happiness? Happiness would be a cool rain storm on a hot summer's day. Happiness would be an easier harvest than last year. Happiness would be a Sunday off to sit in a church and hear someone preach to you about your place in the world. Maybe a little bit of extra gristle in your stew that night. Sure, they were happy in that they found relief from their condition where they could.
I don't really believe that. I think slaves could easily understand that there was a better life because they saw how the masters lived. They didn't need to know about modern life. But it's illustrative of the mindset that ignoramus libs have.
But even under that idea, happiness is relative so why would poor people today be happy? Why should they suddenly compare themselves to a different time than how they're living right now? if iphones and cheap treats are the bottom, then there is a lot more above for which to yearn.
We're not even talking about a world where the global poor is at that level though. We still have slavery. It hasn't gone away. I don't even mean in a cheeky Marxist wage slavery type way. I mean what everyone thinks of when they think of slavery. Being forced to do manual labor in horrible conditions all your life. That hasn't gone anywhere.
That's really why they do this misdirection. They talk about these wonky standards of living that aren't really attached to reality. It's some stat some technocrat can measure and talk about how the system is working. But the actual reality hasn't changed. We haven't eliminated slavery. We haven't even abstracted all of it into wage schemes or social contracts. But UN's fart smelling index indicates a marginal improvement in the gross gestalt of the aggregated poor defined in the range of whatever to whatever.
Are they just this stupid or do they think we’re this stupid?
They're trying to undo the damage that twenty years of sincere climate activism produced. As the harm caused by rising temperatures become more and more tangible, people are getting anxious and are growing increasingly radical in their efforts to hit the brakes on emissions production. So media institutions that had historically used "Climate Change is Real Vote Blue No Matter Who" have to now tap the breaks when its clear Blue won't do shit to curb emissions within the neoliberal model.
We’re not even talking about a world where the global poor is at that level though. We still have slavery. It hasn’t gone away. I don’t even mean in a cheeky Marxist wage slavery type way. I mean what everyone thinks of when they think of slavery. Being forced to do manual labor in horrible conditions all your life. That hasn’t gone anywhere.
Obviously, those people aren't Vox's target audience. They're selling to college students and white collar 20-somethings, not literal human chattel doing factory work under threat of deportation or sex work under threat of being beaten to death.
They talk about these wonky standards of living that aren’t really attached to reality.
They're talking about Numbers Go Up, but what they're really appealing to is a sense of economic nostalgia. Remember the 90s, when the economy was booming and most (white) people (with some inter-generational wealth) were living very comfortably? Do you want to ruin that by trying to radically change our economic model? Because then you'll end up like Venezuela.
"Hey guys, if we do - as looks increasingly likely - kick off a chain of events that causes the extinction of humanity now, it'll take hundreds - maybe even thousands - of years for its inexorable unwinding to reach its grim telos. So what's the big deal?"
