The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism
Let's make sure we're all on the same page on the definition of capitalism.
It's basically a system in which private owne
Are you kidding me ? Do you really believe that there are no reputable groups saying that the carrying capacity of human civilization will decline ?
Everybody is saying that. But not because of global warming but rather population. With our current population we're in overshoot even if we all lived like farmers in the1700s. It would take longer, maybe a couple of generations more, but the earth will still start killing us off exponentially even if we're optimally green with our current population. Go back to pre-industrial population growth rates and there'd be near 100 billion people by 2100, not that our kids would even make it that far. Another Tragedy of the Commons all do to our desire to have children. And if there's one thing we're wired its that.
What do you know about "global warming" ?
Do you understand the feedback loop between greenhouse gases and warming (that warming causes GHG's to be released from land and ocean reservoirs) and that we've already got enough GHG's in the atmosphere to warm the planet 5C vs pre-industrial baseline ?
Do you understand the consequences for wind and ocean circulation, global rainfall patterns, drought, wildfire, sea level rise ?
Do you understand the consequences on micro-organismal life ?
Do you understand the relationship between human health and micro-organismal health ?
Do you understand the importance of ocean chemistry and how oceanic CO2 absorption is significantly changing ocean pH ? Do you understand how ocean pH and temperature influences ocean ecosystems ?
Do you know that virtually ever coral reef will be dead by 2050 ?
Do you know how much sea level rises on the US East & Gulf Coast if the AMOC stops or slows significantly ?
Do you know that 65% of the world calories come from wheat, corn and rice ? Do you know what happens to those crop yields when we warm the planet by 3C which may occur by 2060 ?
I'm trying to discern the basis for your apparently ignorant statements that no credible groups are warning about a collapse in human carrying capacity ? That collapse in carrying capacity is nature's response to a species which has been reading too may press clippings about how supposedly "intelligent" we are.
"Credible groups" need funding. Funding comes from rich people. In order to survive, the people working for those credible groups tell the rich people what they want to hear. What rich people want to hear is that the status quo is fine and that they are virtuous.
I have a lay understanding of some of that stuff but I'm not a scientist so I'm not going really even think about making a decision by evaluating the evidence on my own. Instead, just as I did with the covid vaccine, I asked my doctor along with others I knew in the medical field if they were getting it, along getting their kids and parents vaccinated. Since they were, getting it was the best decision I could make with the information available to me. Of course I was aware that not all people in the medical field were getting it but so were those I asked. So the lack of universal consensus doesn't really add anything to my calculus.
Same with global warming. I'm totally reliant on the consensus of the people with the expertise to know. And I don't mean the talking heads that show up on cnn. I've read a lot of stuff and the consensus of those that have the expertise to know aren't claiming its an extinction-level event or anywhere near. That not all agree doesn't change anything in that regard for me because I really can't critique what any of them are saying. So if someone with the expertise disagrees with the majority of their peers it's their job/duty to persuade their peers, not mine to get a phd to understand what they're talking about. And as I said none of the major institutions that project population growth felt the need to downgrade the earth's population in 2100 from10 billion to 0, or really declining at all outside of the trend of lower fertility rates:
Same with global warming. I'm totally reliant on the consensus of the people with the expertise to know.
Who are the people with the expertise to know ? Can you name even a single person with expertise who says that we're in good shape for many decades? I suspect not. I suspect that if we peel back the layers on your denial of the timing of consequences, there will be no substance underlying it. For many, dark truth is more than they can handle emotionally.
Those words you write .... "I'm totally reliant" ..... these are the words of someone who blindly places their trust in others.
I have a suggestion .... how about I walk you through a list of the world's most respected climate scientists and provide some of their messaging to the world ?
Let's all ask ourselves a question.
Let's imagine that the people who hold important positions in government knew that we were heading for a global population reduction event. How do you think they would handle it ?
Issue #1 ... these people have to maintain some semblance of societal order. The last thing they want everyone to do is panic about whether they are going to be a survivor or not. So, as a result, they don't tell the masses the truth.
In the case of the current US govt, there is an assault on the truth. The Project 2025 Agenda is going full bore. Scientific research and communication is being gutted.
There would be increasing focus on national borders as a boundary. US citizens don't want to share the country's scarce resources with others. They want that survival advantage.
There would be increasing understanding of the vulnerability of global trade supply and tariffs would be an intelligent stress test and inducement to develop alternative supply chains.
There would be a curtailment of human rights just as we saw with the Japanese internment in the US in 1942. We today have a Supreme Court which is granting the executive branch extraordinary leeway. The US govt is going authoritarian. They ordered national guard and US troops to LA to deal with protesters. They are cracking down on free speech.
The actions of the government tell a story. Those actions are completely inconsistent with a world that is doing just fine.
I have a lay understanding of some of that stuff but I'm not a scientist so I'm not going really even think about making a decision by evaluating the evidence on my own. Instead, just as I did with the covid vaccine, I asked my doctor along with others I knew in the medical field if they were getting it, along getting their kids and parents vaccinated. Since they were, getting
What if , unlike for the vaccine, you can find plenty of extremely skilled people telling you that climate change is a massively overblown fabricated crisis and while warming is happening, it is not true that the severity and intensity of most climate related events is increasing (except heat waves), nor that a 2 celsius increase over the pre industrial average is even vaguely close to be the disaster other people say?
Because that's the reality of the scientifical discourse around global warming. There is absolutely no consensus comparable to that about vaccine efficacy for covid. There is a consensus about the fact that the world is warming because of human actions. After that, a ton of the claims used by nut nut and the many other peddlers of apocalypse aren't consensus claim AT ALL.
Do you realize that? but you can also find "experts" claiming the apocalypse is coming if we don't go to net 0 immediatly.
When you have experts saying things with such a wide range of prediction, only one thing is necessarily true: science doesn't have a ****ing clue and no one can claim science is clear about what "we should do", and everyone who does should be permanently discarded from the conversation
What if you can find plenty of extremely skilled people telling you that climate change is a massively overblown fabricated crisis
You can find plenty of extremely skilled people to tell you that climate change is a massively overblown problem.
But the things they would be extremely skilled in is lying and grift.
Lying and grift are ancient skills and predate humanity. Rhesus monkeys deceive each other as well. People will do anything for a buck.
Listen to the scientists, unless they disagree with nut nut because then they are liars and grifters, this is science!
Those words you write .... "I'm totally reliant" ..... these are the words of someone who blindly places their trust in others.
That's what 'believers' do--they rely on or believe in the testimony of others for their opinion because they don't have direct access to the facts or knowhow to interpret them. In other words, we believe people, not facts. It's like with religion, people 'believe' in the 'testament' of others because they believe the person making the truth claim. And if you're not an expert, you're a believer too. On the other hand if you do consider yourself an expert in the field, then you're claiming to have direct knowledge, which makes you like a knower rather than a believer. Same goes with your opponents. And my sort of heuristic when confronted by either pole is to push back and wait to see how long it takes until they start appealing to a global conspiracy or whatever rather than attacking the substance of my push-back to defend their position.
That along with the near term ecological consequences and being able to mitigate what we did is about as far as only belief takes me. From there things get blurry. But I can rely on my abilities to work my through the statistics, ranging and modeling and start forming my own opinion. The main one being the equation: earth's resources / population.
People don't need to believe in global warming to realize that bad things are going to happen to future generations if we don't voluntarily reduce fertility rates. I think you et al know enough about the issue. Same with the other side, they know that's the primary factor in the equation. So why aren't you and NutNut finding a common ground there to at least try to form a consensus get that message out? I have a heuristic to deal that one too.
Nut Nut lives in the ruthless, dog-eat-dog reality which is hostile to life, and he’s trying to lead people into this reality.
The motivation for this is understandable. In order to properly adapt to reality, you must be honest about it.
The thing he is missing, because he denies moral reality, is that his version of reality is hell to anyone with even a small amount of faith (even many hardcore secularists). Most people rightfully don’t want to make their home in hell.
He then thinks, “Well, eventually they will have no other choice but to accept his version of reality. Then, they will be forced to accept the adaptations I’m prophesying.”
Nut Nut - You are wrong about this. Most people would rightfully resist until death rather than distort themselves (by denying morality completely) so they can try to make a home in hell.
Luciom is a slightly different case. He has also accepted the same reality of hell as ultimate reality, but instead of denying morality completely, he seems to instead call (morally) good his preferred hell adaptations.
Regardless, for both of you, your visions of what society looks like in the future depend on convincing the masses to follow you into hell. Which is not going to happen, even if the pendulum is moving in that direction currently.
That along with the near term ecological consequences and being able to mitigate what we did is about as far as only belief takes me. From there things get blurry. But I can rely on my abilities to work my through the statistics, ranging and modeling and start forming my own opinion. The main one being the equation: earth's resources / population. People don't need to believe i
There is no possibility of compromising with the hostility of reality (death). This idea that we will find a Goldilocks zone of sustainability is surrendering to defeat.
Growth is the only way forward. Life no longer is going to fall for the illusion of bargaining with death.
Anyone who refuses this under the guise of being realistic and practical will find themselves cut off from life. Blind faith is no longer going to be optional in the future for anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind.
That along with the near term ecological consequences and being able to mitigate what we did is about as far as only belief takes me. From there things get blurry. But I can rely on my abilities to work my through the statistics, ranging and modeling and start forming my own opinion. The main one being the equation: earth's resources / population. People don't need to believe i
The earth is not a closed system and even the current earth resources are near infinite compared to our current ability to exploit them. Prediction for even a few generations time based on that sort of calculas are hopeless. And the population will not be restricted to earth.
The earth is not a closed system and even the current earth resources are near infinite compared to our current ability to exploit them. .
It's true that Earth is not a completely closed system.
But it's a lot more closed today than it was a hundred years ago.
That greenhouse gas layer is a one way wall between Earth and outer space. It doesn't stop sunlight from getting in. It stops heat from getting out.
You think we have an infinite amount of water ? An infinite amount of topsoil ? An infinite amount of pollinators ? An infinite amount of weather pattern necessary to grow the high calorie crops which are the foundation of modern human civilization. Crops which at the moment can not be grown indoors in sufficient quantity ?
It's not remotely a closed system and heading in the direction of being far more open
You think we have an infinite amount of water ? An infinite amount of topsoil ? An infinite amount of pollinators ? An infinite amount of weather pattern necessary to grow the high calorie crops which are the foundation of modern human civilization. Crops which at the moment can not be grown indoors in sufficient quantity ?
at the moment is key. the recourses available to us in the future are not limited by what is currently available
No one who understands how greenhouse gases trap outgoing heat inside the Earth's atmosphere and oceans would say that we are heading in the direction of openness.
A more open system would allow heat to leave more freely, not less. Shutting a door is not an attribute of openness.
Luciom is a slightly different case. He has also accepted the same reality of hell as ultimate reality, but instead of denying morality completely, he seems to instead call (morally) good his preferred hell adaptations.
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I am actually a techno-optimist which has great faith in top human beings being able to carry on toward eternity.
I just deny most of the other freeriding passengers ever had any inherent value, and I truly deeply don't give a **** about them.
they all disappear in the dustbin of history completely memory holed anyway.
the whole fate of humanity has always been determined by a very small percentage of us and that will continue to be the case. how to manage the herd of NPCs will keep being a question the real ubermensch will discuss with deep disagreement for a while.
doesn't matter much at the end.
we have threats ongoing (mostly, as usual, coming from the worst parts of those NPCs nature aka collectivist pulsions) but we will overcome.
even after what looked like a complete win from the left recently we were able to come back in force toward greatness, and that will happen again and again
I am actually a techno-optimist which has great faith in top human beings being able to carry on toward eternity.
I have more faith in alligators than humans. Alligators have been around over 100 million years. They are amphibians who can survive both above and below the surface of the water. They survived through the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum 65 million years ago that wiped out almost all megafauna (animals > 50 kg) beside themselves and sea turtles. Our mammalian ancestors that made it through that filter weighed an ounce or two.
Techno-optimism is a disease of ignorance. Nature is simply a higher resolution phenomena than humans can synthesize with technology.
What is moral reality ?
Pretend that people like me have a blind spot.
As a scientist .... i would ask a question. Where is the evidence of morality ? How do you know that this phenomena you speak of actually exists ?
For me .... morality is like Santa Claus. A fictional character who we are brainwashed as children to believe is real. People have been to the North Pole and there was no Santa Claus there to be found.
What is moral reality ? Pretend that people like me have a blind spot. As a scientist .... i would ask a question. Where is the evidence of morality ? How do you know that this phenomena you speak of actually exists ? For me .... morality is like Santa Claus. A fictional character who we are brainwashed as children to believe is real. People have been to the North Pole and ther
You are a human being before you are a scientist.
If you are in a situation where, upon deep analysis, telling the truth comes at a social cost to you with no clear benefit, then you will always lie as long as you’re not in danger of being found out later?
In your reality, wouldn’t you be a sucker to ever tell the truth in those circumstances?
Then, do you claim to be a perpetual liar?
Can you act in ways that are more aligned or less aligned with reality?
If so, is it better to act more aligned with reality?
You are a human being before you are a scientist. If you are in a situation where, upon deep analysis, telling the truth comes at a social cost to you with no clear benefit, then you will always lie as long as you’re not in danger of being found out later?In your reality, wouldn’t you be a sucker to ever tell the truth in those circumstances? Then, do you claim to be a perpetua
From my perspective, survival is the only thing that matters.
If people have a choice between:
a) Lying and surviving
b) Getting killed as a result of your honesty
Most people will choose option a. And I can't blame them for that.
The Ten Commandments says "thou shalt not lie.:. Nature tells us "thou shalt not die"
The earth is not a closed system and even the current earth resources are near infinite compared to our current ability to exploit them. Prediction for even a few generations time based on that sort of calculas are hopeless. And the population will not be restricted to earth.
If I have to make a decision on it today all I have is all I have. And where I'm at is incentivize double bottom line with electricity replacing fossil fuels. I don't think things would be much different -except for the lack of gas stations and coal plants - had we gone with electricity instead fossil fuels back in the day. So given what I know now, if I could change that course I would have. So that's my target.
