antisocialite's recent activity
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Comment on Green energy is cheaper... so why aren't we using it? in ~enviro
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~talk
antisocialite Link ParentI can comprehend the non-radical stance. People are only altruistic when it's convenient for them, and radical change presents a great inconvenience, or even just a potential for inconvenience....I can comprehend the non-radical stance. People are only altruistic when it's convenient for them, and radical change presents a great inconvenience, or even just a potential for inconvenience. Edith Wharton has some remarkable prose on this in The House of Mirth (1905), if in a different context:
But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. (Book II, Chapter VIII)
Lily Bart feels as though she deserves both an extravagant and morally justifiable life; the obvious impossibility of this desire leads her to moral quandary. To your point, Wharton's next metaphor suggests that Miss Bart's approach to morality is damaging to the self: "If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level" (Book II, Chapter VIII). In political science, where "the noblest attitude" applies to more than just oneself, it is also damaging to society. But people don't care to address an abstract issue if it makes their own life any more difficult. Even if they find it morally problematic to ignore, it's extremely easy to justify inaction in the context of a problem where an individual solution is secondary to a systemic one. Why help a destitute woman on the street when there are ten thousand more just like her, and when the state could feed them all without any individual action of one's own?
I don't agree with this philosophy either, but it's not complicated. We romanticize our own "continuity of moral strength" enough that we forget how to actually train and exercise it. The real goal of progressive legislation and indeed of radical thought should be to create systems that make it easy to be good; not just easy to donate to charity, but to live sustainable and altruistic lives in general. People are not really so lacking in empathy for this approach to be the philosophical end-all of societal conceptualization, but it is the fastest and most radical way to enact serious change. The existential crises people have when they think about radicalism go away when radicalism no longer requires an uncharacteristic altruistic leap of faith for them.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~talk
antisocialite Link ParentThis is a relatively ineffectual approach by itself because many substantive issues we face really only affect a minority of people negatively, or are understood to manifest that way. Voting out a...Stop voting for them
This is a relatively ineffectual approach by itself because many substantive issues we face really only affect a minority of people negatively, or are understood to manifest that way. Voting out a terrible candidate doesn't work if most constituents are happy with their job performance. Even with a numerical majority, the inaccessibility of voting makes it difficult for disadvantaged people to actually participate. Hence radicalism.
Regardless, voting is simply a mechanism for implementing philosophical action, not a solution to a dilemma as such. A good opposition campaign can make a nasty judge lose reelection, but it doesn't necessarily address the conditions that allowed them to 1) be elected and 2) enact discriminatory rulings to begin with. Those conditions are enforced systemically and it is extremely difficult to adjust them with any one election. Hence radicalism.
Before you "dismantle" the system on behalf of people of color, you might want to ask some of them who explicitly came from other places to escape other systems if that's something they want you to do.
The New York Times has had a few pieces recently about the way in which wealthy, white progressives interested in effective altruism represent a well-meaning but extremely out-of-touch subset of the electorate. This is the demographic of Tildes or your average software company. For instance, the broadly anti-theistic (or theistically indifferent) preferences of most liberals are unattractive to a lot more low-income and non-white voters, who are often deeply religious. The same goes for many radical-progressive positions on policing ("defund") and education ("dismantle"). I don't like being the hand-wavy centrist, but this sort of thing is what loses Democrats half their elections, especially on the local level. And the party that wins instead is not interested in fixing any of these problems.
Certainly many radicals are not wealthy and white, but that is where a large portion of the progressive narrative originates. I think many of us forget that progressivism in itself is not a universal constant. It's sort of ironic that the left wing takes such an objective (and often teleological) meta-stance on policy considering how important subjective reasoning and individual self-empowerment is to the historical progressive ideology.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~health
antisocialite Link ParentSuffering! Sorrow! Shame! It's horrible, isn't it? And mere blocks away you have rows of upper-middle class families clocking into their high-paying remote jobs every day as though nothing is the...Suffering! Sorrow! Shame!
It's horrible, isn't it? And mere blocks away you have rows of upper-middle class families clocking into their high-paying remote jobs every day as though nothing is the matter with their fair city. I have no enmity for the moderately wealthy, but they live in a completely different world. A person operating within such a paradigm breathes abstraction day and night; they are perpetually insulated from the abject despair of poverty and the spiraling abysm of drug addiction. Their quotidian strife is perfecting their lawn manicure, not the endless shock of overdraft fees, substance withdrawal, familial dysfunction, and never-ending streams of death.
I would know; I was born into and continue to live une vie abstrait. The Main Line always welcomes back the fortunate, you see. Eight miles from the Center City may as well be ten thousand. I do not live on Planet Earth and never have. The dichotomy between the HAVE and the HAVE-NOT is beyond words.
I'm deeply troubled by the physicality of drug addiction. Your description speaks volumes in only a few words. I pity those who have been abandoned by their government, their countrymen, their loved ones, and themselves to such a fate. It looks unreal; surreal; hyperreal. The negligent denizens of the pharmaceutical industry will have hell to pay at the ianua coeli, but damned be ye who reside yet on God's sacred soil. Such is the domain of Beelzeboul. Pestilence awaits upon a white horse.
While you allude to some important and relevant logistical problems which I would be interested in learning more about, that's not what the video discusses.
The video is critiquing the capitalistic need for profit under all circumstances. The author explains that private investment in renewables is inherently less profitable than oil and gas ventures because the latter are easier to exploit in a resource-inefficient way in order to generate shareholder returns. Even though renewables continue to fall in price, their decentralized nature means that their corporate owners have less of a capacity to extract "value" from the production and delivery process than they do with fossil fuels. Consequently, corporate investors are disincentivized from supporting capital projects in renewables because the profits, while present, are not universal. It's not that renewables aren't economical for society, they just aren't economical for private investment enterprises.
The author's thesis (with some corollaries) is thus: the neoliberal expectation that the market will naturally solve climate change is flawed and counterproductive. For as long as capitalistic forces inform the behavior of the energy industry, renewables are unlikely to demonstrate an ROI that exceeds that of highly centralized forms of energy extraction like oil and gas. Governments must invest directly in renewable energy sources (and probably just prohibit the use of fossil fuels in energy, barring emergencies). Even neoliberal policies like corporate tax credits for renewable investment are flawed because they maintain the capitalistic status quo of inefficient privatization. Communal ownership of the means of production, in this case the production of electricity, is essential.
I haven't read the sources he provides and I'm not a subject-matter expert in energy. It's common knowledge in finance circles that ESG funds don't compare to the S&P or total market index. This is really for a variety of reasons, only one of which is the inherent profitability (or, apparently lack thereof) of decentralized renewables—frankly, I'm not convinced that this is a truly perennial issue. I see no reason why technological advancements akin to those in the past decade will not continue to lower the upfront cost of renewable energy and therefore increase profit margins for capitalists. However, I agree with the idea that energy should not be privatized and that fossil fuels should not be used to generate it.