I’ve been called eco-fascist for suggesting anything that might help the environment, no matter how small. I’m not impressed by this buzzword.
If there are no more humans than no one will care about the environment.
They are the same piece of generic rhetorical label you slap on or argue you can’t slap on whenever it conveniences you. If your solution is just a sentence long, you are an over-simplifying things.
So what happened to the ancient civilizations that collapsed before capitalism existed? Ducks. It’s the ducks that need to be shot.
Easter Island comes to mind. They showed up, took every tree on the island, then the vegetation went away and the island had nothing left to give.
Destruction of nature & unwise use of resources, or even just multiplying to a point where even the most prudent resource management & minimal environmental impact per capita is the absolute goal could still destiny biodiversity.
This has to do with economical tendencies of living beings, not a particular socioeconomic system.
(Yes, capitalism is accelerating the process by taking away freedoms from the masses - but even a commune can decide to chop up the whole forest for wood. World is a fuck.)“Virus” might not be the best word for it tho (infestation maybe? Fits the capita growth statistics), but successful animals that oversaturate their environment (eg lots of food, no predators, longevity after procreation, tech) cause biodiversity loss (anything from local collapse to a global extinction event with cofactors like climate change or air structure change - what is novel with humans is how rapidly we are developing in our last 0.5% of existence, and how rapid the global impact we case is, it won’t take us 10s of thousands of years, we can speedrun in less than a millennia).
The lack of empathy and true understanding of reverence is the issue.
People do not respect the meat that befalls their plate, the bacteria that ferments their beers, the trees that warms their homes.
Capitalism has two routes, horde through meekness or horde through exploitation. When you horde through meekness, any worth is solely yours - you submit and embrace this moment of life wholely separate from you. You cannot control the world.
Humans are a virus, because we reach for the stars as we eviscerate our host. Lest we learn compassion and empathy, we will consume this earth. The flooding isn’t biblical this time, it’s predicted by science as man decays.
Could dumb shit like this be in lemmy.ml exclusively?
And capitalism is a creation of what?
Humans you say?
Your comic is shit
Oh wait the comic was earnest? I literally thought it was making fun of people who say things like this. Goddamn.
Big “and yet you participate in the system” energy.
No?
What the fuck gave you that impression?
I’m saying the comic is shit because they are just multiplying causes, not that they’re being hypocrites.
Everyone just makes up shit to hear their own voices
You need to chill the fuck out dude.
No one has to suffer your existence but you.
I literally medically CANNOT chill the fuck out, dude, despite decades of psychiatry and dozens of drug trials
Thanks for caring
I never implied you had to suffer my existence, but I’m sure as fuck not going to let you actively twist my message with whatever the fuck you thought you were doing.
If you can’t chill out then you maybe need to not be on social media.
I find it hilarious that you have zero clue how much of a fragile bigot that makes you
Wat
Holy shit dude… stop trying to be a victim all of the time.
I’m not being a bigot, you dweeb. I’m saying social media isn’t exactly known to improve one’s mental health and it seems, judging by you tirade through this post’s comment section, you could stand for a break.
are you just randomly putting words together now
If humans weren’t greedy dicks then capitalism or any other form of government would work perfectly. You can’t force humans to not be greedy dicks. No matter what system is being instituted it is susceptible to greedy dicks.
capitalism or any other form of government
But capitalism isn’t a form of government tho.
Nor is communism of even feudalism.Oops you’re right I meant economic system
Our entire schtick is co operation, it’s literally why we’re the dominant life form
Your generalization is false
The majority of humanity are not greedy or obsessed with profit
The problem is that the few ridiculously greedy sociopaths that do arise per-capita are just so FUCKDAMN good at amassing power and wealth that we assume it’s the natural lot of all people
So we just test and dispose of sociopaths at birth, problem solved. We already have the tests for it.
Don’t look at me like that
and thankfully those sociopaths have enough money to get rid of idiots with those ideas that get too close to power.
Yep, which is why we need to use nontraditional power tactics like leveraging drones and cyber attacks as well as flashmob tactics and social media control
Money buys you a private army but not loyalty, we need to start early and get idealists positioned in those private armies
Make inroads with the children of billionaires tired of their parents’ excesses, this was a valuable vector during the French Revolution that almost no one talks about
More than anything we need to accept the fact that no amount of signs or shouts are going to stop the ultra wealthy from destroying everything for more imaginary numbers in an already unspendable bank account
It’s still objectively eugenics to target people based on genetic conditions, especially if the genetic condition has a not wholly undesirable result.
Yes we can, via laws & regulation (which are also laws). You have no clue about what unrestricted greed does to people especially, on the recieving end
Nope, doesn’t work because power obsessed sociopaths worm their way into government and change the laws
How naive are you?
Yes if you don’t enforce it, but you don’t want to enforce it now, do you. You love greed until you are on the receiving end
You can’t even understand your own mother and here you are making bold assumptions about the personal values of someone you met on the internet half an hour ago. Fucking classic reddit right there man
Greed is the source of nearly all human misery and it is not necessary for life at all, and I have personally witnessed what it has done to people
I do not love greed in any form and the fact you just stated that with such effortless confidence tells me our society really isn’t worth saving.
And now these statements, despite being only minor glimpses into my value system will of course immediately fill you with ten thousand assumptions as to who I am or what I think.
That’s mental illness friend
<Complaint about bold assumptions of individuals values>
< Bold assumption about all of humanity >
<Assertion of personal perspective>
<Further complaints about assumptions>
<Name calling/Labelling>
They’re coming out with some really weird blazor libraries these days.
Dammit, missed the code tags
@page "/lemmy-reply" @using HypocrisyManifest <p>Complaint about bold assumptions of individuals values</p> <p style="font-weight:bold">Bold assumption about all of humanity</p> <p>Assertion of personal perspective</p> <p>Further complaints about assumptions</p> <p>Name calling/Labelling</p>
Are you familiar with anti-trust laws ? Anti-corruption laws ?
According to you they shouldn’t exist, because a crafty psychopath will get in anyway & yes you do love being greedy as long as it benefits you, why else would you be defending capitalism.
Socialism HAS been tried & it works. You see I want everyone to get welfare, because with it you can have a safety net against the abusive owner-class. BTW, I’ve never been on reddit (I don’t even have a twitter account)
So I’ll be upfront and say i don’t know shit about socialism as a concept.
Do you have any examples of socialism that has worked (or is currently working) at modern nation scales ?
I’m genuinely not picking a fight, just looking for examples to read up on.
Cuba, Laos, Vietnam & the state of Kerala in India. China too (but they shifted to state-capitalism). Most of Latin America were electing socialist leaders as well. (Until some coup came along)
We can regulate greedy dick behaviour
Madame Guillotine can help with that
There are human societies were greed is not accepted.
Which ones? Which ones don’t damage their land or steal children from enemies or rape or steal? Please don’t try to say any indigenous tribes because they are all guilty of one or more these.
Proof that lemmy is a failed experiment already, this asshole has five upvotes
Any indigenous tribe. But seriously it was not long ago that no professional fishermen anywhere would ever overfish.
Amish
Only because they weren’t capable of it lmao.
There’s at least some evidence supporting human driven extinctions as far back as some of the earliest ‘modern’ (ie Homo sapien) hominid populations.
this is only true to the smallest of extents, there were plenty that had those behaviors, survivorship bias is not a good footing for an argument.
Survivorship bias is so important to remember when talking about human societies. Even our perceptions and knowledge of indigenous tribes is limited by survivorship bias. Consider that there may have been many more “peaceful” or “non-greedy” tribes, but they were conquered by groups of people that were more violent and selfish. There must be so many tribes that have been wiped away without a trace, tribes we know nothing about.
But the real barrier to this hypothetical “non-greedy population” idea is the matter of scale. A peaceful village of 100 people is easier to create and maintain than a peaceful global population of 8+ billion. Even if indigenous villages managed to build such utopias where greed doesn’t exist, their models wouldn’t easily scale to the world we live in now.
I welcome you to inform us of this utopia you speak of.
duck chasing meme Which human societies?
Sometimes I get frustrated with people and I think this. But then I quickly snap my mindset out of this because I know really what’s the problem. Capitalism.
As we all know, communist countries would never harm the environment for productivity.
Ah yes, the only two systems. Capitalism and communism. There is nothing else or any form of nuance out there.
Of course, thanks for admitting it
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humans also invented socialism, communism, fascism, monarchy, democracy so on and so fourth.
like, you can’t just take the worst and be like “you see this is why we need to get rid of them!”. its literally the point of the post. thats what is going on right now in the US with literally any person below the top square on the family guy race card. Would you say just because less than 1% of immigrants that are in the US have committed violent crimes, that all of them are violent criminals? If you do, I have bad news for you.
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That metaphor doesn’t work. It be more accurate to compare humans to in general bacteria and most bacteria are not harmful, there are even some know useful viruses
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Right… so less than 1% of immigrants being violent criminals, makes them equivalent to a virus?
I mean sure. yeah. You have an opinion. I won’t be continuing this conversation.
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A bunch of people thinking they outsmarted the meme by asking “who made capitalism”.
A better question is “when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?” Because the bunker-state ethnonationalist, the trumpists, the Peter Thiels and the Mark Andreesens, the Dark Enlightenment and Network State and Tech Zionism neofascists, they know exactly what they mean.
The earth is big enough to support modest human life. It’s not big enough to support billionaires’ delusions of singularity. So they imagine to purge the parts of humanity that are not their particular version of white.
Don’t fall for their fascist propaganda.
A better question is “when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?”
I don’t propose to exterminate anyone. I think it’s inevitable that the human virus will eventually kill its host.
If you think we are getting out of this worldwide authoritarianism surge without violence, you are a shitty student of history
When I said “humans are the virus,” I think people heard “so we should kill the people I don’t like,” and missed the part where I don’t like all humans.
I don’t say it anymore, because I don’t want to be overlapped with fascists who apparently say the same thing.
fascists have never left power without violence in all of human history, so keep dreaming about a peaceful solution
It’s easy, mulch all the sociopaths. Problem solved
Can I achieve something by exterminating myself? It should do something, right?
Maybe not having to live in depressing world itself would be a great achievement.
I’m sure the rhetoric stems from propaganda, I won’t disagree there. But I don’t think that trying to logic the analogy itself is the way to outline the problem with it.
Calling humans a ‘virus’ may not mean an extermination is the intention of the person regurgitating it. You can control a virus instead of just exterminating it, for example. It’s just a term people are familiar with that they associate with abusing resources and multiplying beyond a sustainable level, thus creating a toxic environment around them.
Ah, so just exterminate the correct people. Got it.
Nobody has to die if we just make billionnaires millionnaires again.
There’s no chance in hell that would happen non-violently.
Sorry no, some billionaires have to die
I disagree, there are some psychotic people in power and they don’t care one iota about anyone but themselves and maybe a small handful of like minded people. To me they should be wiped from the earth.
You are correct that the planet can support a certain number (whatever that number is), but not with these people in power.
Now will we be able to truly figure which ones are the correct ones, probably not but we need to keep looking and root them out, expose them to the world and then let nature take its role once they are all hanging from the highest most visible place for all to see what happens when you are the virus that is continuously trying to destroy the world.
Good that you clarified that :D
Gotta hand it to China. They’re a few years away from being coal free. A decade at most if they stay on course.
Unfortunately they don’t seem to be on course at all, with coal production and new coal power plants rising in 2024 to an all-time high.
While they have been implementing green energy, which is laudable, they aren’t phasing out coal at all. China seems to crave energy and has no bias about where it comes from.
Humanity: Living with nature and not causing global ecosystem crisis for thousands of years. Capitalism: Starts the industrial revolution and the need for eternal Exponential growth, resulting in massive environmental destruction over the last ~250 years. “Clearly, the humans are the problem.”
I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.
Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.
But the current crisis wasn’t, and isn’t, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.
Our distant ancestors weren’t some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.
Capitalism wasn’t even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn’t always in place.
The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it’s a progression that was damn near inevitable.
I just don’t buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there’s nothing saying it wouldn’t have been worse either. It’s a big game of what if, and there’s no current way to test technological progression theories. We can’t just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.
Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn’t exactly reject it all.
The good old slavery and crusade days.
Yeah but… Humans created capitalism, so again the root issue is that humans suck. Just think of it this way: No humans, no capitalism.
You are still shifting the blame away from capitalism. If we acknowledge capitalism as the problem, then we can change things. If we claim humans are inherently the problem, then it seems pointless to improve.
so you’re just saying we should all kill ourselves? yeah that sounds great, i assume you’re willing to go first since you believe it so strongly?
I for one don’t want me or others to die, and so i don’t go around saying poorly thought-through things on the internet.
Thank you for putting it well, I had similar thought that I wanted to express but I can never write it so coherently.
And it’s not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn’t capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or “communist”, but that definitely wasn’t capitalism) regime.
It’s definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.
People often conflate capitalism with greed because the core of capitalism depends on people acting selfishly. But other systems can also reward the greedy.
I completely agree, other systems have the potential to screw the environment as well. But capitalism is inherently like that and reached environment destroying records. I believe these things are simultaneously true.
I think it even goes beyond that. e.g. the sowjet union genuinely had issues with food security, but they still fucked up when they dried out the aral sea because they were acting shortsightedly.
Supporters of socialism/communism/anarchism/whatever-ism don’t believe that their system will never make mistakes or that it prevents all bad people from having power. But it lessens it, hopefully. If a capitalist nation were in charge during the time the aral sea disappeared, you can bet your sweet ass it would have just the same or faster.
There are a lot of people who do believe that these systems could do no wrong or repeat the narcissist’s prayer to justify any wrong doing.
True. But I suppose I should have clarified it as “intelligent, thoughtful supporters of those ideas”
But it lessens it, hopefully
It’s true that capitalistic societies don’t do any better for the environment (which was the point of my comment, they’re BOTH bad in this aspect), but at least in capitalist Europe the common people got relative wealth out of it. In the soviet union, people were oppressed by the state, poor, and got their environment destroyed.
And now that is happening in capitalist societies.
We have many decades to go until our common people are as poor as they were in the soviet union (at least in countries that were on the capitalistic side of the iron curtain), though that does seem to be the general trajectory. But soviet poverty went beyond not being wealthy - there was always a very distinct risk that the local store was out of basic necessities, and I really don’t think this is going to be common in most western european countries in this century.
Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?
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Point still stands. Nature doesn’t owe anyone a logical explanation.
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Nature is a product of atoms. So atoms suck, right?
For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.
Some people just don’t get nuances.