also mope there's a lot to think about in that post!  gonna gloss over the crt stuff bc I think it's a much longer conversation and the framework is so esoteric and so infrequently understood that it's like impossible to talk about in any normal setting. mostly I just think people outside of academia don't seem to fully engage with it even when they're defending it. a lot of what I've read would sound crazy and threatening to normal people. even that reference to the wretched of the earth gestures towards Fanon who was a prominent influence on crt and the very first chapter is on the necessity and permissibility of straight up political violence against colonizers aaaand fuck that's more than I meant to say but the point is I don't think the public debate is v good on either side but like I said a lot of it is precisely the type of shit that conservative white ppl are justifiably terrified of
 
anyway i find myself kinda impatient with the scoffing white liberals who think disbelief about covid is exclusively a function of trumpist rhetoric. as I mentioned before i have to teach this shit and most faculty in my dpt do not have a significant understanding of the relationship between ethnic minorities and the medical establishment and why black people and low income people display high degrees of mistrust of any information coming from medical institutions.  doctors are like #3 on the list of parties black people have been fucked over by after police and banks
 
I have a lot to say about the education stuff but it's complicated so nah

also tho mainstream discussions about sustainability never lead to the obvious conclusion of there's no ethical consumption under capitalism and it's not because it's taken for granted

agree completely but it makes a lot of those convos kind of fundamentally unsatisfying for me in the same way discussions about diversity and inclusion in consumer products and media does. near-sightedness/analytic myopia/inability to extricate oneself from lines of thought that have already been absorbed into a capitalist ideological structure blah blah blah

this btw is where I think one might begin to find value in the concept of the supernatural

also, never thought about the packaging thing. that fits into how I think about things so thanks for adding another brick to the wall!

Well Rudy; like, when we talk about sustainability. Me personally I kind of mix and blend these things with our current ecological conditions and restraints. Like, the kinds of problems and issues that we are dealing with now and will only get worse for the foreseeable future.

I also meld these things with science; like theoretical projections on the survivability of a civilization itself.


It could be Fermi’s paradox I’m talking about or another one. But there’s this dude that kind of theoretically projected “tiers” to the survivability and extended sustainability of a civilization.

Starts with kind of functioning  geopolitical structure and advancements in technology that allow us to explore and potentially colonize space. Then it goes on and on and on to things like Dyson spheres and manipulating reality as we know it.

Which is like terraforming and creating life, using tech to lengthen our lifespans. Really far out science fiction shit.

But from what I understand what he bases each of these things on is the probability of life in the universe, environmental conditions and potential catastrophes, relative access to resources and I think it’s in part modeled after the foundation, growth, and fall of predominant earth civilizations.


Now all this shit is relatively theoretical and with these things you could be incredibly assumptive REALLY quick.

But honestly, I see that as where sustainability is going. Things like Musk choosing to manufacture and pursue reusable rockets, these ion drives manufactured for a slow kind of gradually building space travel that is very fuel efficient, high capacity battery packs in homes for solar energy, anything Tesla.

On the ONE hand, I see it as you do. A manipulative lie, a farce, a selling point.

But on the OTHER I see it as an integral part of technological growth and our own development.

One big thing this dude talks about is the ability to properly sustain; to use natural resources in a way that is at the least as small a footprint that one can possibly leave. At BEST a means of utilizing energy that naturally occurs within our environment.

Like directly channeling solar energy to a degree that there isn’t nearly as much of a loss in the transfer.

Like, we definitely. DEFINITELY are not even close to being there. But it is becoming a viable option, a conversation, a means to an end.

And with ALL of this I think the biggest payout is the consideration in itself.

Because even that makes a huge difference in the growth of technology I think.

I mean look at it this way. Emissions limits, turning to electric cars, new EPA regulations, even buying power. Individuals choosing not to invest in caustic products or technology.


I think in one way it is easy to look at it like: “This is all just a bureaucratic feint and a fucking marketing ploy.”

Because….IT ABSOLUTELY IS

 But in another we are actually guiding our own sociological/technical growth along a certain path.

And way I see it; it’s an inevitability. We are going to have to in order to survive. Because I see it as a crucible. We’re at the point where we can potentially breach that first tier or just slowly fizzle out over the course of the next few hundred to few thousand years. Like even if things ARE NOT as bad as scientists kind of SAY they will be I think human civilization would take such a hit that at the least it would stunt our growth to an unimaginable degree.

Maybe not, I could be wrong

But! The fear of it and the preparation is kind of encouraging in a way.

It’s like Mother Nature itself is sick of our shit and tossing that BIGASS dumb baby in the deep end of a pool pushing us to work our shit out or die.


I think it is all very interesting

I like to compare it to the atmosphere of WW2 and how we ended up jumping the scope of technological innovation all the way into the 60s and 70s because we were kind of pushed to to resolve our shit.

We had this huge, threatening, imposing enemy we had to overcome. And humans put their thinking caps on and did it.

Then that progress was utilized and put into things like the space program, changing the maritime industry, establishment of the global economy.

It was a kind of echo

Way I see it. That danger, that threat, that kind of foreboding can lead to massive returns and growth.  But that’s all if we can work together and legitimately take it seriously.


But I kind of do that. I see patterns and similarities

Covid, recent geo political strifes and cataclysms, our own kind of sociological inner turmoil, environmental disasters and disasterous projections.

I see them all as inter related. Between humanities kind of latent subconsciousness and harmony with it’s environment, with the environment kind of evolving and responding to humanities influences. It’s all a cause and effect. A delayed response that took generations and generations to get to it’s boiling point. And now….now we are upon its precipice.


And to me! It is fucking INTERESTING!

And then! AND THEN!

We talk about things like capitalism being counterproductive to this kind of growth right?

As being like the manipulative vehicle for economic greed and unnecessary bullshit

ITS A ROADBLOCK YES IT IS!

But here’s an example of that kind of instilled, prevailing system of value getting fucking CLAPPED comparatively overnight

Everybody here knows Andrew Yang, right!?

Now, I think he’d be ineffectual at best but he merits a very interesting conversation and reasons for it.

Universal income

$1,000$ a month for people within certain economic constraints

Andrew Yang: FUCKIN ROBOTS ARE ALL GONNA REPLACE US ANYWAYS!

But seriously though AND THIS IS HILARIOUS

Not MONTHS after scoffing and laughing Yang off the stage at these debates what did the current administration do!?

Enacted a half assed measure of universal income to stimulate a motherfuckin bleeding out economy because THEY FELT THEY HAD TO

Despite it being the epitome of everything they hate and don’t agree with.

To me, this is VERY telling and VERY interesting.

It’s our defiance and ignorance in action kind of trying to reconcile and deal with prevailing adversities.

Brah! BRAH!

Covid made us enforce universal income for a time

And WHAT HAPPENS!?

All these motherfuckin despondent, thoroughly irritated (and rightfully so) poor people are kind of mistakenly given economic leverage. Or the ability to “maneuver” and make certain decisions concerning themselves

So they’re like: “YOU KNOW WHAT!? Fuck this job! I hate this job! This job is a form of enslavement and entitlement to those that lord over me!”

So some…SOME…not all decide to hold out for better jobs, more pay, go back to school, invest, put down payments.

Labor is like: YOU CANT DO THAT! YOU CANT TELL US TO FUCK THEMSELVES! I WANT THINGS BACK THE WAY THEY WERE! DADDY MAKE THEM!

Daddy US government: uh…we can’t

To me, this is ALL very telling and it is a lesson.

These are like the waves on a beach pulling back before a big one comes and sweeps your ass off your feet.

YES! Things are fundamentally broken, institutionalized, and set up in a stifling way. YES! Things are modeled in order to leave you feeling defeated in a way. YES! The bureaucracy has evolved to kind of give a pittance and keep the walls up.

BUT!

Times are changing! There’s a shitstorm brewing and the things it was modeled to kind of sustain are gonna slip a way in a measure of cascade failures, inadvertent progress, and people seeing it. Like rats jumping ship as a kind of comparison.

It’s SO interesting

I keep on and KEEP on saying I saying it. And EVERY TIME I’m like LOOK! LOOK!

But I’m like that kid in the 6th sense, I either have to explain it to intellectuals or normal people think I’m slightly malicious and fucking crazy when I get excited.

I tried to talk about CRT in this manner in a Facebook “intellectual forum” that was really full of a bunch’s pseudo racist chad like white boys that just repeatedly gave that kind of fear momgered reactionary narrative

It’s like prevalently openly racist as fuck but they’re so emotionally and intellectually stupid and stunted they can’t even articulate WHY they feel that way.

Because under the surface it does have a distinct kind of credibility but from that perspective it’s so easy to get lost in stereotypes and narrative and egotistical self preservation


Long story short it devolved into me explaining this and then going off in a funny more articulated manner

You are ALL pieces of shit and I hope your fat, white asses with your overcompensating AR-15 loses the helter skelter


….I got banned

https://the-toast.net/2016/03/02/why-are-you-lonely-a-text-game/

I KEEP CLICKING ON IT BUT NOTHING IS HAPPENING

maybe that's the point

yknow i’m not even certain how i feel about technological advancement. there’s this thing that happens in evo. bio. called adaptationism and it’s basically the tendency for ppl to try to come up with adaptive explanations for traits in organisms that for any number of reasons do not necessarily have any adaptive purpose whatsoever.  like AHA! this is why a giraffe has a long neck and the truth is it may have nothing to do at all with eating leaves  way above the ground or w/e

but, even so adaptive utility is a useful lens and over the course of attempting to dispel the innate sense of human exceptionalism/superiority, i’ve had to explain to students why technological advancement is not necessarily positive if like, going to the moon only occurred in the context of that point in history when we almost bombed our world into an uninhabitable rock, or like iphones existing on the basis of an economic regime that has gone far, far beyond the conditions that can sustainably support an even remotely equitable human civilization

so idk if i want technological growth. i’m not trying to be a luddite or get on some ishmael shit and be like oh well dying from minor injuries wasn’t really that bad if you think about it but i also think our definition of advancement does not and cannot exist outside of a ~*~consumer landscape~*~.  but i also do not see such growth as inevitable. idk if you’ve read anything about accelerationist politics, but i find it kind of compelling for some of the reasons you’re talking about, but then i kind of reflect on it some more and feel ambivalent

i think when you reference the disparate phenomena all being part of the same dynamic you’re actually just talking about global systems ecology or deep ecology if you’re familiar.  this has been sort of a thing with me that real scientists would laugh at bc part of what i do is agent-based modeling which is just modeling individual behavior in a given system within a given set of constraints and like, so much research in general is entirely contingent upon scale of analysis and for me this has been esp obvious in ecology when a given ecosystem has literally no boundaries but the ones we artificially set and eventually one starts to think about higher order agents and whether the behaviors of the global ecosystem as the organisms that exist within it define does not constitute some form of agent

buuuut that gets way out of my dpt and also probably way out of mainstream thinking but at that point you again return to the idea of what makes a person a person at any scale and brb lemme go to the local crystal store and work on my vibrational frequency

wrt what you're saying hobo2 I know a very, very little bit about ecological economics and it's not just that industry avoids paying for their carbon emissions but that those emissions among others things have cascading effects and the very act of calculating the externalities of industrial development is so complicated as to defy possibility some of the time. like there's this concept called ecosystem services and it's essentially conservationists trying to articulate the economic value of ecosystems by determining the value they contribute to the market, which, lol. but that's the primary means of accounting for externalities that development avoids -- treating the "value" we derive from ecosystems like a commodity that needs to be paid for even tho complex dynamical systems are impossible to assign a monetary value to but oh well it's as close as we can get (i think?? like I said I know v little)

it's good and worthy work but it's kind of depressing

also mope i find it literally impossible to engage with everything you say because any actual response i'm capable of generating requires considerable expansion and any response that addresses your points in their entirety would be 1000+ words

p.s. i have a french friend who when that fox news interview with some guy talking about grandparents going to work and dying for their grandchildren was vocally aghast and nobody else really knew what to tell her bc we were just all kind of used to it and she found our indifference even more horrifying than the interview itself

did anybody ever read the age of surveillance capitalism btw

actually I just remembered that I liked ayn rand when I was 17 and vividly recall having used the phrase 'personal responsibility' with steel at one point and getting laughed at so I'm p sure gamingw.net saved me from being a black libertarian who thinks herman cain has a lot of good ideas actually so uh

net impact officially positive

Alls I really know about carbon capture technology is that some company had a way to turn carbon emissions into bread and I was like: BAM! Two world crises with some carbons.

I don’t know specifically how it would work, like is it an industrial modification thing or they plan on trapping the SHIT TON already trapped within our atmosphere!?

See, I do see how our current economic and sociopolitical trappings would make these kinds of changes seem like an idealistic fantasy BUT

Look at where we were bout ten years ago in comparison to now. The world stage is actually starting to take the shit seriously, entrepreneurs bringing it upon themselves, I mean these are assholes; I’m going to use Uber wealthy assholes as a kind of example for a moment.

Elon Musk put a bid out for any sort of blue print or working idea to compensate for global warming (could actually be carbon capture idk) Jeff Bezos fronted 10 billion to help fund conservation efforts

I mean; THIS is a pittance. Really it is, don’t get me wrong about that. But ten years ago the whole concept was nigh fictitious to industry. I mean, really it wasn’t but that was the whole narrative.

Now I really do see it as TOO little TOO late but even if so.

This whole entrepreneurial space race thing is really interesting to me. On the one hand you’ve got NASA cooperating with these huge multi billion dollar corporations planning survey missions, drone missions, colonization efforts.

Now, I TOTALLY HATE the commercialization of it all. I really do. But at the same time we’re bound to make so much MORE progress in the pursuit of surviving within a hostile environment, self sufficiency, trying to make ourselves adaptable within this kind of new frontier and I see that as an aspect of it too.

And yes; back to Andrew Yang and the current political spectrum too.

Like, we all know our system is, has, and will be fundamentally flawed. It’s a fuckin boys club, it really is.

I actually never even expected Biden to win this last election and when he did I just erupted with laughter. It’s fucking hilarious. It reminds me of when the ayatollah and president of Iran conspired the election in like 2014-16 ish and Tehran blew the fuck up because it was such a farce.

I’m not saying it was fake, on the contrary. But it’s all just a facade, some game of thrones shit.

BUT

AT THE SAME TIME

You see these little reverberations; the riots last year, shit even the Capitol Hill uprising.

You DID NOT see these things happening quite so often, quite so consistently fuck even the L.A. Riots themselves took a gestation period and these assholes being constantly and unrepentantly shitty for em to escalate.

To me, these things are different the LA riots kind of being a statically driven reactionary response to latent, underlying frustrations and these more recent ones an escalation of a changing time period

Like, when we talk about “the fall of a civilization” I think hobo mentioned it

I see that, I totally fucking see that coming.

And when we talk about these things I’m not talking about the day after tomorrow or some fallout shit. I’m seeing a fundamental change in power.

Because something I see. Is that EVERYONE is paranoid, fucking angry, discontent, and distrusting. With VERY good reasons

I even see the Chad and Karen outbursts as a kind of underlying hysteria and psychosis.

It’s not about what they’re bitching about, it’s about a world that is changing, it is changing fast and the reality of it. The reality of everything they know being falsities, untruths, or being eroded away scares the ever living shit out of them.

If it’s not the innate sense of privilege, the middle class economic security, being able to GO OUTSIDE WITHOUT A FUCKING MASK ON


Dude, up when Covid hit east Asia, running rampant throughout China and hitting Japan. I PREDICTED this shit happening.

The economic lapse, the general hysteria, even the civil unrest up to a certain extent.

Because something I’ve learned about traveling and working within the atmosphere I have all of my adult life is that Americans have been coddled. Extensively

But in a self defeating kind of way, like giving a kid melatonin to shut them the fuck up and put them to sleep. It is desensitizing, it is suffocating and it stunts personal growth.

I mean MOST modern civilizations are like that but we are the absolute worst at it

It’s like Americans are living in the Truman show

I had an instructor that was just talking shit but he gave me this AWESOME lecture in virility and the evolution of modern diseases.

He called this shit

100%

He said that in a way penicillin, inoculations, and all our antibody, antibacterial treatments had in part caused these viruses to adapt and evolve.

That EVENTUALLY a pandemic of epic proportions would hit if not the US largely then the entire fucking world. It was no longer a matter of WHEN but IF and when it DID it would probably be an offshoot or operate a lot like influenza.


And yes, when you talk about DEEP ECOLOGY that’s kind of the way I think about these things. I mean, they could all be estimates and projections. Of course, but I swear; I swear every fucking single day there’s a new sign. A new struggle or issue or adversity.

And to ME! I don’t think about these things superstitiously and I try not to too abstractly. BUT

I just see us at a crossroads, even the most wealthiest and supposedly effective societies that have fundamentally mastered the trappings of bullshit

And yes, back to the fall of civilization

I don’t see it happening as some great end of the world scenario

I see it happening gradually over time, with subtle changes and accommodations. Do I see those with wealth and power all of a sudden giving it up or sharing!? HELL NO!

I see a new generation living through this shit finding their own ways to initiate change and form fit what is to what works a little better.

I see shit like those riots, like walk on wall street happening time and time again until these concessions are made one after another. Because while it is happening slowly, it is happening and it is a conversation.

Ok, Give me a bit and I’ll talk about Bernie.

I actually LOST faith in Bernies idealism’s and his campaign. I had certain disillusions with it.

Not because he isn’t right in his own ways, but because it would never work within our current functioning society. It is too much bureaucratic bullshit and would just directly empower motherfuckers who would directly abuse it.

He has good intentions but too much faith in the political process

We need a fucking militant

That’s kind of why I like AOC

I mean, she dumb AF but she’s got spirit. More nuts than most men.

And I think I said it before

In some ways I fit in with leftist libertarianism

But dude; when it comes to politics I don’t ascribe to anything. At all

I’ll shoot the shit with the most racist, backwater, fundamentalist conservative son of a bitch there is and even they have reasons for believing the dumb shit they do.

I basically turned a short little Filipino nazi onto the merits of democratic socialism by mind fuckin him

A few of the things that kind of turned me off of Bernie were that, he had the idealism and his ideas SOUNDED great but for practicality they were just futile.


You’re never going to successfully enact single payer healthcare with a parasitic fucking healthcare industry rife with 3rd party middlemen shifting massive amounts of money and gearing the industry itself towards profitability over everything else.

It’s just not a reality with what we’ve got and how these industries function, especially American medicine. It’s bullshit but it just is. Even the way the Obama administration tried to curb it and achieve coverage nationwide just ended up in health insurance companies spiking insurance rates and causing another massive rift between the middle and lower class.

Drudged a lot of support for the monster that became the Trump administration.

I do like how some of these pharmaceutical companies are being brought to court. I think in one instance it was over the pricing of the Epi pen, another insulin prices, most recently for furthering the opioid epidemic. Which is a whole other med industry and FED fuckup. They didn’t fix or alleviate a goddamn thing they took meds out of people’s hands, it was replaced with black market unregulated fentanyl laced heroin and resulted in even more prosecutions for the state. Swept that shit under a pretend rug is all they did.


I mean if you take out the enforcement of gun regulations and wealth distribution and just leaned on THAT, Bernie still doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell.


You know something I’d like to see? A massive lawsuit levied against the country forcing them to actually reflect on the state of health care. How malpractice itself is a leading cause of death in it. How it’s supposedly an inalienable right but left out of the constitution. An effort of resolution and reform. The astronomical prices to seek treatment without coverage, the way coverage itself fluctuates within the market to the point of being a predatory practice. Pharmaceutical companies acting as fucking parasites and levying ones life against them for financial gain. The complete shit show that is the mental healthcare aspect of it.

Just a massive, massive fucking lawsuit of the American people vs the state.

Which seems to me like the only real way to have the conversation taken seriously and actually be addressed. Take it all the way to Supreme Court since the other branches just lean on them to enact or enforce the rule of law anyways.


A candidate like that will never achieve such or be a viable option until either that kinda thing happens or the two party system is eradicated. Which is a whole other shitshow

I hate all of em

Every single fucking one of em and I still don’t get why Debbie Wasserman isn’t doing time in fucking prison for election tampering

But that’s Bernie too, he plays into that “lesser of two evils” bullshit too easily and takes whatever concessions are given to him when faced with stark opposition

And here we go with wealth distribution

Like, in theory it is not a bad idea. Not at all. Except for the fact that what brings a lotta industry into the US is these lower tax rates. And when you raise them, these BIGASS companies just move their headquarters abroad with basically indentured fucking slavery . Build the EXACT same shit and hawk it off to the American consumer market.


There has to be a way to balance that, to penalize companies that do that. I thought about it a lot, I dunno if it’s a thing we do or could do better but we DO have buying power. We DO have the ability to raise those taxes to an industrial viable degree then tax the fuck out those goods when they’re sent here from a foreign manufacturer abroad who just short changed us to save a buck.

I mean, to ME these different things are things that most democratic socialists don’t really sit down and consider because ideally they’re the rhetoric of “the enemy”.

But I dunno, like I’ve seen enough of it to not really take sides I guess!? And not really have the patience anymore for what I call “football team bullshit”.

Because this kind of unarticulated, childish motherfuckin bickering is WHY we are where we are. WHY none of it effectively works. The greedy piece of shit lord baron conservatives, the hypocritical; whiny fucking ineffectual left and then independents or social democrats like the Bernie crew who have this naive as fuck idea of a utopian society that just won’t ever happen. It just won’t

Like, even within the context of reforming the baseline conceptualization of American capitalism it just wouldn’t fucking work. It’s a denial of the idiocracy that is America.

But I definitely feel it could be WAAAAY better. I feel like it is distinctly possible to return to like 1950-60s American golden age kind of economic viability.

You know, when working legitimately amounted to something and we had functioning socialist slanted programs. When your employer provides benefits to entice skilled labor rather than enslaving them.


And when thinking on all this and reflecting on it a friend introduced me to Eugene Debs. Who basically is Bernies hero. With good reason.

Debs was like…THE FIRST democratic socialist candidate and one of the American independent candidates with the most support, which he’d received in fucking jail after protesting the US involvement in the First World War.


Debs didn’t even care about or give a flying fuck about democratic socialism when he’d first gotten into politics, he was a moderate. But did it because he felt HE HAD TO not because he was a house of cards piece of shit.

And through it all he had this kind of distinctly realist, earthly approach that I see entirely missing in more modern incarnations of the party.

He had problems he wanted to fix, a damn good reason to fix them, found an ingenious way to do it and fought like hell to accomplish what he did.

It was about rectifying the gross wrongs of the time period and speaking to the common man to get them to see what he did. It wasn’t idolatry it wasn’t a fucking fantasy, he wasn’t selling a dream but reform.

And to me, that’s the good shit. That’s the kind of conversation we need to be having. Not this war of ideology and everything between bullshit.

I think in a way Bernie GETS that, but he just doesn’t have the ideas or the gumption or the same convictions

A man that has lived and has seen hell is the only kind willing to fight against it by any means.

And those means do not entail bending at the fuckin knee to the Clintons or Obama or Biden or anyone.

But at the same time, you’re not likely to find THAT KIND OF PERSON in fucking politics either.


That’s why…..I nominate Killa Mike for president of the United States