US Politics Megathread

[n0el]

@Squamiger is absolutely right and I feel like the portion of the voter base who thinks this and supports Bernie will decide to vote for Warren to avoid the meltdown but still get a progressive

[Horsemen]

THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WILL BE DONALD TRUMP

[fightinfrenchman]

THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WILL BE DONALD TRUMP

You misspelled Superdreadnaught Rail Cannon Gustav Max

[fightinfrenchman]

@spanky4ever Please read this, it's wild http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/ ... paign.html

[Squamiger]

@Squamiger is absolutely right and I feel like the portion of the voter base who thinks this and supports Bernie will decide to vote for Warren to avoid the meltdown but still get a progressive

I for one am 100% for the meltdown. Lets get this show on the road already. The sooner Americans realize that the ruling class doesn't give a fuck about democracy or the public at large, the better, and we can start organizing some viable alternatives to electoral politics

[deleted_user0]

You're just jealous.

[lejend]

some viable alternatives to electoral politics

Meaning?

[Squamiger]

some viable alternatives to electoral politics

Meaning?

Organizing militant unions, tenant councils, and neighborhood assemblies with the power to coordinate and sustain a nation-wide general strike. No going to work, no paying rent, just people power in the streets and systems of mutual aid to keep everyone fed and healthy until we see some structural change. This would take a HUGE degree of coordination and communication but it is also entirely possible to achieve, if people are willing to see politics as something more than just turning up to vote every 4 years.

[deleted_user0]

some viable alternatives to electoral politics

Meaning?

Organizing militant unions, tenant councils, and neighborhood assemblies with the power to coordinate and sustain a nation-wide general strike. No going to work, no paying rent, just people power in the streets and systems of mutual aid to keep everyone fed and healthy until we see some structural change. This would take a HUGE degree of coordination and communication but it is also entirely possible to achieve, if people are willing to see politics as something more than just turning up to vote every 4 years.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964 ... _Catalonia

[Squamiger]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964 ... _Catalonia

never actually read it but I should! I hope whatever we can cook up in the US won't turn out the same way as in Spain though...

[deleted_user0]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964 ... _Catalonia

never actually read it but I should! I hope whatever we can cook up in the US won't turn out the same way as in Spain though...

well, they got sabotaged by the opposition, never really had a chance to work, but from what is known about it, it actually worked well for the short time that it did. so as long as you beat your Franco... might be fine

[lejend]

some viable alternatives to electoral politics

Meaning?

Organizing militant unions, tenant councils, and neighborhood assemblies with the power to coordinate and sustain a nation-wide general strike. No going to work, no paying rent, just people power in the streets and systems of mutual aid to keep everyone fed and healthy until we see some structural change. This would take a HUGE degree of coordination and communication but it is also entirely possible to achieve, if people are willing to see politics as something more than just turning up to vote every 4 years.

For what purpose, though?

[Dolan]

I for one am 100% for the meltdown.

You don't know what you're wishing for.



Our civilisation(s) are a much more delicate balance of forces than it appears at first sight. The whole world order is not the result of some kind of isotropic paradigm, that applies its model in the same way everywhere. It's all a carefully pieced together puzzle, each with its locally valid rules, and if you disturb one single element, you risk triggering a chain reaction that will make everyone's lives worse off.

For example, if a conflict emerges in Hong Kong or if China invades Taiwan, things could snowball into a conflict between the USA and China, which would put the whole world into recession and possibly lead to firms cutting jobs, capital flight and you losing your job and not being able to find another. While your government has less and less funds to pay welfare.

It all seems kewl if you look at it as if it was a game, until it happens to you. And I'm not saying this to defend the status quo. But if things get to a meltdown point, you're gonna wish to go back to these "crisis times".

Things would be so much more manageable if the world population wasn't 7.7 billions. It needs to be way under 1 billion to keep things more manageable. But try telling that to Asia and Africa. This mindset that "we need more demographic growth to spur more economic growth" is dumb beyond words. We need more smart automation and smaller populations, not a bigger nest crawling with billions of termites.

[deleted_user0]

rofl... as if that "mindset" comes from there and only there... ever read up on french pronatalism, just to mention an example? afaik also asian countries have been the only ones to try limit population by direct political decree, not that it was super effective but k. if you want people to have less children, just "make" them richer.

anyway I thought that only people with superior genes made the world turn and the rest were just along for the ride, eying jealously. Now you're saying it's all interconnected and in a precarious balance... wafuq?

[lejend]

@Dolan, read Jonah Goldberg's "Suicide of the West." It's right up your alley.

[deleted_user0]

then it's the opposite of what he ought to read. =_=

anyway, dolan doesn't like the enlightenment so he will have fundamental difficulties with mr Goldberg's analysis... and for once perhaps for good reason!

[Dolan]

@lejend I'm not only talking about the West, but I'll take a look at that guy's book. So far it seems like a typical conservative apology of the current order.

@deleted_user It's not that I don't like the Enlightenment, as much as I think it's basically utopian thought. It simply doesn't work, like socialism. Or maybe the Enlightenment should not be considered as an absolute ideology, but more like a necessary step in the historical progression that liberated most of Europe from absolutist monarchy. But it shouldn't be considered as a context-free, trans-historical solution to every problem faced by human societies.

[Squamiger]

For what purpose, though?

creating communism duh

Our civilisation(s) are a much more delicate balance of forces than it appears at first sight. The whole world order is not the result of some kind of isotropic paradigm, that applies its model in the same way everywhere. It's all a carefully pieced together puzzle, each with its locally valid rules, and if you disturb one single element, you risk triggering a chain reaction that will make everyone's lives worse off.

For example, if a conflict emerges in Hong Kong or if China invades Taiwan, things could snowball into a conflict between the USA and China, which would put the whole world into recession and possibly lead to firms cutting jobs, capital flight and you losing your job and not being able to find another. While your government has less and less funds to pay welfare.

It all seems kewl if you look at it as if it was a game, until it happens to you. And I'm not saying this to defend the status quo. But if things get to a meltdown point, you're gonna wish to go back to these "crisis times".

Things would be so much more manageable if the world population wasn't 7.7 billions. It needs to be way under 1 billion to keep things more manageable. But try telling that to Asia and Africa. This mindset that "we need more demographic growth to spur more economic growth" is dumb beyond words. We need more smart automation and smaller populations, not a bigger nest crawling with billions of termites.

The status quo is not at all a "balance" of anything. Human societies are hurtling toward imminent collapse already. We have about 11 years before climate change exponentially increases and make global ecological collapse inevitable. Do you know about the permafrost, which is currently sequestering millions of tons of carbon? What do you think will happen when that melts?

I'm guessing we mostly agree that things can't go on like this. But your suggestion that overpopulation is a problem is wrong. The distribution of resources and the unequal consumption of resources is the problem. The United States military is the largest polluter and largest producer of green house gasses on earth. The top polluters are all companies in the US, Europe, and China. Population growth in Asia and Africa has almost nothing to do with ecological collapse, since the average African or Asian family produces a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint of an American.

The sad thing though is that these places will bear the brunt of climate disaster. They already are, actually. Mumbai, a city of 30+ million in which very few people own air conditioners, hit 120 degrees fahrenheit the other day. People are dying all over the global South already as a result of climate change.

Current levels of population are entirely sustainable if we could directly manage the carbon emissions of most of the large industries on earth, to dramatically reduce them. But this would take a concerted international effort to overthrow the ruling classes, who will never submit to de-grow their businesses voluntarily. They will kill us all if we don't though.

[Goodspeed]

Haven't you been paying attention? The free market will fix climate change. It always makes us do the right thing

[lejend]

There's an old saying: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/ ... net-again/

But these “tipping points” and “last chance” claims now have a long history. The United Nations alone has spent more than a quarter of a century announcing a series of ever-shifting deadlines by which the world must act or face disaster from anthropogenic climate change.

Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired. What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.) Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.

Good thing there's a simple and easy way to fix the problem: give government more power over your life.

[fightinfrenchman]

Haven't you been paying attention? The free market will fix climate change. It always makes us do the right thing

Nobody said that

[n0el]

Haven't you been paying attention? The free market will fix climate change. It always makes us do the right thing

Nobody said that

don't you consider yourself a neoliberal?

[fightinfrenchman]

Haven't you been paying attention? The free market will fix climate change. It always makes us do the right thing

Nobody said that

don't you consider yourself a neoliberal?

Yes because I support the government being involved to fix market failures

[n0el]

That isn't what neoliberalism is.

[Dolan]

The status quo is not at all a "balance" of anything.

Well, if you want to philosophise, it's more like an equilibrium between irreconciliable extremes. But I was talking about political and economic order, not about the totality of things and facts on the planet. I've never seen the "status quo" expression used in reference to the state of the planetary ecosystem.

Human societies are hurtling toward imminent collapse already. We have about 11 years before climate change exponentially increases and make global ecological collapse inevitable. Do you know about the permafrost, which is currently sequestering millions of tons of carbon? What do you think will happen when that melts?

Climate change will happen even if tomorrow every human activity on the planet ceases. The question is only of how much human activity actually contributes to climatic changes that will take place no matter what we do. A new ice age will come next, no matter if we continue as we are, make changes or completely disappear. Major climate change has happened in the past, on a geological scale and was responsible with mass extinctions and huge destruction of the biosphere way before the human species came into being. There have been at least 5 major extinction events until now, none of them caused by humans. The Triassic–Jurassic extinction event caused the destruction of 20% of all marine species and it was most likely caused by global warming (and other factors like volcanic erruptions) that happened more than 200 million years ago. But no, let's all go on a guilt trip, motivated by the latest fad in Guardian-style leftist ideologies and NGOs propaganda, and blame it on humans only. This planet has periodically seen massive climatic, geological transformations, all of which were not caused by humans and which led to major or minor extinction events. Maybe humans will play a minor or medium role in the next one, but to imply we're the main cause and we control climate on this planet is pure illusion.

your suggestion that overpopulation is a problem is wrong. The distribution of resources and the unequal consumption of resources is the problem.

Hurrr, durrr, it's economic "inequality" that causes global warming. How about gender inequality and the fact that not all universities have queer and gender studies is causing global warming?

The United States military is the largest polluter and largest producer of green house gasses on earth.

Source? Who says that? Was it replicated multiple times? How do you know it's the military? They have contracts with a multitude of companies that are located in many places on the planet, not only in the USA. They don't make their own stuff, most of it is contracted.
I thought scientists claimed it's animal meat production and animal gases, as well as industrial production which contribute mostly to greenhouse gases. I'm sure those contractors for the US military are part of the equation, but to single them out really shows that such explanations are politically motivated, rather than interested in facts.

The top polluters are all companies in the US, Europe, and China. Population growth in Asia and Africa has almost nothing to do with ecological collapse, since the average African or Asian family produces a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint of an American.

What kind of polluters? US and Europe were the biggest producers of CO2 emissions until recent years. I don't know what changed in the US on this account, but Europe has passed so much legislation to curb emissions, that if you compare EU's emissions from 2017 to a 1990 baseline, emissions are now down to 80% of that output. And this reduction happened in Europe on the backdrop of a growing economy during the last 27 years!

Bottom line? The EU is doing something, other countries aren't. Surprisingly Russia has also cut down their emissions, probably mostly thanks to a collapse in industrial capacities. Whose CO2 emissions keep growing? USA's, India's, China's, South Korea's, etc etc. Before preaching, they should do something to put their house in order. Europe is doing a lot to curb emissions.
If we're talking about plastics, the situation is even more ridiculous. Because Europe is such a huge champion of cutting plastics usage on a mass scale, even though it's one of the smallest plastic polluters in the world. Meaning, such heroic displays of ecologism here have little to no impact on a global scale, if other regions aren't doing the same.
Most of the areas polluted by plastics are in the Pacific:





Source for this image: University of California, https://phys.org/news/2015-02-magnitude ... ocean.html

The sad thing though is that these places will bear the brunt of climate disaster. They already are, actually. Mumbai, a city of 30+ million in which very few people own air conditioners, hit 120 degrees fahrenheit the other day. People are dying all over the global South already as a result of climate change.

India is one of the biggest river polluters in the world. And one of the most populated countries in the world too. Such a surprising coincidence. Same for China. The most populated countries in the world are some of the biggest polluters in the world and they're also some of the fastest growing economies and with the lowest environmental standards. Sure, to a significant extent this happens because lots of outsourcing is based there, but it's not only that. India's rivers aren't full of dead bodies and shit because a couple of local companies are producing T-shirts for the global markets.
Ultimately it's their choice to allow businesses to operate with such low envi- standards. But it's not only that. India is also the country with one of the lowest degree of sewage systematisation in the world: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/hom ... 804660.cms

The reason why India's rivers are full of shit is because of the US army...:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8lu9ntmPJo

But no, let's blame them Westerners and richer countries, it's their fault that politicians from those countries and authorities allow businesses to operate with such low envi standards and people to throw dead animals and poop in their rivers. And let's cry on their shoulders, while we're at it.

Current levels of population are entirely sustainable if we could directly manage the carbon emissions of most of the large industries on earth, to dramatically reduce them. But this would take a concerted international effort to overthrow the ruling classes, who will never submit to de-grow their businesses voluntarily. They will kill us all if we don't though.

Such a naive statement. I don't even know where to start. Yes, let's do that and make you and your family unemployed and without welfare, because there will be fewer taxes to collect from fewer companies. Let's do that. Let's not consider all the economic consequences of shrinking economic activity. Let's just follow naive hippie chants and create one global kumbaya movement that will shut down all industrial plants, bring down "the ruling classes" and install our own hippie messiahs that will bring perpetual world peace and economic abundance for everyone. All it takes is just shutting down those satanic instruments of destruction, called industrial plants and evil politicians and rich people.

Actually, if we managed to reduce population numbers, pollution would also go down without even having to change much in the way of the technology we use. Simply because we would need to produce less. It would be the least costly change, if Asia and Africa managed to get a grip on their population boom, which contributes to nothing but migration and political instability.