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people think of being a climate change denier as binary but the challenge right now is much more one of getting people to grasp the scale than the notion.
the "tide turning" is wonderful but we have very specific deliverables and deadlines to hit. lots of people love to give optimistic status updates at meetings for projects that are not going to hit their deadlines. the catch is, this time, "dead"line is not a metaphor.
This is a fucking nightmare scenario and people are making jokes about "farming in the Yukon and Siberia" as if that's a good thing.
Thank you.
Just as famines and what not are popularly characterized as "crimes of communism" (certainly true to some degree, using simplistic thinking), I believe an unbiased entity could make a similar argument that the current climate issues are in a sense (can be at least partially attributable to) what we loosely (conversationally, simplistically, ideologically) refer to as capitalism, or more specifically Western Democratic Capitalist Systems.
Western democracies, for the most part, seem to have enable a long (long enough) period of relatively peaceful (peaceful enough) cooperation between individuals and nations, and within that climate Capitalism unleashed the ingenuity and hard work of scientists, industrialists, and the common man to produce the amazingly advanced societies that most of us are fortunate enough to live in today.
But both Democracy and Capitalism are double edged swords. Capitalism enables tremendous technological innovation and progress, but it is largely amoral - it deals only with whether something can be done, with no concern for whether it should be done. Democracy (the flavor currently practiced in most of the world) seems to strike sort of a pragmatically useful middle ground between individual and collective rights and responsibilities, under certain sets of circumstances at least - but is it safe to assume that it can do so under all sets of circumstances, particularly considering the infinitely complex and inconsistent societies we live in, composed of millions of individuals each of who have all sorts of known and unknown quirky beliefs and behaviors, all interacting in a recursively unstable system we have little understanding of? Recent history seems to be increasingly hinting to us that perhaps this assumption (overwhelmingly undisputed, based on my reading of sentiment anyways) may not be be technically correct.
Under current conditions (the way the world is, rather than the way the world should be), I continue to overwhelmingly believe that we are trying to solve this and other problems in impractical ways, based on simplistic, ideological, and willfully ignorant thinking thinking, and I would argue that observable evidence is supportive of (but does not prove, obviously) this theory. It's completely possible I am suffering from some sort of delusional mental illness, but it seems absolutely clear as day to me.
But how one might communicate this idea, let alone get some momentum behind it if it just so happens to have some truth to it, is completely beyond my abilities. I have poor communication skills, plus I too suffer to an extremely large degree from the undesirable behaviors I allude to above, resulting in people not liking me, and therefore my ideas, so it seems.
Can something be done about it? I think so, but it has to start somewhere.
Perhaps we could all learn something from the kids in Hong Kong.
After thinking about it and actively investigating for about 30 years, I've come to much the same conclusion, I think: to wit, most people secretly enjoy their problems and suffering. I remember remarking to friends back in high school, in re: "going steady", that it seems like people are less interested in healthy relationships than in finding the kind of pain they favor.
IMO, We have all the answers.
1.) Early on I found my dad's Neurolinguistic Programming books in a box. Now (the other) NLP gets a lot of mostly-deserved flak for being pseudoscientific, but I understood it then pretty well (it grew out of the same Chomsky Transformational Grammar that informs programming language design, eh) and I can vouch for it's rigour and effectiveness. In a nutshell these folks have discovered the "operating system" of the mind.
The problem there is that first, most people still haven't heard about it, second, many who have dismiss it, and third, many of the people who practice and utilize it are working on marginal improvements (money, sex, etc.) rather than becoming better people.
(The old Illuminati slogan "Our method is science, our aim is religion." seems to me to resonate here. We have discovered the science, whither shall we aim?)
2.) I'm also a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He's an engineer who had a kind of spiritual epiphany one day on the banks of one of the Great Lakes and became a kind of secular techno-scientific messiah. He calculated that, by sometime in the 1970's, our technology would be advanced enough to provide for everyone on Earth "without disadvantaging anyone". During his life he traveled around the world ~85 times (IIRC) and was perhaps the most famous American outside of the USA for a time.
3.) Now that's before you factor in applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) Bill Mollison's "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is one of the finest manuals of design ever written, with ramifications way beyond farming and food production. (And with D. Blume's "Alcohol can be a Gas" there's even a model of integrated ecologically harmonious carbon-neutral fuel production. (Bonus: the emissions aren't poisonous.) Geoff Lawton is being pretty literal when he says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."
1.) NLP, 2.) Bucky Fuller Design Science Revolution, and 3.) Applied Ecology taken together seem to me to be the obvious, fun, and easy way to Save the World! I'm not sure, what, if anything, to do about it though...
You're right, but while what's going on in threads like this one and others like it shares many similarities with that, I think it plays a minor role. My estimate of what "it" is, is simply: the human ego - the result of millions of years of crude evolution, forced to live in a world for which it has not yet developed appropriate behaviors, likely in no small part to the fact that our technical and humanitarian capabilities have largely brought evolution, biological at least, to a standstill. Our scientists and industrialists have transported us into the future on a physical level, but from an intellectual and spiritual perspective, we are still cavemen.
I agree with all your other ideas, and could add many of my own.
It's rare to encounter anyone who can see outside this bubble, but also possesses a rational mind. Or....an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out, which is typically what my experience has been in religious and spiritual communities.
Unfortunately neither of us have contact information, some day it would be nice to talk with someone else who sees the same things I do, or something reasonably similar. At the very least it would be enjoyable, and who knows, maybe something useful could even come out of it. Surely there must be others out there somewhere.
That's precisely why it's important to fight against the consensus that communism somehow caused those famines. You'll get downvoted anyway, no need to pander to them.
Even if it were somehow true, capitalism directly leads to the deaths of millions every year. It has historically caused most wars, including both world wars. Why would anyone defend it?