HenryKrinkle posted:TL;DR: shit's complicated.
swirlsofhistory posted:political dissidents
- NO EVIDENCE
OVERTHROW CHAVEZ/QADDAFI/ASSAD
- GOOD ASS SOCIALISM
swirlsofhistory posted:
you know, this reminds me a lot of the BS people used to shovel out about SADDAM'S GOLDEN PALACES while ignoring the fact that the Iraqi people were mostly suffering from the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure in Gulf War I and the subsequent sanctions. and they were still better off under Saddam than they were under the US occupation and today's ethnic fragmentation.
i'm not defending kleptocracy. i'm just saying that we should be wary of vague allegations of "corruption" being used to justify regime change.
even more infuriating is that Gaddafi's investments and charitable contributions to the rest of Africa are viewed as a personal "slush fund." Gaddafi operated within a neo-liberal framework to help wean African countries off of their dependence on the West and--in a way--subverted neo-liberalism from within. this is one of the reasons he was quickly demonized and overthrown.
roseweird posted:we have no chance of feeding the growing global population without continuing to dig up fossil fuels, it's sort of impossible to do anything about fossil fuels without first achieving negative population growth
we definitely can't quit fossil fuels cold turkey, but we could drastically lower their use fairly quickly through a massive rollout of solar/wind and public transportation. the main obstacle to this is our totally irrational economic system; population size has very little to do with it.
if midwestern agricultural stopped getting huge subsidies it would collapse like a house of nitrate saturated cards. even if fertilizer and machine based agriculture was more productive than labor intensive farming, it would still be unsustainable (ugh, buzzzz word) because of the whole top-soil-spilling-out-into-the-gulf and drying aquifers thing.
also, it is very important not to conflate the agricultural effects of the Columbian Exchange for the effects of the industrial revolution; ireland had a massive increase in population due to the introduction of the potato in the early 19th century but i don't hear anyone arguing it was the heart of industrial europe.
(as an aside; potatoes are rich in vitamins B & C, while dairy is rich in A & D (due to being animal fats) so mashed potatoes soaked with butter is an incredibly sustaining and well-rounded meal!)
we have, right now, more access to global cultivars/landraces than ever before. the great fertile regions of the world have finally been linked, and there is massive, massive, MASSIVE space for experimentation in growing plants in new niches. an increase in labor intensity along with a new recognition of the 10000 years of bio-engineering every single farmer in history has contributed too would, un-fucking-doubtly- lead to higher yields than what we have now.
i am wary of putting hopes on wind and solar due to A: jevons paradox (increases in energy efficiency lead to increases in energy consumption, not decreases) and the fact that it's not like solar panel and wind turbines emerge from the ether fully formed. there must be a decrease in absolute use of energy - any alternative is simply shifting the problem around.
by far the biggest problem with renewables is skilled labor and the fact that they already employ as many people as the coal oil and gas industry while producing virtually no power
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20110713/renewable-energy-conventional-transmission-electricity-jobs-labor-shortage
http://ussolarinstitute.com/solar-boot-camps-no-longer-sufficient-for-training-a-green-army/
http://slashdot.org/story/12/03/10/1418207/employers-need-wind-power-technicians
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/01/11/labor-shortage-continues-to-plague-expanding-oil-and-gas-industry/
https://www.google.com/search?q=renewables+labor+shortage&rlz=1C1GGGE_enUS536US536&oq=renewables+labor+shortage&aqs=chrome..69i57.2349j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8
HenryKrinkle posted:http://wrongkindofgreen.org/2012/09/24/on-the-arrogance-of-western-coffee-shop-socialists/
If, like me, you live in relative comfort in a rich country, and your attempts to change the world are limited to ‘safe’ (and generally pretty ineffectual) activities such as writing, demonstrating, ‘online activism’, making music, making films, etc, then you should probably think twice before branding people or movements as ‘sellouts’.
According to our western coffee shop socialists, people like Nelson Mandela and Daniel Ortega are sellouts because they have made various compromises in order to get or keep state power. Qaddafi was a ‘sellout’ because of his (limited) rapprochement with the west since 2003. Mugabe was a sellout when he accepted a Structural Adjustment Program. Deng was a sellout because he invited foreign capital into China. Gerry Adams was a sellout when he signed the Good Friday Agreement, etc etc.
But the reality is that these issues are *incredibly* complicated and cannot be understood with simple formulas (generally I don’t think they can really be understood by people who are not right there in the thick of the situation). Have you ever tried running a third world state that doesn’t accept the dominant world order?
Have you ever had to choose between famine and an unfair loan? Or between a principled war and an unprincipled peace? Between increasing political freedom and preserving basic security? Between winning power in a shaky alliance and not having power at all?
It really isn’t for us to make all these gut-feeling blanket condemnations of people and movements who have made incredible sacrifices for the cause. It only ends up feeding into the divide-and-rule strategy that imperialist states are *always* using against the rest of the world. Our focus should always be on opposing the main enemy, including its very sophisticated divide-and-rule tactics.this blog post has the right idea about "divide and rule" tactics being used to undermine solidarity for regimes which are targeted by imperialism. i'm reminded specifically of Aristide and Gaddafi having been accused of enacting neo-liberal reforms in order to soften up the opposition to their overthrow.
but then again, aren't there legitimate cases of leaders of national liberation movements being co-opted and in turned into full-time collaborators w/ their direct oppressors and/or international capital? Nelson Mandela and the ANC enacted a lot of neo-liberal reforms in South Africa and I used to be critical of them for that, but now I really don't think they had much of a choice.
it gets even more complicated w/ the Palestinian struggle (which the author noticeably doesn't even mention). today there is widespread condemnation of the post-Oslo Palestinian leadership for supposedly being "collaborators." I've heard it said before that Arafat was doing what he thought was best for Palestine in a shitty situation while Abbas crossed the line into collaborator territory.
it's also easy to say "support the left opposition to these regimes and oppose the reactionary/neo-liberal opposition." the fact of the matter is that the US is well aware of how anti-neo-liberal arguments can be utilized against regimes it doesn't like. the 2004 overthrow of Aristide in Haiti is a perfect example of this. the NED, working through the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, even financed a radical leftist union within Haiti that condemned Aristide as a neo-liberal imperialist shill.
TL;DR: shit's complicated.
hi. i'm big butt skinner and i'm ordering you to shut the fuck up and smoke some weed.
roseweird posted:Squalid posted:A lot of the energy inputs in agriculture can be substituted with labor inputs without decreasing total output
without decreasing total output? how could that be true? not sure if you are aware of just how enormous the gains of mechanized agriculture have been (just look at population growth since the industrial revolution?), and how much/how intense labor would be needed to replace them (how many laborers does a single combine harvester replace? i don't know, but it's A Lot). the other issue wrt output is that all commercially important crops are grown with fertilizers manufactured with methane.
toy posted:we definitely can't quit fossil fuels cold turkey, but we could drastically lower their use fairly quickly through a massive rollout of solar/wind and public transportation. the main obstacle to this is our totally irrational economic system; population size has very little to do with it.
population size (and rate of population change) is important because the majority of the population is dependent for its survival on the availability of fossil fuels. also i don't think economic systems are separate from populations, our global economic systems aren't any more irrational than human behavior generally, including reproductive patterns. the momentum of human growth is a major barrier to relieving our dependence on fossil fuels, and very likely the reason we will simply use them until they run out and allow ourselves to collapse instead, since the only alternative to mass starvation later would be artificially inducing lesser starvation now. electric buses are not going to help much
Settle down now, stop trying to imagine my positions. One way to decrease the energy intensity of agriculture is to better integrate meat production with plant crops, so that the massive shit lagoons we currently waste can become fertilizer, and chaff that rots in the field can be turned into meat. Unfortunately this isn't efficient in today's economy, but under theoretical conditions of drastically increased energy costs it might become so. This is one example, there are others.
One way to decrease the energy intensity of agriculture is to better integrate meat production with plant crops, so that the massive shit lagoons we currently waste can become fertilizer, and chaff that rots in the field can be turned into meat.
its called night soil, its been done.
the premodern yield per acre on good farmland (western europe) was 10 bushels of wheat. a 1500 kcal diet requires 500,000 kcal per year, and there's 88,000 kcal per bushel for 880,000 kcal per acre. there are four billion acres of arable land on earth and this has stopped increasing. this means forty billion bushels of wheat and similar crops could be produced for 3.5 quadrillion kcal. that's enough to support 7 billion people. so it's possible! but realistic arable land is probably like 1/5th of that without nitrogen fixation.
roseweird is probably correct, the resources will run out and all liberals will cannibalized for food.
Scrree posted:source: google and what i remember reading in 'the story of stuff' a while ago
back on topic: i always liked mugabe for instating one of the few effective land reform policies, but I don't really feel it's fair to judge him as a 'pragmatist' or 'collaborator' because i have NO FUCKING IDEA what's actually going on in zimbabwe (other than that one study that went 'no, the land reform wasn't totally corrupt').
like, is the rhetoric of the zimbabwean government socialist or nationalist? does it's policies favor certain ethnicitys over others? is the life expectancy data published by the WHO total bunk or evidence of a neo-liberal plot to poison africa's wombs?
im a garbage idiot, why am i deemed fit to judge a movement in a place far away when i barely understand whats happening around me. i just feel that if i study zimbabwe and then wander into town screaming 'we must rise against the rhodeasian aparthied elite' i'm not going to get very far in contributing to communism in america
'wasting' water on a lawn if youre in an area with lots of water isn't exactly a moral crime; that water would be sitting there anyway, not growing sorghum for starving africans
Ironicwarcriminal posted:'wasting' water on a lawn if youre in an area with lots of water isn't exactly a moral crime; that water would be sitting there anyway, not growing sorghum for starving africans
isn't that what baby's dad told her in the dining hall @ kellerman's in dirty dancing
roseweird posted:population size (and rate of population change) is important because the majority of the population is dependent for its survival on the availability of fossil fuels.
i'm not saying it's not important, but we can support this population without running out of fossil fuels. it will require structural changes: crucially in energy and transportation, and it will have to mesh with the more pressing problem, climate change. but these can synergize with each other: changing how we generate energy and get around would have lots of other good effects, too.
population controls, on the other hand, wouldn't even necessarily be effective. that's on top of being hugely unpopular.
sorry this is not a very funny post but if you actually care about environmental issues pointing to "too many (poor) people" as the problem is a very bad idea
Edited by toy ()
population growth is happening almost entirely in the poor countries, it's been this way since like the 70's. that's one of the key reasons malthusian arguments are kind of taboo at this point.
i'm not sure how tight the correlation is b/w fossil fuel use and population growth, but just because it's been that way in the past doesn't mean it will continue. there are other ways of generating energy and feeding people.
Scrree posted:i am wary of putting hopes on wind and solar due to A: jevons paradox (increases in energy efficiency lead to increases in energy consumption, not decreases) and the fact that it's not like solar panel and wind turbines emerge from the ether fully formed. there must be a decrease in absolute use of energy - any alternative is simply shifting the problem around.
how is the increased consumption of non-depletable energy sources necessarily less desirable than the current level (or even significantly decreased) consumption of depletable resources?
tsinava posted:I can't wait until white people like me start to starve. Then change will really happen.
yeah almost. but No.
http://youtu.be/N_ehYkr0NhU