Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world. Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.
And in 20 years time, it will be your turn to be retroactively punished for currently belonging to a society that is burning the world?
Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
261–270 of 314 posts
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) It's not group membership, it's targetted 2) I try to live in such a way that I'm not a wasteful glutton who misuses communal resources.
it might be that you get punished despite trying to live properly as you claim in 2). Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.
Moreover the spoils of doing it once make it easier to do so again.
What possible reason is there not to take those spoils and return them to the commons from whence they were stolen?
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the people who are destroying our biosphere thought they would face appropriate consequences, they would behave very differently.
Bad motives will find their way. Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit). To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no more time left for this kind of pragmatism. It doesn’t matter it people disagree, the truth is supporting meat consumption is supporting industries that are actively killing us and the planet.
It would also help the planet greatly if we stopped sending aid to Africa and other poor nations. Without our help, their populations would decline quite a bit, reducing their meat consumption and emissions by a huge amount. I know this is an unpopular sentiment but we have to be pragmatic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. It richly rewards and strongly encourages behaviors we consider asocial and destructive. Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement. The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing…
Sure but what's the alternative? How can we do better? I don't dislike utopias my issue is that they tend to be dystopic when practiced.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disregarding the question as to why humans are inclined to behave in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of others and the environment—writing this off as “natural” or blaming it on a devil and an angel on our shoulders—is, in my opinion, key to ensuring the ongoing tragedy of the commons at planet scale. Yes, in a free society with capitalism people have more opportunities to behave this way. Yes, that’s why…
" suggesting an alternative to capitalism for some reason, I’m reasonably sure that in any of them the society would suffer from the same issues" capitalism is a term so vague its meaningless in a policy discussion Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is spesifically responsible for many of the problems we are facing now. the fact that people worship it is also a problem, we have media hosts calling large scale landlord…
But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
Problems arise when this basic mechanic is abused: e.g., market participants lie about the value they create, including through concealment of side-effects (let’s drain the aquifers or dump PFAS into the river and pretend we didn’t know), use other measures than actual value when investing (line goes up so who cares if business is unethical or its business model is fundamentally flawed), etc.
Which, again, ultimately comes down to humans trying to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad motives will find their way. Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit). To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
Eliminating the gains from theft and destruction isn't some cruel and unusual eye for an eye punishment.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but what's the alternative? How can we do better? I don't dislike utopias my issue is that they tend to be dystopic when practiced.
Start with the London School of Economics podcast series, read works by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, the late economic anthropologist scholar David Graeber, the finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, there's plenty of alternative configurations that don't have slavery, child labor, scamming and the sex trade as the default nodus operandi.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Start with the London School of Economics podcast series, read works by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, the late economic anthropologist scholar David Graeber, the finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, there's plenty of alternative configurations that don't have slavery, child labor, scamming and the sex trade as the default nodus operandi.
What is your own personal takeaway, from reading that material, as far as the alternative to capitalism (if any)?
As an analogy and an extreme example, pretend there is an evolutionary biologist among a group that believes in creationism.
The creationist has a very simple narrative, only takes a few words. The evolutionary biologist has a much bigger task at hand. They're starting not from an ideology but from a discipline of analysis.
That's the struggle. The neoliberal models are extremely simple to explain, they are taught to elementary school children who all understand the logic of it.
But the anthropologists and economic historians of the world have a different story to tell and they cannot be similarly summarized.
They require careful study and reflection like learning any type of discipline, such as a new programming paradigm or the implications of a new kind of data structure.
And that's my true takeaway here, the answers to your questions are as deep and rich as any other modern school of thought and like any other accurate depiction of reality, say modern physics, chemistry, or biology, there's simply no way to stuff it into 1-2 minutes of casual reading on a social news site.
I guess that's it actually. Instead of starting from an ideology we start from a discipline of analysis. Any summary I can give here will only be totalling ideology, which is what we need to get away from. People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
So this is a bad form for that kind of learning.
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As an aside that's a major breakthrough in a problem I've been struggling with for over a decade. "this is a bad form for that kind of learning." I'm going to print that out to remember it.
Re: Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also help the planet greatly if we stopped sending aid to Africa and other poor nations. Without our help, their populations would decline quite a bit, reducing their meat consumption and emissions by a huge amount. I know this is an unpopular sentiment but we have to be pragmatic.
That’s not being pragmatic. You’re saying “cut aid to countries whose per capita resource usage is 14x lower than that of the US.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...