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Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

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Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#61

Post by rayiner »

johnisgood wrote: post #45
flixic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what the solution is. Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta pro…

> It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. Would you please elaborate on how "rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media" leads to the burning of Amazon forests? I would also like to add these two related paragraphs: > According to various reports on the subject (Greenpeace, FAO), livestock farming, including soya production, is respo…

So we could reduce something that accounts for just 3.4% of global emissions by 75%?

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#62

Post by LoSboccacc »

frankbreetz wrote: post #19

From the article: "Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither. Alone, America cannot protect our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader." This is a true statement, I just hope the damage done can be undone. We are stronger together than we are alone.

> Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither

let me show you exhibit A:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal

"allies" is a romantic concept that doesn't hold any water, only the return of investment forecast drives action and inaction.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#63

Post by jfengel »

rayiner wrote: post #42
frankbreetz wrote: post #19

From the article: "Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither. Alone, America cannot protect our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader." This is a true statement, I just hope the damage done can be undone. We are stronger together than we are alone.

Is that empirically true? The USA was the largest economy in the world by 1890, despite pursing a policy of isolationism for the entire century before that. By the time we entered the First World War, we accounted for a quarter of the world economy, about as much as all of Western Europe put together.

That was also the last expansionist era in world history. The US was able to expand into new, fertile land and exploit new mining resources. The land wasn't completely empty, of course, but it was not being intensely farmed with the new large-scale agricultural techniques.

The expansion wasn't all of it; it was also an era of technological innovation in which the Americans were leaders (though Europe also produced a fair amount of innovation). But the expansionism had another advantage: while Europe was busy fighting a series of wars for control over the same territory, the US had a lot more freedom to devote to increasing production rather than destruction.

So the 19th century may not be an accurate model for the 21st. Isolationism was more feasible then because it was a large, self-sufficient nation. Today, capitalism has broken production down into finer and finer pieces and it's much harder for even a very large nation to compete against the combined strength of the rest of the world. If we don't collaborate, and others do, they'll gain a relative advantage that will slowly eat into our dominance. We can't simply conquer new territory because there isn't any, and even if we did, ownership of land isn't as important in a technological era.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#64

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #61
johnisgood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. Would you please elaborate on how "rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media" leads to the burning of Amazon forests? I would also like to add these two related paragraphs: > According to various reports on the subject (Greenpeace, FAO), livestock farming, including soya production, is respo…

So we could reduce something that accounts for just 3.4% of global emissions by 75%?

[deleted]

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#65

Post by davvolun »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #62
frankbreetz wrote: post #19

From the article: "Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither. Alone, America cannot protect our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader." This is a true statement, I just hope the damage done can be undone. We are stronger together than we are alone.

> Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither let me show you exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal "allies" is a romantic concept that doesn't hold any water, only the return of investment forecast drives action and inaction.

That is effectively fixed by amending the statement

> Nations with ardent and sincere allies

And, clearly though certainly teetering toward "no true scotsman," an ally who is only superficially allied (Germany and the USSR during the first half of WWII, or the Allies and USSR after the war) should not be considered an "ally," for all intents and purposes.

And I think it's clear in that specific example you gave how well selling out their allies worked for U.K. and France. If "greed" is your only motivation, eventually your greedy allies will sell you out as well. See, Prisoner's Dilemma or pretty much the entire field of ethics.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#66

Post by davvolun »

dariusj18 wrote: post #47
Nasrudith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of one thing I noticed about nations and needing a "designated driver". Occasionally one prosperous democratic nation does something which the rest of the world can tell would be a terrible idea, warn them as such and get ignored because so many feel so strongly about. Predictably disaster strikes. The int It makes me wonder if some sort of international veto arrangement might be a good idea - unfortu…

The problem is sometimes someone has to choose the least bad option. Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with, but not choosing is an even worse option. You can see this happening right now with Brexit IMO.

> Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with

Which is part of the reason why most democracies in history are representative democracies; they represent the interests of their constituents, not their constituents personal choices.

A representative should properly make the decision that, in their view, presents the best possible result for their constituency, not "what their constituents would choose if they were elected."

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#67

Post by vekker »

rayiner wrote: post #61
johnisgood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. Would you please elaborate on how "rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media" leads to the burning of Amazon forests? I would also like to add these two related paragraphs: > According to various reports on the subject (Greenpeace, FAO), livestock farming, including soya production, is respo…

So we could reduce something that accounts for just 3.4% of global emissions by 75%?

I'm pretty sure that's wrong or the wrong data point. Livestock is the largest source of methane emissions and methane plays a larger role in climate change.

Not to mention that eating less meat is just karmically/ethically way more optimal, regardless of what the data says.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#68

Post by AnimalMuppet »

flixic wrote: post #34
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

This was a good essay: well-written, cogent, and thought-provoking. I know there are a lot of folks that want to take this essay and bash it into some political points. I think that's probably part of the problem Mattis is describing; our desire to make social media hay out of whatever we're given. He does have a point about current politics in there. It's hidden quite a bit. His larger point, though, is about how in…

> I don't know what the solution is. Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta pro…

> I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world.

Go further back. The Civil War could be viewed as large-scale tribalism. After that, there were regional and ethnic tribalisms. The World Wars pushed us into a bigger tribalism - the US became one giant tribe. (It still had the smaller tribalisms, but they became less important.) That kind of held through the 50s. In the late 60s, the hippie movement could be regarded as a new tribalism (and a rejection of the old one). The US "big tribalism" has been progressively fragmenting into a number of "small tribalisms" since then.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#69

Post by johnisgood »

vekker wrote: post #67
rayiner wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we could reduce something that accounts for just 3.4% of global emissions by 75%?

I'm pretty sure that's wrong or the wrong data point. Livestock is the largest source of methane emissions and methane plays a larger role in climate change. Not to mention that eating less meat is just karmically/ethically way more optimal, regardless of what the data says.

Note that there is a difference between methane and carbon. My quote only mentioned carbon.

> The most important greenhouse gases from animal agriculture are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane, mainly produced by enteric fermentation and manure storage, is a gas which has an effect on global warming 28 times higher than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide, arising from manure storage and the use of organic/inorganic fertilizers, is a molecule with a global warming potential 265 times higher than carbon dioxide.

Additionally, he missed the fact that deforestation has other negative impacts besides contributing to climate change.

All things considered, meat consumption is pretty much the main reason for the destruction of Amazonian rainforest, using up incredible amounts of land, food, and water, as well as producing a statistically significant amount of pollution. Then there is desertification, MDR pathogens, and so forth.

If you want the total percentages per sector: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Some more reading (website is currently down for me but it was available a couple of minutes ago): https://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#70

Post by dariusj18 »

rayiner wrote: post #60
dariusj18 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in seeing this data. I couldn't find anything with a cursory search, can you point me in the right direction?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...

So the source for that appears to be http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm "Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD" but I can't find the methodology used. It is definitely an interesting spreadsheet to look through.
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