It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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https://nitter.lucabased.xyz/ContraPoints/status/1808529692405662047#m
Any fucking questions
There's a concept in the philosophy of climate change called "intervention responsibility." Basically, it just involves the recognition that "x is responsible for y" is only intelligible if x has the power to intervene in a way that prevents or changes y. The upshot of this is that different kinds of agents have different responsibilities with respect to big, complicated problems in light of the power (institutional and otherwise) that they have: I have a certain set of things that I can intervene on as a relatively wealthy white guy in the Imperial Core, giving me a different set of responsibilities than a subsistence farmer in the global South. Neither of us has anything close to the kind of intervention responsibility that, say, the US President or the Chevron Corporation has though, because those sorts of agents have access to causal levers that neither I nor the subsistence farmer could possibly get near, let alone pull.
Asking "what has the disempowered, disenfranchised left done that's more effective than the wealthiest empire in the history of the world" is a category error on par with asking what the color blue has done to make itself larger than the color orange. It's nonsensical, because you're comparing totally different kinds of things with access to totally different sorts of influence, and thus totally different responsibilities.
Americans buy big dirty trucks and oppose public transportation. They defend the existence of the multinational corporations that depredate their environment and poison the air and water. They eat the meat of tortured animals. They absolutely don’t give a flying fuck about the future of their children, let alone humanity. And you want to tell me they’re not responsible? Give me a break. Old people are many things — poisoned by lead, delusional, ignorant — but innocent is not among them. Everyone who voted for Trump or Bush, everyone who failed to make the modicum of effort required to support people like Bernie, they’re all to blame.
Never let anyone tell you that Americans didn’t choose this outcome. They did. It was presented to them, they were told the consequences and they chose it. And unless you’re a vegan who votes in every election and doesn’t own a car, you’re probably not so innocent either. My pity is reserved for the children and animals who will inherit this poisoned world — the only creatures who are genuinely blameless.
trucks and meat are especially interesting, as its not by "natural inborn consumer preference" (a story you seem to share) they were chosen, just as poisoned water is not chosen.
i rather suspect if epa fined dupont/exxon to bankruptcy over their shit, they would get much more popular. small republicans popularly rebel against regulations not only because they annoy them, but they also perceive deep unfairness that giant corporation can poison half the earth and government will just eat shit over it, while their business become closed over something minor like improper engine oil runoff. And i'm not advocating exclusion of small business owners from it, rather large corporation death penalty over their shenanigans.
Its a confused mess (as projected onto political parties) because messaging by large corporations intentionally obfuscates and emphasizes different stories to different groups. Republicans were mega angry about bank bailouts, for example, until kochs hijacked the tea party, the anger was there to make them democrat voters, while democrats at the time were whimpering about the sacred markets
p.s. if you collapse into wild misanthropy, how can you be a communist/anarchist?
The EPA can’t fine anyone precisely because Americans overwhelmingly support ecological depredation and overconsumption. Read the political data! Almost nobody wants the EPA to “fine Exxon into bankruptcy.” A lukewarm slap on the wrist is barely justifiable to most Americans, who demand cheap gas, are falling over themselves to sacrifice the future of their children for cheap gas. It’s a political demand yodeled from the mountaintops.
And you want, what, the EPA — the EPA that belongs to these animals — to fine the large corporations that also belong to these same animals?
That makes absolutely zero sense.
Again, the government serves those who give it power. For years this has been the voters of this country, and they have made their wishes loud and clear, repeatedly.
The demand for cheap gas is learned behavior, cause cheap gas leads to more disposable income. Do americans get mad at aluminum/wood prices oscillations? The car/homes still get more expensive with those, but you won’t lose election on it.
Corporation construct reality where car is a means of survival, induce demand for gas and now people are bad for caring about this? Canadians or germans don’t get half as mad at gas prices as americans, do you guess why?
The voters don’t make anything clear because they don’t vote on policy, they vote on a theater actor tone of voice when reading teleprompter. aside from 30 percent strongly party affiliated electorate, americans don’t give a shit (or see it they all the same cynicism).
Again, say you describe pfas shenanigans to 10000 average americans, you honestly think 50 percent will say: that’s okay, dupont gives jobs?
Inversely, say I want to execute oil executives, who do I vote for that my preference is seen via voting tallies?
you decide to backproject politicians decisions (as signed off by the corporations) on the voters preferences? To get mega cynical about voters?
Corporations are evil, of course. And no one is debating that evil entities seek to lie and cheat their way into power. But falling for self-serving lies makes you culpable.
Are Israeli soldiers not guilty because they follow orders and believe propaganda? You think that’s an excuse?
That is not an excuse. Pollution is bad. Electing narcissists is bad. Denying science is bad. You could argue human nature is fundamentally twisted and selfish, but that would still make those who endorse cruel and stupid ideologies blameworthy.
There is self-indulgent bathing in propaganda of course. but israel soldier whose choice is sit in jail or become a murderer and amerikan chosing between "i can afford rent here, therefore i need a car (because there is no public transport) therefore gas prices are important to me" or dont have a job and become homeless/sick to death aren't exactly comparable. One is trading humanity for comfort, the other one pollution for much more obvious survival. People play hands they are dealt, not ones they could have been dealt (insert
here).
there is difference as well between endorsing and passively accepting, if we don't make it - germany should have been purified in nuclear fire 80 years ago. I mean the position of everyone should be exactly right on all issues is unproductive, and might lead you to passive contempt from which there is no escape
They don’t control the media either. They are brainwashed, disenfranchised, and overworked. The establishment has decades of experience manufacturing consent, and when that doesn’t work, they ignore the people outright. 70% of Americans want public healthcare and it’s not even in the realm of political possibility.
Correct. For all practical purposes, most human beings are just animals — scared, stupid, and impulsive. You live in their world. They outnumber you 10 to 1. So vote in their elections, or don’t. But don't call them disenfranchised. There’s nothing disenfranchised about those shitbags driving $70k pickup trucks eating meat at every meal. At best they’re complicit, at worst little more than zombies.
As for the survey you just cited, try this. Put out a poll asking:
“Do you want to save the rainforest?” My guess is 90% will answer yes. Now ask:
“Would you be willing to stop eating cows to save the rainforest?” 2% might answer yes.
That’s why people elect politicians who act against their best interests: because their best interests and their ugliest desires often misalign.
You have a few days to read his before I get embarrassed about writing a wall of text.
Most of us think and act as our circumstances demand. We believe what those around us believe, because we lack the energy, time, resources, and education to build a worldview from the ground up. Even here on hexbear, we absorb consensus views from our peers rather than each of us individually verifying every detail. We trust the collective intelligence, media literacy, skepticism, and good will of our community, and we trust our process of consensus.
The way propaganda works is by hijacking the consensus. Capitalists control the major mouthpieces of our society - the media and the politicians, and increasingly, the social media. They run astroturf campaigns. They launder false stories through legitimate media outlets. They tell you Saddam has WMDs and Gaddafi is conducting a genocide, and they drum it up into a consensus. Soon all your friends, family, and coworkers believe it too. When they're not lying, or lying by omission, they propagandize by emphasis, by choice of words, by slant. They shape what is permissible to think and say. Propaganda works, and it works on everyone, including you and I. Cultural attitudes about gas-guzzling vehicles were largely manufactured by the oil industry and its media cronies. Those attitudes did not arise organically. Propaganda experts hijacked the consensus and changed the culture.
As individual consumers, we can only do so much. We can't vote with our wallets to change the power grid, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, or commercial supply lines. There are some individual choices we can make, but they would need to be coordinated on a mass scale, and even then the impact would be limited. Sooner or later, change must come from government, and as the 2014 statistical analysis I cited showed, we do not control our government. The public has "little or no independent influence" on public policy. Whenever we disagree with capitalists on an issue, we lose. Sometimes capitalists use their stranglehold on the media to gin up public consensus, other times, as with healthcare in the US, they don't even bother, because they don't have to. Policy is written by money and power and leverage, not by votes. It doesn't even align that well with public sentiment.
The other issue is coordination. Putting the onus of change on the individual is like expecting wildebeests to cross the river one at a time. Individuals don't make change, coordinated movements make change. The issue there is that capitalist states are experts at crushing or co-opting movements. Huge volumes of propaganda, astroturfing, even jailing or assassinating movement leaders, like the six BLM leaders who died in Ferguson under suspicious circumstances in the years after the George Floyd protests. The situation is infinitely worse outside the imperial core, where entire governments can be toppled, nations invaded, and populations starved by sanctions. Capitalists have violently killed millions of people who tried to bring about collective change, including worker's rights, rights for women and minorities, education, healthcare, and environmentalism.
Even modest gains, like the 8 hour work week, and the ostensible right to unionize, have required significant struggle and risk, and since then decades of Cold War propaganda have eroded the class consciousness and solidarity that made that organizing possible.
If you controlled the media and the government the way capitalists do now, I bet in ten years you could persuade the public to reduce red meat consumption at least by half.
Maybe not you, literally, but say a democratic socialist government. Do things for people, meaningfully improve their lives, and they'll start to listen.
Americans choose big trucks because they live in a society that incentives it. They oppose public transport because it is perceived as a hindrance. They do not do these things because they're evil, but because of the way society has been structured and the way their society describes different modes of transport.
Read Making Mobilities Matter or something else about Theory of practice
So to be clear, if I gave Trump supporters a tax incentive and some education, they’d abandon their gas guzzlers and stop eating meat? Are you actually hearing yourself?
The social “structure” you’re describing is literally the manifestation of their will. Yes, it’s a self-perpetuating system, but it’s their system shaped by what they want.
You tell me they’re not evil, and then point to a system responsible for making them evil. Unbelievable.
No, I've simplified a relatively complex piece of urban planning theory so as to make it easy to communicate in a short response. There is a reason I told you to read further, are you hearing yourself trying to come up with a halfbrained unfounded retort to a response that encouraged further education?
Again with this essentialism! The social structure is the society which they live in. It is in part shaped by will, but the will is equally shaped by society. To simplify: what we do is determined by three fields - Means, motive and material. Each field influences the other. We drive the car because it is perceived as the most "effective" vehicle (and because we perceive it as being "a vehicle that gives personal freedom" and other values we equate with "good transport". For a lot of people it is the most effective, because there is no good public transport or other infrastructure, and because it is much easier to drive a car than to rely on public transport (materials and means). This in turn influences public policy, which then ends up reinforcing this.
This is why people drive cars, not because their "will" is evil or some dumb shit. If you're going to insult me, do the required reading first.
Did you think you were cooking here? "You tell me they're not evil, and then point to an evil system" yeah buddy. The system is evil, we're all parts of the system and you won't change it by shaming individuals. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Once again: I encouraged you to read up on urban planning theory, since this is the field within which the issue exists. I gave you a specific text as well and a short simplification of what it detailed. You decided to reply with an uneducated vitriolic vibes-based attempt at a response. Be better, educate yourself.
Yes it is. If we're gonna continue this you're going to have to move away from this vibes based approach you're attempting.
Normally when people attempt to move they goalposts, they stay on the same field.
We're discussing why people choose the means of transport they choose. Within this subject urban planning is paramount. People choose vehicles because of systemic reasons, not because of some nazi-like idea of "the triumph of the will" or weird national essentialism about the American brainpan.
This is really shitty debatebroism of you. You're not engaging with the arguments, you're not engaging with the science and you're trying to make me out to be someone who defends all sorts of weird shit. Also put a spoilertag on your mentions of SA, you piece of shit.
I'm not saying Americans are innocent. The point of intervention responsibility is to pry apart responsibility in the moral or casual sense and responsibility in the ability-to-effect-meaningful-change sense. The idea that climate change is happening because ordinary people won't give up their SUVs and stop eating beef is wrong and deliberate misinformation on the part of companies and governments who want you to think that you bear individual accountability for the problem. That's insane. The overwhelming majority of damage is being done by the wealthiest 1,000 people in the world, the 100 largest companies, and the US Military. Those people (and those institutions) bear the intervention responsibility here, because they're in a position in which changes to their behavior will meaningfully affect the global environment. Becoming a vegan or never flying as a consumer are morally good, but they're not meaningful interventions in the grand scheme of things, even if the overwhelming majority of ordinary people pursue them.
Consider the inverse case: white supremacy and systemic racism. Virtually none of us bear moral responsibility for this: we never owned slaves, didn't design a racist oligarchy of a government, and so on. That doesn't mean we don't have intervention responsibility to fix it, though, because we can enact meaningful resistance to white supremacy in our day-to-day lives by being anti-racist in our actual deeds, fighting for the dignity and rights of marginalized people, and generally enacting resistance.
Exxon, Alphabet, Tyson are all guilty of pollution, but they only exist — indeed, they can only exist — because people pay them to do so. Americans elect the politicians who shield Exxon from consequences, they endorse the policies that enable the ownership of private jets, of mansions, of sports cars, of cruise ships.
Exxon is literally the manifestation of their desires. If people weren’t willing to die over access to cheap fossil fuels we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
You think Americans care that Tyson tortures chickens? Have you met average Americans?? They do not give a fuck! They love cheap, unregulated, dirty meat. They love cheap gas. They love big cars, big houses, cruise ships, and they will die to stop you from taking these things from them.
It’s funny because folks keep saying this over and over: they say it at the polls, in voting booths, at primaries, and you don’t listen. There’s this fantasy that if only we could educate the 50% of Americans who are irremediable shitheads, they’d change their minds. No. They won’t. Only generational turnover can fix this issue. We wait for them to die out until we can outnumber them at voting booths. There’s no other practical option. Unless you have another pandemic up your sleeve?
Generational politics doesn't work, you just end up with Buttigieg with a Boomer Brain implant, and if you're hoping for it just being the old to die I have bad news for you about the current pandemic
Purity Politics? What a poisoned world view.
It is nonsensical. Not to mention delusional. She is chastising people who won't vote for biden and will blame tankies for a loss. Which is bizarre cause not even Democrats are sure to let him run. If they lose it is their making. But nah its the people refusing to vote.
Not to mention these people don't care for climate change or anything. They just wanna handwave it away. At best they will say "Third world does too much pollution, not our problem, sucks to suck"