If you can read and understand Dowd and Pinker, you are certainly not an idiot.
there’s nothing that can be done to change that. i mean the existence of consumerism and its effects. even in a socialist market the same materialism (lifestyle, not the philosophy of) would exist and the desire would need to be met by a competitive market to produce commodities and services. you wouldn’t get something like communist russia where only a few essentials were allowed by the state to be produced. the only noticable difference in the market would be the fact that companies were run and controlled by many people rather than a single owner. so a consumerist culture would still be there, and all the character defects that come with it it would be there too. 'fraid shortsightedness and narrow self-interests is inherent to human nature, and that it will always be fostered by the market - any kind of market - any kind of exchange of commodities and services.
the question should be; how can we organize six billion simpletons so that their shortsightedness and narrow self-interests doesn’t interfere with the shortsightedness and narrow self-interests of the other simpletons. in other words, how do we create a peaceful coexistence between simpletons. well, for one you can eliminate one of the main forces responsible for making them hostile shortsighted and narrow minded self-interested simpletons; economic exploitation at the hands of the capitalist market.
forget about that nonsense of the ‘engineering a new, better man’ utopian myth that surrounds marxism. that was a bit of over-optimistic philanthropy on marx’s part. not all of us can be ‘the better man’. but you can, still, create a society in which simpletons create less problems while there’s still enough freedom and incentive for exceptional individuals to develop and be properly rewarded for their talents.
see formerly elitist philosophers thought simpletons existed to be exploited, so that’s what they did. but in doing so, two disasters resulted. one, the elitists had nothing to show for justifying that exploitation and instead became super-charged simpletons with a shit load of money they did simpleton shit with. second, they created an incredible burden on the already stressed out simpletons and turned them into walking problem-makers.
now we look at society and ask ‘why was it done this way, when we coulda gotten the same results had we dunnit the socialist way and prevented all that extra bullshit from happening’. in other words, we woulda gotten the same net result - simpletons doing simpleton shit with their money - but minus all the unecessary social problems created by the divided classes in violent conflict with one another.
if you have any questions, don’t ax a conservative or a liberal because they’re gonna put a ‘spin’ on the answers. conservative’ll tell you ‘yada yada yada greatness wouldn’t be possible in a socialist society’, while the liberal’ll tell you ‘yada yada yada omg i am not a simpleton! that’s insensitive and politically incorrect!’
the troof is, the conservative is not great and the liberal is a simpleton. ergo; the right and left are simpletons. look i’m trying to be realistic here… even if it means shattering your dreams about man. fact is, there will always be simpletons… and the only thing you can do is arrange a society in which everybody is simple together. no more capitalists parading around like they’re the greatest thing since cheese whiz, and no more liberals bitching and complaining because they can’t afford health care or tuition or a mortgage because the capitalist shitstick they work for is keeping all their money.
you want the troof, ax an anarchist. we have a bird’s eye view on the whole circus and can tell you timeless troofs about it. all this nonsense started all the way back in b.c. same shit then, more complex now. better, more persuasive lies. philosophy and language are to blame for this, btw.
Society is an abstract contributor to the problem of man’s inhumanity to man. Anarchy may reveal the problem but offers no remedy for it. The roots of the problem are to be found in the evolution of genes and social memes. We need to foster memes of empathy and compassion toward each other in order to challenge our genetic heritage.
People tend to be short sighted and have narrow self-interest.
The current consumerist society encourages it.
The question is how to move away from that.
Good to see you are still around. What will it take for us to realize that we are consuming ourselves out of existence?
phyllo:People tend to be short sighted and have narrow self-interest.
The current consumerist society encourages it.
The question is how to move away from that.
Good to see you are still around. What will it take for us to realize that we are consuming ourselves out of existence?
Probably a catastrophe or even a major series of catastrophes that involve large segments of the world’s human population. I mean you would think that the 6th Great Extinction would be enough. But people are consumed with their narrow self-interests. In the year 2020 the best thing Americans can do for the environment is to vote Donald Trump out of office and vote in a president who will reverse his destructive environmental policy and institute a more aggressive policy of international cooperation to curb climate change then has been previously proposed.
Australians are calling for changes as a result of the fires.
Flooding in Canada produced a similar call for changes. Once-in-a-hundred-years floods are happening every 5 years.
Who knows how much traction that will get or how long it will last.
When an economy is good people tend to forget ecological morality. We now have a decent economy in the U.S along with a president who does not believe in the science of global warming. But a price will have to be paid for getting the goods at the expense of Nature. The hubris of having is yet to meet the nemesis of depravation. It is good to see there are some countries realize this and are seeking to address the old Man holds dominion over Nature lie of exploitation.
Ierrellus:Way back in the 1960s Aldous Huxley wrote a utopian novel, Island. In that novel the sense of morality was ecological, a belief in finding human meaning in our inclusion in ecosystems, in our integral part of all life and matter. It is a morality of belonging by being. Is this type of morality the future of religion and science as one thing?
I think one could argue that many animist/indigenous/shamanistic religions had this in the past, and then also this exists in the present. Of course their science however empirical in many ways was not quite modern sciences, except when it was.
Ideas from religions of the past may be enjoying a new presence as many take a good look at the price of our exploitation of Nature and have hopes for a decent future for mankind. Pinker and others have written of tremendous progress in goods and services for people since the enlightenment. Problem is the progress excludes indigenous people.
phyllo:People tend to be short sighted and have narrow self-interest.
The current consumerist society encourages it.
The question is how to move away from that.
Good to see you are still around. What will it take for us to realize that we are consuming ourselves out of existence?
The unavoidable consumption is food and sustenance. And the need for shelter. And all that it takes to deliver and provide it.
Danial Quinn explains this relationship in his Ishmael series, and The Story of B ; the relationship between food and population ; basically, more food produces more population, and more consumers.
So, at bottom, we’re eating ourselves to extinction. Or, when we reach a time when we can’t produce more food, the population will level off – as with all the critters, population is controlled by available food – and consumption will level off.
I think we screwed up by removing ourselves from the food chain.
Speaking of shelter:
America’s biggest homes are getting even bigger.
The average size of homes built last year hit 2,600 square feet, an all-time high that surpassed even the housing bubble years, when homes averaged around 2,400 square feet, according to the Census Bureau.
But there is a clear difference between the days when everyone was building McMansions and what’s happening post-housing crash.
First of all, the rich have gotten richer.
“If you had a lot of money in the stock market, it has doubled since 2009,” said Stephen Melman, director of Economic Services for the National Association of Home Builders.
And many have used those riches to buy even bigger places, he said.
At the same time, relatively few first-time homebuyers – the biggest market for smaller homes – are able to buy homes, said Melman. Many young buyers are having trouble getting mortgages or are heavily in debt with student loans.
As a result, the market for smaller homes, of 1,400 square-feet and less, has shrunk to just 4% of homes built. That compares with 9% in 2005.
Meanwhile, extremely large houses – 4,000 square feet and up – have been making up a much larger slice of the new homes built.
Last year, these mega homes accounted for more than 9% of new homes. In 2005, they represented 6.6% of homes built.
Houses that are a little smaller but still verging on mansion territory, those between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, made up 21.7% of new homes in 2013, up from 15.6% in 2005.
Not only are the homes bigger, they have more rooms as well. There’s the obligatory playroom, the home office, the den and the FROG, or family room over the garage.
And, of course, few children have to bunk up in an older siblings’ room these days. Only 59,000 homes built last year came with less than two bedrooms, compared with more than a quarter million with four bedrooms or more.
“It’s like growth is accelerating,” said Melman.
money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_e … home-size/
New homes in Canada and the US are big and getting bigger. The average size of a newly constructed single-family detached home is now 2,600 square feet in the US and probably 2,200 in Canada. The average size of a new house in the US has doubled since 1960. Though data is sparse for Canada, it appears that the average size of a new house has doubled since the 1970s.
We like our personal space. A lot. Indeed, space per person has been growing even faster than house size. Because as our houses have been growing, our families have been shrinking, and this means that per-capita space has increased dramatically. The graph below, from shrinkthatfootprint.com, shows that, along with Australia, Canadians and Americans enjoy the greatest per-capita floorspace in the world. The average Canadian or American each has double the residential space of the average UK, Spanish, or Italian resident.
Those of us fortunate enough to have houses are living in the biggest houses in the world and the biggest in history. And our houses continue to get bigger. This is bad for the environment, and our finances.
Big houses require more energy and materials to construct. Big houses hold more furniture and stuff—they are integral parts of high-consumption lifestyles. Big houses contribute to lower population densities and, thus, more sprawl and driving. And, all things being equal, big houses require more energy to heat and cool. In Canada and the US we are compounding our errors: making our houses bigger, and making them energy-inefficient. A 2,600 square foot home with leading edge ‘passiv haus’ construction and net-zero energy requirements is one thing, but a house that size that runs its furnace half the year and its air conditioner the other half is something else. And multiply that kind of house times millions and we create a ‘built in’ greenhouse gas emissions problem.
Totally unsustainable.
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True true but without systemic change of the nation states on a global level individual sacrifice will never be enough. So we must do what we can to change the system.
If enough individuals change, then the system will change.
Nations are not going to change until the general population changes.
Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting [at UN]
The US is a hotbed of climate science denial when compared with other countries, with international polling finding a significant number of Americans do not believe human-driven climate change is occurring.
A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.
Only Saudi Arabia (16%) and Indonesia (18%) had a higher proportion of people doubtful of manmade climate change.
Americans were also more likely than any other western country polled to say they did not know whether the climate was changing or people were responsible – a total of 13% said this.
But despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.
Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting [at UN]
What struck me as noteworthy in this article is the mention of a large amount of food wasted while billions go hungry. This shows the extravagance of consumerism and the lack of care for others it generates. I do think wastes of consumerism is more of a problem than is the Malthusian scare about population exceeding the food supply. Some countries, China I believe, are already practicing ZPG.
More is the consumer’s mantra, more things, bigger and better things, etc. Fewer people can opt for more things!
phyllo:[attachment=0]calap.jpg[/attachment]
True true but without systemic change of the nation states on a global level individual sacrifice will never be enough. So we must do what we can to change the system.
I have to admit that I smoke a bowl to dull the impact of hopelessness in the face of this world. Shame shame, I feel for escaping.
With a 97% scientific consensus, that human activity is behind climate change, with little willingness to do much about it from power brokers, that could do something about it, what can I hope to do?
So daily I look out into this world, and cry. And I cry for my contribution to it. I conclude that if I really want to do my part, the best thing I could do is kill myself.
felix dakat: phyllo:[attachment=0]calap.jpg[/attachment]
True true but without systemic change of the nation states on a global level individual sacrifice will never be enough. So we must do what we can to change the system.
I have to admit that I smoke a bowl to dull the impact of hopelessness in the face of this world. Shame shame, I feel for escaping.
With a 97% scientific consensus, that human activity is behind climate change, with little willingness to do much about it from power brokers, that could do something about it, what can I hope to do?
So daily I look out into this world, and cry. And I cry for my contribution to it. I conclude that if I really want to do my part, the best thing I could do is kill myself.
That’s pretty extreme.
Maybe there is some scope for action somewhere between doing nothing and killing yourself.
Maybe there is some scope for action somewhere between doing nothing and killing yourself.
Well I burn wood for heat in the winter. So I’m spewing lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. And if I stopped this adding of CO2, I’d freeze to death, and my contribution would be discontinued.
But thanks for attempting to talk me out of killing myself. I seriously doubt I’m going to become a Popsicle. So climate change here we come. My immediate needs trumps climate change. And it’s the same for the almost 8 billion others in the world.