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and just like in biology, you need a system to fight the cancer, you can't just wish it away.
since we've refused to maintain such an immune system, we're now going to have to go through a miserable period of chemo treatment to rid ourselves of the tumors.
Sorry. We're stage 4. It's terminal.
I thought the chemo treatment was WW1.
Are we really gonna pretend killing a bunch of people is better than doing business with them?
WW1? I;m curious as to why your mind went there? I assumed they were referring to WW2, and having to fight against fascism AGAIN. Fascism is the malignant tumor.
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power, which will utilize that power to accumulate even more in any conceivable way. The system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced if we care at all for basic human rights and a future for this species.
What is your proposed alternative? I struggle to think of any system that doesn’t inevitably result in concentrations of power
Social Democracy. Commerce is key to strong economies, not capitalistic wealth hoarding.
Is there a country that you'd consider a good example of this?
Spot on analogy.
But if you measure growth in made up numbers, you can just keep rolling them up indefinitely.
Time for degrowth
I'm all for an individual decreasing their own consumption for the environment. I try to do that. But decreasing someone else's quality of life is where it gets dicy. You can very easily get discrimination.
decreasing someone else’s quality of life
Who said anything about decreasing quality of life?
Decreasing someones consumption will likely decrease their quality of life. Assuming they wanted to maximize their quality of life, they would consume what would do that. Though there are exceptions, like limiting addiction or short range fights.
Lemme give you a very small concrete example where reduced consumption will not alter the quality of life.
Take a small neighbourhood, maybe 10ish families there. Everybody in that neighbourhood has basic tools that they use maybe once a month or less. Hammers, screwdrivers, spanners, etc. Instead of each family having those tools, have a tool library where you have 2-3 of each tool. Anyone in the neighbourhood can borrow the tools they need when they need them and give them back when done. Congratulations, you've reduced tool consumption by 70-80% with no downsides.
This is just one small example, but there are methods for more efficiently allocating resources within communities.
You decrease quality of life by increasing travel time and resistance to getting the tools, plus rarely not being able to use a tool because it's in use. But it is an efficiency improvement. Same idea with gymns, everyone can share one place instead of duplicating resources. But then you need to make sure everything gets put away and you need to keep the lights on, so you need to charge for it. All that works under normal markets. It's just not as good as ideal because people take advantage of each other. We need more oversight to minimize that, but I don't think it means throwing out the system.
I don't think walking 1 minute to a library inside your immediate vicinity qualifies as a reduction in QoL. Fair point on the potential very unlikely case of 5 people all needing a screwdriver at the same time, but that can be solved by buying 1-2 extra screwdrivers.
I went to this example specifically because I thought it was not controversial and low-hanging fruit. Nobody is talking about throwing out the system. Book libraries exist, and they haven't caused the downfall of modern civilization. All I'm trying to say here is that even in the context of our modern capitalist reality, there are ways of reducing consumption without any aggreived parties that we're just not doing.
degrowth doesn't mean worse quality of life, in many instances it very much increases quality of life.
would you not prefer to work half as much as you do? we can have that with degrowth.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding degrowth. Is it trying to decrease GDP? How does it do that? Or is it moreso increased worker rights and protections with decreased GDP growth as a byproduct? Because I'm all for the second version.
IMO Degrowth would have to start with finding better, less destructive metrics than GDP to measure and plan economic prosperity with
Put a high upper limit only. Don't touch the bottomline.
For example, no more than 4 cars per person: Average Joe won't even know this rule exists but it will still reduce mineral mining due to people who collect cars.
Possible problems with my shitty example: Now a car is a controlled substance. Who decides the limit and how? What if there is a mental disease (with a better example this would make more sense) which requires a person to have 20 cars?
I believe that's called Clarkson's Disease and mostly affects lovable assholes.
I think a better solution is to give everyone less reasons to need and use cars, that a ban becomes unnecessary. But if we're putting limits on things to reduce their consumption, that's what excise taxes are for, most places already do it for fuel.
And of course there could always be taxation relative to a person or company's environmental impact. People get angry at this one.
Buh degrowth is genocide 😅🤣
Literally what some ignoramus on Facebook said when I suggested this.
Objectively if we were to scale back enough, many people currently struggling would die. Excess is the only reason they're still living. Think the rainforest and rain passing the canopy trees enough to still allow life below. Remove the mass amount of rain, that ecosystem suffers.
This is just trickle down economics. It doesn't work.
It's working great for those in power.
Easy to say when you live in the first world.
Not that I'm capitalism's greatest fan, but this sounds about as clever as, "evolution is impossible because the second law of thermodynamics says chaos always increases, and the sun doesn't exist."
Evolution and the stars reside in a local entropy minimum but they speed up the increase of entropy by converting a lot of energy. So low entropy and the global increase aren't contradicting each other. But yes, I agree equating cancer and capitalism isn't very useful. Especially when the main problem with capitalism is distribution and not scarcity.
I had an argument with someone about the nature of motivation within a capitalist system. Specifically related to people who find their motivations in non-monetary ends such as personal pride, the greater good, morality, etc. He said that those people were rubes, but I countered that surely those people were suckers. We still haven't resolved...
You are trying to resolve whether to call them rubes or suckers?
Where did this meme of "capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it's impossible and bad" come from? Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
in biology normal cells are controlled by nucleus and it's hereditory... so it is nepotism and zero rights for others so it's also bad thing like communism
This is a popular take that is just completely wrong. Capitalism as a system does not require growth. Capitalism is a system in which the factors of production are owned by private parties and can be freely traded. The capitalists believe is that markets will allocate those factors of production to the owners that can best exploit them. This can result in growth, but it isn’t necessary for the system to function.
There are literally a thousand issues with the system ranging from inequality to environmental concerns to market concentration (all of which capitalists tend to ignore). I really do not understand why people pick this one to quibble over.
Capitalism isn't killing our planet. Shits like Putin, Winnie Pooh, Kim Jong Un and Erdogan are.
China has met and exceeded every climate goal they have set. However, Putin is just as responsible for killing the planet as the USA, and for the record Russia is a Capitalist economy. Lol, lmao even
Ewwwww, ccp shill.
Wow, such a… deep comparison