You understand the media lies about Ukraine but you trust them about the global warming scam. It’s pretty unreal. Perhaps you should read Dr Patrick Moore’s (Greenpeace founder) analysis of global warming and do some critical thinking. It’s just another scam to promote fear, take control, and deprive populations of cheap energy that will allow them to thrive. Please wake up.
I literally just showed you a mountain of evidence that the environment is being destroyed in a whole host of ways that have nothing to do with warming and you just skimmed right over it, because you haven't been spoon fed any talking points about that yet. The fact that there are powerful people looking to take advantage of climate change doesn't magically negate the fact that it's changing; it's entirely expected that they would do that and it would be surprising if they didn't.
It’s not warming materially. And the climate on this planet changes very dramatically over time. It’s a complex system that we don’t begin to understand, except that the sun and moon are huge influences. I support a clean environment but not at the expense of people’s right to a decent standard of living. Dr. Moore is highly credible, just take a look. And “science” is deeply corrupted by government money; as with Covid, they try to run the real scientists out of town, because their conclusions don’t support the crisis narrative.
Still just skating right past the fact that the biosphere is showing many other signs of death than just warming. You're claiming there's this one highly specific diabolical plot throughout the entire field of research to lie about global warming, but all those many other ways the environment is hurtling toward collapse are so unrecognized by your position that you can't even look at them and acknowledge them.
I think the goal of these warming deniers is to get the thread to ignore the point of your article—that corporate-capitalism is raping and destroying the earth for a fist full of dollars, to steal a phrase. Thank you for your clear delineation of the profit motive.
The EPA constantly presents the government with restrictions and requirements for corporations. They are so difficult to accomplish and very expensive to impliment that only the BIG corporations are able to stay in service.
Currently, the government is putting ESG requirements on corporations.
You are so right. The agenda has been to focus on warming. The even more blatantly obvious; landfill, ocean dead zones, loss of pollinators, the sixth mass species extinction which undoubtedly include species that the whole ecosystem depends on, dust bowls and soil infertility are invisible and may actually get us starving before warming boils us. Plus there are no profitable oil industry funded carbon capture and heat being sent into space projects for any of these (apart from maybe another disastrous Green revolution), which is why the focus is on warming.
No Caitlin, I think people are wondering why you of all people are buying into the MSMs theories of climate change (when there is obviously another agenda) using examples like the hottest day ever in history (ever notice how climate change horror is used more in the summer when temperatures are hot?) and are not questioning it and demanding or posting evidence.
I believe she's suggesting it's the other way around, that the neoliberal imperialists and their austerity fetishists have hijacked a valid proposition (that humans can't just leave their shit everywhere and expect it not to come back to bite them) and presented themselves and their movement as a solution that actually isn't. That's all morality competitions are all about, and yet people believe they're necessary for some reason.
And also where they keep the thermometers. By a highway in a big city? A busy airport runway in a huge city? A quiet shady spot in the country? So easy to manipulate. After 3 years of covid you must understand how statistics can be figured to prove whatever you want. Look beyond the stats and watch the elites demand we give up cars while they fly around in private jets even to climate conferences where they say flying should be limited. They no longer even try to hide it because they think we are all idiotic sheep and they can do what they will with us. BAAAH!
Correct. Just like all of the Covid Lies. Just like all of the Ukraine Lies. They are quite good at controlling the narrative and punishing those that migrate off narrative. For you to suggest in this context that the government could not possibly control the scientific discourse is odd in light of your other thoughtful insights. It’s hubris to attribute all, or maybe any, changes on earth to us. Again, I like a clean environment, but not at the expense of people. The elites are Malthusian mercantilists that think this life is a zero sum game (anything someone else has is less for them); it’s a pathetic outlook. Clean environments are luxury goods that we want more of as we gain wealth; and so over time, as economies mature, their environments get cleaner. The Earth is not dying by our hand, sorry. Read Dr. Patrick Moore.
I can tell you don't farm or even run a community garden. Soil moisture is changing in various soils worldwide and desertfication in previous fertile regions is increasing. The Earth IS dying by our hands. Those of us growing food can tell you that crop yields are decreasing. But go back into your little bubble of denial and stick your fingers in your ears, and I'm sure it'll be all right.
You have been led to believe it's your (our) fault. But look up. Those criss-crossing dusty gray cloud patterns are not normal, and you and your car are not causing it. Study geoengineeringwatch.org and discover how the biosphere is being poisoned and frequency manipulated.
Caitlin Johnstone: Then I suggest you focus on the poisons being put out there by Monsanto and Big Pharma into the environment. And how about all the plastic crap that comes from China and SE Asia?
And how about all those polluting coal power plants being built by China and India at what? One a week?
And here we sit in California paying huge money for electricity, natural gas, gasoline and diesel to "save the planet". Every new home in California has to have a solar system that costs $30k plus. Yeah, that helps affordable housing.
Do some research at geoengineeringwatch.org the biosphere is injected with poisons and frequency manipulations by the same group of high level, high power nut jobs that are busy injecting the same into human bodies.
Geoengineering.News is a right-wing conspiracy and pseudoscience website that routinely publishes false information. The founder is Mike Adams, who owns several Questionable websites such as Natural News and News Target. Geoengineering.News is a part of the Natural News Network. This website lacks transparency and does not disclose ownership.
The moment you said "standard of living" is the precise moment that I knew you don't understand any other way to be ie: Not A Profit Model.
If we would all simply adopt a collaborative, cooperative model as opposed to a competitive model, we would ALL enjoy a reasonable standard of living - not a living driven to the haves and have-nots.
We would instantly solve 90% of the world's woes. And the other 10% would be on the books to be solved, not exploited for, you guessed it, profit.
And regarding global wawa, whatever you want to call it - we have a problem that we created in which our industrialization has affected the weather patterns irreversibly, and it is and will continue to create great hardships.
Just because a problem has been exploited for profit doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I could pretend that you didn't just invoke this ancient fairy tale for schoolchildren to assist in their indoctrination into a lifetime of slavery to the Elite, but since you did, I will pretend that you have a good point that something that was attempted under extremely adverse conditions over 300 years ago without our current technology and abilities still would have no possibility of working today.
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of instances of humans living cooperatively or even communistically for long periods of time. It's one of the many possibilities.
Starry G: Are you referring too tribal living like in the Amazon rain forest? Perhaps the American Indians? These are mostly hunter-gatherer societies and there is nothing wrong with them if you want to die by the age of 40-50. You won't have any modern amenities.
Scientists understand a great deal. The problem is when politicians and industry get involved. The money pushed germ theory and vaccines against all evidence. The money is pushing climate denial against all evidence.
These are all the propaganda I hear over and over. The Holocene, medieval and Roman warming periods were localised and were not warmer than today anyway. Overall the earth has been slightly warming since the last age and now warming sharply and suddenly. https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/climate-change-hasnt-been-debunked
Do you have evidence that the holocene maximum data is wrong?
Your global-mean graph shows that it was likely hotter about 7kya than today.
And why do you think they (the Powers That Be) are not lying about the data, given what we know about their lies elsewhere? And given they so love stirring up fear?
Do you have a version of the Peterson/Allen et al graph as brought up to today?
"And the climate on this planet changes very dramatically over time"
Not that dramatically?
" Animals as we know them require oxygen. Yet it took about 2 billion years for enough oxygen to be produced to allow all animals on Earth. Had our sun’s energy output experienced too much variation during that long period of development (or even afterward), there would have been little chance of animal life evolving on this planet. . . . "
You said "Dr. Moore is highly credible". But by whom ? A scientist becomes credible only when other relevant scientists give him/her due credit. Not by writing a fiction which majority of the scientists never accepts. Science is a special consensual process. It's not about 2-3 scientists saying something. Even Eintstein is credible only because other scientists gave/give him due credit.
Uh - they've drilled into the ice shelf in the North and South Poles. The scientists - can tell you within a 100th of a degree the rate of temperature change on Earth for last few hundred thousand years. You are ignorant of these facts because you're - well, ignorant.
The majority of scientists ... like 99% of the scientists who have studied the ongoing climate change EVIDENCE, which now has massive scientific consensus - have concluded now (for decades)- climate change is occurring, it has been induced by human activity, and the rate of change far exceeds any changes of climate on earth for 100s of thousands of years.
But don't look up Mary - as they say, ignorance is bliss.
Interesting how many wingnuts have targeted Caitlin's comments section here recently. Spewing their usual pseudo-scientific shit. Wonder if you all know each other? Probably ... paid by the same wingnut, propaganda think tank.
Didn't I see this same comment on Trump's site in support of him? I voted for Bernie. Twice. So I guess that does make me a wingnut. Are you Caitlin's category definer? Hired by her or self appointed? You mean I can get paid?!!!! Please post details how.
jamenta: I've lived through a South Dakota winter and an Amazonian summer. Anyone who thinks they can tell the temperature of the Earth from some ice core samples in the poles is demented.
That's so funny, well said Caitlin, They haven't had the propaganda about overfishing, perhaps, like some said about oil, fish could be miraculously self replenishing, nor about the plastics, mercury, toxic animal ag runoff and other stuff in the ocean, err perhaps the oceans will miraculously self cleaning
Actually... the oceans do self-clean. Micro-organisms even take care of oil spills and plastics... given enough time. Doesn't mean we should be dumping to begin with but it's not the end of the world. Or maybe it is? Just not for bacteria.
georgie&donny: Yes, and if enough CO2 goes into calcium carbonate the Earth's CO2 levels will drop below 140 parts per million and the plants will die and so will we.
Anthropogenic global warming is not a useful acronym for this reason, as so many other factors are involved. I propose Anthropogenic self annihilation ASA as the point is is there will be a time when conditions created by human activity make life impossible for the present civilisation of homo sapiens to continue.
I have been listening to Dane Wigington who hosts geoengineering.org, for years, who has lost most of his wilderness reserve to the devastating "weather" in California, and has little left to lose by telling "the truth based on credible evidence", as he says. There is no natural weather now; all weather is geoengineered, as most all countries have been pressured into going along with the program initiated by the bigger, profit-driven countries who began this in the fifties, or before that.
Bhavana: I like Dane W. but he lives in California like me. California has the most diverse weather year to year than any other place on planet Earth.
Look up the great flood of California in the 1800s. The whole Central Valley was covered 5' deep in water. It rained every day all winter long. So many crops and livestock were destroyed that the state couldn't even collect taxes that years.
If they have been deployed, there will have been any number of ham radio enthusiasts monitoring the microwave bands, and they would have very likely sensed something. Where's the evidence of usage? It can't be hidden. Sorry not sorry to ruin your mystery and your myth.
Spare me your argumentative tossing-about on climate change and what's real or invented scam/ greenwashing. The plain fact is that we've been fed a system of mediocrity worship and needless consumption on a finite planet, where all else in the biosphere repurposes and recycles. Humans are at odds with the natural system in which they live and their activities have pauperized that biosphere. Diminishing the complexity of a complex adaptive system diminishes its adaptability, its effects as unpredictable as our deep understanding of that complexity. That is supremely relevant, regardless. Everything else is merely detail.
Sound like you are down for the UN sponsored genocide? Maybe it's not humans who are at odds, but the systems the majority have been taught and corralled into?
Really? Bit of a stretchy conclusion, perhaps more a reflection on your disposition in order to project such an inclination on me? Of course you're right, it's humans functioning within those enslaving systems (corralled is quite mild) -- systems created by humans -- and acting like propaganda magnets to keep people behaving conveniently for the beneficiaries of whomever. Any individual is free to resist at whatever personal cost. Few choose to pay such a cost. I'm old enough to no longer give a shit
I was making this exact argument on here yesterday, climate change is just another propaganda campaign designed to enrich the elite and further impoverish the poor. Its is actually very insidious that they manipulate peoples good intentions to save the planet and avoid destroying our mother earth into a weapon of fascist control.
No. It’s not. Capitalism is limiting our opportunities to correct our climate trajectory, while driving that trajectory up in effective perpetuity for short term private gain.
It's not JUST that, but that certainly is one part of it. Earnest, rational movements can be easily hijacked by managers who have some direct or indirect interest in perpetuating whatever the problem was. By the time it starts to look like a "movement" with a narrative and a passion, it is already recuperated into the Protestant emotional universe and will only bring noise and emotional slavery.
With each scam they hit other buttons, and eventually everyone is captive of at least one scam and thereby paralyzed. Even if it’s the same actors behind the scenes, once the fear has been released it’s game over for that person logic-wise.
And unfortunately, the more scams they run, the easier it is to dismiss skeptics. You don’t believe in this, this, or this? Well, you must be crazy, and you can’t be trusted. It’s a self sustaining sort of fraud.
Your comment is a perfect example of the "scam" and lack of critical thinking you try to criticize.
There are many trying to incorporate climate science into the attack on economic and political elites, e.g. WEF, Soros, UN, et al. These are the same paranoid people who said that the UN would be flying black helicopters with Al Gore to seize control under the "Agenda 21" banner.
They are now being co-opted by corporate money and duped into climate denial. You are a perfect illustration of that.
The same thing is now happening from the "left" and progressive" to the science of endocrine disrupting chemicals, based on an attack on RFK, Jr. and alleged claims of an attack on transgender people. So obvious, and so stupid.
I have learned that the dominant tendency in the human mind is to believe whatever they feel like believing. This stuff about evidence is for the birds. It really makes you wonder about the jury trial thing.
Maybe it's different for something in which they have no personal stake.
Oh, you could be a juror in a trial of people you don't know and don't care about for some alleged crime of no importance to you. Maybe they care about evidence then. Or maybe they just decide based on whether they like the defendant's face.
Jordon Peterson is going on about climate being used to control us through fear. But are people really afraid? Even those who accept AGW generally still take overseas flights for holidays and drive petrol cars. There is no sense of fear as any changes will affect developing nations first and more severally. It's not a present danger even with pictures of floods and hot people in MSM. MSM just cares about selling advertising and disasters and heat waves, all the better if it's also getting hotter, are great for business. It's not a conspiracy.
People say the covid was used to control us through fear too. But was anyone really afraid? Mostly people didn't want to stand out, be fined, get into trouble and wanted to play their part in saving lives. It was a pandemic of conformity not control by fear. The only people I know who were actually motivated by fear where the young people with learning disabilities I was working with at the time. They tend to take what they are told literally and were afraid even to leave the house into the garden.
Complete and total lies from you. Which I hope turn out for some unaccountable reasons to come true. Because it is too late to do anything about it now. In fact, burning as much carbon as possible that will keep a sun-deflecting haze of particulate matter in the stratosphere might give us another couple of years. Which will happen, regardless of the passage of the Biden plan, which would have been a pathetically inadequate start 35 years ago, and was chopped into a laughable waste by Republicans who pretend that it was in some way meaningful, and, therefore, an outrage. Your ability to ignore what is right in front of you is staggering. Good thing it really doesn’t matter what you or I or anyone else thinks anyway. Nature will take its course.
if you think corporations are amoral, just think how bad governments are! All the amorality and all the power to destroy. Corporations don't have any power unless government gives it to them.
They are both part of the state. and are owned and operated by the same kind of people -- indeed, often the same identical people. Corporations are created by the government and are simply another species of ruling-class institution.
You got it backwards. Corporations are told what to do because power only rests in government. Corporations are powerless unless empowered by government to do governments bidding. And they willingly do so because the payoffs are so large.
Look at Microsoft. Shitty software that somehow came to dominate the world and spies on us for the government. Government made Microsoft and now Microsoft does whatever the govt tells it to do. Google, Facebook, GM, Pfizer, NBC, Amazon, and on and on and on.
Corporations are the tools of the fascist government. Never the other way around.
The US government has specific laws and full agencies to prevent monopolies but monopolies can only be created by government. None of the mega corporatois could have become so large and powerful without government protection. The east India company was a good example, using governments military power to protect their business deals. The same is true of most major corporations today, if free competition had been allowed to flourish and even encouraged the mega corps would not have had a monopoly.
There is no such thing as "free competition" and there never was and never will be.
You believe in liberation and capitalist utopian fairy tales, my friend. But even the capitalist economists are at least honest enough to admit the flaws (market failure, public goods, externalities, property rights, economies of scale and scope, natural monopolies, imperfect information, fraud, et al).
Monopolies are corporations. Corporations are the good guys. They should resist becoming monopolies and stay good capitalists.
Are you saying the government makes them become monopolies? Corps are too powerless and fearful to resist? Those benevolent corp heads - why are they so cowardly?
>monopolies (such as private property) can only be created by government
That's not government failure; that's exactly what a capitalist government is for and it has succeeded beyond imagine. The East India Company partakes of the same absentee ownership as your 401(k) does. The Calvinist medieval apprenticeship system and wage system were a different thing entirely, and they never even noticed the world changing around them.
The government institutes laws that allow a business to operate with easy transfer of ownership and limitations to the liability of owners for the activities of the business.
While conferring the benefit of "making it easy for a business to raise capital", it has the unintended consequence of creating an unhealthy distance between a business operation and its owners.
She gave the East India Company a trade monopoly in certain regions of her empire. The web tells me the concept of a corporation traces back to the Romans, but I don't know much about economic history.
My comment was pointing out that it is governments that create corporations, granting them their particular legal status that is distinct from their owners.
Literally Mussolini: Yes, I agree. Governments decided that a corporation is its own entity. The owners are not liable for "mistakes" the corporation makes. Now if the people running the corporation really screw up and the stock price goes to zero the owners of the stock lose it all.
Corporations corrupt governments to serve private interests against public interests, that's why the capitalist empire goes around the world propping up regime change to oust leaders that represent the people's interests and replace him with a corrupt puppet that will do the bidding of corporations and financial markets against the interests of their own country.
If the problem existed in only one industry I could agree its the businesses but it is across the board in every industry we can name which suggests to me it is government fault.
Easy to blame government and pretend the corporations and the billionaires who own more wealth than 90% of Americans combined - haven't bought the US government - or controlled the laws.
Guys like you Bob repeat ad nauseum the problem is government, but you never talk about who OWNS our government. Who is RUNNING the US government. Who is BRIBING our corrupt government politicians. How corporations and the billionaires who own them spend millions and billions to make sure government does what they want it to do. All at the same time maintaining the veneer that we have a representative democracy/republic.
You blame government and pretend there is no corporate/billionaire problem. Which really is the big lie. The big piece of propaganda that only serves to maintain a broken system based on greed and making a relatively handful of people rich, while the rest of Americans try to live off the breadcrumbs of wealth - that their hard labor generated.
Who has the specific task of protecting the public from rapacious businesses ?
Government has that responsibility - no one else.
I didn't say there isn't a problem but rather that the entity that we pay taxes to that is tasked with protecting the people has fallen down on its duties.
For example, under the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”), “‘consumer’ means an individual who enters into a transaction primarily for personal, family, or household purposes”. They are supposed to preotect the indivudal, the family and the household not the businesses.
regardless of the fact that they are corrupt and bought and sold like cattle - they still failed to perform their duty.
And you stop your argument there and don't go further. Which makes your argument one not made in good faith. Because the blame really belongs to the wealthy - to wealth inequality - not government itself. Government is the symptom of the problem - you refuse to acknowledge the disease - which is what Caitlin writes about here. A system itself, based on profit and greed - that serves to enrich a handful of the lucky - while making the country (and the world) a wasteland of inefficiency and destruction.
Corrupt government is the symptom. The disease is the system that has been adopted. Government has been co-opted by the disease - that you refuse to acknowledge. You insist on blaming the "symptom" and turn a blind eye to the real problem.
We all know government has been corrupted by the billionaires. But you won't have any of it will you? That's what you deliberately ignore.
Where mutually satisfactory outcomes can be negotiated we need no government and use the marketplace; however the State enforces good faith/best practices in the market, and intervenes in all other cases. The Prisoners’ Dilemma is the fundamental game theory tool for considering these latter interactions. Optimizing rather than maximizing yields the best result. Cooperation (the key to humanity’s success) and compromise are paramount.
This is the Buddha’s problem, we are not one and not two, the dualism of existence: we are all together in the car, and each of us is trying to drive it himself (I’m gonna stick with the male pronoun here).
I think the wording and officially-inferred meaning of The Constitution makes it a playbook for systemic corruption where individualism is equated with property ownership which is equated with “freedom.” This arrangement apparently benefits enough individuals to effectively muzzle the considerable opposition that it engenders. If more of the apolitical patriots among us had a clue as to how their tacit approval of the country helps to consign millions of people to deprivation, disease and death, unnecessarily, we might not be so collectively impotent.
You ignore the structural constraints on government intervention in markets. Start with the US Constitution: property rights, due process, State's rights, free speech, et al.
Then look at the role of the Supreme Court and the electoral college and allocation of representation in the Senate.
The problem with the medical system began when we allowed government to become involved. Don’t blame capitalism; what we have today has been taken over by corrupt officials.
Wow, the comments here are so revealing. The minute you criticize capitalism, the lemmings grab their privates and run for the nearest platitude about how “it isn’t capitalism, it’s …. fill in the blank. Try saying it’s not capitalism, it’s patriarchy and watch the fur fly! Hahahahha 🤪
It's an exercise of "No True Scotsman", which you can look up in Wikipedia. The technique is available not only to capitalism fans but those of many other belief systems and groups and is actively practiced almost universally: "That's not capitalism / communism / socialism / monarchy / feudalism / Christianity / Biddhism / anarchy / ..... Y'all know the routine.
Jeano: Are kids running a lemonade stand (no license or zoning permit) practicing capitalism? The kids bought the lemons, sugar, and water. The kids set up the stand with the sign. Would you fine and lock up the kids?
Yum. Dorothy Parker said “The 1st thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue”. If only I were in her class! She was amazing. Got arrested in 1927 for protesting about Succo and Vinzetti. They called it “loitering and sauntering”. I can just see it. She was a committed commie and left her estate to Dr. King. And eviscerated anybody who took her on! I’m honored to have you say I have sharp tongue. PS What’s CA? Is that like caca?
Jeano: Ahhhh, thanks for the Gold Star. I'll add it to my collection.
I have made rational arguments on this site many times. Many people here prefer playing the Insult Game vs. debate. That's fine. The Insult Game can be fun.
If you wish to debate my "rational discourse" please do. If you wish to play the Insult Game. I'll play that, too.
I’ve been reading your comments on here for months, and you’re a dumbbell. You’re arguments are straight out of the 7th grade in what, about 1975. There are plenty of people on here that I don’t agree with but they are smart and say smart things. You? No.
This is so prevalent that resisting is like trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble. I just skip over this stuff. Life is too short for such things.
Nothing wrong with profit-driven systems. It's the greedy, lustful, and insane perps that are wrecking the profit motive. It's the same with any enterprise. The super-greedy, arrogant and agendized anti-humans do the most damage to any system they are involved with. Take away the profit motive and you have socialism, Marxism or communism...all losing isms.
You should understand Marx created theory and we are living it now. Capitalism has an end, just as in the game of Monopoly. There is only one winner in the end and it's not you. Marx actually states all system have to go through capitalism in order to create innovation. Innovation isn't standing in line for a phone that can produce 1 Billion colors as opposed to 500 Million.
>"Marx crefated theory and we are living in it now"
"The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane."
Literally Protestant Evangelicalism with the serial numbers rubbed off.
Dude, it was a good critique of capitalism and produced some interesting intellectual moments, some which headed in more interesting directions than others, but I can't imagine being so crunk as to take Platonic "Greatness" seriously and try to deify men. The world isn't German and doesn't aspire to be.
Marx, at most, fashioned a general theory of critique *under capitalism*, but he wasn't doing the needed work of burning Western thought to the ground and the professional-managerial class recuperated every Marxist movement into happy capitalist servitude and laborism. A Marxism that can't into 3D printers or home AI is useless to the current state of material things, nothing more than a _fin de siècle_ reenactment club with a religious cult glued on the side. Pay grave heed to Uncle Joe's advice to Dmitri Chesnokov:
"You are now a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee. Your task is a revitalization of the theoretical work in Party, to provide the analysis of new processes and phenomena in our country and in the world. Without theory, for us it is death, death, death!"
Actually, the "maximizing individual" existed in religious bullshit long before they ever existed in fact. People still worked on a "target income" basis and spent their fat times taking extra time off. Sowell is a mythologist, not a historian or a sociologist. None of his narratives are actual; they are all proposals, like all moralistic blather.
Why there needs to be other incentives in a society. Basing everything simply on greed, and letting that principle control all facets of your society, from labor to governance itself - is leading us to where we are today. There needs to be other overarching goals other than just profits and greed. It's not working.
I do think part of the problem we do have right now is a dearth of authentic spirituality - i.e. the intellectual era we are in now insists we are nothing more than biological products in a material universe that really doesn't give two cents about your individual existence. You're just another cog in the material universal machine.
So one can see how such a philosophical nihilism could lead people to live more self-centered lives, where profit for themselves - the pursuit of wealth over everyone else - is a priority, since your own life itself is limited to a brief happenstance existence and nothing more. The belief there is nothing more after the body dies, logically leads to all types of behavior and choices in people's lives - in my opinion.
But you're right, organized religion doesn't just stop at humane doctrines - inevitably organized religious doctrine also becomes a control mechanism for the Elites, who use it to unscrupulously pursue their own self-centered goals. But one could also say the same of the dominant Materialism/Atheism we live in right now.
I don't have an answer to all this. Only that the obvious neurotic focus on profits and greed to base your entire society upon- is leading to catastrophe. Something new needs to be introduced to moderate the self-destructive path we're on. Whether its spiritual or secular (or a combination of both) something needs to be done, or the human race is kaput.
Actually, there was a revolutionary-socialist element in the Iranian revolution that the mullahs didn't want either. The entire Mosaic religious heritage is inherently capitalist, regardless of the Christian unity woo-woo.
Maybe. I imagine like anything, some theocracies were better than others. I would like to think we're making some progress as human beings, and spiritual progress - and there is something more than just a brief, flashpan of existence. But what do I know. Cheers.
The Catholic Church was the first multinational corporation. The Protestant movement was a reaction to its corruption, supported by princes who were tired of paying taxes to the Catholics. The Church went to war to defend its turf. It's discouraging.
jamenta: Do you want the human race to survive? How? In the thousands of years of recorded human history it has been one war after another. One empire after another. One insanity after another.
Look at your own family. Do you all get along with each other?
I'm surprised the human race made it this far. We have flush toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, airplanes, HVAC,... etc.
You have to distinguish from the Apex Predators paradigms of "monopoly capitalism" and "financial capitalism" which is based on the privately owned globalized central banking system and the International Banking & Financial Cartels - which are the Apex Predators raping, pillaging and plundering the citizen-slave consumers worldwide.
The problem is not profit.
The problem is not small to medium sized businesses, which represent the best of "capitalism" and create the most jobs and opportunities for enterprise, quality businesses and jobs.
Nope.
The problem is the 1% fascist global capitalists and their internationalized monopoly capitalism.
For reference read Carroll Quigley's 1966 book Tragedy and Hope.
Once business gets the power to change the rules in its own favor then its all over.
Now the political parties are doing the same thing. They concentrate on changing the rules so they can win more elections. Forget about doing anything useful.
The predators don't exist without the hunting ground constructed by capitalist ideology.
Quigley is good on some things (I can't remember what at the moment, probably some subtle aspect of history) but also had many strong pro-capitalist priors and values.
2025-2026 is forecast to be exceptionally hot, with high Wet Bulb Temperatures that make those locations where wet bulb temperatures approach 35C unsurvivable.
Humans cannot adapt, air-conditioning systems will not function and plants will be unable to thermo-regulate and so goes the one thing that sustains most life on earth - Photosynthesis.
Lead times are long, measured in decades and processes are locked in. There is actually nothing that can be done to alleviate the dramatic accumulation of heat, as forecast.
Obviously worth hanging about for. We'll see who's right.
___________
As for that highly literate class who helpfully inform one and all that the climate has always changed, 'tis true. It always has.
They never complete that sentence.
For the entire period of life on earth, extending back perhaps two billion years, humans did not exist and could not exist.
The recent few hundred thousand years has been very conveniently and sufficiently cooler.
___________
Just who has the best survival strategies? Microbes. The first life on earth and likely the last. Anaerobic microbes do quite well without oxygen.
BTW - No country for the young. It now pays to be old, very old. Or an anaerobic microbe.
___________
But it gets worse than that.
As the seas rise, nuclear electricity generator cooling systems flood and then a very difficult situation arises, as the nuclear generators must be shut down.
Yet energy is required to manage them for decades to maintain safety and then there are the pools of spent radioactive rods.
You are right.I think all your analysis of the relationship between war and capitalist profit-seeking is valid. But do you live in a world before COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines? No matter how many wonderful spiritual insights you add to the Ukrainian war without mentioning COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines at all, a great mystery remains. Can you not see, in your lucid mind, that COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines have taken world politics, economics, military and information control into an even more disastrous next dimension?
Constant and accelerating growth on a finite planet with finite resources. And we're actually burning more and more FFS and cutting down more and more forests, even though we know (if we care to look) it will make it hotter and hotter.
I don't think we'll stop, and even if we did life will drastically change for millions.
So be it. A world without humans is not something I have any problem with.
Literally. (It’s rare to find an opportunity to use that word correctly these days [now known as “anymore”, lol]; but your last sentence begged for it.)
I find it very revealing that nobody ever bothers engaging my point that the biosphere is showing many signs of looming collapse that have nothing to do with warming. Almost as though none of you have any information about the environment that doesn't consist of talking points which benefit fossil fuel companies.
Caitlin I can tell you that political conversation amongst random people consists of about 99% of repeating what they have been told via the media. If they don't like your evidence then it's a hoax. It doesn't help that hoaxes dominate the "news." In the end most people believe what they feel like believing.
I once participated in political discussion in website run by physicists. You'd think they'd be evidence-based, right? Wrong. They had all these rules about evidence but they were never followed. They way it really worked is that you could repeat whatever you'd heard on television. That was all that was allowed. Should you counter the narratives it didn't matter how solid your evidence was. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even bother to look at your evidence. I got banned for life, twice. I later realized that most physicists can only find work in the hi tech arms industry. This naturally colors their view. They may be highly rational people very good at math but in the world of war politics this makes no difference at all.
The physicists later quite sensibly banned all political discussion. I may have had something to do with that.
I will further say that the discussion here is much better than what you usually get.
There was a quote that particularly accused Fox News, paraphrased, "Rich people paying Comfortable people to tell Middle Class people to blame Poor people" which is a good way to describe the entire American political cosmos. We can encourage them to devalue their vicarious participation in the "conversation". If nothing else, it quickly separates those who live FOR the delusions of their own grandeur, and those who are forced to live IN their delusions.
Caitlin Johnstone: I replied about the evils of Monsanto, Big Pharma drugs, and the plastic and other pollution from China and SE Asia, India too, going into the oceans. Also the pollution from unfiltered coal power plants in China and India.
No one talks about that.
Or that the USA military is the single biggest polluter on the planet.
But no, it's all about us little guys in California driving an SUV.
Yes scientists know all about climate shifts in nature, because they were the ones who discovered them. They know about solar activity, volcanoes, La Nina, El Nino, earth tilt, earth wobble, changes in orbital ellipse.
And just to clarify, I do believe we are doing harm to the planet, another good voice to listen to is Zack Bush on this subject.
I also believe there are ways outside of oil & gas to create the energy we need, we either haven’t discovered them yet, or they are hidden from us for profit by the OG industry.
Why do you make the error of reducing all critique of environmentalism to the middle-class tendency to recuperate every narrative to their religious benefit?
Of course, defense contractors have come to this conclusion a while ago--keep your contracts completely open-ended so you can profit exponentially more on machines that fail and require recurrent--and often massive--re-designing, i..e. the F-35, the Osprey, etc, etc, etc . Those guys really are the apex of capitalism as universal wrong: devices that are designed to do horrible things that cost us more the worse they work. A perverse GOOD?
This is an excellent description of our predicament.
(I think "win over" should replace "lose out to" in this phrase: "the most profitable model will always lose out to less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment.")
Zibon W: What you write is true in the long term. But companies now act in the short term. There are incentives to "take the money and run". Enron is an example.
Yes, it’s excellent BUT it cries out for that edit. Or "beat out" or whatever. I was about to cross post the piece and then decided not to with it as is.
About the Instant Pot -- there's a principle called "You must dance with the one who brought you." In the case of the Instant Pot, you had two lines of industrial development: one represented by the venerable pressure cooker, and the other by cheap / crap electronica. The Instant Pot was not their only progeny, there has been also the Crock Pot and its numerous knock-offs.
Because I cook regularly for myself and for various causes, I became familiar with these tools, most of which I acquired free because people didn't like them and gave them to me. For the most part, because they are subject to crapification, they tend not to last very long, and to break or go haywire with discouraging frequency.
The application of the principle I enunciated above is that there would have been no Instant Pot had the pressure cooker and the crock pot and crap electronica not been invented, and they, in turn, would not have appeared had not more primitive tools first been developed. Back when your ancestors were painting themselves blue (if you're English) and burning goats in trees, they cooked in clay pots that broke all the time, until copper, bronze, iron and steel pots came along. In short, the Instant Pot was the child of a long ancestry of tools driven by _greed_ and _progress_. (Same thing, really: I want stuff, I want more stuff, I want better stuff, money money money, and so forth.) Greed and progress in the modern world are usually under the aegis of capitalism. So that was the dance that Instant Pot was invited to, whereupon it entered upon the way of all mechanism, dread Entropy (the fourth of the Fates or Furies).
Exactly what happened to it I don't know, but as I recall it was pricey considering all it could do was something that could also be done with less shiny stuff, so I am guessing it appealed to yuppies, that is, not too bright younger people with not too much experience in the kitchen, and then they got tired of it or didn't want to spend the money and it didn't sell enough to keep it going any more. The only alternative, in capitalism, is crapification, where you make a successful product ever more cheaply until it fails completely. Yes, capitalism destroyed it, but capitalism was always going to destroy it, because that's what capitalism/greed/progress inherently does, destroy things. Creatively, of course.
And, too bad, those of us who can't manage a clay pot and weed soup are hopelessly addicted to it.
There is no such thing as "good greed", the ultimate problem with being driven by profit through competition is that you are endlessly pursuing limited resources. In the end we can only fail because the game that is capitalism will eventually end when there is no more for us to take. Many predators have hunted themselves into extinction, we are one species preying on everything on this planet. I have always said we should put ourselves on the invasive species list because we do far worse than all of the animals and plants on them combined.
Capitalism states we should have the right to work hard and rightfully have more from the fruits of our labor, but what if the system favors a small number while the majority have very little? What if it threatens countless other species? For the good of life on this planet, we must stop ourselves from going down a path leading only to demise.
And it doesn't have to be black and white. An organized market seems invaluable for a free society. But don't base your entire society on market ideology.
Long ago the light bulb companies formed a cartel that required the lifetime of light bulbs be limited. It's late at night and I'm about to go to bed but it should be easy to find.
The noted Livermore Light Bulb has been burning nearly continuously for 120 years. 1903 technology was superior in that regard.
Nowadays what everyone who can tries to do is get you on a subscription. Microsoft Word is $100 a year. So if you use it for thirty years, that's three thousand dollars. Unless there is a price hike, of course.
That's what "You will own nothing" means. Everything will be alienable. I imagine neoliberal mystics believe that underneath the alienation of all of one's possessions, one can find the "true Human soul" or some other nonsense.
You understand the media lies about Ukraine but you trust them about the global warming scam. It’s pretty unreal. Perhaps you should read Dr Patrick Moore’s (Greenpeace founder) analysis of global warming and do some critical thinking. It’s just another scam to promote fear, take control, and deprive populations of cheap energy that will allow them to thrive. Please wake up.
I literally just showed you a mountain of evidence that the environment is being destroyed in a whole host of ways that have nothing to do with warming and you just skimmed right over it, because you haven't been spoon fed any talking points about that yet. The fact that there are powerful people looking to take advantage of climate change doesn't magically negate the fact that it's changing; it's entirely expected that they would do that and it would be surprising if they didn't.
It’s not warming materially. And the climate on this planet changes very dramatically over time. It’s a complex system that we don’t begin to understand, except that the sun and moon are huge influences. I support a clean environment but not at the expense of people’s right to a decent standard of living. Dr. Moore is highly credible, just take a look. And “science” is deeply corrupted by government money; as with Covid, they try to run the real scientists out of town, because their conclusions don’t support the crisis narrative.
Still just skating right past the fact that the biosphere is showing many other signs of death than just warming. You're claiming there's this one highly specific diabolical plot throughout the entire field of research to lie about global warming, but all those many other ways the environment is hurtling toward collapse are so unrecognized by your position that you can't even look at them and acknowledge them.
I think the goal of these warming deniers is to get the thread to ignore the point of your article—that corporate-capitalism is raping and destroying the earth for a fist full of dollars, to steal a phrase. Thank you for your clear delineation of the profit motive.
Jeano: Corporatism is the correct term. The union of the State and Big Business. It was Mussolini's model for fascism.
"Don't call my girlfriend mean names!"
Stfu you pathetic Puritan whiner and keep your received idiocy to yourself.
O gee Timmy, ya think so? And does the earth go around the Sun too? Shall we all sit down and let grampa pontificate about nothing?
The EPA constantly presents the government with restrictions and requirements for corporations. They are so difficult to accomplish and very expensive to impliment that only the BIG corporations are able to stay in service.
Currently, the government is putting ESG requirements on corporations.
Me thinks I smell some corporate propaganda.
You are so right. The agenda has been to focus on warming. The even more blatantly obvious; landfill, ocean dead zones, loss of pollinators, the sixth mass species extinction which undoubtedly include species that the whole ecosystem depends on, dust bowls and soil infertility are invisible and may actually get us starving before warming boils us. Plus there are no profitable oil industry funded carbon capture and heat being sent into space projects for any of these (apart from maybe another disastrous Green revolution), which is why the focus is on warming.
https://energyskeptic.com/2020/climate-change-dominates-news-coverage-at-expense-of-more-important-existential-issues/ ?
No Caitlin, I think people are wondering why you of all people are buying into the MSMs theories of climate change (when there is obviously another agenda) using examples like the hottest day ever in history (ever notice how climate change horror is used more in the summer when temperatures are hot?) and are not questioning it and demanding or posting evidence.
I believe she's suggesting it's the other way around, that the neoliberal imperialists and their austerity fetishists have hijacked a valid proposition (that humans can't just leave their shit everywhere and expect it not to come back to bite them) and presented themselves and their movement as a solution that actually isn't. That's all morality competitions are all about, and yet people believe they're necessary for some reason.
Stinky: My shit goes to a very expensive sewage treatment plant. We pay over $100/month for sewage in our town.
Just because the MSM fetishizes an issue doesn’t mean it’s a non-issue.
The "hottest day" finding is Earth's average - it's not the middle of summer in Australia.
And also where they keep the thermometers. By a highway in a big city? A busy airport runway in a huge city? A quiet shady spot in the country? So easy to manipulate. After 3 years of covid you must understand how statistics can be figured to prove whatever you want. Look beyond the stats and watch the elites demand we give up cars while they fly around in private jets even to climate conferences where they say flying should be limited. They no longer even try to hide it because they think we are all idiotic sheep and they can do what they will with us. BAAAH!
Darren Whitney: Earth has an average temp? LOL! The planet may look like a baseball, but it's not a baseball player.
Correct. Just like all of the Covid Lies. Just like all of the Ukraine Lies. They are quite good at controlling the narrative and punishing those that migrate off narrative. For you to suggest in this context that the government could not possibly control the scientific discourse is odd in light of your other thoughtful insights. It’s hubris to attribute all, or maybe any, changes on earth to us. Again, I like a clean environment, but not at the expense of people. The elites are Malthusian mercantilists that think this life is a zero sum game (anything someone else has is less for them); it’s a pathetic outlook. Clean environments are luxury goods that we want more of as we gain wealth; and so over time, as economies mature, their environments get cleaner. The Earth is not dying by our hand, sorry. Read Dr. Patrick Moore.
I can tell you don't farm or even run a community garden. Soil moisture is changing in various soils worldwide and desertfication in previous fertile regions is increasing. The Earth IS dying by our hands. Those of us growing food can tell you that crop yields are decreasing. But go back into your little bubble of denial and stick your fingers in your ears, and I'm sure it'll be all right.
You have been led to believe it's your (our) fault. But look up. Those criss-crossing dusty gray cloud patterns are not normal, and you and your car are not causing it. Study geoengineeringwatch.org and discover how the biosphere is being poisoned and frequency manipulated.
Caitlin Johnstone: Then I suggest you focus on the poisons being put out there by Monsanto and Big Pharma into the environment. And how about all the plastic crap that comes from China and SE Asia?
And how about all those polluting coal power plants being built by China and India at what? One a week?
And here we sit in California paying huge money for electricity, natural gas, gasoline and diesel to "save the planet". Every new home in California has to have a solar system that costs $30k plus. Yeah, that helps affordable housing.
But California is "Saving the Planet".
Sheesh!
Come back to the light!
Do some research at geoengineeringwatch.org the biosphere is injected with poisons and frequency manipulations by the same group of high level, high power nut jobs that are busy injecting the same into human bodies.
Geoengineering.News is a right-wing conspiracy and pseudoscience website that routinely publishes false information. The founder is Mike Adams, who owns several Questionable websites such as Natural News and News Target. Geoengineering.News is a part of the Natural News Network. This website lacks transparency and does not disclose ownership.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/geoengineering-news/
The moment you said "standard of living" is the precise moment that I knew you don't understand any other way to be ie: Not A Profit Model.
If we would all simply adopt a collaborative, cooperative model as opposed to a competitive model, we would ALL enjoy a reasonable standard of living - not a living driven to the haves and have-nots.
We would instantly solve 90% of the world's woes. And the other 10% would be on the books to be solved, not exploited for, you guessed it, profit.
And regarding global wawa, whatever you want to call it - we have a problem that we created in which our industrialization has affected the weather patterns irreversibly, and it is and will continue to create great hardships.
Just because a problem has been exploited for profit doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Phillip Mollica: Bullshit! The Jamestown colonists in Virginia tried your collaborative, cooperative model. People starved.
Finally, the leader of the colony went back to private property and the colony thrived. That is the source of the bounty for the first Thanksgiving.
I could pretend that you didn't just invoke this ancient fairy tale for schoolchildren to assist in their indoctrination into a lifetime of slavery to the Elite, but since you did, I will pretend that you have a good point that something that was attempted under extremely adverse conditions over 300 years ago without our current technology and abilities still would have no possibility of working today.
Phillip Mollica: Has human nature changed in the past 300 years? You are living the fairy tale.
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of instances of humans living cooperatively or even communistically for long periods of time. It's one of the many possibilities.
Starry G: Are you referring too tribal living like in the Amazon rain forest? Perhaps the American Indians? These are mostly hunter-gatherer societies and there is nothing wrong with them if you want to die by the age of 40-50. You won't have any modern amenities.
And maybe that's fine.
But most people don't want to live that way.
Oh, you mean the ones that went off to join the Indians?
Are you going to start telling us what shitty little religious book you're copying your myths out of someday?
God this is good. Clear, concise and workable.
Not warming materially, what does that mean? It IS warming factually https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/1/6/1850-2023
Scientists understand a great deal. The problem is when politicians and industry get involved. The money pushed germ theory and vaccines against all evidence. The money is pushing climate denial against all evidence.
Caitlin is right, there are many other critical planetary issues happening. All the same, the earth has been cooling since 8000 years ago. Overall.
https://sites.google.com/a/kgv.hk/kgv-gcse-geography/home/climate-and-change
They lied to us about covid. They lie to us about climate. Duh. Who? "The Science."
These are all the propaganda I hear over and over. The Holocene, medieval and Roman warming periods were localised and were not warmer than today anyway. Overall the earth has been slightly warming since the last age and now warming sharply and suddenly. https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/climate-change-hasnt-been-debunked
Do you have evidence that the holocene maximum data is wrong?
Your global-mean graph shows that it was likely hotter about 7kya than today.
And why do you think they (the Powers That Be) are not lying about the data, given what we know about their lies elsewhere? And given they so love stirring up fear?
Do you have a version of the Peterson/Allen et al graph as brought up to today?
"And the climate on this planet changes very dramatically over time"
Not that dramatically?
" Animals as we know them require oxygen. Yet it took about 2 billion years for enough oxygen to be produced to allow all animals on Earth. Had our sun’s energy output experienced too much variation during that long period of development (or even afterward), there would have been little chance of animal life evolving on this planet. . . . "
You said "Dr. Moore is highly credible". But by whom ? A scientist becomes credible only when other relevant scientists give him/her due credit. Not by writing a fiction which majority of the scientists never accepts. Science is a special consensual process. It's not about 2-3 scientists saying something. Even Eintstein is credible only because other scientists gave/give him due credit.
But you still insist on using MSM talking points. The hottest day? Really? Where is the evidence for the past 200, let alone 10,000 years. https://off-guardian.org/2023/07/12/reality-check-no-we-didnt-just-have-the-hottest-week-in-100000-years/
Uh - they've drilled into the ice shelf in the North and South Poles. The scientists - can tell you within a 100th of a degree the rate of temperature change on Earth for last few hundred thousand years. You are ignorant of these facts because you're - well, ignorant.
The majority of scientists ... like 99% of the scientists who have studied the ongoing climate change EVIDENCE, which now has massive scientific consensus - have concluded now (for decades)- climate change is occurring, it has been induced by human activity, and the rate of change far exceeds any changes of climate on earth for 100s of thousands of years.
But don't look up Mary - as they say, ignorance is bliss.
99% of scientists? Consensus? Massive amounts of evidence? Evidence? Any charts and stats to back you up? Follow your own advice and LOOK IT UP.
You should be getting paid by CNN .
The best available evidence from NOAA shows that June 2023 was by far the hottest June since records began in 1880. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/1/6/1850-2023 The charts show that it has been this hot for thousands of years https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/climate-change-hasnt-been-debunked
Interesting how many wingnuts have targeted Caitlin's comments section here recently. Spewing their usual pseudo-scientific shit. Wonder if you all know each other? Probably ... paid by the same wingnut, propaganda think tank.
Didn't I see this same comment on Trump's site in support of him? I voted for Bernie. Twice. So I guess that does make me a wingnut. Are you Caitlin's category definer? Hired by her or self appointed? You mean I can get paid?!!!! Please post details how.
jamenta: I've lived through a South Dakota winter and an Amazonian summer. Anyone who thinks they can tell the temperature of the Earth from some ice core samples in the poles is demented.
Oh oh Lassie, Timmy fell in the well again. We gotta get him some help!!!!
Hard disagree.
Jeano: Bring your pizza rolls.
That's so funny, well said Caitlin, They haven't had the propaganda about overfishing, perhaps, like some said about oil, fish could be miraculously self replenishing, nor about the plastics, mercury, toxic animal ag runoff and other stuff in the ocean, err perhaps the oceans will miraculously self cleaning
Actually... the oceans do self-clean. Micro-organisms even take care of oil spills and plastics... given enough time. Doesn't mean we should be dumping to begin with but it's not the end of the world. Or maybe it is? Just not for bacteria.
Yes and carbon can be taken out of the atmosphere and made into calcium carbonate and corals in the ocean, given millennia too!
Better get started then!
georgie&donny: Yes, and if enough CO2 goes into calcium carbonate the Earth's CO2 levels will drop below 140 parts per million and the plants will die and so will we.
yes
Anthropogenic global warming is not a useful acronym for this reason, as so many other factors are involved. I propose Anthropogenic self annihilation ASA as the point is is there will be a time when conditions created by human activity make life impossible for the present civilisation of homo sapiens to continue.
I have been listening to Dane Wigington who hosts geoengineering.org, for years, who has lost most of his wilderness reserve to the devastating "weather" in California, and has little left to lose by telling "the truth based on credible evidence", as he says. There is no natural weather now; all weather is geoengineered, as most all countries have been pressured into going along with the program initiated by the bigger, profit-driven countries who began this in the fifties, or before that.
Bhavana: I like Dane W. but he lives in California like me. California has the most diverse weather year to year than any other place on planet Earth.
Look up the great flood of California in the 1800s. The whole Central Valley was covered 5' deep in water. It rained every day all winter long. So many crops and livestock were destroyed that the state couldn't even collect taxes that years.
The climate czars are not going back far enough with their models. It was hotter in the late 1800's than it is now.
If they have been deployed, there will have been any number of ham radio enthusiasts monitoring the microwave bands, and they would have very likely sensed something. Where's the evidence of usage? It can't be hidden. Sorry not sorry to ruin your mystery and your myth.
Link me directly to the waterfall plot, please; I have no interest in being rhetorically manipulated.
Spare me your argumentative tossing-about on climate change and what's real or invented scam/ greenwashing. The plain fact is that we've been fed a system of mediocrity worship and needless consumption on a finite planet, where all else in the biosphere repurposes and recycles. Humans are at odds with the natural system in which they live and their activities have pauperized that biosphere. Diminishing the complexity of a complex adaptive system diminishes its adaptability, its effects as unpredictable as our deep understanding of that complexity. That is supremely relevant, regardless. Everything else is merely detail.
No, "Greatness" is exactly what caused humans to destroy the earth for a chance to be seen acting Great. Plato needs to be erased.
Stinky: So you think humans need an audience applauding them? Maybe you do.
That's how all values work: by their recognition. You just create an imaginary friend to do it for you.
Learn some basic philosophy you pretentious jabbering idiot.
I invented Scientific Accelerationism, Don't worry science will save us and a bonus the collective we don't have to do anything.
Sound like you are down for the UN sponsored genocide? Maybe it's not humans who are at odds, but the systems the majority have been taught and corralled into?
Really? Bit of a stretchy conclusion, perhaps more a reflection on your disposition in order to project such an inclination on me? Of course you're right, it's humans functioning within those enslaving systems (corralled is quite mild) -- systems created by humans -- and acting like propaganda magnets to keep people behaving conveniently for the beneficiaries of whomever. Any individual is free to resist at whatever personal cost. Few choose to pay such a cost. I'm old enough to no longer give a shit
I was making this exact argument on here yesterday, climate change is just another propaganda campaign designed to enrich the elite and further impoverish the poor. Its is actually very insidious that they manipulate peoples good intentions to save the planet and avoid destroying our mother earth into a weapon of fascist control.
No. It’s not. Capitalism is limiting our opportunities to correct our climate trajectory, while driving that trajectory up in effective perpetuity for short term private gain.
Jeremy: Put down the Playboy. You are going to go blind.
It's not JUST that, but that certainly is one part of it. Earnest, rational movements can be easily hijacked by managers who have some direct or indirect interest in perpetuating whatever the problem was. By the time it starts to look like a "movement" with a narrative and a passion, it is already recuperated into the Protestant emotional universe and will only bring noise and emotional slavery.
With each scam they hit other buttons, and eventually everyone is captive of at least one scam and thereby paralyzed. Even if it’s the same actors behind the scenes, once the fear has been released it’s game over for that person logic-wise.
And unfortunately, the more scams they run, the easier it is to dismiss skeptics. You don’t believe in this, this, or this? Well, you must be crazy, and you can’t be trusted. It’s a self sustaining sort of fraud.
Here's a sort of allegory about this.
https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/my-science-fiction-plot
With the third scam that I resisted I acquired a label that has yet to expire. :)
"Intransigent scam resistor. Repeat offender."
PP: LOL! What is a 'transient scam resistor'. He resists one scam and falls for another? Hahaha.
Sorry but, people do have to believe in something. I don't know why.
Your comment is a perfect example of the "scam" and lack of critical thinking you try to criticize.
There are many trying to incorporate climate science into the attack on economic and political elites, e.g. WEF, Soros, UN, et al. These are the same paranoid people who said that the UN would be flying black helicopters with Al Gore to seize control under the "Agenda 21" banner.
They are now being co-opted by corporate money and duped into climate denial. You are a perfect illustration of that.
The same thing is now happening from the "left" and progressive" to the science of endocrine disrupting chemicals, based on an attack on RFK, Jr. and alleged claims of an attack on transgender people. So obvious, and so stupid.
Exactly. The process is called "recuperation" and it is simply how a liberal capitalist politics operates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Thanks, I was not aware of that term, but I've criticized many examples of it for many years.
bill w: I've seen Al Gore in that black helicopter. I waved at him. He waved back.
He flew away, and you stayed. The results are on full display. Thanks, Timmy.
russian_bot: You are three for three on pronouns. Who the hell is "he"?
Timmy, you’re in California. I understand.
russian_bot: LOL! Are you in Moscow (Russia not Idaho).
I have learned that the dominant tendency in the human mind is to believe whatever they feel like believing. This stuff about evidence is for the birds. It really makes you wonder about the jury trial thing.
Maybe it's different for something in which they have no personal stake.
PP: Unfortunately everyone always has something at stake.
Oh, you could be a juror in a trial of people you don't know and don't care about for some alleged crime of no importance to you. Maybe they care about evidence then. Or maybe they just decide based on whether they like the defendant's face.
PP: And maybe as a juror I'm pissed off about having to be there in the first place.
Good thing you're unregistered to vote. They cannot find you. I remember the trick.
russian_bot: Again, pronouns. Who is "they"?
See? All values exist through their recognition. All your feelings are wrong and worthless.
Read Patrick Moore and he is soooo disappointed in the way his organization has been captured by extremists.
Jordon Peterson is going on about climate being used to control us through fear. But are people really afraid? Even those who accept AGW generally still take overseas flights for holidays and drive petrol cars. There is no sense of fear as any changes will affect developing nations first and more severally. It's not a present danger even with pictures of floods and hot people in MSM. MSM just cares about selling advertising and disasters and heat waves, all the better if it's also getting hotter, are great for business. It's not a conspiracy.
People say the covid was used to control us through fear too. But was anyone really afraid? Mostly people didn't want to stand out, be fined, get into trouble and wanted to play their part in saving lives. It was a pandemic of conformity not control by fear. The only people I know who were actually motivated by fear where the young people with learning disabilities I was working with at the time. They tend to take what they are told literally and were afraid even to leave the house into the garden.
Complete and total lies from you. Which I hope turn out for some unaccountable reasons to come true. Because it is too late to do anything about it now. In fact, burning as much carbon as possible that will keep a sun-deflecting haze of particulate matter in the stratosphere might give us another couple of years. Which will happen, regardless of the passage of the Biden plan, which would have been a pathetically inadequate start 35 years ago, and was chopped into a laughable waste by Republicans who pretend that it was in some way meaningful, and, therefore, an outrage. Your ability to ignore what is right in front of you is staggering. Good thing it really doesn’t matter what you or I or anyone else thinks anyway. Nature will take its course.
I've long called Paul Beckwith The Valedictorian of Spaceship Earth. Give this a listen if you'd like to know why: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-Together-by-Daniel-Geery-Learning-161114-161.html
Of course there will be psychopaths doing anything they can to make things worse, in their little minds for their own little benefits.
if you think corporations are amoral, just think how bad governments are! All the amorality and all the power to destroy. Corporations don't have any power unless government gives it to them.
Corporations are running the US government. Wake up.
I was just going to say that- governments don't have any power unless corporations give it to them!
They are both part of the state. and are owned and operated by the same kind of people -- indeed, often the same identical people. Corporations are created by the government and are simply another species of ruling-class institution.
You got it backwards. Corporations are told what to do because power only rests in government. Corporations are powerless unless empowered by government to do governments bidding. And they willingly do so because the payoffs are so large.
Look at Microsoft. Shitty software that somehow came to dominate the world and spies on us for the government. Government made Microsoft and now Microsoft does whatever the govt tells it to do. Google, Facebook, GM, Pfizer, NBC, Amazon, and on and on and on.
Corporations are the tools of the fascist government. Never the other way around.
"You got it backwards." Quite the projection.
The globe.
Corporations are government.
russian_bot: I thought you were in Belarus with Big Ears Prigozhin. Did you get your ammo?
You have excellent vantage point and binoculars. You know the answer re ammo too.
russian_bot: What is this comment about ammo about? Are you drinking cheap vodka again?
The US government has specific laws and full agencies to prevent monopolies but monopolies can only be created by government. None of the mega corporatois could have become so large and powerful without government protection. The east India company was a good example, using governments military power to protect their business deals. The same is true of most major corporations today, if free competition had been allowed to flourish and even encouraged the mega corps would not have had a monopoly.
It is the primary example of government failure !
There is no such thing as "free competition" and there never was and never will be.
You believe in liberation and capitalist utopian fairy tales, my friend. But even the capitalist economists are at least honest enough to admit the flaws (market failure, public goods, externalities, property rights, economies of scale and scope, natural monopolies, imperfect information, fraud, et al).
Libertarian - not liberation. Funny, the machine makes that typo all the time!
bill w: There is nothing free about competition.
oops, I left out intergenerational equity and interest rates.
and rent seeking.
Monopolies are corporations. Corporations are the good guys. They should resist becoming monopolies and stay good capitalists.
Are you saying the government makes them become monopolies? Corps are too powerless and fearful to resist? Those benevolent corp heads - why are they so cowardly?
>monopolies (such as private property) can only be created by government
That's not government failure; that's exactly what a capitalist government is for and it has succeeded beyond imagine. The East India Company partakes of the same absentee ownership as your 401(k) does. The Calvinist medieval apprenticeship system and wage system were a different thing entirely, and they never even noticed the world changing around them.
Corporations are a creation of government.
The government institutes laws that allow a business to operate with easy transfer of ownership and limitations to the liability of owners for the activities of the business.
While conferring the benefit of "making it easy for a business to raise capital", it has the unintended consequence of creating an unhealthy distance between a business operation and its owners.
Literally Mussolini: I believe it was Queen Elizabeth I who started corporations. Yes?
She gave the East India Company a trade monopoly in certain regions of her empire. The web tells me the concept of a corporation traces back to the Romans, but I don't know much about economic history.
My comment was pointing out that it is governments that create corporations, granting them their particular legal status that is distinct from their owners.
Literally Mussolini: Yes, I agree. Governments decided that a corporation is its own entity. The owners are not liable for "mistakes" the corporation makes. Now if the people running the corporation really screw up and the stock price goes to zero the owners of the stock lose it all.
States guarantee values. Without them, there is no such thing as a corporation, and no values to "purify" or "corrupt".
Stinky: Do you value your penis? Did the state guarantee its value?
Corporations corrupt governments to serve private interests against public interests, that's why the capitalist empire goes around the world propping up regime change to oust leaders that represent the people's interests and replace him with a corrupt puppet that will do the bidding of corporations and financial markets against the interests of their own country.
"We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich."
That sums up the problem in a single line.
jamenta: What paradise? I've never seen it. Nature is a bitch trying to kill us.
But a damned pretty bitch. At least from some angles.
Starry G: LOL! Yeah, the Earth is a pretty bitch from outer space.
Reminds me of our "medical system"...
Perfect example. Profits over human mortality and well-being.
If the problem existed in only one industry I could agree its the businesses but it is across the board in every industry we can name which suggests to me it is government fault.
Easy to blame government and pretend the corporations and the billionaires who own more wealth than 90% of Americans combined - haven't bought the US government - or controlled the laws.
Guys like you Bob repeat ad nauseum the problem is government, but you never talk about who OWNS our government. Who is RUNNING the US government. Who is BRIBING our corrupt government politicians. How corporations and the billionaires who own them spend millions and billions to make sure government does what they want it to do. All at the same time maintaining the veneer that we have a representative democracy/republic.
You blame government and pretend there is no corporate/billionaire problem. Which really is the big lie. The big piece of propaganda that only serves to maintain a broken system based on greed and making a relatively handful of people rich, while the rest of Americans try to live off the breadcrumbs of wealth - that their hard labor generated.
Rich people used the government to create the corporate form of business ownership to benefit themselves.
Who has the specific task of protecting the public from rapacious businesses ?
Government has that responsibility - no one else.
I didn't say there isn't a problem but rather that the entity that we pay taxes to that is tasked with protecting the people has fallen down on its duties.
For example, under the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”), “‘consumer’ means an individual who enters into a transaction primarily for personal, family, or household purposes”. They are supposed to preotect the indivudal, the family and the household not the businesses.
regardless of the fact that they are corrupt and bought and sold like cattle - they still failed to perform their duty.
And you stop your argument there and don't go further. Which makes your argument one not made in good faith. Because the blame really belongs to the wealthy - to wealth inequality - not government itself. Government is the symptom of the problem - you refuse to acknowledge the disease - which is what Caitlin writes about here. A system itself, based on profit and greed - that serves to enrich a handful of the lucky - while making the country (and the world) a wasteland of inefficiency and destruction.
The disease is human greed, it always has been.
Government was supposed to be the cure, it failed.
Corrupt government is the symptom. The disease is the system that has been adopted. Government has been co-opted by the disease - that you refuse to acknowledge. You insist on blaming the "symptom" and turn a blind eye to the real problem.
We all know government has been corrupted by the billionaires. But you won't have any of it will you? That's what you deliberately ignore.
Where mutually satisfactory outcomes can be negotiated we need no government and use the marketplace; however the State enforces good faith/best practices in the market, and intervenes in all other cases. The Prisoners’ Dilemma is the fundamental game theory tool for considering these latter interactions. Optimizing rather than maximizing yields the best result. Cooperation (the key to humanity’s success) and compromise are paramount.
This is the Buddha’s problem, we are not one and not two, the dualism of existence: we are all together in the car, and each of us is trying to drive it himself (I’m gonna stick with the male pronoun here).
I think the wording and officially-inferred meaning of The Constitution makes it a playbook for systemic corruption where individualism is equated with property ownership which is equated with “freedom.” This arrangement apparently benefits enough individuals to effectively muzzle the considerable opposition that it engenders. If more of the apolitical patriots among us had a clue as to how their tacit approval of the country helps to consign millions of people to deprivation, disease and death, unnecessarily, we might not be so collectively impotent.
You ignore the structural constraints on government intervention in markets. Start with the US Constitution: property rights, due process, State's rights, free speech, et al.
Then look at the role of the Supreme Court and the electoral college and allocation of representation in the Senate.
I could go on.
The problem with the medical system began when we allowed government to become involved. Don’t blame capitalism; what we have today has been taken over by corrupt officials.
Corporations and the billionaires OWN the government and are RUNNING the government.
Capitalism is fragile and helpless. Needs 24/7 nurturing. Easily corrupted by evil officials. No builtin defense mechanism.
I want to pet its head.
Society is fragile and helpless. Capitalism unimpaired by corruption actually works to raise all boats.
If you must. Best you wash your hands afterward.
I meant to use gloves. Not necessarily the kid type.
There's not enough latex in all of Malaysia to make that seem safe to me.
Shut up and eat your mercury-laced snake oil.
Wow, the comments here are so revealing. The minute you criticize capitalism, the lemmings grab their privates and run for the nearest platitude about how “it isn’t capitalism, it’s …. fill in the blank. Try saying it’s not capitalism, it’s patriarchy and watch the fur fly! Hahahahha 🤪
It's an exercise of "No True Scotsman", which you can look up in Wikipedia. The technique is available not only to capitalism fans but those of many other belief systems and groups and is actively practiced almost universally: "That's not capitalism / communism / socialism / monarchy / feudalism / Christianity / Biddhism / anarchy / ..... Y'all know the routine.
Jeano: Are kids running a lemonade stand (no license or zoning permit) practicing capitalism? The kids bought the lemons, sugar, and water. The kids set up the stand with the sign. Would you fine and lock up the kids?
Entrepreneurialism is not capitalism and can be the opposite of capitalism.
Your head is so far up your ass, you’re sucking on your tonsils.
Jeano: I donated my tonsils to the Smithsonian Museum decades ago.
Awwww. Ga’boy. Here’s your pat on the head and GOLD STAR TIMMY, for most idiotic and pointless use of Caitlin’s place for rational discourse today.
I love Jeano's tongue. Nothing can be sharper, especially for those in CA.
Yum. Dorothy Parker said “The 1st thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue”. If only I were in her class! She was amazing. Got arrested in 1927 for protesting about Succo and Vinzetti. They called it “loitering and sauntering”. I can just see it. She was a committed commie and left her estate to Dr. King. And eviscerated anybody who took her on! I’m honored to have you say I have sharp tongue. PS What’s CA? Is that like caca?
Jeano: Ahhhh, thanks for the Gold Star. I'll add it to my collection.
I have made rational arguments on this site many times. Many people here prefer playing the Insult Game vs. debate. That's fine. The Insult Game can be fun.
If you wish to debate my "rational discourse" please do. If you wish to play the Insult Game. I'll play that, too.
I’ve been reading your comments on here for months, and you’re a dumbbell. You’re arguments are straight out of the 7th grade in what, about 1975. There are plenty of people on here that I don’t agree with but they are smart and say smart things. You? No.
This is so prevalent that resisting is like trying to bail out the ocean with a thimble. I just skip over this stuff. Life is too short for such things.
This is a fake scam.
Nothing wrong with profit-driven systems. It's the greedy, lustful, and insane perps that are wrecking the profit motive. It's the same with any enterprise. The super-greedy, arrogant and agendized anti-humans do the most damage to any system they are involved with. Take away the profit motive and you have socialism, Marxism or communism...all losing isms.
You should understand Marx created theory and we are living it now. Capitalism has an end, just as in the game of Monopoly. There is only one winner in the end and it's not you. Marx actually states all system have to go through capitalism in order to create innovation. Innovation isn't standing in line for a phone that can produce 1 Billion colors as opposed to 500 Million.
>"Marx crefated theory and we are living in it now"
"The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane."
Literally Protestant Evangelicalism with the serial numbers rubbed off.
Dude, it was a good critique of capitalism and produced some interesting intellectual moments, some which headed in more interesting directions than others, but I can't imagine being so crunk as to take Platonic "Greatness" seriously and try to deify men. The world isn't German and doesn't aspire to be.
Marx, at most, fashioned a general theory of critique *under capitalism*, but he wasn't doing the needed work of burning Western thought to the ground and the professional-managerial class recuperated every Marxist movement into happy capitalist servitude and laborism. A Marxism that can't into 3D printers or home AI is useless to the current state of material things, nothing more than a _fin de siècle_ reenactment club with a religious cult glued on the side. Pay grave heed to Uncle Joe's advice to Dmitri Chesnokov:
"You are now a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee. Your task is a revitalization of the theoretical work in Party, to provide the analysis of new processes and phenomena in our country and in the world. Without theory, for us it is death, death, death!"
I think any system can be made to work and any system can be subverted. So...does the system make any difference at all?
PP: Good question.
Actually, the "maximizing individual" existed in religious bullshit long before they ever existed in fact. People still worked on a "target income" basis and spent their fat times taking extra time off. Sowell is a mythologist, not a historian or a sociologist. None of his narratives are actual; they are all proposals, like all moralistic blather.
Why there needs to be other incentives in a society. Basing everything simply on greed, and letting that principle control all facets of your society, from labor to governance itself - is leading us to where we are today. There needs to be other overarching goals other than just profits and greed. It's not working.
There is. Every religion worth spit starts with it; unfortunately they do not stop there.
The golden rule ACTUALLY instructs us not to maximize when we could optimize.
As StinkyParts points out there are religious exhortations to maximize; they fall in the “did not stop there” category above.
I do think part of the problem we do have right now is a dearth of authentic spirituality - i.e. the intellectual era we are in now insists we are nothing more than biological products in a material universe that really doesn't give two cents about your individual existence. You're just another cog in the material universal machine.
So one can see how such a philosophical nihilism could lead people to live more self-centered lives, where profit for themselves - the pursuit of wealth over everyone else - is a priority, since your own life itself is limited to a brief happenstance existence and nothing more. The belief there is nothing more after the body dies, logically leads to all types of behavior and choices in people's lives - in my opinion.
But you're right, organized religion doesn't just stop at humane doctrines - inevitably organized religious doctrine also becomes a control mechanism for the Elites, who use it to unscrupulously pursue their own self-centered goals. But one could also say the same of the dominant Materialism/Atheism we live in right now.
I don't have an answer to all this. Only that the obvious neurotic focus on profits and greed to base your entire society upon- is leading to catastrophe. Something new needs to be introduced to moderate the self-destructive path we're on. Whether its spiritual or secular (or a combination of both) something needs to be done, or the human race is kaput.
Yeah. Maybe the old religion-dominated societies were better. Corrupt though they often were.
I do know that the Iran revolution was about burning down the banks that represented ownership and returning to a theocracy.
Actually, there was a revolutionary-socialist element in the Iranian revolution that the mullahs didn't want either. The entire Mosaic religious heritage is inherently capitalist, regardless of the Christian unity woo-woo.
Maybe. I imagine like anything, some theocracies were better than others. I would like to think we're making some progress as human beings, and spiritual progress - and there is something more than just a brief, flashpan of existence. But what do I know. Cheers.
The Catholic Church was the first multinational corporation. The Protestant movement was a reaction to its corruption, supported by princes who were tired of paying taxes to the Catholics. The Church went to war to defend its turf. It's discouraging.
jamenta: Do you want the human race to survive? How? In the thousands of years of recorded human history it has been one war after another. One empire after another. One insanity after another.
Look at your own family. Do you all get along with each other?
I'm surprised the human race made it this far. We have flush toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, airplanes, HVAC,... etc.
How many clothes do you own?
We are lucky.
Rubbish.
You have to distinguish from the Apex Predators paradigms of "monopoly capitalism" and "financial capitalism" which is based on the privately owned globalized central banking system and the International Banking & Financial Cartels - which are the Apex Predators raping, pillaging and plundering the citizen-slave consumers worldwide.
The problem is not profit.
The problem is not small to medium sized businesses, which represent the best of "capitalism" and create the most jobs and opportunities for enterprise, quality businesses and jobs.
Nope.
The problem is the 1% fascist global capitalists and their internationalized monopoly capitalism.
For reference read Carroll Quigley's 1966 book Tragedy and Hope.
Google it for a free PDF download.
Once business gets the power to change the rules in its own favor then its all over.
Now the political parties are doing the same thing. They concentrate on changing the rules so they can win more elections. Forget about doing anything useful.
The predators don't exist without the hunting ground constructed by capitalist ideology.
Quigley is good on some things (I can't remember what at the moment, probably some subtle aspect of history) but also had many strong pro-capitalist priors and values.
Why argue.
2025-2026 is forecast to be exceptionally hot, with high Wet Bulb Temperatures that make those locations where wet bulb temperatures approach 35C unsurvivable.
Humans cannot adapt, air-conditioning systems will not function and plants will be unable to thermo-regulate and so goes the one thing that sustains most life on earth - Photosynthesis.
Lead times are long, measured in decades and processes are locked in. There is actually nothing that can be done to alleviate the dramatic accumulation of heat, as forecast.
Obviously worth hanging about for. We'll see who's right.
___________
As for that highly literate class who helpfully inform one and all that the climate has always changed, 'tis true. It always has.
They never complete that sentence.
For the entire period of life on earth, extending back perhaps two billion years, humans did not exist and could not exist.
The recent few hundred thousand years has been very conveniently and sufficiently cooler.
___________
Just who has the best survival strategies? Microbes. The first life on earth and likely the last. Anaerobic microbes do quite well without oxygen.
BTW - No country for the young. It now pays to be old, very old. Or an anaerobic microbe.
___________
But it gets worse than that.
As the seas rise, nuclear electricity generator cooling systems flood and then a very difficult situation arises, as the nuclear generators must be shut down.
Yet energy is required to manage them for decades to maintain safety and then there are the pools of spent radioactive rods.
By what means is this to be managed?
You are right.I think all your analysis of the relationship between war and capitalist profit-seeking is valid. But do you live in a world before COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines? No matter how many wonderful spiritual insights you add to the Ukrainian war without mentioning COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines at all, a great mystery remains. Can you not see, in your lucid mind, that COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines have taken world politics, economics, military and information control into an even more disastrous next dimension?
How many times can you say COVID-19 in a single paragraph? Is this a paid advertisement?
Constant and accelerating growth on a finite planet with finite resources. And we're actually burning more and more FFS and cutting down more and more forests, even though we know (if we care to look) it will make it hotter and hotter.
I don't think we'll stop, and even if we did life will drastically change for millions.
So be it. A world without humans is not something I have any problem with.
Literally. (It’s rare to find an opportunity to use that word correctly these days [now known as “anymore”, lol]; but your last sentence begged for it.)
I suggest you read Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger.
Climate shifts are a part of nature, we are not creating it.
I find it very revealing that nobody ever bothers engaging my point that the biosphere is showing many signs of looming collapse that have nothing to do with warming. Almost as though none of you have any information about the environment that doesn't consist of talking points which benefit fossil fuel companies.
Caitlin I can tell you that political conversation amongst random people consists of about 99% of repeating what they have been told via the media. If they don't like your evidence then it's a hoax. It doesn't help that hoaxes dominate the "news." In the end most people believe what they feel like believing.
I once participated in political discussion in website run by physicists. You'd think they'd be evidence-based, right? Wrong. They had all these rules about evidence but they were never followed. They way it really worked is that you could repeat whatever you'd heard on television. That was all that was allowed. Should you counter the narratives it didn't matter how solid your evidence was. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even bother to look at your evidence. I got banned for life, twice. I later realized that most physicists can only find work in the hi tech arms industry. This naturally colors their view. They may be highly rational people very good at math but in the world of war politics this makes no difference at all.
The physicists later quite sensibly banned all political discussion. I may have had something to do with that.
I will further say that the discussion here is much better than what you usually get.
There was a quote that particularly accused Fox News, paraphrased, "Rich people paying Comfortable people to tell Middle Class people to blame Poor people" which is a good way to describe the entire American political cosmos. We can encourage them to devalue their vicarious participation in the "conversation". If nothing else, it quickly separates those who live FOR the delusions of their own grandeur, and those who are forced to live IN their delusions.
Caitlin Johnstone: I replied about the evils of Monsanto, Big Pharma drugs, and the plastic and other pollution from China and SE Asia, India too, going into the oceans. Also the pollution from unfiltered coal power plants in China and India.
No one talks about that.
Or that the USA military is the single biggest polluter on the planet.
But no, it's all about us little guys in California driving an SUV.
Wow. That's an entirely new low in ignorance. Incredible. Do you think the earth is flat too?
You're half right: I don't have the time or space (or inclination) to educate you on the fundamental science of geology.
Capitalist mysticism is a mental illness. Put down the Lacan and pick up some Veblen.
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf
Yes scientists know all about climate shifts in nature, because they were the ones who discovered them. They know about solar activity, volcanoes, La Nina, El Nino, earth tilt, earth wobble, changes in orbital ellipse.
We should be going through a cooling period according to all the data, minus humans. According to all the data it's getting hotter and hotter and El Nino has come back this year https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202213
Shellenberger was wrong about the lab leak too!
You don't think the scientists who have been studying this problem for decades don't know this? Good grief.
And just to clarify, I do believe we are doing harm to the planet, another good voice to listen to is Zack Bush on this subject.
I also believe there are ways outside of oil & gas to create the energy we need, we either haven’t discovered them yet, or they are hidden from us for profit by the OG industry.
Yeah I really like Zach Bush too. He is on it with air quality, pollution, GMOs and pesticides.
Completely wrong about the virus though!
Brenna: Define "we". I hate pronouns. I'm not Monsanto.
Why do you make the error of reducing all critique of environmentalism to the middle-class tendency to recuperate every narrative to their religious benefit?
Stinky: Your sentence above is first rate. You really outdid yourself with this one.
Of course, defense contractors have come to this conclusion a while ago--keep your contracts completely open-ended so you can profit exponentially more on machines that fail and require recurrent--and often massive--re-designing, i..e. the F-35, the Osprey, etc, etc, etc . Those guys really are the apex of capitalism as universal wrong: devices that are designed to do horrible things that cost us more the worse they work. A perverse GOOD?
And have as many wars as you can.
This is an excellent description of our predicament.
(I think "win over" should replace "lose out to" in this phrase: "the most profitable model will always lose out to less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment.")
Zibon W: What you write is true in the long term. But companies now act in the short term. There are incentives to "take the money and run". Enron is an example.
Yes, it’s excellent BUT it cries out for that edit. Or "beat out" or whatever. I was about to cross post the piece and then decided not to with it as is.
Caitlin, please fix.
Already did! Thank you both.
About the Instant Pot -- there's a principle called "You must dance with the one who brought you." In the case of the Instant Pot, you had two lines of industrial development: one represented by the venerable pressure cooker, and the other by cheap / crap electronica. The Instant Pot was not their only progeny, there has been also the Crock Pot and its numerous knock-offs.
Because I cook regularly for myself and for various causes, I became familiar with these tools, most of which I acquired free because people didn't like them and gave them to me. For the most part, because they are subject to crapification, they tend not to last very long, and to break or go haywire with discouraging frequency.
The application of the principle I enunciated above is that there would have been no Instant Pot had the pressure cooker and the crock pot and crap electronica not been invented, and they, in turn, would not have appeared had not more primitive tools first been developed. Back when your ancestors were painting themselves blue (if you're English) and burning goats in trees, they cooked in clay pots that broke all the time, until copper, bronze, iron and steel pots came along. In short, the Instant Pot was the child of a long ancestry of tools driven by _greed_ and _progress_. (Same thing, really: I want stuff, I want more stuff, I want better stuff, money money money, and so forth.) Greed and progress in the modern world are usually under the aegis of capitalism. So that was the dance that Instant Pot was invited to, whereupon it entered upon the way of all mechanism, dread Entropy (the fourth of the Fates or Furies).
Exactly what happened to it I don't know, but as I recall it was pricey considering all it could do was something that could also be done with less shiny stuff, so I am guessing it appealed to yuppies, that is, not too bright younger people with not too much experience in the kitchen, and then they got tired of it or didn't want to spend the money and it didn't sell enough to keep it going any more. The only alternative, in capitalism, is crapification, where you make a successful product ever more cheaply until it fails completely. Yes, capitalism destroyed it, but capitalism was always going to destroy it, because that's what capitalism/greed/progress inherently does, destroy things. Creatively, of course.
And, too bad, those of us who can't manage a clay pot and weed soup are hopelessly addicted to it.
There is no such thing as "good greed", the ultimate problem with being driven by profit through competition is that you are endlessly pursuing limited resources. In the end we can only fail because the game that is capitalism will eventually end when there is no more for us to take. Many predators have hunted themselves into extinction, we are one species preying on everything on this planet. I have always said we should put ourselves on the invasive species list because we do far worse than all of the animals and plants on them combined.
Capitalism states we should have the right to work hard and rightfully have more from the fruits of our labor, but what if the system favors a small number while the majority have very little? What if it threatens countless other species? For the good of life on this planet, we must stop ourselves from going down a path leading only to demise.
And it doesn't have to be black and white. An organized market seems invaluable for a free society. But don't base your entire society on market ideology.
Caitlin newsletter: You remind me of a crying baby.
This piece has a major and seriously flawed unstated premise.
It assumes that technological innovation and "progress" are desirable.
Long ago the light bulb companies formed a cartel that required the lifetime of light bulbs be limited. It's late at night and I'm about to go to bed but it should be easy to find.
The noted Livermore Light Bulb has been burning nearly continuously for 120 years. 1903 technology was superior in that regard.
Nowadays what everyone who can tries to do is get you on a subscription. Microsoft Word is $100 a year. So if you use it for thirty years, that's three thousand dollars. Unless there is a price hike, of course.
The Phoebus Cartel.
That's what "You will own nothing" means. Everything will be alienable. I imagine neoliberal mystics believe that underneath the alienation of all of one's possessions, one can find the "true Human soul" or some other nonsense.
"You will own nothing and be happy."
"We will own everything and be even happier."
Stinky: I have a false human soul. But at least it is mine.