Embarrassing, retarded bullshit.

I'm not sure the capitalist doomsday engine can be stopped without extraterrestrial intervention. Buying Premier Elon's Tesla cars will just feed him more funding for his polluting ass space rockets. While I don't condone killing people, wouldn't eliminating large swaths of the global population just consolidate their collective power?

I'm fine with them spraying private jets, but not on-board with the Stonehenge stunt. Our primitive ancestors didn't envision a world run by Shell and Bain Capital.

The best way to kill capitalism is to remove the one thing that allows it to succeed: surplus labor. Stop creating the surplus labor that provides masses of the weak to be exploited in the first place.

If "we", the collective vast majority we, elect to limit our growth and to ensure a constrained and declining population that will ensure a lack of surplus labor, the exploitable labor class, and the need for a growth economy to feed all those hungry jobless mouths.

I just can't wrap my head around this "it's a good thing that humans pop out as many goddamn kids as biology allows regardless of deeper consequences that includes the usurping of normal checks and balances of the natural world" mentality. Because "gawd" or whatever. Somehow your right to pop out as many hungry, dumb, abused and traumatized puppies as you carelessly like overrules my right to live in a world with ecological balance and sustainable technology.

Geiginni wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 5:22 pm If "we", the collective vast majority we, elect to limit our growth and to ensure a constrained and declining population that will ensure a lack of surplus labor, the exploitable labor class, and the need for a growth economy to feed all those hungry jobless mouths.

Great in theory, but the many headed hydra you mentioned would just import them from some third world country.

Curry Pervert wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 9:57 pm

Geiginni wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 5:22 pm If "we", the collective vast majority we, elect to limit our growth and to ensure a constrained and declining population that will ensure a lack of surplus labor, the exploitable labor class, and the need for a growth economy to feed all those hungry jobless mouths.

Great in theory, but the many headed hydra you mentioned would just import them from some third world country.

Oh absolutely. That's why it really needs to be a global "we". The interesting thing is, it only takes educating women to make it happen.

That, combined with a virus that pretty much didn't do anything but infect testicles and render 90% of men sterile would go a long way to address things.

Geiginni wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 1:16 pm When you can no longer go on that intercontinental vacation or fly home to visit family, can’t relocate to another city, when you can no longer afford avocados or almond milk and your food bill is 1/3 your income, or afford to keep your apartment above 65 degrees in winter or below 85 in the summer, or buy the cheap shit you love to order off Temu or Forever 21 or whateverthehell it is right now, when you can’t get the new iPhone and have to be on a waiting list for five years for a laptop or wait for months to get a Eurail ticket, that’s when shit gets real.

That’s quite a straw man you have built up there. I am willing to bet that a good number of people on this forum are happy to accept those changes, and my already be living within those parameters. I don’t know any sane person who orders from Temu for example, I never paid more than $50 for a cellphone, and unless I get a cancer diagnosis I probably won’t be flying to another country any time soon. But go off, grandpa.

Geiginni wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2024 1:16 pmGiven younger generations lack of grit and resilience, I don’t think it will be done.

OK you just took an intercontinental flight to Fuddy Duddy Land. You have no idea what young people are capable of, and many of them are already living below the poverty line, developing resilience you could never imagine, and I hope they eat your goddamn brains for breakfast some day, cooked over a burning grand piano in your gutted ivory tower.

Since I was just discussing this yesterday in a NZ politics forum, if you forgive me for the cut and paste, I'll repost the thoughts I put forward there:

I think it's fascinating, people who say that irritating protesters like Just Stop Oil have made them less likely to care if the biosphere collapses. It's a bit like saying your stupid beeping fire alarm is so annoying, it makes you glad your house is burning down. The difference between climate protests and most other protests is that everybody's neck is on the line. People say "they're just making me less likely to support their cause", when their cause should already be everybody's cause. So many people get absolutely furious about these minor stunts - internationally furious - and yet are indifferent to the slowly unfolding catastrophe.

The disproportionate irritation they provoke, to me highlights our general complacency and the complete lack of urgency felt by ordinary people.

[Commentator] was surprised to learn that Just Stop Oil is a small protest group on the opposite side of the world, protesting a local issue. Is it any wonder we don't know exactly what their demands were? The way they are used by the media to provoke outrage internationally says more about our media than anything.

I always think "why should we feel so angry about this, and yet not get angry about what's being done to the climate?"

It reminds me that our own complacency is a big part of the problem, mine included. Protesting oil CEOs seems like more of a waste of time; they're not going to stop being oil CEOs.

[On the media attention given to Just Stop Oil]

Well it's funny how much media attention they do get internationally, considering they're only protesting against the UK government. I think their stunts tap into people's psychological need to feel morally superior to climate protesters. They're rage-clickbait. "A snooker game? Corn starch?! That's going too far!!"

A mining company can poison an entire lake with heavy metals and that's not even news, but as soon as a little bit of soup gets on a painting it's making global headlines and all the anti-environmentalist bile starts pouring out. Striking at the symbols of the things people care about more than a liveable planet. It demonstrates how shallow people's sense of heritage is.

Sure Stonehenge is a taonga [cultural treasure], but it's just a dirty old pile of rocks compared to the taonga that are all the species under threat of extinction. Yes, it represents thousands of years of history, but we're casually exterminating millions of years of living history.

If a native frog is in the way of a mining project it's "Goodbye Freddie", according to [New Zealand Minister of Resources] Shane Jones. Imagine a story millions of years old that terminates at Shane Jones.

Flint, Michigan.

The illusion of permanence, innit? People are unwilling to countenance change affected by their own behaviours that may occur outside of their own frame of existence.

Except...

I read stuff today about the 'henge protest and the damage it may have inflicted on the rare lichens on the stones' surfaces. We're talking going-on-for 3000 year-old rocks, here....and suddenly these self-same lichens (species of which are recognised indicators of air quality) are more sensitive to a one-time light dusting of coloured cornstarch, than they are to atmospheric changes related to hundreds of years of industrialisation. Convenient weaponised bullshit. Nothing more.

"What about the children?" > "What about the Druids?"