Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

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I am against central economic control so everyone needs to realize the importance of conservation and reducing their footprint so we can achieve a good planetary future WITHOUT repressing decentralized liberty in favor of centralized economic control.

Utopian libertarian thinking. It's never going to work.

'Libertarian?' That's crazy. Libertarians are for laissez faire everything. What I am saying is exactly the opposite: i.e. that people have to utilize their liberty to achieve standards so that centralized control is unnecessary.

What Democrats/structuralists want is a structural form of government that guides people so they don't have to be responsible for governing themselves in a decentralized way. I think you can give them a little help but ultimately they have to take the reigns of self-governance, and I guess people who keep shirking that responsibility ultimately have to be punished/incarcerated for 'failing at liberty.'

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Our grand children and grand grand children will probably just have to die early, due to lack of ressources and extreme weather events. The human population will crash down. Hopefully two or three thousand years later, the climate will gradually cool down.

Sounds plausible, unfortunately; though I think there's also a lot of strife and conflict that comes with blaming each other for the failure to do more to solve the problems.

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You see? That's a far more effective form of self-regulation: when a species pollutes or depletes its environment too much, it just dies out from the consequences. Think Easter Island.

Right, but humans have a capacity to foresee and do something about it beforehand. Europe is currently talking about building new military capacity. China is working on reforestation projects and sustainable technologies and urban design. They may eventually get tired of US people shirking responsibility and attempt a military solution. That may actually already be happening with all the terrorism, and they just don't want to take credit because they don't want to deal with retaliation. That's not accusation of blame, because there are plenty of European and Chinese citizens who are just as apathetic about climate as average US people, I think, but there's just no telling who in the world has the power to muster these terrorist attacks and ultimately what could motivate further military escalation to bring greater submission to climate regeneration goals.

It's a very dangerous situation, because obviously the lowest hanging fruit that could be plucked to buy time and space for environmental restoration would be population reduction, but the problem with that besides the obvious ethical/moral atrocity of it is that once you reset the population, the survivors don't bother reforming the unsustainable industries because they don't think about 50 years down the road when the population will be back to what it was before the world war and probably much bigger.

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@livinglava,

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China is working on reforestation projects and sustainable technologies and urban design.

You make China sound environmentally responsible when the facts are somewhat different. China is pretty much deforested.(They have less than 3% o thir forets left) Theyve been sening silviculture reserchers to US an EUrope to learn how reforestation has returned our woodlands. ALSO China has tranferred its forest product needs to other less developed countries SO THEY BECOME DEFORESTED.

Pleease, Im getting a bit bored with how certain news services make China appear a "leader in sustainability"

They are the hands down, largest polluter on the planet.

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@Olivier5,

The cooling cycles of the last ten thousand years have shown up every 1700 to 2300 years. The last cooling low was in the early 18th century. Some time right after 3400 CE or as long as 4000 CE will probably be the bottom of the next cooling cycle, which, of course, will take place after a heating high such as had not been seen at any time in the last ten thousand years.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

What Democrats/structuralists want is a structural form of government that guides people so they don't have to be responsible for governing themselves in a decentralized way. I think you can give them a little help but ultimately they have to take the reigns of self-governance, and I guess people who keep shirking that responsibility ultimately have to be punished/incarcerated for 'failing at liberty.'

By whom would they be incarcerated, if not by a government applying a certain law?

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"We've decided to ban plastic straws from our cafeteria."
Drawing by Côté, Canada, in Courrier International

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
What Democrats/structuralists want is a structural form of government that guides people so they don't have to be responsible for governing themselves in a decentralized way. I think you can give them a little help but ultimately they have to take the reigns of self-governance, and I guess people who keep shirking that responsibility ultimately have to be punished/incarcerated for 'failing at liberty.'

By whom would they be incarcerated, if not by a government applying a certain law?

Right, the question is whether the government should focus on structuring and guiding people so that they don't have to govern themselves, or whether the government should expect them to responsibly govern themselves using their liberty in a decentralized way, and then punish them for failing when they shirk the responsibility.

Basically, the issue is whether we should allow people to refuse to take personal responsibility for self-governance where there's no specific law/policy to tell them what to do. As long as we keep allowing them to shirk what's not explicitly required of them by law, they will continue to obstruct and manipulate the legislative process to avoid doing the right thing.

The 9th amendment should respect the right of the people to hold others accountable for failing to exercise their liberty responsibly, provided the rights of the accused, etc. are respected.

Another aspect of this is that it should be possible to sue in civil court for non-monetary outcomes, such as law changes. For example, if it can be proven that some industrial or consumer practice is poses long-term dangers, etc. then it should be possible to sue for regulatory/policy changes without having to go through the legislature and executive branches of government. This wouldn't breach the separation/balance of powers because the legislature would still be able to make laws to overturn the court ruling. It would just add another avenue to redress public failures to self-govern responsibly.

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No, that's not the question. The question is whether or not the human race is on a suicide mission. Try to keep up, will ya?

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@livinglava,

In my mind, nations need governments to govern them. Or is that too complicated?

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

In my mind, nations need governments to govern them. Or is that too complicated?

Without people complying with government, government fails. Then you have some other dysfunctional possibilities:
1) government is bad/corrupt and the people are compliant = bad society
2) government is good and the people are defiant = bad society.

Now you have this concept of liberty where people govern themselves in a decentralized way, which renders central government redundant/superfluous. In short, if the people take responsibility for self-governance and good stewardship of resources, then a good government has nothing to tell them because they are already doing the right thing, like students/workers who are diligent learners/workers who don't need to be managed because they know what they're doing and if they don't, they know how to consult experts for advice and take the advice.

Now, the dysfuction we have with liberty is that people abuse it to behave irresponsibly. Then you have others who want to increase governmental power as a solution, but then still others manipulate governmental power to protect the irresponsible people and businesses against accountability and government. In fact, you have things like environmental regulations and other industry regulations that actually end up serving powerful players by creating barriers to competition, which puts the powerful players in a stronger position to garner stock investment. Plus you have stock investors who are willing to ignore/dismiss any irresponsibility in the industries they are investing in because they see it as government's job to prevent abuses, not business. Yet business lobbies government to get away with the abuses that make more money for the investors.

So why you and some others think that government isn't dysfunctional idk.

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@livinglava,

So you're an anarchist?

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If you are a fur trapper in the 1600's in Canada, you may not need government. If you live in a society of millions, odds are you need jobs, infrastructure, someone to organize and enforce against criminality and even foolishness. For a partial instance.

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https://laurentmartinblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/loeil-de-willem.jpg

"As long as we have air-con..."
(who cares?)

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

So you're an anarchist?

When you want to have an intelligent discussion on this topic, post something interesting and I'll give it some thought.

Oh, and no I'm not an 'anarchist,' whatever that even means in this context.

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@livinglava,

You make very little sense, so i am trying to see where you come from, ideologically. Anyway. If people are free to do whatever they want, you can’t punish them for not doing the right thing.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

You make very little sense, so i am trying to see where you come from, ideologically. Anyway. If people are free to do whatever they want, you can’t punish them for not doing the right thing.

Why not? Can't people be held accountable for the effects of their choices without making an explicit law/rule/policy for them to follow/break?

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@livinglava,

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Why not? Can't people be held accountable for the effects of their choices without making an explicit law/rule/policy for them to follow/break?

How would that work for emigration? Or for CO2 emissions? Who would assess ‘the effects of their actions’?

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Why not? Can't people be held accountable for the effects of their choices without making an explicit law/rule/policy for them to follow/break?

How would that work for emigration? Or for CO2 emissions? Who would assess ‘the effects of their actions’?

How are the effects of actions assessed in civil lawsuits?

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@livinglava,

I don’t know, really. Must depend on the case.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I don’t know, really. Must depend on the case.

I'm no expert, but I think it involves claiming damage/harm and then putting a dollar value on it.

What I'm saying is that it should be possible to sue for changes in policy, behavior, etc. and not just for money. You should also be able to sue to shut down businesses and/or force them to stop certain activities, and then punish them when they don't, i.e. not with fines but with confiscation/demolition of business equipment, for example.

When you sue for money, it implies that problems can be resolved by compensating the victim economically. With problems like environment and sustainability, that doesn't work because the economy is what you're trying to protect the environment and the future against.

This is the same problem with a carbon tax, i.e. that if you tax people for burning fossil fuels, then that money just gets recycled into the economy and stimulates more business activity, which involves more energy use unless people are doing everything by manual labor, for example. Plus, even if they doing things manually, they spend money on other things that aren't, so unless the whole economy is cured of unsustainability, stimulating it through any form of fiscal stimulus is going to boost other businesses and individuals that need more money to pay more taxes for not making the change.

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Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

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