Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

write.as

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 176 posts

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#61

Post by majormajor »

cratermoon wrote: post #51
majormajor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so hard to find good data on this in one place. On one hand there's a pandemic, on the other hand there's police protests, etc. Year by year numbers will be so lumpy that you could support tons of narratives, I bet. I couldn't find month-by-month numbers quickly for some of the cities in that article like Chicago or NYC, but Baltimore has some: https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020 Interestingly th…

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.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#62

Post by AlexCoventry »

ivraatiems wrote: post #23

This is a Very Online taxonomy; I don't think it incorporates the vast majority of normal, not particularly Online people who are aware of these problems but aren't spending most of their energy on them. The vast majority of people are fundamentally outside of this taxonomy because even if they are thinking about ideas related to "collapse", it's as a problem someone else is going to solve for them. The biggest chall…

It's a taxonomy of political discourse regarding collapse. It's not surprising that it has little to say about people who have no political investment in ideas related to collapse.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#63

Post by cryonics »

Very not-nuanced. This article doesn't seem to be based in any kind of factual reality. It relegates the idea that rapid climate collapse is inevitable to lobbyist groups, when anyone who's read any of IPCC's reports would agree with their own conclusions that the collapse is gradual and somewhat arbitrary in its checkpoints. It restricts the "future" to a Malthusian dichotomy where we either have perfection or some kind of post-apocaplyptic agrarian society.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#64

Post by mden »

tharne wrote: post #47
ivraatiems wrote: post #23

This is a Very Online taxonomy; I don't think it incorporates the vast majority of normal, not particularly Online people who are aware of these problems but aren't spending most of their energy on them. The vast majority of people are fundamentally outside of this taxonomy because even if they are thinking about ideas related to "collapse", it's as a problem someone else is going to solve for them. The biggest chall…

> The biggest challenge in climate change (for example) is that it's simply happening on too long a timescale for the average person to pay much attention to it. I disagree. This may be a problem, but I think the bigger problem is one that was described in a post on HN a few weeks back. Namely, that most of the folks advocating for action and sacrifice on climate change are themselves unwilling to lead by example, e.…

I don't buy into the argument that if those people limited their travel and consumption then all of the sudden the non-believers will start believing. There's just no evidence that's an effective way to have societal impact. Not an exact parallel but just because people talk about wanting higher overall taxes and at the same time don't want to pay more than what is required doesn't mean they are hypocritical and it doesn't mean that if they did pay more others would follow.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#66

Post by skillpass »

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 disasters leading to mass displacement of populations, etc.).

It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse.

There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world.

Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#67

Post by jnurmine »

An interesting article, it made me think.

I doubt there is one global model or form of a collapse scenario which would happen everywhere. It's likely that some places, already hanging on the edge of chaos, would enter this state in a very short time whereas some would persist over a longer time, and some would perhaps even adapt to the changing circumstances.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#68

Post by NationalPark »

tharne wrote: post #47
ivraatiems wrote: post #23

This is a Very Online taxonomy; I don't think it incorporates the vast majority of normal, not particularly Online people who are aware of these problems but aren't spending most of their energy on them. The vast majority of people are fundamentally outside of this taxonomy because even if they are thinking about ideas related to "collapse", it's as a problem someone else is going to solve for them. The biggest chall…

> The biggest challenge in climate change (for example) is that it's simply happening on too long a timescale for the average person to pay much attention to it. I disagree. This may be a problem, but I think the bigger problem is one that was described in a post on HN a few weeks back. Namely, that most of the folks advocating for action and sacrifice on climate change are themselves unwilling to lead by example, e.…

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the science understands that we need to cut emissions on a wide scale, and that air travel by a few hundred politicians is a meaninglessly small fraction of the actual problem. This is essentially a bad faith attack on the few people in congress trying to do something about climate change. Where is your ire for the dozens of Republican congressmen who don't believe climate change is real or believe the Christian end times will happen first? Please, be serious and don't engage in contrarian purity tests that only serve to set back our attempts at mitigation.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#69

Post by Manuel_D »

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 months of this kind of commenting. The kicker was a wall of text, a dozen paragraphs long, about how he'd emerge from his bunker and become the patriarch of the local group of survivors - ultimately leading to him having several wives, of course.

While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy. I see lots of parallels with people preparing for Judgement Day: some unprecedented event is going to kill off the majority of the population leaving a chosen few to inherit the new world. These collapse predictions are often rooted in serious issues, but I find that this kind of escapism makes the average person more skeptical of serious activism.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#70

Post by chobeat »

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…

For sure there are eschatological traits, it's discussed quite commonly in the literature on the topic. We are exiting the linear, flat time of our parents and entering again in a cyclical time and we need ruptures: Collapse is one, Singularity is another but there are more on the horizon (like escape to space and so on).
Post reply on HN