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A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

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Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#71

Post by jhbadger »

wayoutthere wrote: post #27
ReadEvalPost wrote: post #21

Notably missing Doomer Optimists who accept the reality and inevitability of collapse, while viewing it as an opportunity for localist, agrarian communities to rise in the wake.

Anarcho-communism long predates the Doomers and has always had similar framing. It was real popular in the late 60s / early 70s; the world collapsing is something we’ve known about for a very long time but people have to get fantastically wealthy somehow so we keep doing the old thing.

It's popular whenever society seems to be changing too fast and people think "going back to the simple life" is the solution. Not only was it popular now and in the 1960s, but also in the 19th century when people were weirded out by the Industrial Revolution. People like Henry David Thoreau in the US and William Morris in the UK.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#72

Post by thisiszilff »

wayoutthere wrote: post #32
abduhl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s currently understood that crime rates in aggregate are down because people stayed home during the pandemic. So, burglary/mugging/drug dealing and other crimes that mostly take place when people are out have fallen. On the flip side, crimes driven by annoyances (for lack of a better term) or “fun” have gone up: murders, domestic violence, car jackings, commercial theft below the local prosecution limit, e…

Where I live, the murders are about social media and “the rap game”. It used to be about drugs but weed is legal now and there are enough junkies to go around. The entire criminalization of drugs was invented by the Nixon White House as a pretext to oppress black people and “hippies”. There are official tapes and transcripts where it’s all described in great detail so this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The war on drugs…

> The entire criminalization of drugs was invented by the Nixon White House as a pretext to oppress black people and “hippies”. There are official tapes and transcripts where it’s all described in great detail so this isn’t a conspiracy theory.

When I've looked into this in the past, almost everything points to an alleged quote from John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's advisors, with Dan Baum in 1994. The alleged quote wasn't published in Baum's 1996 book and only later appeared in 2016 for an article in Harper's Bazaar, 16 years after Ehrlichman's death. On its own it never seemed like compelling evidence, especially as Ehrlichman was dead when the quote was first published.

Are there any other sources you are familiar with?

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#73

Post by chobeat »

giantg2 wrote: post #55
chobeat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a compass, it's a tool. You give it a purpose

And what purpose have you given it? Do you have any theoretical uses?

well I wrote it lol. But it helps me navigate the politics of it and try to build better communication and praxis in my own politics.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#74

Post by Manuel_D »

skillpass wrote: post #66

Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced…

I think the allure is escapism: life is boring and unfulfilling for many people, so they are attracted to the notion that some spectacular event is going to suddenly upend their lives and make life more interesting.

One of the other patterns I see is justification of apathy. People rationalize lack of desire to work or apply themselves with the justification that the world is going to end relatively soon, so why bother.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#75

Post by paraph1n »

Manuel_D wrote: post #69

I once encountered a reddit user vocally insisting in a regional subreddit that industrialized society would collapse in the next 10-20 years. I poked around his comment history and it was non-stop commenting in /r/collapse pondering the kind of collapse that would happen, theories as to what would trigger it, and plans for how they would somehow survive and turn it into a utopian society for themselves. Like 9 month…

Not sure if you read the article, but both you and the redditor you are describing fit archetypes explicitly called out by the author.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#76

Post by pW9GLKxm9taFEhz »

throw0101a wrote: post #26

For those that would like to know how to rebuild civilization, the book The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell is a handy reference on things to know and do. General bibliography: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ Deep dives on particular topics of agriculture, food and clothing, substances (charcoal, lime), materials (wood, cement, furnaces, glass), medicine, etc: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-readi…

Also relevant is Long Now's "Manual for Civilization"

https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#77

Post by Karrot_Kream »

skillpass wrote: post #66

Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced…

The era of Mutually Assured Destruction inspired tons of post-nuclear-fallout fiction. I'm pretty sure Collapse is just the modern version of the same thing.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#78

Post by titzer »

Hokusai wrote: post #36

It's interesting but not insightful. Anyway, I would find more conducive to stop talking nonsense about collapses and focus on the many technologies that are being developed. We got a million times better at creating vaccines. AIDS vaccine is on the way. Clean technologies are growing exponentially and a future of clean-air cities is approaching fast. Working from home thru video conferences, I saw that in sci-fi whe…

The irony is that the people who see collapse the most clearly are not actually the ones who spend all day inside looking at computer screens. Spend some time down at your local waterway, pick up some garbage, and behold just a small sliver of the millions of tons, perhaps billions of tons, of shit that this economy has produced and just dumped or discarded right into the ecosystem.

The little squares that you gaze into are just one massive distortion field. If you see whizbang video conferencing and techno hopium, then that's your lens.

If you want to build a better future, please take a stark look at what's actually going down on this planet, and it's not just better Zoom calls.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#79

Post by ben_w »

chobeat wrote: post #60
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found Collapse believers to be composed of mostly people from highly developed Western nations. From what I've read online, many of these folks cannot visualize a world where their society/nation may backslide in a couple aspects (e.g. government corruption or infrastructure standards), but still continue to function mostly normally. Most of these folks have never seen rampant political corruption, low hy…

well, they are already living it, westeners have the privilege to believe it's not something that is happening but something that will happen in the future and take distance from it framing it as a collapse after peak prosperity. Third world never had peak prosperity or at least it didn't look particularly different from their past. But they are gonna starve and migrate too even if they don't call it collapse.

I think you’re discussing a very different thing to the parent and grandparent comments. Yes, by the standard that counts the end of the Roman Empire as a collapse, any given nation or union of nations may still collapse and those within may starve or migrate; this still won’t look like any of the post-apocalyptic narratives that represent the loudest and most obvious examples of this topic.

I expect that, much like every other community, the loudest “collapsers” are merely an embarrassing minority, and certainly I hear that the people who stockpile food and maintain a strong relationship with their neighbours roll their eyes at those who stockpile ammunition and do nothing else.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#80

Post by cratermoon »

majormajor wrote: post #61
cratermoon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty cherry you've picked.

Please be my guest, if you can find month-by-month shooting and/or homicide numbers for NYC/Chicago/LA/other cities that have seen big 2019->2021 homicide spikes. I spent a few minutes trying, but this one the only one I could find nicely broken down. The coarse yearly numbers tell us these crimes have increased, they don't let us see how they play out with regard to the different things that changed in 2020.

looking at just 2019-2021 is cherry picking. Look back to the 70s and 80s if you really want to see that our current "crime wave" is nothing more than a made-up crisis for pushing a law-and-order agenda.
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