I’ve long accepted that we’re going to see the bad ending, as I’ve never had any say in what happens, and I know what kind of world we live in. We’re going out with a long drawn-out whimper while capitalists scurry to ride the wave on a ship made out of the corpses of the ignorant. This was always the way things were going to happen, and revolution was always the only way to prevent it.
<span style="color:#323232;">I go to civil rights rallies
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And I put down the old D.A.R.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I hope every colored boy becomes a star
</span><span style="color:#323232;">But don't talk about revolution
</span><span style="color:#323232;">That's going a little bit too far
</span><span style="color:#323232;">So love me, love me
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Love me, I'm a liberal
</span>
The system is rigged, politicians are bought and sold, the democratic process is agonizingly slow on purpose.
Our politicians, regardless of affiliation, have been shown to consistently push policies that do not represent their constituents. Rather, their decisions are much more in tandem with corporate interests. Corporate interests are the single largest contributions to climate change and environmental destruction. To solve something like this, we would need to essentially replace nearly every member of our governing body and update processes to allow more rapid favorable changes that accurately represent the will of the people and the betterment of the planet. We lack the power to do this with votes, as the system is rigged, politicians are bought and sold, and the democratic process is agonizingly slow on purpose. We do not lack the power to do this via revolution.
However, you are depressingly correct that we have an undereducated population, and future generations indicate a bleaker future. Propaganda and conspiracy (not theories; actual powerful groups doing shady shit that hurts the public at large) has us ignorant and fighting amongst ourselves. The longer this continues, the more hopeless a revolution becomes. To restate my initial comment: this has continued long enough that I forsee the bad ending. We will hold the elite afloat while we bicker in ignorance, and we will be the ones to accept the consequences of a system that hates us.
USA doesn’t need a revolution, USA needs to fix their democracy so it doesn’t favor “strong” government, but instead favors actual democracy. That is done by removing everything first past the post, and having fair democratic representation based on votes. That will enable more parties, so voters can vote closer to their interest instead of just choosing between 2 bad options. This is how almost all democratic countries do democracy better than most English speaking countries, and especially USA.
This is worth fighting for as an American IMO.
You’re right. But I think you’re underestimating just how monumental a task that is, as you’d have to address the overwhelming amount of influence money has in our system. Billionaires, CEOs, and investors have as much, if not more control over our way of life as any politician, and many politicians overlap heavily with those types. The people who’d need to fix the system are the people benefitting from the system being the way it is. There’s no clean method of addressing that issue in a timely manner, and we need results 50 years ago.
Yes, despite it’s the only sensible thing to do for USA if USA wants to improve maybe even just to remain a democracy, it requires an active movement that is very big. Democrats may be less bad than Republicans, but they still defend the status quo.
I do however think that it is easier than an outright revolution, which would also have great uncertainties about the actual end result if successful.
But it needs people that burn for it, and it needs people to connect across states. And you are right, there will probably appear massive misinformation against it financed by the 1%. And the established parties will be against it, and may even make methods used illegal, even if they are perfectly democratic according to current rules. But as I see it, it’s a fight that is as important as when USA originally fought for their freedom from the British Empire.
Ditto, except I consider it extremely improbable that revolution would fix anything. The problem is human nature — greed, ignorance, ego, tribalism; the tendency to support sociopaths in leadership — ultimately it may turn out that no amount of any ism can meaningfully safeguard us from ourselves.
What you’re describing isn’t human nature. We aren’t all slaves to greed or supporting sociopaths. What we are is impressionable, disorganized, and willing to submit to a higher authority. Sociopaths take advantage of this by acting as our higher authority, feeding us misinformation, and keeping us thoroughly divided. A collective wake-up call is just about the only thing we could undergo to break the cycle, but we are firmly trapped within our delusions for the foreseeable future.
What we’re doing is working. The system we have doesn’t do what we want it to do. We all, on some level, understand this. To acknowledge that we want a better system that is better capable of doing good for as many entities as possible is to acknowledge that we want a revolution, because our system is incapable of doing anything that we want it to do at this point.
It’s not even delusions, it’s that for many our simplest means to access food and shelter directly enriches a class that is forced to play the role of humanity’s antagonist just by virtue of existing as a class.
Exactly so enjoy it. Eat donuts and deep fried corn dogs, drink booze and don’t worry about your ibs. Smoke a cigarette, try drugs. Lol seriously who gives a fuck.
Well, I give a fuck. Barring the bits where humanity really shat the bed, I sincerely love this planet. Life is a wondrous, miraculous, utterly beautiful thing. It’s depressing to see it all go to waste for the sake of capital. We could have created a paradise, but we chose a suffocating death. I wish we took “eat the rich” more seriously. It should have been a promise, not a threat.
Maybe. I do think the climate is pretty screwed, but at the same time there’s developments in play that even a few years ago I wouldn’t have been expecting within my lifetime.
It’s really too early to call how this all plays out ultimately.
As an ancient group claiming we are a future recreation of a long dead original humanity had said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.”
We may be heading for an end of many things, but we are also watching a beginning take form, and it seems to my eye to be a bit of a race between the collective environmental debts we’ve racked up and the advancement of a true game changer that might take what seems inevitable and turn it on its head.
What I would say is that I think people doing really bad shit in the world right now are in for a serious surprise within a generation. It’s going to be increasingly hard to keep skeletons in closets and even the most powerful people in the world today may not still be on top of the food chain by tomorrow.
I too am skeptical we escape the catastrophe of climate change - but I think the path to that end may yet have some promising twists and turns along the way.
Interesting take. I‘m interested in what you see as an emerging game changer at the moment? Maybe I am too blind because of doomerism in the morning. Also, what‘s the ancient group claiming there was a original humanity before ours, whatever that means.?
Thus, our human brain are incapable of grasping or begin to comprehend the scale and severity of the climate crisis with just soundbites, anecdotes, news-rants and tiktok videos.
Understanding complex systems is hard and requires continuous concentration over months and years. Even more so for the Hyperobject that is ephemerally understood as Climate Change.
We can barely begin to collectively acknowledge that perhaps something is indeed wrong with :
all the burning forests just because of the smoke/smog “inconveniently” smothers our cities (occasionally burning them for being too close)
atmospheric rivers drowning towns and cities in flash floods
high altitude glaciers irreversibly melting and disappearing
Greenland and Antarctic have only accelerated their ice loss from sustained glacier retreat
the thermohaline circulation slowing down due to all that melted water (less dense due to higher temperature and less salt) staying on the surface of the water column
the migration of millions of humans mostly from regions with latitude between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn due to drought, crops loss, famine, extreme storms, natural disasters and violence or wars
the increase in frequency and length of heatwaves
Unfortunately, we will probably sooner or later go to war over made-up fantasies or leftovers of a ruined planet before finally collectively understanding and tackling the complex thing that is currently (for now) known as Climate Change.
I mean, they’re gonna deal with the consequences too so I cheer. I cheer because I don’t care and have nothing to lose. And the people responsible should Suffer the consequences instead of being constantly bailed out by the rest. Let it all fail. You’re just trying to delay thr inevitable. Claiming it isn’t inevitable is exactly why things never changed and never will because people believe it works itself out. Grab popcorn and enjoy.
I hear you. I find some peace in watching my conservative neighbors’ faces when I tell them I want this planet to cook us all into starvation. Conservatives don’t really know how to respond to someone who actually wants to watch the world burn.
When we begin competing for resources, conservative neighbors will be the first places to focus on. They caused all of this. They should be the first to suffer the losses.
The left is not exactly better or more effective, on a global scale. This is the real issue. sides are also really mostly relative. The right here (Scandinavian country) would be considered somewhere between socialist and communist in the us. Its not about sides. It’s about the lack of actions
Yes, it is. And the solutions are multi-tiered. And the tiers of solutions that would be reachable are defended against by conservatives who have been brainwashed for generations by corporate interests.
Yes, it’s bigger than conservatives in just the U.S. too. Conservatives globally are the security layer that prevent every major solution from being attainable. To defeat the major pollutors and to legislate change globally, we must first defeat the corporations’ brainwashed henchmen, who are otherwise known as conservatives.
If we instinctually felt how dire this is, akin to the imminent danger of, like, a lion circling our huts, maybe we would rise up and do something.
But we didn’t evolve to feel a true sense of urgency about abstract dangers that will happen in 30-100 years.
We know we are fucked beyond belief. We know billions will die. We know 90%+ of the planet’s species will go extinct. We know we will live to see a barren wasteland of populated by suffering. Intellectually we know the horrors. Yet it feels more urgent to go to work and pay the bills and do our day to day things.
Imagine if we felt the urgency to a point where we walked out of our jobs and did what we needed to do to force the change. Force companies to shut down. Ground all airplanes and dismantle cargo ships. Wrest control from the rich. Shut down coal plants. Etc.
And then there’s the greedy bastards… Who would rather do anything to make money now than deal with anything tomorrow or anything that might hurt all of us.
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