few things have battered my faith in the US and the west in general like the institutional response to climate science. we have known for decades that a transition is required, but not only that: that the transition would not be some descent into drudgery and discomfort. that it could improve our day to day lives, increase comfort and convenience. we had the resources to make the transition smoothly.
the problem is it would marginally decrease the political power and wealth of the already powerful elite minority, so instead we're going to commit to the path that social murders billions of people and trillions of organisms we share this planet with. it's so banal, lazy, and cruel.
much of my hope for the future comes from the PRC's attempt to build socialism and hopefully drag the remnants of this shitty empire and its vassals into a better world.
The conspiracy-brained part of me thinks there's a sizable number of billionaires in key sectors who know what's going on and want billions to suffer in the belief that they will somehow weather the storm and inherit a depopulated earth.
On the other hand it could just be the bourgeoisie being that out to lunch after conquering the world that they just lost all their instincts for self-preservation. They certainly don't have any progressive role in history anymore.
they will somehow weather the storm and inherit a depopulated earth.
Given all the articles on their various bunker projects and the continued anti-immigrant drumbeat, it seems like that's exactly what they want. Fiends in human shape, all of 'em.
My thoughts exactly. It's just so delusional of them to think that they'll survive. A Roman villa in late 7th century Britain has a better chance at survival.
Yeah stuff like this is what could make me believe in Satanist cabals running the west. It's so obviously blood hungry. What makes it suck is that it's not even some rad shit like that, it's just people like Jeff, Tim and Bill who enjoy being billionaires.
I'm not even talking about those guys who we hear so much, I'm talking about the vast majority of the Bourgeoisie who got their money from older industries and who's names we never hear. This many generations out, they don't need to take any helm or even make an occasional trip to the bridge like the tech guys do. They just have other people manage their money for them. It kinda sounds like the self-perpetuating process folks like Matt talk about when I put it like that. And that's just as scary a thought: Capitalism running on autopilot and destroying the planet for the great great grandchildren of Henry Ford.
Inventing a new therapy method for climate scientists called SRRGT - State and Revolution Reading and Gun Training
Was reading some of those letters submitted to the "Is This How You Feel" project mentioned in the article. A lot of those scientists struggling with this cataclysmic problem have come to the doomer conclusion, far more doomer than any communist/anarchist could come up with, is that people are just stupid, unaware, and/or it's just not in "human nature" to deal with "slow moving" (not so slow moving when a flood or fire destroys your home) problems like climate change. They can't see what's right in front of them - that we live in a class society and the SPECIFIC class that has total control over state power DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK regardless of how the masses feel and they won't until either the masses force them to (or seize state power ofc lol) or we are facing climate catastrophe on an unimaginably destructive level that forces even this privileged and sheltered class to do something about it.
Those letters were written during the early phase of the COVID pandemic and many expressed hope that the state could take the same kind of extreme actions being used to fight the pandemic to fight climate change. I wonder how they feel now
I recently read Kalmus's book, Being the Change. It was published in 2019, evidently before his shift to activism. It's not bad, but it definitely has a
perspective; the latter half of the book focuses mainly on his individual efforts to reduce his own family's carbon footprint through urban homesteading and running a car on vegetable oil. There's a chapter toward the end about efforts to build community, but the organizations he mentions by name appear to have gone defunct (or at least ended their online engagement) during Covid.Anywho, seems like his perspective is shifting. I wonder if we're about to witness the radicalization of a lot of scientists who were still thinking change was possible within existing systems.
The people who make decisions on the scale that could affect climate change are content to change nothing but accellerate automation in all economic sectors and prepare for collapse/accellerate it because they're all malthusian ecofash nutjobs who are convinced they're the only worthwhile souls on the planet, so dash your hopes for anything else, this is basically kill or be killed stuff.
