Living in the Truth or Dying in Lies

Damn straight. I wish you were posting a bunch of other places, such as DailyKos.

At the risk of sounding ungracious I’ve been waiting for you to post this for years.

What would a real anti-global warming policy look like?

It would, bare minimum, have at least five legs:

1) Actual negative emissions to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
2) Scrap the debt-based money printing system that requires growth to pay off debt.
3) Population control; we’ve known since the sixties that we were too many.
4) Localization, not globalization.
5) Deurbanization, desuburbanization, reruralization, and rewilding.

No doubt we could come up with more. Proper care of the oceans, for example, if it’s not already too late. But without these five, no real progress.

@Tony Wikrent,

Yeah, I like to read Daily Kos just to see what mainstream liberals are thinking and there seems to be little soul-searching going on. Sure, you have a few Bernie supporters who write “we told you so” pieces that correctly point to the Democrats and their willingness to allow the decay to continue, but they are the minority. Most of the comments there seem to be about how dumb and evil those hillbillies who voted for Trump are, even though many of them probably voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

The big reason why Americans let things get this bad is because enough of them were doing well enough to ignore the signs of distress all around them. As long as it was someone else doing the suffering, as long as it was someone else whose jobs were going overseas, somebody else’s union was being destroyed, somebody else’s town or neighborhood going to pot, it didn’t matter. As long as me and mine are going well, everything is fine.

I remember in the 1980s and 1990s when educated, white-collar workers were supposed to be the future winners of the New Economy, many of these yuppies sneered at factory workers whose jobs were leaving the country. “Oh, well they should have gotten a better education it is their fault.” Now you have hundreds of sob pieces written about college debt burdens and H-1B visas and we are supposed to cry and gnash our teeth over that. Well, where were all these distressed white collar types twenty or thirty years ago when the factories were leaving? And it is not just blue collar vs white collar. I know plenty of blue-collar workers who sneer at the efforts of fast food and other service workers to unionize and get better pay, even though these same blue-collar workers benefit from being in some of the few remaining unions in the country.

We need solidarity between workers of all types, white collar, blue collar, pink collar, public sector or private sector. But this seems to be almost impossible. The majority of Americans WANT the economy and the society be nasty. They feel that their lives are miserable and nasty so they want the same for others. The leadership class supports a nasty society because they are largely immune from the negatives of same. If you are rich you can avoid much of the nastiness or at least have a buffer to cushion you during the bad times. The Clintons, for example, will be fine.

To paraphrase Howard Zinn: The arc of history is progressive.But it ain’t a straight line.

To quote Bob Dylan “I paid the price in blood.” As will we all.

This time the cycle of history has new vectors: a destabilized thermal gradient in the thermal-halide cycle and associated biosphere impacts (dramatically declining fish, insect, plant and mammal populations), vast fresh water depletion and toxification combined with arable topsoil destruction, large swathes of population densities unable to survive without centralized agriculture, critical resource depletion (boron, copper, etc.).

It may well be the fascists are the least of our worries.

I think this post is right in pegging corporate liberals as the most destructive force on Earth. Just like in the Spanish Civil War, they would prefer right wing authoritarianism or fascism to a truly egalitarian outcome; that’s how indelible the hierarchical authoritarian mindset is – liberals have more in common with fascists than with true anarchists.

I wish I could sympathize with the minority groups who fear some special persecution from a Trump administration, but I can’t get past the sense that anyone who claimed to want “progressivism” had their chance to have Bernie Sanders (and, in 2010, single payer), and they aggressively chose against Sanders, and against single payer. (My understanding is that minority voters went for Clinton.) So they got exactly what they wanted.

As for my anti-corporate wedge campaign, I already gave up on “leftism” long ago and am trying to find a new way to think and speak. I think this can persist even under nastier pseudo-fascist” conditions, though I doubt it’ll get like that, as opposed to intensifying corporate domination, since so far no one’s serious about fighting corporate rule.

The US has always had crypto fascist inclinations; despite all the hooey about “freedom” and “liberty” it is and has always been a highly authoritarian society, especially for the lower orders. I’ve long asked, “Liberty for whom to do what?” It has never been for everyone to do as they please. Far from it.

European fascists and Nazis took some of their inspiration from the US genocide of the Natives, the reservation system, the various neo-colonial and neo-imperial operations the US engaged in, and they took more than a little inspiration from the Progressive movement — its eugenics elements in particular.

And of course there’s always been White Supremacy. Always.

We got away from it for a time and gingerly tip toed toward a more refined and inclusive vision of America the Better, if not America the Best, starting in the ’50s and accelerating in the ’60s. Even during some of the worst recent times (such as the Bush2 era) there was a conscious effort by those in power keep the trend going (well, some of them; shouldn’t really say Cheney gave a bucket of spit about that.) Cautious efforts continued toward addressing the problems of climate change, regardless of the deniers, and efforts were made to “help” the downtrodden improve their lot. Until the economic collapse, when for some unspoken reason, the banks and the rich were hoisted into the lifeboat while everyone else was left to drown.

This was as true under Bush as under Obama. All of the rescue went to those who caused the calamity. It could easily have gone the other way, toward the people who were falling into the abyss — I remember making the recommendation that instead of giving all the money to the banks and the already obscenely rich, provide $80-$100,000 to every household (this in lieu of a debt jubilee) and watch the economy recover almost overnight. Oh, the savagery of so-called liberals! “Moral hazard! Moral hazard! Moral hazard!” They might use it to buy drugs or throw a big party!!!!! You can’t do that!

Right, as if giving gargantuan sums of money to those who caused the collapse wasn’t hazard enough.

Most of those millions who were forced into poverty due to the collapse are still there, and they will likely be there for the rest of their shortened lives. As that situation was unlikely to change under Hillary, it was just one more reason not to vote for her.

Now we have another set of problems to address and there’s even less hope that things will get better for the many. How that plays out is anybody’s guess. But if the Revolution is to come, watch it come from the right.

Ah well. Nobody promised us a rose garden…

A few more points about overpopulation, since, as always, it’s a thorny issue:

1)

Paul Ehrlich repeatedly gets objections to his work from people along the lines of: “It’s not an overpopulation problem, it’s an X problem.” For “X” insert anything you like: racism, sexism, the corporate system, the banking cartel, whatever. Ehrlich’s response is that when he and other biologists evaluate the question of overpopulation, they take the data as they find it. To say that there’s no overpopulation problem because if society followed a particular fantasy blueprint of how things ought to be, or could be—or might be if the fantasy blueprint were not only followed but actually worked out exactly as imagined—is not evaluating the actually existing data.

2)

When we discuss overpopulation, we encounter conflicting views are freedom. Some people seem to view the earth as an expansive frontier, and from this flows a particular view of freedom. Obviously, if you believe we’re going to colonize other worlds, from this you take a particular view of growth, of human freedom, of overpopulation. The other view is seeing the earth as a lifeboat, from which a different conception of human freedom arises. Everything I have ever studied of science and technology tells me that the first view is false and the second view is true.

@GW

The only pertinent questions are “How do we feed, house, clothe and employ them and how do we deal with their waste”. Everything else is a semi-trailer full of red herrings. In theory, these are problems but problems amenable to technological solutions. This notion that there’s some magic number of people that will exceed the ability to feed itself before other population limiting factors(social breakdown, epidemic, war) kick in is, let us say, yet to be proven. The Erhlich stuff is panic from the fading of the “Green revolution” of mechanized agriculture, petrol-chemical fertilizers and elementary irrigation reform. Once we’re off the carbon based energy, industrial scale hydroponics becomes feasible with the arrival of CHEAP energy. Housing and clothing and waste, ditto. Employing them is going to take some rethinking(to say the least) in how we allocate labor and reward but there should be no shortage of things that need doing. So really, it all depends on getting off the carbon and on to renewables. To that end, eliminate subsidies for carbon at all levels. Economic factors alone should take care of the transition from there. When renewables are not just cheaper but significantly cheaper than coal, we’ll stop burning coal. So for oil, so for natural gas.

Ok ghostwheel, now I see what a criminal you are.

Here’s a telegram from reality: Earth is home, dumbass. There will be no rapture. Any version of the rapture, religious or secular (I’m aware that Ian is a fundamentalist of this lunacy) is an evil, sociopathic, anti-environmental notion. And the people you see on Earth are the people you have to live with. I can imagine how loathesome you find that idea.

Therefore, you must want for middle class Westerners to be exterminated, or at least to stop reproducing, no? After all, it’s these who have the ecological and moral footprint.

Does anyone actually ~like~ planet Earth, which indisputably is our home?

For those who don’t understand the fear, let me try to explain it to you. On the other hand, if you like the fact that a goodly percentage of your fellow citizens are fearful of the future, this might not be a useful discussion for you.

First thing, note that Our Betters — no matter their race/ethnic origin, gender, orientation or political affiliation– are not afraid at all. Some of them are positively giddy on both sides of the aisle. Why shouldn’t they be? No matter who is in the White House, they’re going to be fine. The tumbrels haven’t assembled yet, and none, so far, have rolled, so it’s party-on for them.

The lower down the ladder you go, however, the greater the fear levels rise. Why should that be? What could the untermenschen possibly be afraid of? Their lives will get better, no? Hasn’t Trump promised?

Why did blacks live in fear for their lives for most of the history of this country? Why do so many still live in fear of the police? Simple: random, arbitrary, unpunished acts of violence against them with no recourse for the victims induces the fear that at any minute someone with authority over them will act out their violent nature. That is a very useful fear for authority to induce.

Why have Native Americans lived in fear for their lives for most of the history of this country, and why are some of them so fearful for the future now? Simple: a history of dislocation, relocation, and genocide will do that to just about any survivors there might be. The fact that Native Americans are asserting themselves and their Native interests where authority wishes them harm (for disobedience if nothing else) means that they are literally risking their lives given the history they know all too well. They’re brave to do it, and they know full well the consequences which may result. Brave as they are, the fear of what might happen to them and their families when they challenge dominant authority doesn’t go away. Obama has been ostensibly a friend; Trump has indicated he won’t be. Not unless they submit.

Why have women been afraid if not for their lives, at least for their well-being for most of the history of this country? Why are so many women fearful of the future now? Unless she were the chattel of a man — who basically could do anything he wanted to and with her — it was difficult or impossible for a woman to get by on her own account in this country until quite recently. I was raised by a single mother in the 1950s, and I know very well how difficult it was for her. She was the victim of attempted rape and assault more than once, and nothing was done about it by authorities, because… “she was asking for it,” unmarried working woman that she was and all. But all that’s changed, hasn’t it? There are no impediments for women now, are there? The threats to end a woman’s access to abortion and reproductive health have been around for decades, and restrictions have been proliferating. Trump’s promise to overturn Roe v Wade may not come to pass, but it is more likely now than in the recent past. Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and further restrict a woman’s access to reproductive health are means of control of women’s bodies and their lives. That’s just one aspect of constraints on women’s freedom that are only slated to increase in the New (Old)America about to be set in motion.

Why are Latin American and Mexican immigrants and American citizens of Latin American origin fearful when only the criminals among them will be rounded up and sent to the camps before their expeditious deportation over The Wall? For most of the history of the territory seized from Mexico after the 1846-7 US war of aggression, the non-Anglo residents were treated as inferiors subject to any sort of theft and abuse the Americanos chose to practice. Conditions for some improved gradually over a century and a half since the American conquest, but for many, including particularly vulnerable recent immigrants driven north by the effects of NAFTA, they never have. Many have pointed out that conditions for farm workers in California — mostly of Latin American origin, and an unknown number undocumented — are worse now than they were before César started his marches and hunger strikes. And by what means is Authority going to tell who among them is the “deportable criminal?” It’s been bad enough under Obama’s deportation operations (quite bad indeed), and it’s about to get an order of magnitude worse. People who have been living in fear of a knock on the door for years, can now fear being out in public at all. They fear for their children perhaps more than for their own safety. It’s come to the point where any person who might be suspect/”deportable” (ie: brown) has to fear that knock or armored raid, because you never know when it might come.

On and on, one group after another targeted. That’s how nations of fear work. And that’s how this nation has worked for much of its history. Many justly fear a reversion to what used to be, when America was “Great.”



We earthlings are not Vulcans, ruled by logic and truth. We’re cooperative creatures seeking to agree with the others in our community. That makes us very susceptible to propaganda, especially the propaganda that binds us to our own group. And that means we can be whipped up into a destructive partisanship too easily.

We also learn how to deal with situations by watching others and imitating others. That’s what underlies the concept of the “role model”.

For the past 35 years, every presidential campaign has been the most important campaign ever! The other party is evil and will destroy our way of life and everything moral in it. What’s important is not whether it’s true, but whether it’s effective — we know because every pundit has become a theater critic of the great campaign show, and we smart people display our smarts through the same kind of analysis. The dumb people spend all their time doing dumb things instead of having our exquisite insights.

This is why I’m reluctant to blame most people for what has happened. I keep trying to remember that as I’ve been absolutely furious at the self-righteous blindness of the liberals. It’s been a long failure of leadership. I just hope this breakdown has opened a space for cooperativeness based on an accurate realism.

Indeed, we are too many. Many times too many.
We live on an island; this Island Earth.
Its resources are not infinite, as any idiot should know.
Anybody who thinks we are not too many already is a bloody fool.
If one does nothing else, find out what sustainability is; understand sustainability and what it means in the context of living on an island.
It has been said that the “sustainable” population of North America is 50 million, 50 million; think about that…

I’m 59 and I’ve been a political junkie since eleven years old; and I have watched this happen, depressingly, over and over again.

The latest example was just yesterday, when I posted on a politically-liberal blog. First, I said, the Trumpkins now have the ability to: , and I listed 13 horrible things. Second, I said, Hillary Clinton lost because she was just not a very good politician. She had known she was running since 2008; she was already rich, she didn’t need to make those $100,000+ speeches to Wall Street thugs, but she did anyway, much to her detriment. And after she had defeated Sanders, she openly sneered at Sanders’ supporters and alienated millions of potential voters, instead of gracefully lying and accepting their upcoming votes, which any competent candidate would have done. That sort of stuff, I pointed out, was just not being very good at being a politician.

So a Clinton partisan posted immediately after, accusing me of whining, of supporting Trump, and demanding that I shut the fuck up.

In other words, “Don’t bother me with reality, I want to go on doing the same thing, because I am RIGHT even though I continue to lose.”

Excellent. Or as I say, never bet against the math and never take Mother Nature for granted.

Trump is just the latest self-indulgent bus driver too important to notice the cliff he is piloting us toward. The only difference between him and his predecessors is that he is just that much closer to it than they were and he’s driving even faster.

It is interesting that while we do not seem to have any climate change deniers here, we have been visited by overpopulation deniers. If you go to the international data at the US Census, you might find, for example, that a country like Nigeria had a population of 32 million in 1950 and is expected to have a population of 391 million in 2050. Or that Uganda over this same timeframe will go from 5.5 million to 93.5 million. Or that Mexico will go from 28.5 million to 150.5 million. You can assemble the data by country, region, and continent and its message is always the same: Uncontrolled and unsustainable growth. The idea that well, if we just had more equitable government and better planning everything would be honky-dory is just another example of the refusal to entertain inconvenient truths. First, even if we could do this worldwide, it would only delay the inevitable. Energy, water, arable land are finite resources. Habitats are fragile and damaged by both technological societies and developing economies. Population growth puts increasing pressure on all of these. Second, we in the US live overall in the largest, richest, and most powerful country on the planet and yet we see our society fraying and pulling apart. If we can’t get our act together, given the narrow window of some 15 years we are now in, how realistic is it to expect countries in the developing world to do what we aren’t. We have the capacity but not the will. They have neither the capacity nor the will.

On a different but still mathematical subject, has anyone seen the outline of one of Trump’s most ballyhooed populist planks, infrastructure spending? It turns out it is a really, really lame public-private partnership scam. The idea would be for the federal government to put up 80% or $800 billion of a one trillion dollar plan, financed by borrowing, not taxes. The private sector would put up 20% or $200 billion. For this, they would get 82% in tax rebates, meaning that they would get a 20% share for an ultimate outlay of 3.6% or $36 billion. All this money would be for highways and bridges and get paid back by tolls and fees. Now if you look at tolls and fees as taxes by other means, it is real easy to see that these Trump taxes are all regressive. It is not just the ordinary Americans/users who would be hit directly by the tolls, but tolls on trucking would get passed along to consumers in general as a hidden sales tax. Further, a profit would be needed for the private side. So there would be a first rentier tax on the spending and then there is the second rentier tax of the interest on the money the government borrows. In other words, the financing of Trump’s infrastructure projects represents a transfer of wealth from the lower 80% to the top 5%. Oh, and Trump maintains the fiction that this spending would NOT increase the federal debt because it is “paid for”. As rigged for the rich as this program is the joke is that the private side is largely steering clear of it. When you have a tremendous casino like Wall Street running full blast, the rich can make a lot more money playing there than in some project that might tie up their funds for decades and at a much lower rate of return. That is there are still much better scams out there than the one Trump is offering them. But hey, Trump, populist, yeh!

Russ
November 17, 2016

I’m not going anywhere.
The last refuge of scoundrels, when losing arguments is ad hom and insults.
You are a troll; go away…

and as to commenter Russ . . .

Pwog , Weft and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

@ DC
“Is it really too late change that future “if all the right things are done”, even in theory?”

Yes. There is just too damn much already “in the pipeline” (so-to-speak). David Suzuki said that directly in the late 80’s; and look at where we are today; still playing climate games and doing nothing, in fact, to mitigate the problem.
This fits perfectly with Ian’s thread title; Living in the Truth Or Dying In Lies.
Those of us living in truth accept the inevitable and find meaningful things to fill our lives; enjoying every day we get.
I very much liked your John L. King quote. ” He who is not surprised when the future comes, lives very close to the truth.”
Despair over an election outcome exhibited by so many is ample evidence of a society gone off the rails. I want and take no part in such a society; and geography has nothing to do with it; it’s a state of being.

Mandos
November 17, 2016

Ah, the Sophist Mandos, is going to set all aright.
The Paris Accord is a sham, a bad feel good joke.

The world has already well proved that a one world government is not possible at this time.
This (the world) is going to end badly because of a world gone insane with globalism that just cannot work; not now and certainly not tomorrow.
We’re already skirting around WWIII with Russia; and that danger is not past.
Presidents no longer determine events; people we do not know, make decisions way beyond their pay grade.
And we ultimately pay the consequences with our lives.
Allegiance to a government, any government, is the first step to enslavement…

Mandos makes some interesting points … which dovetails with another analysis.
Many are not aware of the secret military alliance which survives WW II. Basically, intel sharing with specific areas of responsibility was carrved up between Britain, the USA, and Canada. They and the Commonwealth and now NATO are in effect a bloc controlling the UN on terms inherited from the Potsdam Conference where FDR set the terms for control of the postwar world as a condition of Lend Lease.
The IPCC – a UN bureaucracy – says on its website that it collates scientific papers. This is done under the assumption that man has wrecked the climate and leads directly to position papers which set government policies. The \’science\’ is limited by lack of research outside parameters, directly giving rise to \’consensus\’ as nothing else is financed. In fact, dissent is punished : scholars and scientists need funding like everyone else. Media control simplifies the job of biased reporting. The BBC even had censorship of any reports indicating lack of certainty.
That\’s a pretty good job of obscuring the fact that there has not been any progress from the shaman reading entrails when it comes to forecasting the future. It has not happened. There is no data to report.
Meteorologists and weathermen noting this in their TV programs were censored. The originator of the Weather Network continues his open scorn, as do senior and retired NASA scientists and groupings of disagreeing PhDs.
Education has long been affected by Julian Huxley\’s UNESCO, which sets \’standards\’ for educational programs globally. That means content is circumscribed. If you think global governance means progress in reining in corporate control ( rather than expediting it ) then you might have a look at YouTube videos describing the hatchet job made to the \’education\’ system in a series around \’The Dumbing Down\’ reports by Charlotte Iserbyt : institutional punishment of students to discourage learning and dysfunctional techniques being curricula to drive home the message.
Military propaganda cannot ignore the potential for driving panic as a method of controlling the energy markets. It isn\’t just the tax that is as stake, but removing national and local opposition to control of land use by making it subject to international control. The culprits ? Those who control the military.
Conspiracy theory ? Go to Transcend Media and read the sickening report on the NPT TRAP which illustrates perfectly the depths of cynical deception and institutional murder ( such as the Secret Behind the Sanctions ) current in our world.
Reflect on the idea that the perpetrators of war support this initiative – a greater destroyer of numbers of humanity and the planetary ecology should not be imagined. The UN Security Council is, after all, controlled by nuclear armed nations. Such public servants and altruists are a horror far outmatching \’what ifs\’ of climate.
Do they lie as a matter of policy ? The US and UK are masters of propaganda. Look up \”Leading to War\’ for an education in deception.

I believe Ian has sometimes noted that what is moral often lines up with what works, in a practical sense.

When people fret about population control it always reminds me that making sure women have the power to control our own fertility is the best way to do that.

Ugh, my above comment was from my mobile, which is shit, so my posting wrought with errors, but my message is to the point.. The internet here is shit, but all I’ve got.
But Hugh is operating from lala land and far to reasonable given the circumstances.
But then he reflects the status quo, who fancy themselves as uber informed and ahead of the pack.
Well, they’ll be sucking hind tit very soon…

@different clue,

Are you ever going to get a clue different from what the corporate media tells you? News flash, it’s all lies.

It isn’t Trump who frightens me. His cabinet appointments; the petit bourgeois ideologues whom the appointed bring into America’s bureaucracy; the judges and teachers and endowments to ‘christian’ universities; and the general encouragement to similar right-wing movements which Trump’s ‘victory’ provides — these frighten me.

On a planet experiencing climate change with more impact each season, limited resources and rising global population growth, Trump’s rise in in America (with the LePens, Straches and Petrys anxious to have their turn) makes more serious development of nationalistic and fascist governments possible.

Trump and people like him aren’t the last stop; they’re the Prologue, and that is what frightens me.

Amazing how the hostility comes out “pants-wetting snowflakes”…really, how childish?

But we are seeing a lot of that. Naturally it is (US after all) bullying types of behaviour, against Asians, pick on a small Asian girl. Hate Muslims, pick on Muslim women. Hate gay men, pick on a 75 year old (these are all real stories by the way).

Brave white ‘men’ doing this. The doors have been opened to those bullies, cowards, full of hostility. Full of anger at whatever and whoever looking for an excuse, any excuse, to lash out…not at anyone that can fight back of course, that would be too dangerous.

@XFR, someofparts & nihil obstet — To your very different points–yes!

@V. Arnold, et al.

1) I agree that the climate change tipping point was long ago reached (probably in the ’80’s) and there is no stalling or reversing it.

2) It is simply false that “nothing has been done” about it. What has been done, what is being done, and what will be done cannot stall or reverse what is to come, but it may have a cumulative mitigating effect somewhere down the road — essentially the best we could hope for under the circumstances.

3) White people have been freaking out about the overpopulation problem — due to “those people’s constant breeding” — for my entire (longish) lifetime, they were doing it long before I was born, and they continue to do so. It’s ALWAYS about “those people” (brown and black) breeding “too much,” never is it about white folks hogging too many resources and polluting with abandon.

This is obvious as sin, and it’s repeated right here in this thread. Is it any wonder people on the other side of this freak out think the Euro-Americans are full of self-serving crap? And those on the other side of the freak out won’t do what they are being commanded to do by the overpopulation gurus.

Which is not to say they are doing nothing. They are doing what they can under very difficult circumstances. But as the Chinese discovered long ago, controlling population growth is a complex and almost intractable problem even with draconian policies to limit breeding. The best way to do it, barring the reimposition of slaughters and famines which were the favored tactics of the western colonial era, is to raise overall living standards and to provide women with the tools and tactics to control their own reproduction. It’s not some mystery yet to be solved.

I love how the snarky crap of fascist fanbois is soon overtaken by the news from the Trump admin:

Jeffrey Session as AG. (Clue: really hates black people)

Flynn as NSA (Clue: really hates Muslims)

Hahah, what a funny joke, huh? I guess we should have taken the Trumpistas at their word when they told us that it wasn’t going to be a big deal since white folks are just sooo enlightened and they weren’t really racist nutters, huh?

Morons.

My question is how long will sites that purport themselves to be savvy and “kewel” keep clinging to their Trump love until they realize they look like a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots?

MoA? 100% Trump normalization
Naked Capitalism: 100% Trump normalization
The Saker: 100% Trump normalization

I was wondering if Ian or someone might write a little post about how the post-Bernie nihilistic support for Trump on the “left” someone got so completely morphed into legitimate Trump-love?

I thought the “left’s” support for Trump was so that the “system/Empire could burn down” but all I see now is Trump-love as far as the eye can see.

Funny how that worked, huh? It’s almost like people were played, huh?

Way out of bounds?

Spoken like a true defender of the new Trump campaign “STFU!”.

What you and all of the others seem to be missing – not that it’s much of a surprise coming from the fake left – is that being against HRC does NOT mean that you have to give Trump or anyone who tries to normalize him a freaking chance or is that concept to difficult for you and others to understand?

If we want to end/change the system then you have to NOT allow the soft-soap of propaganda to ameliorate your positions – e.g., NC, MoA, the Saker, etc etc.

If we are going to change things then that means not accepting HRC et al AND ALSO not accepting Trump. Understand?

Probably not.

@ Ron Showalter

Ah, poor Ron. Your words might ring so much truer if you had not always been so rabidly pro-Clinton and so devoted to Democrap talking points.

Maybe this: Trump ain’t ideal, but he was the only one allowed to get to the point where we could vote for someone who would derail the crazy train the PC and neo-lib types have been pushing in recent decades.

Some pushback was required for the sake of all our sanity–we will have to wait and see how this imperfect lever back toward balance works out. It will look messy, because such a dynamic can never be effected with scalpel-like precision.

And I say this as someone who has always been a strong progressive left supporter, but even so, I can see where we allowed too much crazy into our rhetoric. Thinking persons can only tolerate so much cognitive dissonance, no matter in which direction those biases are pushing. At some point, one must insist on accuracy.

Accuracy rules.

@V. Arnold

I’ve never thought your population statements aligned with the white-folk freak out over it. I expect you’re close to right about the “natural” carrying capacity of North America, and we could extrapolate that to the rest of the globe and come up with a maximum carrying capacity of about a billion, give or take. But surprisingly enough, there are 7 plus billion of us and still growing, and but for a widespread deterioration of living standards for the masses and isolated famines (like in Yemen) caused by imperialist interference, 7 billion + seems to be a manageable number. Anyone care for 8?

Despite deteriorating living standards for many, by the way, in much of the world current living standards are vast improvements over those imposed on the common people by the British Empire, as one example.

As for “getting out” I lived in California for most of my life, and as soon as I had the opportunity I got out of there for the wide open spaces of New Mexico, often considered a “foreign country” by other Americans. For me, leaving the US was never an option. New Mexico is about as close to “not US” as I could get.

Heads buried deep in the sand:

* Progs are still babbling about not wanting to “normalize” Trump. He’s the President-elect.
* Progs want to ban “fake news”. Republicans control the entire government and (soon) SCOTUS.

Some good articles putting the prog/media psychic break into context:

* Jared Taylor explains how the prog media tried to meme a fake reality into existence, and somehow convinced only themselves.
* Scott Alexander makes the case that Trump is entirely conventional on [insert CultMarx litany of -ists and -phobias].

Let’s verbally abuse each other a little more. That’ll teach Donald Trump a lesson!

Man, that is some fast-acting kool-aid!!!

Why, it’s only been just a little over a week since Trump stole the election yet we’ve already been treated to a plethora of instances displaying this ingenious line of reasoning:

If you’re white, you now somehow can no longer be a racist b/c (fill in some instance of puke-worthy buffoonery here).

And, boy and girls, it doesn’t end with racism as the the sexist/sexual predator-in-Chief has ably demonstrated!!!!

Yup, that’s right, now if you have a demonstrated/recorded past of being racist, being sexist or guilty of sexual assault you are miraculously absolved of said behavior b/c (Trump?)

Holy eff.

@Che Pasa: The best way to (stop or reverse population growth) is to raise overall living standards and to provide women with the tools and tactics to control their own reproduction.

On this we agree. I have said this before, in many different places.

But I only got to this part (or the part about moving to New Mexico, which is awesome, because beautiful state!) because I like to see what different people think, even those I don’t take seriously (on this, I agree w/Mark from Ireland’s comment above). And I’m not taking you seriously anymore.

Because the following statement is just garbage, and I’ve gotten so sick of people throwing either gross delusion or deliberate lies like this around that I’m done giving them extra chances once they say it:

It’s ALWAYS about “those people” (brown and black) breeding “too much,” never is it about white folks hogging too many resources and polluting with abandon.

I’ve seen a LOT of people talk about this in recent years, almost all of them on the left and almost none of them in the slightest racist; pretty much all of them want fewer people *period* and don’t care where the fewer people come from.

We do need to work on both, population and resource consumption, and again, I haven’t seen anyone saying we’re overpopulated or in danger of being overpopulated even suggest that we aren’t also overconsuming our resources.

Nothing about “those people” is in the text, the subtext, or has anything to do with the text, nor is such reasonably inferrable.

I’ve also seen a LOT of people on the left make the same assertion that you just did, in complete ignorance and/or delusional blindness to the world around them. I’m sorry, but if you think we don’t have too many people in the world and efforts to slow down population growth are due to evil white racism, then you are just as much as threat to the world’s continued existence as the dumbasses who wanted a contained war with Russia.

At this point, I’m done giving a good faith benefit of the doubt to people who make statements like yours. You know it’s not what anyone was even contemplating in this thread so bringing it up is either some sort of pointless virtue signalling or an effort to distract from the issue .

Either you haven’t investigated this issue at all or you are too blind to look around if you think 7 billion is working out reasonably well. We are using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate.Species are going extinct everywhere from a multiplicity of causes. I happen to like all the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the beasts of the land and all the little fishies in the deep blue see, and I would like to see the lot of them survive. Even if you are the sort of scumbag (and I’m not saying you are, but there are plenty such) who just cares about humans, it’s kind of unpredictable what the decimation of our food change and the entire web of our ecosystem will do to our continued survival.

@Che Pasa one more time: You said: I expect you’re close to right about the “natural” carrying capacity of North America, and we could extrapolate that to the rest of the globe and come up with a maximum carrying capacity of about a billion, give or take.

If you think the various comments about overpopulation are correct, then why did your previous post on the subject talk about how it was all white bigots saying this? I thought about your second comment a second, went back and looked, and now I’m wondering if you just like insulting people for the hell of it. Or just doing your part to help build the identity politics coffin?

@CP

The US population has increased by more than 50% since 1970, 125 million people. while the Americas have mirrored Africa in population and growth during that time. The problem is that there is a divergence predicted that will take the Africa’s population to 4 billion by 2100 equaling Asia’s population at the same time that the America’s population will have stabilized near where it is today at about one billion and Asia’s has started to fall.

A lot can happen in 85 years and this predicted African growth will cause extreme problems there that technology won’t be able to address. This is predicted but today US consumers use about five times the resources as much of the world’s population use and we generated most of the GW causing carbon now in the atmosphere so we, western civilization, are the problem.

@MW and P

You make my point for me. Thanks.

Both of you appear to lack something called empathy, as you appear to be unable to see things from the point of view of the Other. In the context of the question it is a matter of placing pretty much the entire burden of population control (like climate change mitigation) on those least able to do much about it in the short term.

Is it bigotry? That’s your word MW, not mine. I’d say it’s essentially denial and an offloading of responsibility. The history of this sort of thing is a big reason why progress on these issues and many others is so often stalled. The burden cannot be placed solely or primarily on those least able to carry the load, but that’s what many population control and climate change mitigation advocates have wanted and tried to do. Because there are just too many of “them.” And they chop down forests and burn the wood and their poop pollutes the rivers, and they’ve got to be made to stop it. By force if they won’t do it voluntarily.

The Malthusian population growth projections were long ago discredited, btw. Population growth is never a straight line.

The best way to deal with population growth and climate change mitigation is through raising living standards and by providing women with the tools and tactics to control their own reproduction. Both are tried and true and successful methods, and they can work fairly quickly if they aren’t abandoned mid-stream, which is essentially what happened with the ideological victories of neoliberalism and neoconservativism — which rely on “growth”, exploitation of people and resources, and use of force to control inevitable rebellions for their temporary success.

@ Ché Pasa
November 19, 2016

Very good and point on post.
Empathy, the missing link to understanding other, as you say.
Without empathy all reason towards life is lost.
I’ll leave it there…

@MW

And you also.

International Co-operation is where good intentions go to die. In a “perfect world”, a National Protectionist survival-mode America could force the pace of skycarbon drawdown, all within the laws of physical and ecological possibility. It would be a multi-year commitment and effort in the teeth of international opposition and obstruction and subversion.

Here is how it would work. First we in the US would figure out how much carbon is released per unit of physical production of things. Then we would figure out which countries emit more per unit of thing-production then we do. We would ban imports from these countries. We would re-patriate our industries-held-hostage in foreign-captivity in these countries and rebuild those industries here, where we would produce at less-carbon-per-item those things which we currently import at more-carbon-per-item.

Second, we would institute the Fee and Dividend on all carbon-containing fossil fuels at the mine-mouth or well-head. The imposed extra price would follow these products downstream all the way through the economy, punishing their use and rewarding things-production and service-performance achieved with LESS carbon output as opposed to MORE carbon output. Once we have imposed the Hansen Fee and Dividend plan against fossil carbon withIN our National Economic borders, we would ban imports from any country which fails to impose the same exact plan within its own country-state borders.

These two steps would reduce carbon output in two ways. First, they would reduce production in the MORE carbon-intensive production areas and bring it back to our American LESS carbon-intensive production area. Second, they would reduce the overall amount of trade in the world. And international trade is in itself a major cause of global warming all by itself. I have read that one ultra super-ginormous container ship emits as much carbon as a hundred million average cars. If we shrank international trade enough to retire 10 super container ships from service, we would reduce carbon output by as much as if we took a billion cars off the road.

Then, we could make our own use of things and energy more efficient than it now is. And becasue we wouldn’t be subject to predatory undercutting by forced imports from carbon inferior places working the differential-conditions-arbitrage rackets, we would be able to achieve these higher efficiencies without having the higher-efficient domestic producer-performer driven bankrupt by the lower efficiency foreign producer-performer.

And at the same time as we are shrinking our carbon output within our Belligerent Militant Protectionist borders, we can increase our skycarbon-suckdown and biosequestration within those same borders. We could re-flood all the marshland and swampland that we have spent 200 years draining for agriculture, and let all these restored wetlands resume their role of sucking carbon out of the air through plant growth, and packing that carbon down under the water in the form of re-growing peat beds and muck layers. We could apply everything we are learning about skycarbon-capture farming and capture skycarbon over every square foot of America’s million square miles of farm/pasture/rangeland. We could encourage the return of the beaver to its pre-settlement numbers and let the beavers rebuild their dams all over America. Four Hundred Million beaver ponds would be four hundred million MORE sites of skycarbon suckdown and underwater carbon storage.

There. Problem on the way to solution without any bullshit delay due to wasting time on bullshit International Co-operation bullshit.