You left out, create energy markets, make electricity generation horribly volatile by infecting the grid with large amounts of unreliable wind and solar generation, then profit off of the market volatility.
Ultimately, this leads to higher prices and the money comes out of consumers' pockets.
It might be rational to hold beliefs, or at least feign that you do, to avoid being assailed by your in-group, but it is also cowardly. For example, it could be “rational” for some to pretend that a President had command of his mental capacity even if he did not, in order to avoid rocking the boat, even if such pretense was to the detriment of the country. This kind of partisanship abhors the courage to be candid and truthful, qualities sadly lacking in our institutions.
If a nation is going to exist it should first and foremost focus on the well being of its citizens over that of immigrants. Leaning towards anarchism has made me care less about the well-being of nations and I do agree with your purposed solution. I think in our current reality it's best to limit immigration so we can elevate the native working class as much as possible.
Prior to the early '70s there was no such thing as "environmental journalism". I'm guessing it sprouted from the forehead of Zeus about the time Earth Day debuted. When you're an environmental journalist, you have to have something to write about. It has to catch the eye or no one reads it and you are soon out of a job. What better attraction than global catastrophe?
There was the Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the Death of Lake Eire. Then the hole in the ozone at the poles, surprisingly, the coming Ice Age. All of these items oversold the risks as none of them triggered The End of The World As We Know It (TETWAWKI). Then there was Chernobyl and Fukushima, each a serious environmental disaster, but still, not TETWAWKI.
Somewhere prior to the turn of the Century, the coming Ice Age reversed course and became Global Warming. Environmental journalists had a field day with this one until the scandal at East Anglia University where the research scientists (who had a financial stake similar to the journalists) were found to be cherry-picking data and fudging numbers.
Shortly thereafter, Global Warming became Global Change, as if the world's weather was always one way and now - strangely - it was changing. The culprit was carbon dioxide, so if you burned anything, or were breathing, you were the Threat, TETWAWKI.
Several scientists since then have shown research from Antarctic ice cores which indicates no correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, but no matter. Give us your car, your gas stove, your cows and those awful factories where you make things. And for God's sake, stop breathing! None of this should be happening.
I don't listen to them, I watch the world itself. Is anyone selling Malibu beachfront property for pennies on the dollar? Is the Statue of Liberty under water, or even that sea level platform on which it's perched? Have we been having one hurricane after another, as they predicted? Have all the polar bears drowned?
Yeah, none of that. The US is not part of the Paris Accords and we are still cleaner than most of the world. Of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world, 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa. We don't have killer smog or thermal inversions. Oh, they still happen, but in parts of the world we're told are examples we should emulate. China, India. Yeah, no.
I know DOOM is everything and TETWAWKI is just around the corner, but we're really not going to change much of anything with an electric stove, let alone swearing off the internal combustion engine.
The world is divided between practical types who believe we can do better and radical types who think retreating to the Bronze Age is the only way to avoid TETWAWKI.
My apologies for being late to this party. I enjoyed your comment, but "take issue" with your conclusion. A retreat into the Bronze Age will not avoid TETWAWKI (I love that acronym and will insert it into my dictionary), it will only delay it. After all, what is there to think that after re-living the Bronze Age for a bit, folks won't get a taste for something better, and sooner or later, we're back to 11:58 on the Doomsday Clock. It becomes a sort of perpetual motion in futility machine.
I'll be on your side of the fence, trying to do better but willing to accept what will come.
I suspect the evolutionary value of the doom-mongers is that when they are right (not that often), other people will tend to see the danger and take precautions.
That does not stop the merchants of doom and gloom from being very annoying.
"There is a neurological reason for this penchant for doom mongering. As it happens, part of the temporal lobe of the human brain, called the amygdala, is a warning detector. The amygdala is constantly scouring all available information in search of danger. And because the brain cannot possibly analyze all the incoming information fast enough, it gives priority to any data that endangers us."
Interesting. My hypothesis is based on variation within human societies, but this argument applies to every human (to many/most species, in fact!).
On a closely related note, I believe Pareidolia is a survival trait from prehistorical tribal societies. The quote from haaretz is a generalization from that, so I'm pretty sure it is true to some extent.
I'm also sure that some people are a lot fonder of doom and gloom than most of us.
Tribalism and emotional commitments to beliefs are most certainly hard wired, IMO. I recognize the former as I'm against uncontrolled immigration. I rationalize my position with the added belief that the example of desired, well-functioning social organisms that maintain their own integrity serve as examples and encourage emulation, whereas the absence of boundaries, in general, leads to a net decay for everyone. I then wonder if that belief is falsifiable. I realize it can be considered falsified already but don't agree. I suspect you would argue that and I would be interested.
I recognize the emotion associated with strong beliefs not when I read that you think that global warming could be a net gain for reasons you've enumerated. I just don't, on balance, find it persuasive. I do recognize the emotion of convictions in having compared you to the people who made Hitler possible because of citing 'lawfare" against Trump, which I cannot find tolerable if I wish to maintain my worldview as coherent. This is true despite the fact that I didn't like the case Alvin Bragg brought. It was the closest one could come to "lawfare" as proposed, despite the fact that Trump broke laws, as he does daily and then brags about. People who flaunt their immorality incur my wrath. Whether it's at the level of Foucault or Trump doesn't matter. Normalizing psychopathy is not acceptable, even as it may become the winning strategy ("weird" per the current parlance) because it allows some face saving for a certain group of voters who cannot deal with the far more correct word "criminal".
People who love the feeling of solidarity that comes with joining vastly many others in an all-out collective effort to achieve a vitally important goal—most likely, to avert a terrible looming disaster.
You left out, create energy markets, make electricity generation horribly volatile by infecting the grid with large amounts of unreliable wind and solar generation, then profit off of the market volatility.
Ultimately, this leads to higher prices and the money comes out of consumers' pockets.
It might be rational to hold beliefs, or at least feign that you do, to avoid being assailed by your in-group, but it is also cowardly. For example, it could be “rational” for some to pretend that a President had command of his mental capacity even if he did not, in order to avoid rocking the boat, even if such pretense was to the detriment of the country. This kind of partisanship abhors the courage to be candid and truthful, qualities sadly lacking in our institutions.
If a nation is going to exist it should first and foremost focus on the well being of its citizens over that of immigrants. Leaning towards anarchism has made me care less about the well-being of nations and I do agree with your purposed solution. I think in our current reality it's best to limit immigration so we can elevate the native working class as much as possible.
I don't care much for partisanship either, David, but parts of your discourse on it are almost delusional.
Examples?
Like they say, David, if I have to explain it you wouldn't likely understand.
Prior to the early '70s there was no such thing as "environmental journalism". I'm guessing it sprouted from the forehead of Zeus about the time Earth Day debuted. When you're an environmental journalist, you have to have something to write about. It has to catch the eye or no one reads it and you are soon out of a job. What better attraction than global catastrophe?
There was the Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the Death of Lake Eire. Then the hole in the ozone at the poles, surprisingly, the coming Ice Age. All of these items oversold the risks as none of them triggered The End of The World As We Know It (TETWAWKI). Then there was Chernobyl and Fukushima, each a serious environmental disaster, but still, not TETWAWKI.
Somewhere prior to the turn of the Century, the coming Ice Age reversed course and became Global Warming. Environmental journalists had a field day with this one until the scandal at East Anglia University where the research scientists (who had a financial stake similar to the journalists) were found to be cherry-picking data and fudging numbers.
Shortly thereafter, Global Warming became Global Change, as if the world's weather was always one way and now - strangely - it was changing. The culprit was carbon dioxide, so if you burned anything, or were breathing, you were the Threat, TETWAWKI.
Several scientists since then have shown research from Antarctic ice cores which indicates no correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, but no matter. Give us your car, your gas stove, your cows and those awful factories where you make things. And for God's sake, stop breathing! None of this should be happening.
I don't listen to them, I watch the world itself. Is anyone selling Malibu beachfront property for pennies on the dollar? Is the Statue of Liberty under water, or even that sea level platform on which it's perched? Have we been having one hurricane after another, as they predicted? Have all the polar bears drowned?
Yeah, none of that. The US is not part of the Paris Accords and we are still cleaner than most of the world. Of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world, 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa. We don't have killer smog or thermal inversions. Oh, they still happen, but in parts of the world we're told are examples we should emulate. China, India. Yeah, no.
I know DOOM is everything and TETWAWKI is just around the corner, but we're really not going to change much of anything with an electric stove, let alone swearing off the internal combustion engine.
The world is divided between practical types who believe we can do better and radical types who think retreating to the Bronze Age is the only way to avoid TETWAWKI.
I know which side I'm on.
My apologies for being late to this party. I enjoyed your comment, but "take issue" with your conclusion. A retreat into the Bronze Age will not avoid TETWAWKI (I love that acronym and will insert it into my dictionary), it will only delay it. After all, what is there to think that after re-living the Bronze Age for a bit, folks won't get a taste for something better, and sooner or later, we're back to 11:58 on the Doomsday Clock. It becomes a sort of perpetual motion in futility machine.
I'll be on your side of the fence, trying to do better but willing to accept what will come.
Thanks.
> human taste for gloom
This seems hard to motivate from evolutionary pressures?
> partisanship
much easier to motivate :)
I suspect the evolutionary value of the doom-mongers is that when they are right (not that often), other people will tend to see the danger and take precautions.
That does not stop the merchants of doom and gloom from being very annoying.
Tried to look it up..
For example:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/2012-04-02/ty-article/doom-and-gloom-is-fun/0000017f-e6e2-dc7e-adff-f6ef9bd10000
"There is a neurological reason for this penchant for doom mongering. As it happens, part of the temporal lobe of the human brain, called the amygdala, is a warning detector. The amygdala is constantly scouring all available information in search of danger. And because the brain cannot possibly analyze all the incoming information fast enough, it gives priority to any data that endangers us."
Plausible, though a bit far fetched.
Interesting. My hypothesis is based on variation within human societies, but this argument applies to every human (to many/most species, in fact!).
On a closely related note, I believe Pareidolia is a survival trait from prehistorical tribal societies. The quote from haaretz is a generalization from that, so I'm pretty sure it is true to some extent.
I'm also sure that some people are a lot fonder of doom and gloom than most of us.
Thanks for this contribution.
Tribalism and emotional commitments to beliefs are most certainly hard wired, IMO. I recognize the former as I'm against uncontrolled immigration. I rationalize my position with the added belief that the example of desired, well-functioning social organisms that maintain their own integrity serve as examples and encourage emulation, whereas the absence of boundaries, in general, leads to a net decay for everyone. I then wonder if that belief is falsifiable. I realize it can be considered falsified already but don't agree. I suspect you would argue that and I would be interested.
I recognize the emotion associated with strong beliefs not when I read that you think that global warming could be a net gain for reasons you've enumerated. I just don't, on balance, find it persuasive. I do recognize the emotion of convictions in having compared you to the people who made Hitler possible because of citing 'lawfare" against Trump, which I cannot find tolerable if I wish to maintain my worldview as coherent. This is true despite the fact that I didn't like the case Alvin Bragg brought. It was the closest one could come to "lawfare" as proposed, despite the fact that Trump broke laws, as he does daily and then brags about. People who flaunt their immorality incur my wrath. Whether it's at the level of Foucault or Trump doesn't matter. Normalizing psychopathy is not acceptable, even as it may become the winning strategy ("weird" per the current parlance) because it allows some face saving for a certain group of voters who cannot deal with the far more correct word "criminal".
People who love the feeling of solidarity that comes with joining vastly many others in an all-out collective effort to achieve a vitally important goal—most likely, to avert a terrible looming disaster.