ongoing ecological collapse thread

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby Muad'dib bin Stiltzkin » Sun Aug 26, 2018 11:24 am

The ongoing and escalating fights for arctic sovereignty is such a shit show
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Postby messier object » Tue Aug 28, 2018 5:13 pm


I really dislike when environmental scientists discover “early warnings against climate change” because they’re almost invariably actually warnings against the racial degeneracy their authors think is caused by breathing the hot, wet African air or by eating curry taken out of context, which this is what this quote is.
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Postby Destroyevsky » Thu Sep 06, 2018 2:53 pm

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Postby Destroyevsky » Thu Sep 06, 2018 3:03 pm

This is a really nice review of a new book on Keynes but I think it's really tied into this thread


If you were seeking an example of Keynesian government today you wouldn’t look first to the West, but to China, where a Communist Party that brooks no opposition presides over a technocratic regime par excellence. Not only are China’s economic managers hard-headedly pragmatic in their approach to the politics of the market, but the deeper impetus for the policy-makers in Beijing is, in Mann’s sense, truly Keynesian. What is at stake is the post-Tiananmen compromise: accept and support the regime in exchange for growth and social transformation. Much has been made of the role of neoliberal thinkers in launching Deng’s market revolution in the 1980s. But when the going gets rough, the Chinese turn Keynesian. Beijing’s response to the 2008 crisis was the most dramatic work-creation stimulus in history. When in 2009 the governor of the People’s Bank of China proposed a new global currency system, he explicitly invoked Keynes’s proposals at Bretton Woods. Beijing’s successful management of China’s growth involves exchange controls, guidance of the exchange rate and direct regulation of bank lending – techniques reminiscent of 1950s Keynesian fine-tuning. And President Xi’s current personal priority is the elimination of the final residuum of absolute poverty by means of large-scale resettlement and investment.

Hitherto, the ultimate justification of Keynesianism hasn’t been simply the preservation of the status quo, but the promise of progress. Keynes waxed lyrical about the economic opportunities for our grandchildren; the only things that could stop them from being realised were wars and economic crisis. Radical politics made the same wager. As Mann puts it, the Marxian case is ‘based on the guarantee that, however long it might take, unrelenting struggle will eventually be rewarded. In other words, when Marx urged the proletariat to make history, he did so by positing – through analysis, not prophecy – a light at the end of the tunnel.’ But if growth is the common denominator of the political philosophies we inherit from the 19th century, are those philosophies capable of grasping the existential challenges that are presented by climate change? As the world melts before our eyes, what does Keynesian managerialism have to offer our children and grandchildren? Don’t we need a revolution? But then what, today, is the promise of revolution? ‘Whatever radical wagers we choose to make,’ Mann writes, ‘there is a very real possibility that we make them in vain. There is no certain victory, even in the longest run or the latest instance – or if there is, it is presently unimaginable. No matter how long and hard the path, it may still end in disaster.’

This makes for grim reading. But if we expand our horizon beyond what Mann clearly regards as the exhausted model of Western Keynesianism, it might not be grim enough. If, faced with fundamental environmental challenges, Keynesianism is reaching its ultimate limit, will it end with a whimper or a bang? Beijing faces the classical Keynesian dilemmas raised to a new level of extremity. Xi’s ‘Chinese dream’ is the most spectacular Keynesian promise ever made. The underlying fear of domestic unrest is palpable, the scale of repression is astonishing, but so is the gamble on growth. There is no counterpart in Western experience to the astonishing transformation in the fortunes of a population of more than a billion people in a matter of thirty years. But like any instance of rapid capitalist growth, China’s boom is fraught with danger. The country’s finances are highly unstable. The boom generates deep inequality at home, while abroad it incurs the envy of the United States, a declining hegemon with erratic politics and a track record of aggression. Added to which few places on earth experience the environmental costs of growth more acutely than China. Large parts of the country are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. The promise of growth is more real and more life-altering than ever. But so too is the possibility of catastrophe. Keynesians insist that we resist the blandishment of future calm to focus on the turmoil of the present. But on a rapidly warming planet, the waters are calmer now than they will be later. Just decades from now, a large part of humanity may count itself lucky if it is only in the long run that we are all dead.


https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n17/adam-tooz ... us-seasons

Like now the most immediate choice is between socialism or barbarism. Either it becomes easier to let the majority of the globe die due to catastrophe, illness, heat death, resource wars, whatever, while the 1% runs away to like New Zealand or whatever, or we do the Keynesian thing and reinvest in infrastructure, reregulate business and finance. But all those nice pro-social measures are predicated on petro-fueled growth that will just lock us into an equally bad (?) timeline. LIke until the Ocasio-Cortez's or whatever are including degrowth as part of the platform does any of this really matter?
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Postby alaska » Thu Sep 06, 2018 4:33 pm

will definitely check out that book review when i have time, thanks destroyevsky

a while ago benjamin kunkel was hyping up herman daly as an economist who has done a lot of work in thinking through what a post-growth economy would look like. i got his "beyond growth" from the library and haven't dug into it yet but it looks pretty interesting
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Postby inkling » Thu Sep 06, 2018 5:47 pm

I think we have gone backwards in the U.S. since the sixties when it comes to an antimaterialism or anticonsumerism that would make a postgrowth argument possible.

like some people on the left and the right used to believe "you can't buy happiness" or that certain possessions are a "plastic hassle" or that it's ok to live modestly. There were even people on the right who who had a waspish disdain for conspicuous consumption. But almost nobody believes anything like that anymore.

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Postby Destroyevsky » Thu Sep 06, 2018 10:14 pm

Make Waspish Disdain American Again!

That Herman Daly guy looks good, thanks Alaska

I just feel that in the same way that socialism is now part of the American political vocabulary whereas a decade before it was unthinkable, degrowth has to get there too.
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 07, 2018 6:02 am

it's hard to tell exactly what the new socialists believe socialism is, but it seems more like free college than living with less

I hate hippies as much as the next guy, but at least they believed in leaving things behind, living communally. They didn't just hate the brutalities of a supply chain or the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. They knew that having a bunch of stuff made you a shitty person. It was a spiritual idea people used to hold.
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 07, 2018 6:04 am

I've been aware of the world for only like 20 years, but in that time Americans have grown to expect so much more luxury.

one of my neighbors is a professor who identifies as socialist. His published work is marxist.

He's refurbishing his house with all the most expensive materials thrown together. He used that bark siding and put a copper roof over the front door, just apparently unashamed by any of that.

(I'm an angry person who hates the world, sorry, don't mind me)
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Postby tanaka » Fri Sep 07, 2018 6:50 am

The Rise of China and the End of the World as We Know It

I read this essay by Arif Dirlik a week or so after I made my rambling post a few pages back, it addresses a lot of the contradictions I've been trying to get a handle on in regards to the conversation of growth. I found it pretty moving, and a little unsettling when considering the implications.
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Postby iambic » Mon Sep 10, 2018 6:06 pm

curious if the thread has insight into this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/568309/
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Postby Dead_Wizard » Mon Sep 10, 2018 6:20 pm

Carbon Ideologies was very rough to get through. Vollmann basically engages in folk science throughout, offering his own measurements and deeply confusing tables of data, spending a lot of the book talking about how confused and unsure he is of the data. So much is filled with incomprehensible minutae, but the author of that piece nails how pessimistic the project is - serving as a catalog of our insane and unstoppable wastefullness, with this sardonic tone of apology.
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Postby sordid affair » Mon Sep 10, 2018 6:38 pm

marlon rando, i felt that series of posts
andrei wrote: i heard james joyce is tough, this is probably like the james joyce of rap, ostensibly, if you wanna think of it in those terms. haha, and it bumps, too!


Alaskasoft Corporation wrote:Alaskasoft Corporation and Sordid Affair...two classic great men
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Postby alaska » Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:32 pm

I am an ignorant doof but the things that frustrate me about the Vollmann review (fwiw I have not read CARBON IDEOLOGIES, this is just abt the review) are the same as what frustrated me about e.g. the Wallace-Wells NY Mag piece & the NY Times thing (which I admit to not reading all the way through) -- a) "we" are not responsible, oil/economic and government elites are (as are the imperatives of our systems of production and consumption). The self-chastising "man I make these milkshakes...human nature sure is fucked" stuff seems totally masturbatory to me

And b) there are degrees of apocalypse. It's not some binaristic on-off switch and it's frustrating when people play the Too Late Doesn't Matter card because the difference between like less and more catastrophic famine/flooding/whatever is a lot of human lives

C) ties in with a, I think, which is just a lack of political imagination. (Roy Scranton's book is v guilty of this I think) We in the US are actively talking about socialism now, a development that would've bern unthinkable 10 years ago or whatever. It's a super chaotic time and I,don't think it's necessarily the best move for a number of reasons to assume underlying political paradigms aren't capable of changing in the way "human nature" arguments make it sound. That's obviously not to say the necessary change is inevitable or even likely, but you know

D) is a more subjevtive point that I don't looove throwing around but I feel like these We Are Fucked missives usually come from very confident, materially comfortable white men. Vollmann's whole thing is like Extreme Teller of Difficult Truths Man and I don't know if that's the best frame for this stuff. (Like this review says that it's refreshing to encounter something " so honest" -- but i don't always trust the intuiton that the grimmest possible read on something is the most honest. I think we associate the affective experience of "honesty" with, like, worst-case scenarios, and I think that this is an extension of our collective anxiety and our belief in "brutal honesty", which I think itself masks both microlevel social dynamics and our ideological predisposition to There Is No Alternative-style thinking

Sorry this is a mess I wrote this from my phone lol
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Postby Annie May » Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:36 pm

Marlon Rando wrote:it's hard to tell exactly what the new socialists believe socialism is, but it seems more like free college than living with less

I hate hippies as much as the next guy, but at least they believed in leaving things behind, living communally. They didn't just hate the brutalities of a supply chain or the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. They knew that having a bunch of stuff made you a shitty person. It was a spiritual idea people used to hold.

a good amount of online socialists are really just meme socialists with little connection or understanding of class stuggles. see the 'fully automated luxury communism' nonsense. there's a lot to be discussed about how many jobs under capitalism are completely pointless (i saw an article recently about a study that showed how the average worker works more hours under late capitalism than European peasants did under feudalism), but these meme socialists aren't willing to acknowledge or undertake the tremendous amount of work that goes into organizing, and that would take place in a theoretical post-rev society. I'm not much better than them, my knowledge of theory is limited and I'm not involved in any orgs but even i can see that many americans are used to comforts that are disastrous for the rest of the world--the proliferation of personal cars, or having meat for every meal (I'm not vegan and i have a lot of issues with vegan activism but if you look at the science it's so clear that the meat industry is helping wreck the world and we should revert back to a culture that treats meat as a once a week delicacy instead of a staple). maybe some more educated boarder has more coherent thoughts about this but after spending alot of time in online left spaces i feel the same as you i think
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Postby bear » Tue Sep 11, 2018 6:47 pm

yeah
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Postby Barthes Starr » Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:30 pm

gonna crosspost this thread on mcwop's behalf

mcwop23 wrote:
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Postby Paul » Tue Sep 18, 2018 12:20 am

Barthes Starr wrote:gonna crosspost this thread on mcwop's behalf

mcwop23 wrote:



I posted a bunch of gifs in a chat the other day. the crane that came down was spinning wildly before

also, kept scrolling and this showed up

lordofdiapers wrote:Paul is worthy

guy forget wrote:Woah wait a minute Phish is dumb as hell
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Postby Paul » Fri Sep 28, 2018 12:05 pm

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45683630

the video in this article is fucking insane. straight out of the new tomb raider game.
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Postby alaska » Fri Sep 28, 2018 12:07 pm

^jesus christ

also, xpost trump thread

delgriffith wrote:
I don't really have any words for how horrific this is.


these fuckers all know
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Postby grace cathedral park » Fri Sep 28, 2018 12:24 pm

palmer eldritch wrote:
grace cathedral park wrote:Does anyone else ever feel like scientists were bending the truth on their predictions and everything is happening much sooner than they said but since there’s nothing to be done they just lied to make us not worry but then every businessman and politician in power is just in total nihilist mode and capitalizing on the end of the world before they all hide underground in Kansas or wherever? Asking for a friend


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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 28, 2018 12:42 pm

It's amazing we don't have a violent leftist-environmentalist underground
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Postby alaska » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:02 pm

idk if the scientists are underestimating things but i posted it to say that that the "science-denier" politicians, like exxon before them, actually totally understand the science
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Postby alaska » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:04 pm

Marlon Rando wrote:It's amazing we don't have a violent leftist-environmentalist underground


yeah i have a running convo with a friend where we're like, at what point do we drop everything we're doing and devote ourselves full-time to eg chaining ourselves to pipelines. i'm giving myself some time because i'm not the most abled person but i'm feeling like 5 years from now max
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:10 pm

yeah I mean we have lots of people chaining themselves to pipelines, infiltrating CAFOs. I was referring to a more violent underground movement, people putting bullets in heads. I can't believe that movement doesn't really exist, especially with so many people who are economically desperate, don't have much to lose.
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Postby saranclaps ultra mode 9000 » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:17 pm

Marlon Rando wrote:yeah I mean we have lots of people chaining themselves to pipelines, infiltrating CAFOs. I was referring to a more violent underground movement, people putting bullets in heads. I can't believe that movement doesn't really exist, especially with so many people who are economically desperate, don't have much to lose.

http://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=101786
delgriffith wrote:Quick Google search reveals that I have no idea what I'm talking about.
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:18 pm

@Ankh: I don't think I said that at all. Can't believe you'd read that that way. I believe the opposite, that money isn't worth living for. I guess I figure it's harder for salaried people to choose an underground lifestyle.

People often respond to dislocation with violence, justifiably so. I wonder why that isn't happening more.

thanks for the link saranclaps
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Postby lame sayings » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:23 pm

participated in my first civil disobedience at a climate protest earlier in the month. can't wait to escalate 8-) it's gonna be our only hope.
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:23 pm

well, something like the weather underground, I guess, ankh
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Postby inkling » Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:25 pm

lame sayings wrote:participated in my first civil disobedience at a climate protest earlier in the month. can't wait to escalate 8-) it's gonna be our only hope.


what kind of civil disobedience?

I have participated in protests to take down confederate statues and occupy public spaces for economic justice. We made noise and filled a space for a while.
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