You clearly took their prediction of the likely outcome (given the world we do live in and the obviously shitty priorities of the powers that be) as an endorsement or acceptance of that outcome, when they did not say anything to indicate that they found it at all acceptable. While your overall points about the options that we as humans have are valid, your positioning of this poster’s values in opposition to your own is baseless and unwarranted. Pessimism about humanity’s ability to successfully mitigate or overcome the problems of our own making is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try. For example, even the most ardent advocates of ending fossil fuel usage understand that in the past 50 years we have done far more to exacerbate climate change than to mitigate its effects, let alone reverse the damage already done. Predicting the most likely outcome of a situation is not at all the same as saying that nothing better than that outcome is possible.
“When we just accept that there is no avoiding or mitigating events like, “a lot of people” starving in colonized spaces, and then promote technological utopianism as a solution (even if inadvertently by only imagining tech as a solution), we are naturalizing the root cause of this violence, which is colonialism. Doesn’t seem like you intended it, but this is also a markedly ecofascist narrative in the way that the inevitability of that death also means that it is a prescribed trajectory for this system to take to “improvement,” much in the same way that fascists precribe the removal (genocide) of an arbitrary group of people in the metropole (US or EU) as a solution to inequities there.”
Right, could you point out where I said OP holds these values or endorsed them?
Even more, it is very difficult to read this as something other than purposefully distortive. In what way is criticizing ecofascist narratives a refusal to recognize the material conditions of climate change? You have a name about killing fascists, and yet cannot seperate socially constructed values from material relations, or individuals’ desired moral values? You’ll note that my first comment asked the commenter to also clarify if they did indeed mean to say that this is what they think would happen in a hypothetical where, despite reality, all gasoline and fertilizer disappeared. I did that to avoid exactly this kind of reading, since liberals so often subscribe to fascist values without realizing it due exactly to their refusal to interrogate their own understanding of things without fear that internalized values reflect their quality of character or, “moral purity.”
As always, scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.
Quoting yourself and bolding the few phrases you used to acknowledge that Simulation6 might not be a moustache-twirling, colonial techno-fascist does not adequately offset the aggressiveness and assumption of ill-intent that pervades your comments.
You also seem to be much more interested in what you have to say than in the actual content of the comments you respond to. For example, I did not say anything about criticizing ecofascist narratives being a denial of climate change, and I don’t even see how what I wrote could be read as such. I pointed out that though the public has been aware of climate change for half a century, in that time we have not only collectively failed to reverse its course, we have only continued to accelerate the process. Factual acceptance of that reality is not equivalent to moral acceptance of climate change, its causes, or its effects.
You seem to really want both Simulation6 and myself to be colonialist liberals unwilling to look for non-tech solutions to problems (presumably because that is the argument you were prepared to have), but neither of us has said anything to indicate that that is the case. I don’t want to speak for Simulation6, but I saw nothing in their comments beyond an entirely justified cynicism that short- and medium-term material difficulties will most likely adversely effect primarily those who are least able to weather such problems. That, and apparent bewilderment as to adswhy they were seemingly being attacked by you for things they did not say.
“You clearly took their prediction of the likely outcome (given the world we do live in and the obviously shitty priorities of the powers that be) as an endorsement or acceptance of that outcome, when they did not say anything to indicate that they found it at all acceptable.”
"Predicting the most likely outcome of a situation is not at all the same as saying that nothing better than that outcome is possible. … Pessimism about humanity’s ability to successfully mitigate or overcome the problems of our own making is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try. "
Yeah, you did say those things, but whatever you’re already mad about being told that the words you say have effect beyond what you intend, so you’re already over that hurdle (hilarious for an “anti-fascist”)." Unless, of course, you meant that intentionally dissuading this pessimistic and markedly liberal reading counts as “clearly.”
You and the original commenter (along with many other users on this lib site), take offense to this form of criticism because you fundamentally believe that you’re only bad if you intend to be actively; which is obviously not the case in a system that both dominates your language and understanding of your own participation in genocide. It’s literally beyond you because you would rather maintain your own moral purity than actually behave in a moral way. If you are an “anti-fascist,” you should go look up what internalization is and how it happens, and then consider whether you have actually done that work for yourself.
My comment told the original commenter that, whether they intended to or not, their statement (not factual btw, which is the entire problem since, again, this is a social issue more than a technological issue, but whatever), presented a narrative of both the present conditions and future imagination of climate change in a way that is consistent with eco-fascism. I even said that this is apparently unintentional and then illustrated how that specific narrative relates to the ecofascism. It’s a common thing liberals resort to because they typically lack the political literacy (or fortitude) to interrogate their own values with the openness to accept when they’ve reproduced something harmful without intending to.
In five years, there’ll be a bunch of dickheads like you two talking about how you’ve known this all along, I’ve alreaady seen this a few times in the past decade; maybe you’ll be one of them. You’re not bad for being socialized to hold internalized values, you are bad for refusing to even consider if you hold them. Fuck off, chud.
Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
You clearly took their prediction of the likely outcome (given the world we do live in and the obviously shitty priorities of the powers that be) as an endorsement or acceptance of that outcome, when they did not say anything to indicate that they found it at all acceptable. While your overall points about the options that we as humans have are valid, your positioning of this poster’s values in opposition to your own is baseless and unwarranted. Pessimism about humanity’s ability to successfully mitigate or overcome the problems of our own making is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try. For example, even the most ardent advocates of ending fossil fuel usage understand that in the past 50 years we have done far more to exacerbate climate change than to mitigate its effects, let alone reverse the damage already done. Predicting the most likely outcome of a situation is not at all the same as saying that nothing better than that outcome is possible.
“When we just accept that there is no avoiding or mitigating events like, “a lot of people” starving in colonized spaces, and then promote technological utopianism as a solution (even if inadvertently by only imagining tech as a solution), we are naturalizing the root cause of this violence, which is colonialism. Doesn’t seem like you intended it, but this is also a markedly ecofascist narrative in the way that the inevitability of that death also means that it is a prescribed trajectory for this system to take to “improvement,” much in the same way that fascists precribe the removal (genocide) of an arbitrary group of people in the metropole (US or EU) as a solution to inequities there.”
Right, could you point out where I said OP holds these values or endorsed them?
Even more, it is very difficult to read this as something other than purposefully distortive. In what way is criticizing ecofascist narratives a refusal to recognize the material conditions of climate change? You have a name about killing fascists, and yet cannot seperate socially constructed values from material relations, or individuals’ desired moral values? You’ll note that my first comment asked the commenter to also clarify if they did indeed mean to say that this is what they think would happen in a hypothetical where, despite reality, all gasoline and fertilizer disappeared. I did that to avoid exactly this kind of reading, since liberals so often subscribe to fascist values without realizing it due exactly to their refusal to interrogate their own understanding of things without fear that internalized values reflect their quality of character or, “moral purity.”
As always, scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.
Quoting yourself and bolding the few phrases you used to acknowledge that Simulation6 might not be a moustache-twirling, colonial techno-fascist does not adequately offset the aggressiveness and assumption of ill-intent that pervades your comments.
You also seem to be much more interested in what you have to say than in the actual content of the comments you respond to. For example, I did not say anything about criticizing ecofascist narratives being a denial of climate change, and I don’t even see how what I wrote could be read as such. I pointed out that though the public has been aware of climate change for half a century, in that time we have not only collectively failed to reverse its course, we have only continued to accelerate the process. Factual acceptance of that reality is not equivalent to moral acceptance of climate change, its causes, or its effects.
You seem to really want both Simulation6 and myself to be colonialist liberals unwilling to look for non-tech solutions to problems (presumably because that is the argument you were prepared to have), but neither of us has said anything to indicate that that is the case. I don’t want to speak for Simulation6, but I saw nothing in their comments beyond an entirely justified cynicism that short- and medium-term material difficulties will most likely adversely effect primarily those who are least able to weather such problems. That, and apparent bewilderment as to adswhy they were seemingly being attacked by you for things they did not say.
“You clearly took their prediction of the likely outcome (given the world we do live in and the obviously shitty priorities of the powers that be) as an endorsement or acceptance of that outcome, when they did not say anything to indicate that they found it at all acceptable.”
"Predicting the most likely outcome of a situation is not at all the same as saying that nothing better than that outcome is possible. … Pessimism about humanity’s ability to successfully mitigate or overcome the problems of our own making is not the same as saying we shouldn’t try. "
Yeah, you did say those things, but whatever you’re already mad about being told that the words you say have effect beyond what you intend, so you’re already over that hurdle (hilarious for an “anti-fascist”)." Unless, of course, you meant that intentionally dissuading this pessimistic and markedly liberal reading counts as “clearly.”
You and the original commenter (along with many other users on this lib site), take offense to this form of criticism because you fundamentally believe that you’re only bad if you intend to be actively; which is obviously not the case in a system that both dominates your language and understanding of your own participation in genocide. It’s literally beyond you because you would rather maintain your own moral purity than actually behave in a moral way. If you are an “anti-fascist,” you should go look up what internalization is and how it happens, and then consider whether you have actually done that work for yourself.
My comment told the original commenter that, whether they intended to or not, their statement (not factual btw, which is the entire problem since, again, this is a social issue more than a technological issue, but whatever), presented a narrative of both the present conditions and future imagination of climate change in a way that is consistent with eco-fascism. I even said that this is apparently unintentional and then illustrated how that specific narrative relates to the ecofascism. It’s a common thing liberals resort to because they typically lack the political literacy (or fortitude) to interrogate their own values with the openness to accept when they’ve reproduced something harmful without intending to.
In five years, there’ll be a bunch of dickheads like you two talking about how you’ve known this all along, I’ve alreaady seen this a few times in the past decade; maybe you’ll be one of them. You’re not bad for being socialized to hold internalized values, you are bad for refusing to even consider if you hold them. Fuck off, chud.
Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.