Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Nevertheless, fusion power and solar power are not mutually exclusive, and it's a good idea to pursue both.

Harnessing artificial fusion on Earth, if it's even possible, wouldn't be a good idea because of the consequences of unleashing unlimited cheap power into the biosphere.

Try to understand that energy and entropy (destruction) are two sides of the same coin. Think about a large waterfall like Niagara falls. All that water power is violent and causing erosion, re-evaporation, etc. The water that's falling down Niagara falls is powered by sunlight, i.e. by evaporation lifting the water up into the sky and redepositing it upstream of the falls so that it can flow back downhill to the ocean.

The more energy you add to the biosphere, the more evaporation and precipitation you are going to create. What's more, H2O behaves as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, so the more water is dissolved in the atmosphere on average, the more heat is blanketed, regardless of the CO2 content.

So really we should be striving to suffice with the natural forms of energy already available within the biosphere and avoid adding additional artificial sources like fusion or even fission, which naturally occurs deep underground, where natural processes have surely evolved around it that help sustain the planet as a natural system.

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You're guilty of that yourself, when you say that "Nations are just jurisdictions that were created to give people the idea that they are being ruled by their own 'kind' in hopes that they would submit to authority more readily."

That's just the historical reality. Before there were nations as jurisdictions there were empires. Some people were able to work with others constructively by using Latin or some other common language, but some people decided to rebel against the government by asserting the principle that ethnic differences made them unnatural subjects of the sovereign, e.g. the Dutch speakers of the Low Countries claiming to be naturally different from the Spanish Hapsburgs. In reality, they probably just wanted independence because they were doing well economically and didn't want to be burdened with supporting the empire, and historians have said that the various provinces that united in rebellion against Phillip II weren't actually unified in any natural sense besides having been opposed to Spanish rule.

Nevertheless, they were united as a nation based on that principle that Phillip II was less a natural ruler for them than having 'their own king,'

As I said, people shouldn't ultimately need a sovereign or government to make them behave. They should just take responsibility for governing themselves. However, because they don't, they incur hostilities from others who hope to govern them and make them behave themselves. And, of course, sometimes people just want to govern others to exploit them and gain advantage over them, and/or use them to gain advantage over others still.

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@livinglava,

I still think fusion power is a key but agree that renewable energy sources should be relied to as a matter of some urgency.

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As I said, people shouldn't ultimately need a sovereign or government to make them behave. They should just take responsibility for governing themselves.

What about the need for a defense force, a police force, a justice system? At the very least you need these three functions, called regalian. If no state steps in to address defense or law and order, some other structure will step in, eg a mafia, a big man, or any other form of local government.

That is because power -- the subject matter of politics -- power exists objectively. The power to kill, to rob, to rape, that is something real, and to a degree natural. You can wish that all people were angels but we are by nature Darwinian animals. Competitive, tough, cruel even. So humans like power, they get high on it. You can't wish power away. Nature abhors void they used to say. Anarchy has never worked.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I still think fusion power is a key but agree that renewable energy sources should be relied to as a matter of some urgency.

Why don't you see how destructive and unnecessary fusion and fission nuclear power are? Do you just really like having big heated indoor spaces or what?

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What about the need for a defense force, a police force, a justice system?

Like I said, if people would behave themselves voluntarily there would be no need for such things. It's not a question of whether or not they are good or necessary. It's a question of what to do with the natural human propensity to regulate bad behavior and exploit power for personal and biased-collective gain.

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At the very least you need these three functions, called regalian. If no state steps in to address defense or law and order, some other structure will step in, eg a mafia, a big man, or any other form of local government.

Yes, and even if you have ostensibly legitimate government, you will have forces of corruption pulling strings and manipulating legitimate government institutions in subtle ways to their advantage.

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That is because power -- the subject matter of politics -- power exists objectively. The power to kill, to rob, to rape, that is something real, and to a degree natural. You can wish that all people were angels but we are by nature Darwinian animals. Competitive, tough, cruel even. So humans like power, they get high on it. You can't wish power away. Nature abhors void they used to say. Anarchy has never worked.

No, but neither has benevolent top-down authority. So what we're left with is punishing people for failing to properly self-regulate by responsibility of their own inalienable liberty. If we don't punish people for failing to use liberty responsibly, we end up with a situation where people keep defying governmental authority and blaming government for failing instead of the people themselves.

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@livinglava,

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Like I said, if people would behave themselves voluntarily there would be no need for such things.

Go tell that to the good people in Paradise. Tell them that if people behaved by themselves, there would not be climate change, droughts and huge fires like that... I'm sure they'll be delighted to know that.

If only humans were not so selfish...

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Like I said, if people would behave themselves voluntarily there would be no need for such things.

Go tell that to the good people in Paradise. Tell them that if people behaved by themselves, there would not be climate change, droughts and huge fires like that... I'm sure they'll be delighted to know that.

If only humans were not so selfish...

Did you read the rest of my post? I acknowledged that it is unrealistic to expect that all people will behave themselves voluntarily.

That leaves the question of what to do with them. Do you try to structure their lives in a way that prevents their bad tendencies from causing harm, or do you punish them for the harm they cause?

If you try to structure their lives in a benevolent way, they manipulate the system to allow them to cause harm. E.g. Democrats make laws that ostensibly protect the environment, but those contain loopholes that allow all the abuses that make the corporations their money. So, put simply, structuralist government fails.

Now, if liberty fails AND structuralist government fails because of corruption; what's next? Do you give up and allow the corrupt government to structure people's lives or do you try to stop it in some way?

If you try to stop it, you're going to have to 1) punish the government for failing to govern properly AND 2) punish the people for failing to govern themselves properly with their own liberty.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

I acknowledged that it is unrealistic to expect that all people will behave themselves voluntarily.

So why do you keep bringing up this unrealistic idea???

And what do you propose we do then? Govern them, or not govern them people?

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Wonder if you could start a thread called "If people would behave themselves voluntarily there would be no need for such things"...

Like there would be no need for traffic lights. Or safeboxes.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
I acknowledged that it is unrealistic to expect that all people will behave themselves voluntarily.

So why do you keep bringing up this unrealistic idea???

And what do you propose we do then? Govern them, or not govern them people?

It is important to put things in perspective in order to avoid naive assumptions about the goodness and functionality of government.

You have to start with the principle that people should govern themselves. If you start with the assumption that they won't or can't, then you will just assume structuralism is the ideal form and purpose of government. Structuring the lives of wild animals is not the purpose of government. We have to assume that they can and should govern themselves, even though they fail to in practice for various reasons.

Next, if you give up on them governing themselves with their own liberty, you risk assuming that structuralist governance is a good alternative. It's not, because they manipulate the structures of government to undermine safeguards against abuses of liberty.

In other words, people want to abuse and exploit each other and the environment and government is (ab)used as a tool to aide them in doing so. We like to imagine idealistically that government is beyond corruption but it's not. It is just very good at whitewashing and hiding the corruption it facilitates, by representing itself to the public in terms that make it look good. It is like any corporation that presents itself as good while quietly procuring dubious and exploitative goals.

So you shouldn't assume that government is good because people don't govern themselves. In reality, government is as bad as the bad people it's supposed to govern. So the solution is to punish BOTH bad government AND bad people. In other words, hold people AND government accountable for the failure to properly self-govern.

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@livinglava,

In effect, climate change means nature is holding us accountable as a species. Nature will hold our grand children accountable for the **** we did.

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UN report: Greenhouse gasses at highest level in 5 million years

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/report-greenhouse-gasses-highest-level-5-million-years-181123063503929.html?fbclid=IwAR3AdeobCKkybbde9DOxpoEzHaZW5pEIOZUiH5y1O3cbhPmIEPQmAQdte1c

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

In effect, climate change means nature is holding us accountable as a species. Nature will hold our grand children accountable for the **** we did.

Yes, but there are two further possibilities that follow from that:
1) people will just continue allowing the climate to change peacefully and deal with the degeneration of the biosphere as we know it.

or

2) people will blame each other and engage in wars or other violence in an effort to correct and/or punish those they see as being more responsible and/or less vigilant in solving it.

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Along with his pledge to sell off their rainforest home to agribusiness and mining, Bolsonaro has said openly “minorities will have to adapt … or simply disappear”

Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, campaigned on a plan to sell off major portions of the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness, mining. and hydro-power.

“Minorities have to adapt to the majority, or simply disappear,” he said on the campaign trail, adding that under his administration, “not one square centimeter” of Brazil will be reserved for the country’s indigenous peoples.

Thirteen percent of the land in Brazil is protected indigenous territory in the Amazon rainforest, where most of the world’s last uncontacted tribes take refuge. Bolsonaro has said he wants to put all of that land on the auction block.

Since his election on October 28, he’s announced a merging of the ministries of agriculture and the environment — the latter of which was supposed regulate the former — into a new “super ministry” to oversee his plan.

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@livinglava,

The two options are not mutually exclusive.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

The two options are not mutually exclusive.

How? One is peace and the other is war.

Repeat: 1) will humans maintain a peaceful industrial trajectory toward degeneration of the biosphere or 2) will they fight about it?

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@livinglava,

They will remain peaceful, untill they fight?... They will fight in some places and not others? I don't know. Will the US ever attack Canada for its fresh water resources? Will there be another oil war like Iraq? Are more mass migrations in the books? Only God knows. And He's not telling anyone.

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https://media.giphy.com/media/25A17crsUbYje/giphy.gif

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

They will remain peaceful, untill they fight?... They will fight in some places and not others? I don't know. Will the US ever attack Canada for its fresh water resources? Will there be another oil war like Iraq? Are more mass migrations in the books? Only God knows. And He's not telling anyone.

Unlikely. Most violence in the developed world occurs by means of economy/finance, not direct fighting. People who get cut out of the (social) economies get gradually disenfranchized and suicide themselves with drugs, alcohol, etc.

What strikes me as more interesting in terms of the evolution of war and conflict is all this horrifying terrorism. It seems logical to me that there are various angry factions around the globe, and none of them want to openly declare war because of the highly effective counter-terrorism forces they would have to face.

So I assume that when some seemingly crazy lone attacker executes some micro-atrocity, which seems to happen quite frequently these days; it is entirely possible that they have been trained to camouflage their cause by effectively pretending they have acted out for some other reason besides terrorism.

This is amazingly disturbing because it thwarts the possibility of responding and attempting to control/fight terrorism. We end up with a war of retaliations against retaliations without ever knowing exactly who is retaliating against whom for what. Part of the tactics would then be to hold governments accountable for retaliatory attacks that can't be justified by positive evidence about the target of retaliation, but yet the perpetrators of terrorism have concealed their true sources in order to avoid such retaliation.

Basically it all amounts to increasingly violent provocations and irrational responses to provocations. It is horrifically disturbing.

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@livinglava,

I suppose the best case scenario would be a good old thermonuclear war between China and the US. That will solve the problem alright, by taking out the two largest contributors to climate change.

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Right . . . thermonuclear war . . . that would contribute to climate change. It's called nuclear winter. China would be virtually obliterated, the United States, no so much. China has not even close to a parity in nuclear devices with reliable delivery systems.

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@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

So I assume that when some seemingly crazy lone attacker executes some micro-atrocity, which seems to happen quite frequently these days; it is entirely possible that they have been trained to camouflage their cause by effectively pretending they have acted out for some other reason besides terrorism.

Highly unlikely. Terrorists rarely attack military installations, apart from the occasional barracks. In terms of military power, killing of a bunch of civilians with terrorist attacks, atrocious as it is, will rather have the averse effect: Giving the local population an increased sense of being unsafe, they will probably ask, or react positively, to any attempt by the government/ dictator to build up the military. So what would be the use?

Also, the risk of discovery seems too high in my books. Most terrorists seem to be killed in action, but there's no certainty that will happen all the time. And if one is captured and gives information on the faction/country that is behind these so called random attacks, that country will be condemned at the very least, and more likely face an impromptu alliance of outraged governments hell bend on stopping that sort of attack.

1 Reply

Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

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