sweetpotato

My “attitude” in no way excuses the very offensive remarks on your part, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to defend undefendable claims. You jump from claim to claim, when you are proven wrong, like how you edited out the part where you claim the European trend can be extrapolated to the entire world and you personally attack me with the excuse that I was taken aback by the ignorance on a straightforward Google search.

From what you remember (from where? That’s a good question I guess no one will ever answer us apparently)that does not make up for the overall downwards trend of consumption and emissions. Ok let’s deconstruct that quickly. Consumption has not been decreasing, it has been increasing, proven by the ever rising GDP, which measures exactly that, the total output of goods and services and considering the imports and exports are roughly equal for Europe and that material consumption is coupled to gdp, that’s the consumption.

When I say that Europe has outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries, I wasn’t talking just about “importing goods”. I was talking about their entire production. And the fact that fossil fuel consumption is still ever growing in Europe as well as in the entire West, coupled to the GDP growth is proven in Hickel(2019) “Is green growth possible”, where the domestic material consumption index is proven not to be accounting for the outsourced fossil fuels and materials consumed in third world countries to produce the goods imported, vital for Europe. The actual material footprint(which is the fossil fuel consumption and materials combined) is growing along with the GDP. And when you understand this, you realize it is all an illusion of accounting.

These are your two tragically false claims. For the third paragraph I don’t have much to say besides that third world countries need to increase their GDP to be living comfortably since they are destitute and the first world countries need to degrow like we said. Scientists have been saying this for so many years. There is a space between planetary boundaries and the decent living conditions that all people can and should be living in. The west exceeds the planetary limits(per capita), the economic south is below decent living conditions. That’s what degrowth preaches. It refers to the west, not the world in general.

Why would you assume I am talking about Europe which accounts for 1/10 of the global energy consumption and why would I be talking the continent that has mostly outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries? Why would you assume this?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy?time=2000..latest

Here’s your source. Here’s your total energy consumption. It couldn’t have been that hard to look at our world in data right? How can you be so absolutely wrong about data in plain sight while being confident about it? Do you have an agenda?

Wasn’t expecting this under a random unrelated post. A very welcome comment nonetheless.

Never forget that the exponential boom of renewable energy tech the last 20 years has entirely served as additional energy, not as replacement of fossil fuels.

I don’t get why you purposefully obfuscate what ruling class I am referring to. What kind of example are managers and drivers when I am clearly talking about the people comprising the decision making body or Communist party under communism? I think that’s simple enough and also the fact that any communist government that survived long enough gradually became more and more authoritarian, more detached from the people - never in the other direction. The evidence is there and we both know it. The burden of proof that this isn’t the case is on you, not me…

You simply dismissed my claims without any evidence on that. Although you seem to like to meticulously answer every sentence separately, you dismiss the core of the argument. I understand most communism movements start off with noble and admirable intentions and I’m not ignoring this, but the fundamental issue here is that in the longterm, by design, in order to preserve state power, for whatever reason, you’d be heading to the opposite direction of a stateless society.

I’ve read enough Lenin to understand this from his descriptions of the ideal Party. I don’t need reading recommendations, thank you. I am not saying anything profound here, this is like mainstream critique of marxism.

What does it mean to have a misreading in this context (last point)? You are just reiterating what they said but reassuring us that the most “advanced” among them are not going to turn into a ruling class because…?

Any form of political power is poison. You don’t get to a state-less, egalitarian society by going in the exact opposite direction, by enforcing a ruling class and an hierarchy like any else.

And you can see this practically not in any massacre, genocide, famine or war communist countries have inflicted, these are up for discussion. The actual evidence that this is not the right path is in the lack of accountability of the governing Party under communism, the lack of freedom of speech inside that party and the decision making body, the absolute discipline required to be in it or you get kicked out for having a different opinion for any topic, the gradual increase in authoritarianism by it and the Party’s gradual alienation from the people. These all are fundamental structural problems that stem from the fact that you set out to solve a problem by endorsing it and practising it.

People are never going to free themselves from hierarchy and the state if they don’t learn to live without it in practise, take decisions for themselves, develop the skills, knowledge and tactics to abolish it etc. You are/become what you practise in your life, not what you preach.

I’m sorry I assumed that, people’s goal when making comments on semantics is usually to obfuscate the point

As far as I’m concerned, the 92-01 war had the support of the US along with Russia. But that’s way besides the point I’m making.

I didn’t mean that it’s 30 years strictly against the US, I am only saying that these people have been tortured by war for 30 years and all people care about is to call the Talibans terrorists, not the people’s suffering by the world powers’ interventions.

Instead of playing with numbers, we could just focus on the issue of portraying every enemy of the US as a terrorist and mocking anything these people go through just because someone the west doesn’t like prevailed. Of course they are religious fundamentalists and oppressing, especially to women, but they are a legitimate government as much as you don’t like it and the people have the right to sort their society morals on their own just like the west did - it feels stupid to articulate such obvious statements, but people don’t get it.

It’s funny cause they legit have a terrorism problem with the once US funded IS. If you people had ever cared to see what has happened to Afghanistan after the Talibans took over you’d know that the terrorists are constantly bombing public spaces, public infrastructure etc.

The Talibans may be extremists and fundamentalists but terrorists? That’s a CIA talking point - any violence against us, the west, is terrorism.

The US abandoned Afghanistan in ruins after 30 years of war, bombing people and infrastructure and now they have to rebuild their country on their own, forgotten by the world. They are starving, they are extremely poor and because they are so vulnerable, the IS was able to establish itself there and terrorise the people. So I don’t get the irony here, you people are just hypocrites and don’t remember who caused all this in the first place.

First Arab country to do so, sad

Is this supposed to be ragebait or what? This review is obviously non-sensical end of story

Yesterday 21th of July was the hottest day in recorded global history. This year’s February, April and June were the hottest respective months in recorded history. Just putting this out there

My issue with nuclear energy isn’t that it’s dangerous or that it’s inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that’s either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.

My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That’s categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.

Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it’s not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can’t “science and invent” our way out of this, it’s not about the tech, it’s about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.

One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.

This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That’s the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.

Or better yet - this helped me more because I couldn’t get what you were saying until I saw it - is that you can think of either one of two faces that the cube can sit on. Before I explain which faces I am talking of, I have to note that a cube face can be described by its diagonal, which is what I have to do to explain this in words and the second one is that in a drawing of a cube there are six peripheral intersection points(three to the right and three to the left) and two inside points a right one and a left one. So these two faces the cube can sit on are:

The first is the face whose diagonal starts from the bottom left peripheral point and reaches the right inside point

Then the second face is the one that spans from the left bottom peripheral point until the right middle peripheral point.

This helps me change perspective instantly.

“promising to give two different groups”? You mean the natives and the colonisers? Tf is this “meme”?