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Extinction Rebellion

Started by MoonDust, November 17, 2018, 10:52:14 PM

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MoonDust

I too think we should be putting our biggest brains together to solve our problems rather than hoping and praying for our extinction. Having said that saying someone should kill themselves is not on, but at least you acknowledged that yourself Mr_Simnock.

I can understand where the feeling comes from that we'd be better off not here though, as a species. Just out of curiosity Buelligan, when you look up at the clear moon and stars does it not make you think as well that there's natural beauty worth preserving?

That's what tips the balance for me. If we can fuck the planet through complacency and thinking in the short term, I'm sure we're capable of saving the planet through planning and thinking ahead.

Whether we like it or not people, we're in the anthropocene - human activity shaping the planet. We can either make sure its lasting legacy is a good thing or a bad thing.

Mr_Simnock

QuoteHaving said that saying someone should kill themselves is not on, but at least you acknowledged that yourself Mr_Simnock


please tell me no one reading my post was thick enough to actually think I wanted that, jesus wept give me some credit

Chollis

Quote from: Mr_Simnock on November 19, 2018, 05:00:50 PM

please tell me no one reading my post was thick enough to actually think I wanted that, jesus wept give me some credit

i did, I'm posting this from beyond the grave

MoonDust

#63
Quote from: Mr_Simnock on November 19, 2018, 05:00:50 PM

please tell me no one reading my post was thick enough to actually think I wanted that, jesus wept give me some credit

Of course not. I knew it was meant tongue-in-cheek. But still. Meant no acrimony by it. Just think it's not something to joke about.

*wags finger

manticore

Quote from: jobotic on November 19, 2018, 04:24:58 PM
When I look at my kids I do just see evil little fuckers who are here to destroy the world and I feel deep deep shame for bringing into this world and i'd like to apologise to you all. The sooner they die the better eh?

I don't normally do posts like this, but I'm entirely with you in your feeling jobotic. I think some of the people who spout the stuff in these threads are blinding themselves to what they're saying. Do they have no one they love?

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Mr_Simnock on November 19, 2018, 05:00:50 PM

please tell me no one reading my post was thick enough to actually think I wanted that, jesus wept give me some credit

I'm glad to hear you were joking, although:
1 - I've read it back several times and it's not obviously a joke
2 - I don't think (the royal) you should suggest to an individual to top themselves no matter how much you're joking and how obvious it may or may not be.  For a start you don't know what their mental state is. 

Anyways, that.  And we're still megafucked regardless.

chveik

Even if we have a strong desire to change things, I'm sure a lot of us know that we won't actually ever do anything, because we don't have the courage or the strenght or the adequate mental health, or that deep down we don't care that much about our fellow humans because they let us down so many times.
And when you realise that, if you don't want to be an hypocrite, either killing yourself becomes a serious option or you stop judging and saying hypocrite things like "humanity should be wiped out" because people who say such a thing don't understand subjectively what the agony and death of billions of people mean.

Noonling

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on November 19, 2018, 05:43:09 PM
2 - I don't think (the royal) you should suggest to an individual to top themselves no matter how much you're joking and how obvious it may or may not be.  For a start you don't know what their mental state is. 
Avoid awkward English pronouns by going full Queen:

One doesn't think one should suggest to one to top oneself no matter how much one is joking and how obvious it may or may not be.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Noonling on November 19, 2018, 06:17:02 PM
Avoid awkward English pronouns by going full Queen:

One doesn't think one should suggest to one to top oneself no matter how much one is joking and how obvious it may or may not be.

Fried chicken.

bgmnts

Quote from: MoonDust on November 19, 2018, 04:55:30 PM
I too think we should be putting our biggest brains together to solve our problems rather than hoping and praying for our extinction.

I'm busy playing video games sorry.

Buelligan

Quote from: MoonDust on November 19, 2018, 04:55:30 PM
I can understand where the feeling comes from that we'd be better off not here though, as a species. Just out of curiosity Buelligan, when you look up at the clear moon and stars does it not make you think as well that there's natural beauty worth preserving?

It's the natural beauty I want to preserve.  I've been walking that same route, most nights and days, for three years now. 

In that short time, it's changed.  What was pristine (by pristine, I mean, there were signs of humanity, vinyards and tracks here and there but it was pretty much like that for the last five hundred years or more) is now littered with fragments of plastic and glass, to a noticeable degree.  That's what prompted the thought. 

That, and the fact that we've just suffered two of the hottest summers ever in succession.  Hotter than any of the old folk round here remember, ever, where many, many, trees have died.  This year, we've had a plague of imported (asiatic) moths, so numerous they gave the impression of snow storms every night for weeks.  Their larvae have stripped every leaf (I really mean every leaf) from the box bushes that form a very significant percentage of the brush on the garrigue (which, in turn, holds the soil on the mountains in times of heavy rain and supports a huge number of indigenous creatures, who now have no food or place to shelter).  This, in combination with the exceptional high temperatures and lack of rain means that a lot of this vegetation has died. We've also had a plague of plane tree virus (imported from the antipodes) that has killed most of the napoleonic avenues of plane trees and a terrible flood (which destroyed houses, uprooted ancient trees, washed away bridges and walls, dug up roads - it moved a thirty ton stone about 60m in a nearby (flat) vinyard, that's the kind of force I'm talking about.  It killed quite a few people).  You may have seen it on the news. 

IMO, these things are all the result of human activity.  If they occur once in a decade, they're a problem, if they happen all the time, it's simply not sustainable.  And it is happening all the time now.

Yesterday, I watched the huge annual skeins of wild geese, moving across the skies.  I've watched them migrating every year for years.  They always pass over, north to south.  But, guess what?  This year they were flying east to west.  We hardly see the swallows any more.  Something is very fucked up but most people, I think, are so insulated from nature that they're not noticing.

These are the kinds of experiences I've had recently that made me have that thought.

On the joking about suicide, I'm afraid, given recent experience (more experience), the laughter has gone right out of it.

MoonDust

Fucking bleak. I think you're right that too many of us are too insulated from nature to notice it so drastically. I'm guilty of that too.

I do think though it's increasingly becoming more and more unavoidable to notice. Especially with the freak weather you mentioned.

That said, during the heatwave summer just gone, one of my friends back in the UK couldn't get enough of it. Constantly saying "this is well good. Finally a proper summer." I couldn't convince him that it wasn't "we'll good". It was actually a really fucking worrying event. Unprecedented as it was global. Not just local. I realised I sounded like a kill joy while everyone was enjoying the hot weather. But I think it's something one is justified to be a kill joy about: the recent heat waves should be a cause for concern for everyone. It's not normal. It's frightening.

AllisonSays

I find people in Europe or north America ruminating on the desirability of species-death for humans deeply troubling, particularly because it isn't people in Europe or north America who are deemed expendable populations when these kind of conversations roll around (as they did in the eugenics movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance). I mean, you're talking about genocide, right? And it might be genocide draped in hazy, hippyish primitivism but the way it will happen, if it does happen, will be a product of the social and material conditions of the world now - which means it'll be the global south (which has already been fucked by the early industrialisation of Europe) where millions and millions of people would be killed. I mean, Jesus Christ. It genuinely baffles me when people express those kind of sentiments glibly; the deep ecology people, Donna Harraway, apparently a significant subset of people on CnB ... weird.

imitationleather

Quote from: AllisonSays on November 19, 2018, 06:57:49 PM
I find people in Europe or north America ruminating on the desirability of species-death for humans deeply troubling, particularly because it isn't people in Europe or north America who are deemed expendable populations when these kind of conversations roll around (as they did in the eugenics movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance). I mean, you're talking about genocide, right? And it might be genocide draped in hazy, hippyish primitivism but the way it will happen, if it does happen, will be a product of the social and material conditions of the world now - which means it'll be the global south (which has already been fucked by the early industrialisation of Europe) where millions and millions of people would be killed. I mean, Jesus Christ. It genuinely baffles me when people express those kind of sentiments glibly; the deep ecology people, Donna Harraway, apparently a significant subset of people on CnB ... weird.

I get what you mean, but I always thought that when people said a very significant proportion of the population was going to die they included themselves in the part that was toast. Surviving and then having to live in a post-apocalyptic world would be shit anyway, even if you could afford the fanciest bunker from Insane Libertarian Lifestyle Stuff Inc.

Mr_Simnock

QuoteI mean, you're talking about genocide, right?

they are but remember that's nothing like joking about a single suicide is it


Shit Good Nose

I believe me and Buellers said total extinction of the human race - no geographic, racial, political or religious distinctions.

Mind you, today I learnt that termites produce more harmful gases from their termite arses than all the vehicles, industrial processes AND cows on the planet combined, so maybe get rid of termites first (are they useful for anything?) to buy us a few more years before me and Buellers push the oversized red button, just like Vasquez and Gorman in Aliens.  Except we won't be incredibly badly dated.


Quote from: Mr_Simnock on November 19, 2018, 07:06:35 PM
they are but remember that's nothing like joking about a single suicide is it



As I said, it didn't read like a joke to me at all.  Barbed sarcasm at the most.

Buelligan

Quote from: AllisonSays on November 19, 2018, 06:57:49 PM
I find people in Europe or north America ruminating on the desirability of species-death for humans deeply troubling, particularly because it isn't people in Europe or north America who are deemed expendable populations when these kind of conversations roll around (as they did in the eugenics movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance). I mean, you're talking about genocide, right? And it might be genocide draped in hazy, hippyish primitivism but the way it will happen, if it does happen, will be a product of the social and material conditions of the world now - which means it'll be the global south (which has already been fucked by the early industrialisation of Europe) where millions and millions of people would be killed. I mean, Jesus Christ. It genuinely baffles me when people express those kind of sentiments glibly; the deep ecology people, Donna Harraway, apparently a significant subset of people on CnB ... weird.

I don't know what other people here or elsewhere are talking about, what I'm talking about is the recognition that no one is going to do anything, a big enough anything, to change the path we're on.  IMO, the options are not, stay as we are and put up with some over-crowding and mess or kill everyone and make a nice eco-park.  It's more like if we're not going to change, everyone is going to die, that's banked, do we want to take the whole planet with us or not?  Although, of course, in truth I absolutely do not want anything horrible to happen to anyone.

The ideal solution is that people (all the people or at least, enough people) wake up to the fact that something drastic needs to be changed.  If we could get to that, change our ways radically, maybe there could be a better set of choices before us.  But, as I said already, I don't think enough people are going to understand how bad things are getting until it affects them personally and seriously and at that point, I think it will probably be too late.

MoonDust

I fear you might be right. I think another radical shift that needs to happen as well is how scientists think and treat their work. I mentioned in other pages things about what science gets funded. But for too long scientists have abandoned responsibility owing to the objectivity of science because they have the ethos "our job is to inform, it's to others what they do with that info." Well, scientists said the same thing when they published their hypotheses about splitting the atom. But how many of them truly had a clear conscious after Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

Abandoning responsibility like that won't cut the mustard. Especially when you think what posterity will think of it. "All well and good those climate/energy scientists telling us about climate change back in the 20th century. But what did they actually do?" "They just hoped governments would listen."

They need to do more than hope. I don't know what or how exactly, but the science community needs to start getting fucking political and sod the old philosophy that what people do - or in the case of climate change, don't do - with their information isn't their problem or responsibility.

And it works both ways. Scientists who go to work for oil giants should be shunned from the scientific community. We need to get to the point where a scientist deciding to pursue research in fossil fuel energy is committing career suicide. "Oh Professor Smith, you're off to work for Shell? Get to fuck." Etc etc

chveik

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on November 19, 2018, 07:09:05 PM
I believe me and Buellers said total extinction of the human race - no geographic, racial, political or religious distinctions.

Yes, but you are aware that people from rich countries won't be the first concerned about this extinction, despite the fact that they are the most responsible for the state of the world

Shoulders?-Stomach!

If there is a form of communism in the future it's almost certainly going to be a resource-scarcity one where the capitalist system implodes as a result of environmental damage and its corollary effects on governments and stability. Authoritarianism will return big time in some form.

It will be so obvious that consumer capitalism based on duplication of goods leads to a creation of surplus waste - unthinkable during a time of resource scarcity, that some central forces will take it over.

It's whether governments will be powerful enough to take on corporations, or whether corporations will change tack and become a proxy state in a two tier society. One we are already morphing towards.

What is to stop creation of an Amazon Zone or the Apple Zone etc? Or more dull and likely: Capita Zone where our freedom and choices is subtly reduced more and more to the benefit of an unaccountable elite.?

Perhaps the misery and authoritarianism will be corporate led this time.

Buelligan

Quote from: chveik on November 19, 2018, 07:29:14 PM
Yes, but you are aware that people from rich countries won't be the first concerned about this extinction, despite the fact that they are the most responsible for the state of the world

I think people in the third world are already suffering and dying but probably because they're in the third world, people like us often tend to gloss over it and change nothing, because we're used to people dying in the third world and our world staying safe.  I fear that this thing that appears to be happening doesn't really care where anyone comes from, it's going to have us all (though, I hope, most fervently, I am wrong).

MoonDust

Not gonna happen in a million years but a nice idea what be to rather than fine companies and governments that break climate legislation, actually give the CEOs and other higher ups responsible prison sentences? Name and shame them. Perhaps put them on trial in the Hague. Afterall, this climate emergency will claim the lives of millions, and human rights is intrinsically linked to climate catastrophe. Treat those directly responsible accordingly.


Pingers

Quote from: Twit 2 on November 18, 2018, 10:39:18 AM
Extinction is too extreme a word I think (extirpation might be better). It'd have to be a big disaster indeed to wipe out literally every person on the planet. More likely is 99.9% dying and a few people left in Barnsley, scrabbling around for whelks.

Ah, no change for Barnsley then.

The more mass civil disobedience the better in my view, whether it's on this or Universal Credit or anything else. Let's face it, they got rid of loads of the coppers and the prisons are full, so what the fuck are the powers that be going to do about it? They're hopelessly divided and there for the taking as far as I can see.

Lemming

Controversial though it is, I actually like humans/humanity (bar obvious exceptions like Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy and Lee Mack). Therefore, I'd like to do something to tackle the impending apocalypse.

Given that I'm too PITIFULLY LAZY to engage in any kind of activism, is there actually anything practical that can be done on a personal level? I'm already never having kids, I don't have a car, and I don't eat meat or animal products, which I understand are the Big Three of hopefully-not-destroying-the-planet. I do have the TV on in the background when I'm not even watching it, though, so it will be essentially all my fault when the tsunamis start hitting.

Anything else that we can actually do? Or do we just have to subject ourselves to the whims of the corporations who cause the vast majority of this shit?

KennyMonster

If we do agree to stop ourselves existing for the sake of the planet I bet we forget to switch Trident off or something and it all goes to tits anyway.

We are balls.

manticore

Quote from: AllisonSays on November 19, 2018, 06:57:49 PM
I mean, Jesus Christ. It genuinely baffles me when people express those kind of sentiments glibly; the deep ecology people, Donna Harraway, apparently a significant subset of people on CnB ... weird.

Yes, and anyone indulging their mass homicidal fantasies about the human race are actually complicit in the hastening of the ecological disaster they claim to fear because by doing so they're actively promoting apathy and hopelessness about the human capacity to do something about it. Their attitude is one of the defining characterisics of the spirit of the age which is leading us into disaster as it undermines the quailities of human care and mutuality that we most need.

That capacity would come from a realisation that it's social and political forces that have led us into the situation we're in, not some Original Sin or essential evil, and that it's criticising and acting against those forces that would give us some chance.

So maybe people can look at what Extinction Rebellion have to say and think about what you can do, even if it just involves contributing a little money, and give up with all the luxuriating in despair.



https://rebellion.earth/who-we-are/


imitationleather

I wonder if undercover police officers have managed to get any of Extinction Rebellion pregnant yet.

Buelligan

It's only a matter of time but fortunately, that's exactly what we don't have.

manticore

A short report from The Real News about the Saturday protests:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poZV4OfieAA

The comments section is full of right-wing lunatics. The video must have been shared around on their websites or something.

MoonDust

Another road block today. Lambeth bridge during rush hour. Apparently lots of drivers hurling abuse and lots of cyclists giving praise.

Quite mad really. They were barely unheard of a month ago and now have already made 3 (or was it 4) big protests that got mainstream media attention. All very close together in time as well.

I hope this isn't the initial flame of a new group being giddy with excitement. I hope the momentum can keep going and growing. Who knows, maybe politicians might start paying attention (fat chance but one can dream).