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Preparing for An Unfriendly Future (Climate Change, Authoritarianism, etc)


Maithanet

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13 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I can’t for the life of me see what caused this to gain such a spectrum of emojis, or such condemnation. Nothing about this is condescending. Sounds fairly reasonable to me.

What a nihilistic bunch we are here.

If there is one thing that winds up certain members of this forum it’s a positive view of the world.

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9 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Given the investment the USA has placed in supporting Ukraine, yes, I have absolutely no doubt it would fight a hot war over Taiwan, if it had to.  It would lose all credibility with its allies in the region if it was not willing to do so.

Support for Ukraine is already on a knife edge. When Trump wins in 2024 (if Ukraine hasn't ceased to exist by then) it will be game over for Zelensky.

And now that China and Russia are bffs, do you seriously expect Mitch McConnell and his traitorous Republicans to stand up to Putin and his friends? Because I don't.

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Support for Ukraine is already on a knife edge. When Trump wins in 2024 (if Ukraine hasn't ceased to exist by then) it will be game over for Zelensky.

And now that China and Russia are bffs, do you seriously expect Mitch McConnell and his traitorous Republicans to stand up to Putin and his friends? Because I don't.

 

 

I'd trust them to fight for their own interests. 

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12 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

If there is one thing that winds up certain members of this forum it’s a positive view of the world.

It used to be conservatives who dreaded the future.

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51 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I can’t for the life of me see what caused this to gain such a spectrum of emojis, or such condemnation. Nothing about this is condescending. Sounds fairly reasonable to me.

What a nihilistic bunch we are here.

For me, it's a little strange to see some of of the same people decrying "cancel culture" as some uniquely harmful new phenomenon and then handwave away the prospect of massive, destructive climate change with "People thought it was bad 20 years ago but we're still here."

The harm that will result from climate change alone is pretty daunting. It's worse and harder to reverse now than 20 years ago and it affects just about every aspect of life you can think of. Seriously, with the amount of data available, I think the "this too shall pass" attitude towards climate change is ill-informed or naive.

People are saying it's unwise to behave like the world is ending, but I think it's pretty unwise to behave like it's not a major problem.

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39 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

For me, it's a little strange to see some of of the same people decrying "cancel culture" as some uniquely harmful new phenomenon and then handwave away the prospect of massive, destructive climate change with "People thought it was bad 20 years ago but we're still here."

The harm that will result from climate change alone is pretty daunting. It's worse and harder to reverse now than 20 years ago and it affects just about every aspect of life you can think of. Seriously, with the amount of data available, I think the "this too shall pass" attitude towards climate change is ill-informed or naive.

People are saying it's unwise to behave like the world is ending, but I think it's pretty unwise to behave like it's not a major problem.

I don’t think anyone here is claiming cancel culture isn’t a completely different, and far less significant problem. And I haven’t seen anyone saying it’ll work itself out and we’ll probably be fine.

But I still believe today is, overall, the best time to live. You’re more likely to live a long, healthy and happy life than ever before. So I think there’s a window between ‘serious problem’ and ‘world ending’. The world isn’t ending, civilisation isn’t going to imminently collapse.

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1 hour ago, SeanF said:

It used to be conservatives who dreaded the future.

They are getting the future they want which includes ignoring the fact that we only have one planet.

Of course the world is nice now for a lot of people because we are using finite ressources, destabilising the biosphere and exterminating other lifeform while keeping an insane number of lifeforms in settings that maximize suffering for profit.

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1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

But I still believe today is, overall, the best time to live. You’re more likely to live a long, healthy and happy life than ever before. So I think there’s a window between ‘serious problem’ and ‘world ending’. The world isn’t ending, civilisation isn’t going to imminently collapse.

Today is an overall best time (from an anthropocentric point of view, of course; from any other point of view it is the single worst time in millions of years, and when considering net suffering, perhaps ever).

But I am quite amazed at the blind faith people have in technology and the conviction that it will help us out of what climate change will bring.

Werthead mentioned the wet bulb temperature, of which, according to the latest research, humans have a lower survival threshold than believed. Humans are not even remotely equipped to deal with this problem.

You thought Covid was bad? With the changing ecosystem and melting permafrost, the chances of viruses and bacteria deadly to humans appearing increases significantly. In a time when antibiotics are losing their effectiveness.

Rising sea levels are a problem because 40% of the world population is within 100km of a coast.

Not to mention the cascade effect when almost every non-domesticated complex life form is brought to extinction.

Do you really think that technology is going to save us when billions of people are displaced? Do you think countries will respond rationally and humanely to this?

Imagine the effects this will have on economies when valuable resources are no longer accessible. As an obscure example, what would happen if we lose access to major sources of neodymium, because mining it in Africa is no longer feasible? The medical industry takes a huge hit.

What will happen when sea food is no longer available? 

I'm just throwing random things out there that have a high probability of occurring in the future. The list of problems humans are going to have to deal with are mind-boggling, and nothing is remotely conducive to a continuation of unprecedented quality of life.

Even more speculative stuff: what if things deteriorate with China and they cut off the West's access to gallium, tanking the semiconductor industry? The list goes on and on.

And keep in mind, as the world gets increasingly desperate, the chances of countries nuking each other become more likely.

It is perfectly reasonable to anticipate catastrophic effects. We had events like WW1 and WW2 in far less dire environmental circumstances. Even now, in our best of times circumstances, we have multiple genocides occurring.

I think the unreasonable thing to do is dismiss the magnitude of peril that we face.

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1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

For me, it's a little strange to see some of of the same people decrying "cancel culture" as some uniquely harmful new phenomenon and then handwave away the prospect of massive, destructive climate change with "People thought it was bad 20 years ago but we're still here."

The harm that will result from climate change alone is pretty daunting. It's worse and harder to reverse now than 20 years ago and it affects just about every aspect of life you can think of. Seriously, with the amount of data available, I think the "this too shall pass" attitude towards climate change is ill-informed or naive.

People are saying it's unwise to behave like the world is ending, but I think it's pretty unwise to behave like it's not a major problem.

I think every generation of humanity likes to think they are special. Every generation of christians believe they are living the last days, every green person thinks we are crossing the point of no return, every person with fixed ideologies believes people of the current generation are the dumbest and most ignorant ones.

Climate change is a very real thing that has an impact in our lives, and that impact will continue to grow. I completely agree that thinking this will pass just as well is the bad attitude, but let's be real here: You can't win elections in second and third world countries with talking about fixing climate change. Vast majority of people from these countries live in poverty or dance on the edge of it. What they care about is fixing their life, not the planet, and the main thing keeping them down there are first world countries and their business counterparts.

If someone is actually interested in the future, they should look into futures studies/futurology. I think the future will come with many restrictions in our freedom to preserve our standards of living. These restrictions will be outrageous to many, but I assume there isn't a way out. I could give examples, but I'm not gonna. It's just a lot of petty things on a large scale. If someone looks into futures studies, they can quickly explore these ideas.

I'm not saying that climate change will just dissapear, but I think we will begin to deal with it once the govts will enforce the necesarry (this sounds authoritarian, I know, but I can see it coming). It's not on me or you to change things (I wish it was), we aren't capable of convincing and enforcing anything on anyone.

It's a burning fire that we ignore unless it just makes us sweat but doesn't burn our feet.

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It’s depressing.

Look qt all the wars in very recent times, mostly over ideology/ego/‘influence’. Ukraine for one.

Other strife, such as the right v left in the US for one.

What will happen when we have to fight over resources?

Fuel, food, clean water. Mass exodus from areas rendered uninhabitable 

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1 minute ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

It’s depressing.

Look qt all the wars in very recent times, mostly over ideology/ego/‘influence’. Ukraine for one.

Other strife, such as the right v left in the US for one.

What will happen when we have to fight over resources?

Fuel, food, clean water. Mass exodus from areas rendered uninhabitable 

Why not both?

Ukraine has a lot of fertile and useful land that might weather climate change relatively well. Water supply to Crimea was also a key objective.

 

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I don't think anyone is at all surprised by the attitudes of the 'I'm-all-right-fuck-the-grandkids' gammons.

Give it twenty or thirty years when we will be literally fighting off invaders trying to seize our tiny little island at the edge of the northern Atlantic because much of Europe will be too hot to sustain human life.

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3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t think anyone here is claiming cancel culture isn’t a completely different, and far less significant problem.

I'm just pointing out what some people here have chosen to spend their time framing as a major problem, while poo-pooing legitimate concerns about a real problem.

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

And I haven’t seen anyone saying it’ll work itself out and we’ll probably be fine.

KoW said "and yet we managed to survive and thrive" every time we faced a major threat. Of course every generation believes the threats they face are the most dire ever confronted (our music is better too). But at some point, some generation will be correct about that. Just by measuring global temperature you can see that we are currently facing problems no one else has had to contend with.

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

But I still believe today is, overall, the best time to live. You’re more likely to live a long, healthy and happy life than ever before.

I think you are comparing standard of living and personal comfort with the health of the planet and our political systems. My standard of living is higher than my parents', but I am not confident it will be so for my son or his potential kids, when water and viable farmland become scarce. I have a smartphone when my parents had rotary phones. Bully for me. Meanwhile my son already has his name, likeness, and personal information captured by corporate databases.

My parents used to tell me about the wonder of the coral reefs in our home province. Forty years ago their favorite pastime was snorkeling through the reefs with my brother, while I chased crabs on the shore under a cousin's supervision. My mother took me to those same reefs thirty years ago, and they were dead, brown, silty. Ten years ago my  brother took me to some reefs farther offshore that he'd enjoyed a few years earlier as an adult. He found that they were dying too.

 

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

So I think there’s a window between ‘serious problem’ and ‘world ending’. The world isn’t ending, civilisation isn’t going to imminently collapse.

Yes, and we're trying to figure out how big the window is. Civilization isn't going to imminently collapse, and no one is claiming it will. The most pessimistic here are talking about shit hitting the fan in ten years -- at least from the perspective of comfortable industrial nations, the people most responsible for the damage to the environment. For people like Syrian refugees, the disaster point came long ago.

Do you think the prospects are good for industrial nations to massively curb their emissions and avert disaster? I am not at all confident, given humans' difficulty balancing short term gain vs long term consequences. Then there's the problem that in our most consumption-driven nations, the most unscrupulous tend to accumulate more power and profit than others, which makes the most culpable nations the least likely to do what's needed. So what's going to stop the slide? Some kind of technological Hail Mary, I guess?

Of course I am not the first person to make these points in this thread, but it seems to need repeating . For every person with a relentlessly gloomy outlook in these boards, there's someone so above it all, sneering about how alarmist they are from the comfort of a rich, northern country.

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3 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

For me, it's a little strange to see some of of the same people decrying "cancel culture" as some uniquely harmful new phenomenon and then handwave away the prospect of massive, destructive climate change with "People thought it was bad 20 years ago but we're still here."

Dante, once again, you are marginalizing and ignoring the whinging cries on behalf of the poor, poor men turning to a life of crime after losing their role models to the feminization of Dr Who, Bond, etc. The all encompassing and corrupting scourge of 'wokeness'. They have their focus where it most comfortable and resistant to climate change -- so far up their own backside that the weather is already a balmy 98.6 on the reg.

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6 minutes ago, Week said:

Dante, once again, you are marginalizing and ignoring the whinging cries on behalf of the poor, poor men turning to a life of crime after losing their role models to the feminization of Dr Who, Bond, etc. The all encompassing and corrupting scourge of 'wokeness'. They have their focus where it most comfortable and resistant to climate change -- so far up their own backside that the weather is already a balmy 98.6 on the reg.

I acknowledge that my denuded reefs are not the end of the world, while the emasculation of James Bond is a pressing problem... For some subset of the population.

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You can choose what topics you wish to talk about or respond to on a forum and that doesn’t really have any bearing on what your opinions are ok other topics. 
 

One person only talks about Star Wars all the time, so what you think Star Trek is shit yeah?!!?  ( actually yes)

I don’t recall any actual climate change deniers on this board, but if there were, I’m sure I’d disagree with them. There are certainly quite a few Cancel Culture deniers though and I disagree with them.. because they are vocal about it. That’s just how it works.

You can also think that climate change is real, and a problem and something we should do something about, but not really ever talk about it, whilst also thinking that people talking about how they should consider retreating to the wilds and taking up a pastoral lifestyle might be taking it all a little to heart and could do with a bit of perspective. 
 

As a general trend we are bombarded with cataclysmic news every day, and are being told that things are much worse than they ever were, when in many ways that is absolutely not true. There are quite a few people here who really react strongly to being told that, i guess because there is something addictive in feeding off these apocalyptic thoughts and sense of outrage and terror. 

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Just now, Heartofice said:

There are certainly quite a few Cancel Culture deniers though and I disagree with them.. because they are vocal about it. That’s just how it works.

Bullshit. Find me a quote of that. As I recall, the closest to denial would be those who said the current "epidemic" of cancellations, which you have certainly expounded upon, is mainly just the old systems of shame and exclusion being turned on elites instead of marginalized people, exacerbated by the Internet.

I also recall the "cancel culture" and "woke" threads were started to identify and complain about those phenomena, because who starts a thread about a thing that does not exist?

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