Did you listen to Hell on Earth? The conclusion to that really helped me get past this kind of doomerism to the possibility that things will not just keep going like they have been, forever. The world is ending, yes, but it's been ending before. And it's utterly impossible to see past the here and now to realize which people, ideas, efforts, movements, and actions will (and which won't) ultimately decide the course of history.
Awfully hard to recognize all of that right now, though, as the global hegemon continues to ignore the deafening chorus of experts insisting that we're almost out of time to preserve a recognizable world.
Just because the world is ending doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. Those motherfuckers stole our sky from us…
I care about my friends and family not fucking dying either due heat stroke, starvation, dangerous increases in Co2 concentration or some eco-fascist.
I think the pushback you got from myself and others stems from the fact that your fixation on these concerns is not rationally grounded. Not because any of these things aren't possible, but because the path from current climate science to these specific outcomes for those specific people is so riddled with contingencies and beyond our meaningful prediction horizon that to worry about it daily unmoores you from whats actually going on around you. You don't seem equally worried about them dying in car accidents or heart disease or the people who are going to die due to inadequate healthcare access.
No one here is denying climate change, or that it's going to be bad, or even that you should take it into account when making decisions in your day to day life (i.e don't buy a house in Phoenix). All I'm saying is do what you reasonably can to prepare for reasonably possible outcomes, use what little influence you have to try to push things in a better direction, but don't make these specific lurid death fantasies (which is what they are) more than an occasional indulgence.
You kept digging into the statement as though I believed the concept of climate change would stab me in the heart, which I repeatedly explained was not the worry.
No your worry is that one of it's manifestations is going to kill you an everyone you know. Right?
I care about my friends and family not fucking dying either due heat stroke, starvation, dangerous increases in Co2 concentration or some eco-fascist.
Which is what we're talking about now.
"that has a low probability to happen"
This was specifically referencing human extinction, and that was not my assessment, but the assessment of the scientists who wrote the paper cited. But this isn't relevant as you're specifically uninterested in human extinction.
I'm not denying any of these things. I'm questioning the usefulness and rationality of taking foreseeable climate change consequences by all of those things and applying them haphazardly right now to make predictions of specific causes of death to specific people in the unforeseeable future. What do you get out of that other than a malaise?
That's not at all what you've been doing in your discussions with me, not then nor now.
No one here is denying climate change, or that it's going to be bad, or even that you should take it into account when making decisions in your day to day life (i.e don't buy a house in Phoenix). All I'm saying is do what you reasonably can to prepare for reasonably possible outcomes, use what little influence you have to try to push things in a better direction, but don't make these specific lurid death fantasies (which is what they are) more than an occasional indulgence.
Jee, I wonder why people are pushing back when you call them climate change deniers
I care about my friends and family not fucking dying either due heat stroke, starvation, dangerous increases in Co2 concentration or some eco-fascist.
yeah that's what organizing and mutual aid are for, actions which are difficult to take for people wracked by hopelessness and anxiety.
realizing and admitting how completely and utterly fucked we all are
see this is where there's a problem due to (maybe unintentional) semantic waffling. this statement potentially means both "accept and engage with reality no matter how bleak" as well as "reality is hopeless and not worth engaging with". any and every self-described leftist should be on-board with the former and wholly against the latter.
I think we're all doomed and that things won't get better.
you're free to feel that vibe, but it's ultimately an unprovable and thought-terminating statement. and you're gonna get pushback from leftists because it's literally expressing hopeless doomerism, not engaging with the harsh reality. I also think it's a counterproductive vibe when it comes to agitating and organizing, so unless you have a strong mask of revolutionary optimism when engaging in real life it's probably not a helpful mindset for you and those around you either.
i personally doubt that "things are hopeless" messaging helps motivate people, at least in my experience it does the opposite. but i don't think that's your intention which is why i'm trying to tease out two distinct essences/ideas behind the signifier, and maybe help modify the signifier so that it isn't communicating such hopelessness to people. this is where/why semantics can be important: understanding what you intend to communicate as compared to what people interpret. also exploring how indistinct signifiers can make it harder to for a person to conceptualize/communicate reality.
so when you communicate // someone interprets the essence that things are hopeless, that essence implies that there's no reason to engage with reality because we're all doomed anyway. this is different from the essence: "things are not fine, stop grillpilling, shit's fucked and we need to get to work". which is true and imo a requirement to leftist praxis. so that's where i'll push back on your semantics, because enough people are interpreting hopelessness even if it's not your intention.
but the semantic problem also suggests a problem with conceptualization, where the two distinct essences themselves are conflated. this is why i try to draw a distinction between a vibe and a truth in my mind: "things are hopeless" is a vibe. "climate change will make things harder in specific ways" is a truth. the latter can be engaged with and used to modify my praxis. the former doesn't do anything for me or anyone around me. vibes can certainly be motivating or demotivating factors (and should be utilized as tools when interacting with non-radicalized people) but we have to be careful not to let them encroach on truth in our minds.
gotta go to work so don't have a chance to proofread this for coherence lol
Global warming won't be an apocalypse.
...except for all of those people for which it will be literally an apocalypse, as the ocean and the heat and the food shortages start overtaking, killing and scattering their communities.
To save the Earth, capitalists must live with less. Broadly, this also means the rest of the West also has to live with less.
less, but only in trivial ways like "you can't drive 5 miles to get a quadruple cheeseburger anymore".
material consumption is not the sole predictor of happiness though. Among other things, variety of experience is a good predictor of happiness. When you take a depressed mouse and put it in a new environment, it becomes less depressed
A planned economy while making people materially poorer based on ownership, would allow a greater variety of experience, and greater life freedom for the vast majority of people, including 1st worlders. The happiness from not being tied to a job is far greater than any freedom 1st world people have today. It all depends on how it's planned and the competence and enthusiasm of the planners
There are also enough resources on earth to feed double the world population on a 1st world material lifestyle. Between all the rain, desert, human waste, etc., it's just a matter of moving resources to where they need to be, even if it's not profitable in cash terms.
oh I'm not debating that, 99% of people would be against it
I'm just saying that it's physically, materially possible. Also everyone could still have a computer more or less, think about how many electronics are dumped in the trash which could otherwise have been reused for poor people
planned economy would mean no pointless windows updates every 5 years, food gets shipped to where it's needed, desert regreening, people likely would be able to switch jobs every 5 years or something like that (within reason), everyone would be assigned to shovel at least a bit of shit at some point in their lives, etc
of course the age old question is how to preserve the mentality of the leadership that oversees all of it, without later corruption
uhh how do you figure that
world GDP = 100 Trillion
world population = 8 Billioncomes out to $12,500 per person
of course this is irrelevant in a planned world, because what people really need is healthy food, security, and a variety of activities/environments. You could rotate most occupations in such a way that people are maximizing novelty and only working in the same field for 5 years or so (unless they choose to stay longer)
The total amount of assets in the world is estimated to be about 1.540 trillion dollars.
that would make the figure even lower.
Not to mention the fact that if all the money in the world was shared in equal parts between all of us, we'd all be millionaires
if the world's GDP ($100 trillion) was shared in equal parts now, we'd all only get $12,500 each
if we're going by your "global asset worth" of $1.5 trillion, then it would be $187 each. I doubt that figure for asset worth is legitimate though, it would mean that all the earth's assets are worth less than the economy of France? That can't be right lmao
Before you comment something about "just kys then, why are you saying we should do nothing?"
Damn you really feel like that’s the response you’d get on this site of all places?
1,000 Points of
LightNo Return :george-HW-bush-emoji:
I'm sure we're actually past it by now.
I just wish we'd start trying to mitigate how bad it will be, but we're still accelerating fossil fuel usage.
Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now, haven't scientists already concluded that we are past the point of no return? Maybe it's time to seriously consider geo-engineering or something like that (and yes I know it's dystopian, but what else is there?)
We're at the point where we've initiated several feedback loops and we've emitted enough to ensure more are on their way. There is nothing to do about this.
Do you have any sources that support this claim? Going through most of this and the other posts you've made, I see a lot of claims that I find to be dubious solely because there are no sources that I can find that have said some of the things you claim. In bold are specifically what I am inquiring about.
a steamy ocean is still better than a boiling ocean
there may be points of no return, but there's points of no return that are better than other points of no return
Deploy the mirror satellites and sulfur clouds
Drop some big ice cubes into the ocean
File a restraining order against thermal energy
Video game bad guy trying to mercy kill the human race ironically doesnt sound that bad. Meteor 2024
