The funniest thing about Donald Trump is that he is so routinely honest in public—“I will be a dictator,” “there will be violence if I lose”—and yet the majority of people are so concerned about decorum, so terrified of appearing to overreact, that the American political system just plods along as if he hadn’t said what he said.
@HeavenlyPossum also thinking about how the day the Dobbs decision got leaked, the supreme court was basically unguarded, because the whole thing was a surprise. But there were all these videos of people... chanting slogans politely. They could've taken it. I think that was the moment I realized there's no hope for the US
@HeavenlyPossum Same here - the right extremist AfD party ("alternative for Germany") is also not shy, stands at nearly 30% in some states. Yet, politicians are afraid of outlawing them because this "could make them stronger".
@HeavenlyPossum And among those I know who discount these statements, there are many who say 1. He’s just exaggerating and doesn’t mean any of it; 2. He’s just saying out loud what others say behind closed doors, so why hold it against him; 3. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s all written down in the Project 2025 document because no one is going to allow any of that to happen.
@jik@HeavenlyPossum Trump deeply traumatizes me. His verbal gaffes don't amuse me, his threats, and abuses don't amuse me. Nothing amuses me about that filthy Antichrist. I hope when he goes away - the sooner the better - I can begin to walk the long road of recovery from this orange nightmare.
I find it quite funny that many Americans will go to their doom because they’re more afraid of looking silly in front of others than they are of the guy who explicitly said he’s planning to murder them.
@HeavenlyPossum the weird thing is that interpreting everything one says in the most generous possible way seems to only apply to guys on the far right
“I didn’t threaten violence if I lose, I merely anticipate that other people would be violent”
This is a clever child’s logic for lawyering their way out of trouble for a threat they made. No one is under any obligation to take any of this seriously. But the prevailing preference is to pretend that the most generous interpretation of his words is the correct one, and that people really can just spend a few moments in November voting and then bear no subsequent cost.
It’s a popular myth that in crises people will panic and devolve into chaos. The opposite is mostly true: in times of crisis, people tend to become more, not less, pro-social. This is to our credit as a species, but it is sometimes to our detriment. I remember a story of an office full of people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, sitting down on the carpet to debate their next moves. Should they evacuate or wait there for rescue?
People want to stop, to discuss, to debate. No one wants to be seen as overreacting. It’s embarrassing. No one wants to feel embarrassed. What if you act with urgency and then discover afterwords that you didn’t need to? You will look like a fool.
Of course, if you act without urgency and then discover afterwords that you did need to, you might be dead.
I've always wondered if our propensity to listen to orders, to trust and conform, while lethal in certain situations, is the crucial element that allows us to form complex societies in the first place. Is it the same instinct that allows us to shrug and not care where things we buy come from? The same instinct that allows us to defer responsibility as shown in the Milgram experiment? Is obedience just the other side of the cooperation coin?
I definitely think we have a propensity to defer to social cues from other people, which can sometimes be hijacked for nefarious purposes, but I don’t think that’s the same as a propensity to obedience—obedience to authority is something that has to be constantly reproduced at considerable expense by people who’d like to stay in charge.
I certainly don’t think obedience is a condition of cooperation—consent, agreement, and persuasion are.
That's at the heart of what I'm asking: whether concepts like obedience, compromise, consent, trust, faith, agreement are simply steps on a single scale of the underlying psychological structure. I don't know either way, but would love to find out.
Alternative to how our species behave now is a radical individual that is not obedient, but neither trusts the judgment of other people nor is willing to cooperate due to the fear of being betrayed. Society would be impossible.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum Game theoretically, it has been shown that this sort of position falsely assumes a single-shot prisoner dilemma when really a iterated game makes more sense for modeling the situation. In an iterated prisoner's dilemma, conditional cooperation is a dominant strategy and works to achieve overall cooperation, and this is with extremely implausible assumption of completely selfish agents. Conditional cooperation works by defecting against cooperation defectors
I may be wrong about this, but I see these things as a continuum.
When working on a project I defer authority of what needs to be done and in what order to the leader. No matter if we're building a bridge or waging war. If people tell me to run for the exit I better run for the exit, even though I don't sense any danger myself. If they tell me to stay put I will do that.
If all of us would constantly doubt and question each other it would considerably hinder cooperation.
You’re conflating too unlike meanings of the word “authority,” one being about things like expertise and competence, the other about command and coercion. We can voluntarily defer to people we trust without being obedient to them in the same sense that a relationship of command implies.
A slave might be obedient out of fear of torture or murder. You might be “obedient” to an expert in the sense that your threshold for being persuaded by them is very low.
That's the question though: am I conflating two distinct mechanisms in our psyche or do both of these things originate from the same place?
Is obeying the voice on the loudspeakers all that different from obeying prescriptions from your doctor or new directives from the CEO? Our human instinct is to generally trust each other and cooperate, a fact that is often abused by the power-seeking. This instinct is rarely motivated by the fear of direct violence.
That's fair, I really don't care what words we use to describe it. Obviously, train passengers from the HP's example were not listening to the voice out of fear. Habit? Perhaps, but it must've been a pretty unique situation.
Either way, however we name it, I wonder if it's the same mechanism in our brains that makes us listen to that voice that also allows us to cooperate in general and form complex societies.
I really think you’re mistaking habituation to command for something more primeval than it is. A circus elephant that does tricks for an audience behaves that way because it remembers punishment during training, and its silly little tricks in the ring aren’t a good indicator of how a free elephant would behave.
@HeavenlyPossum@CorvidCrone@jackofalltrades@jlou yes, just look at how long it took to create industrialised society and how it involved constantly battling waves of resistance. Or, on a more micro level, how long it takes to train soldiers to habitually obey. Those projects wouldn't need to happen if unthinking obedience was reliable based on innate features.
"[T]he vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be unable to kill."
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing (rev. ed. 2009).
I mean, all of our behavior originates from “the same place,” in that we each only have one brain. But even though our ability to trust each other can be hijacked for nefarious purposes—ie, by con artists—that doesn’t mean that hijacking is necessary for cooperation.
I'm not saying this "hijacking" is necessary for cooperation.
What I'm wondering is this: if we were to raise our defences against that hijacking (through cultural or physical means) would that lower our ability to cooperate in general?
There is nothing abusive about obeying the voice on the loudspeakers. The passengers decided to listen to its advice, and the person behind the voice itself is probably just following procedure (which is another type of authority), yet the consequences were fatal.
Similarly, a trucker may consent to deliver a package without knowing its contents, and a drone pilot may consent to press the button on the order of his commander. Nothing abusive about any of these interactions (at least not in the violent way you suggest in your other examples), yet the end result is war being waged and innocent people being killed.
The ability to not question our role and responsibility in the greater whole of the system is what enables these abusive results. My question is really more about that than the concept of obedience of one particular person to another.
It’s not a weird analogy; it was designed to highlight the distinction between coercion and consent, and illustrate why removing coercion does not affect our ability to consent.
The system under which we live is not made possible by our lack of questioning. I question it constantly, but I still live under it, because it is ultimately reproduced by violence. The absence of immediate and explicit violence in every instance does not make the entire system consensual somehow.
“Not thinking about the harm caused by our participation in a coercive system” is probably how people try to say sane, not the cause of that coercive system.
It is a hopeful conjecture, but I'm not really convinced most people think they live in a coercive system. Which is obviously part of the problem.
Just like a religious person brought up in an orthodox household consents to prayer, confession and other rituals. Same for a worker in a capitalist system.
Ultimately, nobody consented to being born and nobody consciously decided to be part of the system. Yet here we are.
Since human cooperation predates the sort of pervasively coercive and intrusively hierarchical society in which we live by hundreds of thousands of years, I’d answer “no”
That's part of it, but there are more factors to consider.
Are we now more or less cooperative than in the past? Hunter-gatherers lived in groups of a few dozen, while nomadic tribes could organize into bigger structures, mainly for war. Now our cities are home to millions and we have a global economy of billions.
A human outside of a tribe then would struggle to survive just like (or perhaps more so) than a person not willing to participate in capitalism now.
Coercion (including war, slavery and rape) was always part of humanity, or is there something fundamentally unique about capitalistic coercion? Is the hierarchy a consequence of the rules of the system or simply a function of its size? Are there any examples of societies that were big, cooperative and non-hierarchical?
Where did you get the idea that a human outside of a “tribe” would struggle to survive?
Coercion has of course always existed. In capitalism, as in other statist forms of domination, it is institutionalized. That’s a pretty big difference I’m happy to explain.
The biggest cooperative and non-hierarchical society we know about was probably the Indus Valley civilization. Trypillia was also quite large.
Most people probably don’t think “the system in which I live is coercive” but most are aware that coercion is the backstop of every institution in our lives.
@HeavenlyPossum@jackofalltrades@jlou agreed! Like if you ask people who didn't think theoretically about this stuff, they'll say stuff like "because I don't want to be homeless" or "because I didn't want to go to jail" or "because I don't want someone to take my home/stuff" which is fundamentally about the fear of violence.
If you asked a nomad why they hunt dangerous animals or go on with painful rituals of their tribe they'd also say stuff like "because I don't want to be ostracized", "because I don't want to go hungry", etc.
While previously the fear of violence came mainly from nature now the environment we live in is of our own making, so the violence is also mostly human-made.
So in theory we could structure it differently now.
Being hungry isn’t a form of coercion. Being violently prevented from feeding yourself by your own effort, so that you’ll labor for the aggressor first, is a form of coercion. That’s a pretty big distinction that capitalism goes to great lengths to ideologically mask.
Ostracism is unpleasant but it’s not a form of coercion. Coercion is not merely “unpleasant things.” It’s an act or threat of physical harm.
Tribes had territories and were violently preventing others from feeding themselves by their own effort. They also took slaves, so that they could labor for the aggressor.
Ostracism (in the sense of being excluded / driven away from the tribe) is life-threatening.
@jackofalltrades
Sure some took slaves and defended territories but that's not all tribes, and I can't think of any that violently deprived others of living off their own labor. Do you have any examples?
And no one group controlled enough territory to make migration impossible. @HeavenlyPossum@jlou
Defending territory to me implies depriving others from being able to use that land.
And if you get expelled what are you gonna do, gather berries on a steppe? I wouldn't guess at the chances of the other tribe taking you in (and not as a slave). I'm sure it was possible in some cases. But in the same way you can leave capitalism today.
I’m having flashbacks to twitter arguments with ancaps who insisted that a community having a home is the same thing as capitalist private property because they both entail some form of exclusionary rights.
In short, most people would agree that you have a right to, say, exclude an intruder from your home. But the capitalist isn’t trying to exclude from his home; the capitalist is excluding you from your home in order to extract tribute from you.
Capitalist property would be worthless if capitalists excluded everyone else from it. They need a pool of hungry people, from whom they can let a few people in at a time, under threat of exclusion and homelessness.
Just for the record, I'm not arguing for the ancap position. 😉
I wonder if this is a matter of scale. The world then was much less populated, so there was much more space for people to go away and do their own thing if they wanted.
Doing that in a modern city means living on a street with no access to food or water. So, definitely much harder. But it's a consequence of being surrounded by millions of people in an environment that's parasitic (with cities depending on much more land and resources than they physically occupy). That's in addition to capitalist enclosure, which obviously doesn't help.
You can still go out into the woods today if you want, I guess.
The point is that you are not free to exit capitalism if every square inch of the world is already privately owned by some actor assigned property rights under a global capitalist order. You’re not free to exit capitalism if you have to beg permission from owners or live in fear of the cops.
Agreed, however it is a consequence of capitalism as much as it is the consequence of industrialization. It is hard to go out and live off of your own labor in the hunter-gatherer sense, because there aren't enough wild mammals, not enough wild berries, not enough wilderness, period. Most of it has been replaced with farms, roads and cities. Hunter gatherer lifestyle was dependent on low population density, and that world is now mostly gone.
I’m not talking about living as a forager. I’m talking about the impossibility of freedom in a world in which exclusionary property rights have already been assigned for every possible resource.
We live in times of very high social complexity, i.e. high specialization and interdependence. It's not just other people that labor for us, but most of all energy slaves of fossil fuels.
Even without enclosure, living off of one's labor would be impossible for most people, especially city dwellers.
Is abolishing capitalism necessary for freedom? Sure, we can agree on that. Would that be sufficient? Hardly, due to the physical constraints I described.
"[I]t is a consequence of capitalism as much as it is the consequence of industrialization."
and:
"Is abolishing capitalism necessary for freedom? Sure, we can agree on that. Would that be sufficient? Hardly, due to the physical constraints I described."
In other words, I'm not convinced abolishing capitalism is sufficient to make all people engage only in voluntary cooperation, if we want to keep industrialization intact.
I agree—voluntary cooperation takes lots of work and isn’t always successful. Merely abolishing coercion doesn’t make everyone default to harmony.
It would be very difficult for most people, today and any time, to sustain themselves purely by their own labor. But cooperative labor is an option! Capitalism is a social obstacle to freedom, not a technical or material obstacle.
Where we differ, if I understand you correctly, is that you equate "abolishing capitalism" with "abolishing coercion". Is that right?
In my view capitalism is just one source of coercion out of many. And some of these other sources are indeed material in nature, making them in some ways harder to abolish.
Capitalism is one system of coercion, entangled with many other kinds—the state, patriarchy, gerontocracy, etc. Abolishing capitalism is about getting rid of the most dominant, pervasive mode of coercion and exploitation in our lives.
Since coercion is a social act, I’m not sure how any kind of coercion could be material in nature, except insofar as people act materially on each other.
One example that I see as a potential source of coercion that's material in nature are modern cities.
Cities are inherently parasitic: they siphon resources from other places and export waste they have no way to contain. This unequal flow is really no different than what you see in a relation between Global North and Global South. In this way, you could say cities are colonial in nature.
Cities are not parasitic. I have no idea where this notion comes from. But even if that were the case, how could the mere existence of people living in close proximity to each other be coercive on anyone else?
The idea comes from William Rees and other researchers that study population, urbanization and ecological footprint. I provided you with one link to their work.
A city being parasitic is not about people living in close proximity, but about it requiring a constant stream of resources from the outside on the order of 100 to 1000-fold of its physical size. It's hard for me to imagine this unequal exchange continuing without some form of coercion.
Not if they contribute back a comparable amount of resources. Which isn't the case in modern cities. They exist only because they usurp resources from the outside: from both renewable and nonrenewable natural stocks, often located in rural areas or in the Global South.
I’m a bit flabbergasted by this. The mere act of living in a city is not an act of usurping someone else’s resources. People in the global south also live in cities. People in rural areas also consume both renewable and non renewable resources. Any human being consumes the resources of more land than they physically occupy with their body.
If you replace certain words this honestly reads like capitalist apologia. 😉 "The mere act of being in the top 10% of earners is not an act of usurping someone else’s resources." 😅
Look at the numbers I gave you. Don't you see it as a problem that Tokyo, being a home to 11% of Japan's population, consumes resources that require the land of the whole of Japan to provide?
This is not a stable situation and capitalism is not solely to blame for this.
Yes, if you replace words with other words with different meanings, you will indeed get a different statement.
If capitalism is not to blame for the situation you just illustrated, what is to blame? Do you think the problem emerges from density of habitation, so that if all those people spread out their consumption would stop being coercive?
It's not a totally different meaning, that's the point. Top 10% live in the cities. Meanwhile the poorest live in rural areas.
"If capitalism is not to blame for the situation you just illustrated, what is to blame?"
To blame is the fact that people living in cities require surplus (of all kinds: energy, agricultural produce, minerals) that by necessity must come from the outside.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@jlou capitalist laws against productive uses of land contributes greatly to this imbalance. E.g. as recently as a hundred years ago cities could produce all their own dairy products by using open land later enclosed as parkland specifically if not wholly to prevent this. Chickens, goats, pigs, cows, other urban livestock and market gardens, all of which capital has effectively banished from cities are surprisingly productive. Yes, cities can't feed themselves, but very few human communities can and I don't see why it should be a goal.
Even if cities hadn’t been sites of agricultural production for thousands of years (they were and in some places still are), this kind of argument would only make sense if we rejected division of labor. Most people alive today are not involved in agricultural production or the extraction of primary resources; I do not think this makes doctors, artists, teachers, or anyone else a parasite.
It isn't a goal as much as it is a framework to understand how coercion could prevail even after capitalism, which was the whole point of this example.
Coercion is a thing that people do to each other. The transfer of resources from one place to another can be the product of coercion, but it can also be the product of consensual transfer or exchange. You have argued (unobjectionably) that coercion could persist after capitalism, but seem to have just assumed that cities must be coercively extracting surpluses.
Maybe people just really want to visit art museums, which are often located in cities, for a variety of reasons related to efficiency gains from dense habitation.
Imagine a scenario in your "post-capitalist only concentual trades" world where rural workers decide they don't like the 100-to-1 deal anymore and want to get it down to 1-to-1. What would happen to cities then? I'm not saying it's an inevitability, only saying it's a strong possibility given how cities operate.
Presumably, people in those cities would have to find alternative means of provisioning themselves, much as people in rural areas would probably have to figure out alternative means of provisioning themselves with the goods and services they receive from people in cities. That’s usually how consent works.
Or, "alternative means of provisioning themselves" could mean coercion of some kind.
I don't understand why you assume that without capitalism people would never engage in non-consentual acts. You brought up ancaps before and this assumption is really no different from NAP.
This conversation has a funhouse mirror quality to it. You explicitly asked how people in cities might manage via consensual exchange and when I answered your question you…accused me of assuming people would never engage in non-consensual acts in the absence of capitalism.
Am I missing something here? Did I misread your question somehow? What the actual fuck?
Lol, sorry, indeed my bad. 😅 Just scratch "only concentual trades" from the question. The discussion is getting quite convoluted and I mistakenly referred to your concept of "abolishing coercion" / "living only in voluntary cooperation", while the whole point of this subthread is whether such a thing is even possible.
There’s this strange idea running through this thread that cities consume resources at a “100 to 1” ratio as if the people living in cities are gaping maws of consumption who produce nothing of value that anyone in a rural area might want in return for the things they produce in rural areas.
So much of this starts with “100x farm land is needed to produce food per urban area”, then conveniently in the same sentence structure it somehow conflates and morphs into the unrecognizable “therefore 100x rural people are being oppressed by 1 urban elite”. If anything, the ratio of people is urban >> rural.
Is there no chemistry and biology and engineering and fabrication in this world at all? Do these things not matter and only farming produce any “surplus” whatsoever, to just disappear into the maws of urban freeloaders?
Do we need transportation? Do farms produce those too?
There’s a map that circulated around the internet that claimed the whole world’s population would fit into Texas if everyone lived at the density of New York City. Add in 100 times that amount of land to feed all those people and that amounts to…about 14-15% of the world’s land area.
That actually seems quite better than our current global footprint.
I mean, yeah, farm subsidies suck, but the existence of subsidies doesn’t invalidate the entire project of “farms.” Likewise, there are surely subsidies that some people in some cities enjoy, but that doesn’t invalidate the entire project of “cities.”
I’m ok with division of labor. I don’t consider someone to be a parasite because they’ve specialized in something other than the extraction of primary raw materials. I don’t consider artists or doctors to be parasites because they eat more food than they harvest and use more kaolin than they mine.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@jlou@thesquirrelfish Wouldn't people in general be parasitic? We all consume more resources than our size? Also, modern farmers do not produce anything for themselves, but for others because of Capitalism. So rural areas are no different in cities in that regard.
All living organisms are energy dissipating structures. My comments are chiefly about the inequality that arises here.
The difference between urban and rural areas is in the direction of the flow. Rural areas produce surplus that then gets channeled to the urban areas.
This is really no different to me than resources flowing from the Global South to the Global North under colonialism, or wealth being channeled to the 1% under capitalism.
“Gets channeled” covers a lot of potential mechanisms for moving resources back and forth among people, not all of which are coercive. There is nothing intrinsically coercive about people living close to each other.
You can’t imagine any circumstances in which people might consensually move resources back and forth between areas of denser and less dense habitation?
We're not talking about moving resources "back and forth". We're talking about moving 100 units towards cities and moving 1 unit back. That's the basis of how cities operate and it is only tangentially related to capitalism. Cities worked that way long before capitalism. Without surplus to be usurped there are no cities.
I just want to note-- dense residential areas are good. If everyone just sprawled out to live rurally and started making "unused" land all "productive", it would devastate the landscape and remaining wildlife. The only way we could get by without cities is if the population dropped dramatically. Granted, basically ALL of our problems get smaller with a smaller population, but here we are all the billions of us. Well-designed urban infrastructure can be awesome, but I'm the type that has Venus Project looking images flying around in my brain all day.
And a surprising amount of food can be generated in urban areas if the roof space is used judiciously (vertical farming gets hype but no matter what fun tubes you wanna build you only get so much sunlight per square foot). Aquaponics is awesome. Not enough to feed everybody once the buildings are over half a dozen stories tall, but still enough to matter.
"If everyone just sprawled out to live rurally and started making "unused" land all "productive", it would devastate the landscape and remaining wildlife."
Yes, exactly! This is part of the point I'm trying to make.
I agree that people should live densely to take advantage of economies of scale and thus use fewer resources per capita than they would if they lived spread out.
Now please explain how the "people should live a certain way" part can be achieved without coercion, especially in a time of progressive ecological degradation that we are living through.
I asked "please explain how the "people should live a certain way" part can be achieved without coercion" to which you replied "by not hurting each other".
I am unsure how modern cities could be maintained without some kind of coercive structure, given how they exceed the carrying capacity of the land, especially under the conditions of ecological degradation.
Like @violetmadder noted, city dwellers simply cannot move out of cities anymore, as that would result in destruction of the environment and societal collapse.
That implies that any disruption to the status quo would either result in coercion of city dwellers (to keep them living "densely to take advantage of economies of scale") or coercion of rural / remote population (to keep the flow of resources going).
The ecological overshoot is the reality we live under today and urbanization (along with exctractivism and globalization) is a way this is being masked.
Any human being who is not involved directly in the primary production of food is “consuming more” than they produce and would die if there were any disruption to that production. The entirety of specialization and division of labor is predicated on this exchange. This is not unique to cities. This is also true for anyone in a rural area who is not directly engaged in food production which, for at least large parts of the world, is most people even in rural areas.
Is this a response to my last post? It doesn't seem to address anything I said. I did not even use the words "consuming more" there that you seem to be "quoting".
I did mention the carrying capacity of the land and the ecological overshoot. Do you have any thoughts about that?
I do not produce most of the food I eat. Does that, in your view, make me a parasite? If we abolished capitalist coercion, do you anticipate that I would likely starve to death because the producers of food would withhold from me?
She wouldn't get spare parts for her tractor because former slave miners decided to preserve their land and herd sheep instead.
etc.
In other words, without coercion I wouldn't be surprised if rural communities would renege on their deal of destroying their land and sending their resources to the city on the other side of the region / continent / world that they would never even get to visit anyway.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@afterconnery@jlou@violetmadder
Right, we'd have to change our practices - stuff like extractive environmental destruction is less likely in a society where people are free to stop doing it. But I fail to see why we would increase the resources we consume by moving out of cities for that change.
For most extractive resource work, like mining and farming, you can get more returns per acre & per capita by investing in equipment and labor and worker education - it's just not economically efficient now because capitalists can depend on cheaper labor who isn't empowered to demand much. There are plenty of people who have liked their work in those fields even under current conditions, so given the ability to improve their conditions, I think we can assume the work would continue.
We should also consider that no labor occurs in isolation, and the people who work in the production of food are already embedded in dense webs of relationships. There’s no single unitary actor “the rural farmer” who could suddenly turn off food to everyone who currently specializes in something other than food production (which, absent from this conversation, includes many rural people).
One hallmark of precapitalist society was the absence of starvation unless the entirety of society had no food at all. People tend to take care of people in need. It’s difficult for me to imagine the entirety of some critical sector suddenly deciding en masse to stop and let everyone else die in agony while they watch.
So, you posit that, in the absence of coercion, I might starve to death because producers of food might withhold their products from me. This is because (I assume, you didn’t answer) you view me as a parasite because I consume more food than I produce.
Why would this be more likely based on the number of neighbors I have?
I also remain incredibly befuddled by the assumption here that the literally billions of urban workers (and rural workers who don’t engage in the production of primary resources like food) are all just parasites, whose labor is utterly worthless.
Cities being parasitic is the word being used by scholars in the field. A technical term, if you will, and not a moral statement that you're trying to make out of it.
It's also not about the producers intentionally withholding food from you, but rather about them not having enough food to give.
It has to do with material reality of the complexity of industrial food production and distribution. It has to do with local decisions having second-order effects.
Cities would be first to be affected by this, because they don't produce food locally.
The vast majority of people don’t produce food, including a majority of rural people. They would also be among the first to be affected by a disruption to global food production because they do not produce food.
The major difference between the two is that rural people do not exceed the carrying capacity of the land they live on to the same dramatic extent as city dwellers do. I.e. you can live like River Dave for a while if you need to.
The average urban resident can benefit from economies of scale that require fewer resources per capita than an equivalent rural resident. They can walk or bike to more amenities, share heating between residential units, and enjoy access to mass transit that is more cost effective in denser settlements.
I really don’t know where this idea of yours comes from. People use resources; many people living close together will use many resources, but this does not mean they somehow use more resources per capita than people living less densely. There’s no need to fetishize rural life as somehow closer to the earth just because they’re more spread out.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@afterconnery@jlou@violetmadder@thesquirrelfish But cities do produce food locally, and if capitalists hadn't outlawed most forms of urban food production in order to force people into the labor market we could produce much more. E.g. before refrigerated transport every city produced all its own dairy locally by allowing cows and goats to graze on common property. There's no reason this wouldn't still work. Same with chickens, pigs, rabbits, bees, and other such small livestock.
There's also fishing. Here in Los Angeles we produce incredible amounts of seafood. It's also possible to farm fish in surprisingly small ponds if the law allows. There are or have been trout farms on city lots right in urban LA. Fruit trees and small gardens are incredibly productive. Cities may not produce sufficient food locally, but many rural areas don't either. Trade certainly doesn't depend on coercion. Why would it stop?
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@afterconnery@jlou@violetmadder I don't see why we'd expect additional scarcity if people are more free to produce... There are waiting lists literally years long to get garden plots in SF. If all those folks are free to garden on available land there'd be zucchini bread for years.
You may be overestimating the difference in production between industrial and small plot production, but a lot of industrial ag production isn't going to food or when it is it's not the healthiest foods. Like we're not going to starve if there's less cheap beef and corn syrup. Fruit and veggies are already less industrialized - without giant land enclosures we could expect a change from monocrop corn/wheat/whatever to a more mixed ag production - which is also better for the climate and people and the local environment and overall resilience of the system.
Yes, I was thinking along these lines as well. The "material reality of the complexity of industrial food production and distribution" that Jack mentioned is very deeply warped by capitalism. I don't know how the transition would work exactly but food production and distribution would have to look very different in a post-capitalist society.
[edited to remove "non-coerced society" because that's outside the point and I didn't mean it that way]
You pointed out just a few relevant and very significant changes, ultimately there would be too many to count, throughout all stages of the process and the decisions made.
Take just one issue for example: waste. The capitalist system generates unbelievably insane levels of waste throughout the entire chain, from decisions to grow monocrops of things we don't even really need (only to support the continuation of capitalist society) to the motivations that lead to grocery stores discarding (and even intentionally contaminating) unimaginable amounts of good food, with police playing their coercive role in denying people access to that food. This consideration alone is profound and far-reaching.
What I find unbelievable is the suggestion that without coercion 8 billion people will spontaneously keep the globalization going or just naturally move towards sustainable practices without major conflicts breaking out. I'm pretty sure even without capitalism people will seek comfort and status, so will still demand hamburgers, cars, plastic toys, international vacations, big sport events, new fashion, etc.
The problem with urbanites is that they get all these wonderful benefits of modern life while being mostly blind to the pressure on resource extraction and ecological degradation that comes along with it, all because it happens outside of the city, sometimes on the other side of the world.
Abolishing capitalism would only make these patterns of consumption more equitable, but would not make them disappear.
Yet here I'm being led to believe that farmers will continue to produce because they can visit art museums in the city. 😅 Without capitalism and coercion this would irreversibly go away, and for sectors much more important than chocolate production. The whole imperial mode of living, to use term from Brand and Wissen, would need to go, and with it big modern cities.
@HeavenlyPossum I love how I thought the conversation was over yesterday, but this morning he had to go one more round. Apparently he was done with me so he blocked me. Oh well, we were probably talking past each other anyway.
The ecological footprint framework tries to bridge that gap in understanding, but just look at knee-jerk reactions of people in this thread to see how hard it is to accept. It is easier to simply dismiss the idea, blame it all on capitalism and imagine all these material constraints will magically go away or will be resolved without coercion of any kind.
My understanding is that as people regain freedom over their lives and their surroundings they will prioritize local over global, just like we have a natural inclination to prioritize our family and friends over people on the other side of the globe.
Everyone will be affected by this, but big cities especially, since they are dependent on materials and ecological degradation happening all over the world.
Bottom line, overshoot will not automatically go away after capitalism, and I see it as a major flash point for potential conflict.
@jackofalltrades
The inputs you're describing are essential to imperial-industrial production but that style of production is not essential. Global trade existed before capitalism - corn varieties went back & forth from the Amazon to the Great Lakes for 10,000 years and the number of varieties have crashed since North American enclosure. Currently we're killing the Gulf of Mexico with overflowing oil fertilizer and failing to manage many other traditional fertilizer sources. That's a healthy food source being destroyed for false efficiencies & less valuable ag products.
The ecological footprint model is one of the strongest arguments that capitalism & coercion is the problem - the US military is the single biggest GHG emitter and the difference between the extremely wealthy and everyone else is very illustrative.
Conspicuous consumption and purchases as status will necessarily be changed if sharing becomes the expectation.
There are currently many more people not in overshoot than in overshoot.
"The inputs you're describing are essential to imperial-industrial production but that style of production is not essential."
It is now. Half of the world's population would starve without it. And this is based just on nitrogen fertilizer input. In pre-industrial times the human population was one tenth of what it is today.
@jackofalltrades again, no. Excess nitrogen fertilizer is draining into the Gulf of Mexico and other bodies of water while reducing available healthy foods.
There's also the problems of excess unmanaged nitrogen production on cattle feedlots and similar conditions - which would need to be more sustainably managed in any system.
Most of the fertilizer in use isn't even going to growing food directly but involved in growing animal feed and shelf stable corn syrup and other products with higher profit ratios than more sustainably grown food. https://ourworldindata.org/reducing-fertilizer-use
@thesquirrelfish Good article, thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to invalidate my point though.
They mention potential efficiency improvements:
"""
In the decade from 2005 to 2015, average yields of maize, rice and wheat increased by around 11%. At the same time, nitrogen fertilizer use decreased by around one-sixth. (...) Nitrogen pollution could be reduced by around 35% if polluting countries became as efficient as their neighbors. This would have little impact on crop yields.
"""
@jackofalltrades yes, fertilizers are necessary & always have been - that doesn't mean industrial fertilizer and industrial farming is necessary. Particularly if we're no longer in an enclosure situation where commodity monocrops are repeatedly farmed on the same piece of land. Crop rotation & farm diversity is a very real solution that is more resilient for food production in a less stable climate with novel pathogens.
Do you have any numbers behind this? How would the yields be affected if all farming would be done this way? How much land would that require? How are you going to get food from producers to consumers before it spoils (since ships are slower, can they use refrigeration and plastic packaging?)
@jackofalltrades it's hard because it's literally an apples to oranges comparison. How many carrots and lentils substitutes for how much corn syrup & cow feed?
Here's an overview article showing in general smaller farms tend to be more diverse in production with greater production per unit of land.
>>What I find unbelievable is the suggestion that without coercion 8 billion people will spontaneously keep the globalization going or just naturally move towards sustainable practices without major conflicts breaking out.<<
Nobody has suggested this and the scenario being discussed was a post-capitalist world free only of capitalist coercion. Not a very realistic scenario as we haven't addressed state at all, but we've been talking about possibilities not prophecies.
>>I'm pretty sure even without capitalism people will seek comfort and status, so will still demand hamburgers, cars, plastic toys, international vacations, big sport events, new fashion, etc.
The problem with urbanites is that they get all these wonderful benefits of modern life while being mostly blind to the pressure on resource extraction and ecological degradation that comes along with it, all because it happens outside of the city, sometimes on the other side of the world.<<
Are you saying that non-urbanites don't also desire these things?
Do you think that non-urbanites are somehow more conscious of the pressure on resource extraction and ecological degradation that come with these things?
>>current food production absolutely depends on these basic inputs like fossil fuels, artificial fertilizers, etc.<<
Current food production is to a great extent not designed to feed people efficiently, or even to feed people at all except as a side effect.
On a tangent, there's a key piece of the puzzle I just want to mention: composting.
>>There is probably something to be said about calories vs nutritional value though.<<
Galaxy-sized understatement!
>>In my Earth government fantasy there would be a wealth transfer to the Global South, taxing billionaires to oblivion, mandatory switch to public transport, worldwide ban on industrial meat production and ever smaller quotas on fossil extraction.<<
Do you realize that this makes you a tankie?
The bottom line here for me is that you seem to be arguing in favor of maintaining (or probably even increasing) some form of coercion in order to maintain the global north's living standards and "wonderful benefits".
I would rather take my chances in a world without coercion, even knowing that it means our lifestyles will necessarily not be the same. I do not want to coerce people to eat carrots and lentils instead of breakfast cereal and hamburgers. But if capitalist coercion is removed, many things are going to become more scarce and we're going to have to adapt - and I know we can.
@RD4Anarchy@jackofalltrades@thesquirrelfish@violetmadder@afterconnery@jlou Only wonderful benefit of modern capitalism is keeping mass production line. Which largely produse superfluous stuff. Scientifically and technologically developed production would need a whole reorganisation of production. Coca cola is not a scientifically designed cold beverage designed for maximum, idk, tasefulness. No matter how much science and technology you use while making it. Because it's a commodity. You WOULD need coercion continue developing mass production capabilities of the world even if you wanted to share it. But, it is pointless and ecocidal to do so, expect for couple of goods such as basic food and shelter necessities for those who lack. You definitely do not need to mass produce cars, for example. It makes no sense except in relation to profit motive and exploitation.
All of this would make more sense if you started with the unspoken, unquestioned assumptions that people are very stupid, and ignorant, and shortsighted, and possessing unlimited hedonic wants they can never satisfy, and apt to murderous violence in the face of shortages, and habitually parochial.
"Are you saying that non-urbanites don't also desire these things? Do you think that non-urbanites are somehow more conscious of the pressure on resource extraction and ecological degradation that come with these things?"
Yes, of course there will be ecological limits (specific to each location) to how many people can live sustainably and equitably in a particular city, even if all those individuals are living sustainably on a per capita basis.
But this is not an argument against all cities ever.
"But this is not an argument against all cities ever."
Good I did not make such an argument.
This was about the future, so it was implied it was about cities as they are today, and besides I clearly said I meant modern cities.
The argument also wasn't about being "against" cities. I only pointed out material constraints present in cities that will be a breeding ground for conflict.
I think we all understand that cities as they are today cannot continue (and some of us have given examples of some things that could be done differently). Cities as they are today could not continue to exist in a post-capitalist scenario.
We do not say this because we think people are going to suddenly change their minds overnight, but because without constant capitalist coercion to sustain and enable them, many things would cease to exist (example: the dominance of automobiles as a transportation solution), or become scarce (hamburgers and fast fashion) or be transformed by ingenuity and necessity (agriculture and food supply chains).
What I don't understand is on what basis you assume that private cars would cease to exist, but not things like vaccines or computers. Why would hamburgers become scarce and not fertilizers or insulin? Why would things be transformed by ingenuity and necessity rather than by local self-interest and short-term thinking?
The world is very interconnected. We got to this point exactly because of colonial relations and exploitation. Flows were enforced to go a certain way and people downstream depend on them going unimpeded.
In the last 50 years we've doubled the amount of people that depend on these flows. And it's not just Americans waiting for their hamburgers, but also Nigerians powering their generators with diesel. Critical stuff that when disturbed will mean people dying.
If you empower local decision-making it's going to upset all of these flows in a profound way.
An alternative to your vision is the following: Citizens now sharing wealth more equally will create more demand for cars and vacations. Auto workers will not suddenly decide to stop making cars or only make buses, pilots and flight attendants will not stop flying, etc.
At the same time communities around the world will make decisions to shut down that coal mine / oil pipeline / wind farm next door, because it hurts them much more than it serves them. This will affect everyone, but not equally. Some will drive their new car to the beach, others will die of hunger.
Since no local community can be forced to sacrifice for the greater good globalization would unravel. Violence, coercion, states and war all would come back with a vengeance.
Hamburgers won't either but without capitalist coercion I don't think things like McDonald's will continue. Maybe I'm wrong. As far as I know insulin production is not the environmental disaster that industrial beef production is.
>>Why would things be transformed by ingenuity and necessity rather than by local self-interest and short-term thinking?<<
There will probably be all those things.
>>And it's not just Americans waiting for their hamburgers, but also Nigerians powering their generators with diesel.<<
You are an example of someone considering the fate of Nigerians. I suspect you're not the only one.
>>Since no local community can be forced to sacrifice for the greater good globalization would unravel. Violence, coercion, states and war all would come back with a vengeance.<<
Maybe. I don't know.
I can't go any further with this discussion because our hypothetical scenario is too simplistic. We've assumed capitalism is gone but we haven't stated conditions around other forms of coercion like state. More importantly, we haven't said anything about how we got to this post-capitalist condition in the first place and this is critically important. A society that has purposefully managed to free itself from capitalism somehow is, IMO, probably less likely to allow these things to return.
Or, In a world where climate and environmental disasters have brought capitalism down I don't think society will have the option to recreate it even if they wanted to, and I think they will have learned their lesson and won't want to.
We're not talking about a fantasy scenario where every capitalist in the world suddenly magically disappears and everyone else fails to take the hint to start anew and instead recreates their own subordination somehow.
We can spin scenarios forever but as always this comes down to whether we believe that people need to be managed by an authority with power over them or not. I believe not, I believe that's a deal with the devil that never pays off. You've claimed to agree with that but everything you say continues to be the same as typical propertarian liberal justifications for state and coercive power structures. Perhaps you're just playing devil's advocate, but I don't have all the answers for you, and no single person will.
But if humanity really is not capable of anything else then maybe it would be better if we perish.
I think the main source of contention is that I see the collapse of industrial civilization as inevitable.
During the discussion there was very little acknowledgement of biophysical constraints and a lot of wishing away the problem of cooperation of 8 billion humans. To me, adopting this or that political system ultimately sounds like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Wishing away the problems of cooperation. That’s definitely what we were doing. Thank goodness you came along because I don’t think I’ve ever once thought or written about cooperation or how humans interact with their environment. Whew.
Without a surplus to be shared, there would be no human beings. There’s nothing that changes about those human beings when they live nearer each other than to other people.
Let’s consider an example. Cities tend to feature hospitals, especially hospitals with sophisticated equipment. This is because density allows the doctors at those hospitals to enjoy economies of scale. Rather than purchase many expensive MRI machines to treat a few scattered people, doctors in cities can purchase a few MRI machines and treat many patients by taking turns using a single machine many times.
Are those doctors parasites because they consume more food than they produce? (And: are you rejecting specialization and division of labor?)
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@jlou@thesquirrelfish but if people all use the same resources then it doesn't matter if it is city or rural. Cars, roads, gas, air conditioners, solar panels, food, restaurants, gadgets, etc. gets used by people in cities or in the sticks. Just because people are in close proximity in cities doesn't mean they use more than those in the sticks. What your saying makes more sense in Global South and Global North terms, but not with cities and rural.
The global transfer of resources from south to north is a consequence of violence and power. The transfer of food from parent to child is a consequence of love. The movement of resources is, by itself, not evidence of coercion.
Cities consume a lot of resources, because people consume resources and there are a lot of them in cities. Cities also produce lots of stuff of value. Some of the movement of stuff to and from cities is the product of coercion. Some of it is voluntary exchange. I assume that, absent capitalism and the coercive state that works for capital, cities would consume less stuff, since they’d no longer have a rentier class to support and no intensification to pursue.
But cities would continue to exist because people seem to really like them. Cities predate capitalism and, critically, they predate the state—there is no intrinsic reasons why cities would be any more parasitic than any arbitrary number N people living near each other.
That’s the funny thing about cities, they’re full of people who do all kinds of work that other people find useful, doing all kinds of things people find desirable.
Cities allow us to exceed carrying capacity of the land they sit on, requiring a steady flow of resources from the outside. The problem with any disruption of this flow is that you have millions of people that will go hungry all at once if it stops. Rural citizens are not going to be up in arms if they can't visit art museums, but urban citizens will if they don't get their food or energy.
So while it is somewhat easier to imagine a coercion-free society of hunter gatherers that do not exceed the carrying capacity of the land and therefore live in balance with their environment I find it next to impossible for cities, because they inherently are out of balance.
I dunno man, I've been reading the news from Germany, where rural citizens have been taking to the streets with their tractors because they're afraid they won't get their subsidies.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@afterconnery@jlou I get what you're saying. The USSR in the later 1920s onwards basically had that experience, where peasants would only bring their grain to cities at gunpoint. But that was a society under great scarcity. With political and cultural agreement I'm sure food could flow from producers to places like cities. With a few hundred more years of climate change we might end up in Siberian scarcity, of course.
Thank you for this, at least one person understands what I'm saying. 😄
This "political and cultural agreement" is the hazy part to me, especially when scarcity inevitably rears its head. Which it will due to the undisputable fact we're in overshoot.
I don't think we'll need to wait a few hundred more years to see these things unravel, unfortunately.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@afterconnery@jlou well the thing is, that any society will have a lot of these flows of food from producers to consumers. Even within a village you'll have people who aren't engaged in food production but who get food because they are embraced by the community. Unless your hands are actually on the food during production, it's always a cultural and social agreement that means you get fed. I don't think wider versions of this are impossible.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@afterconnery@jlou (and another version of this is the mine between city and country becoming more blurred. People stream out of London to the surrounding countryside during harvest time etc. Seasonal migration and part-time urbanism used to be a common thing.
It's not really about the existence of economic flows in general, but the fact that these flows to the cities obscure an inherent unsustainability.
If a city of Tokyo requires resources from land the size of Japan while housing only 11% of Japan's population it's obvious something's gonna give at some point.
I'm not convinced that it's all due to capitalism, but rather is a characteristic of cities themselves. Maybe I'm wrong about this point, but I haven't heard any arguments to that effect. So far most of the discussion has been about misreadings of what I said. 😔
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@afterconnery@jlou I'm wary of arguments based on an idea of a natural balance. I agree that megacities would probably not exist without coercion, unless we're in some kind of Iain Banks post-scarcity, but in the same way Hollywood would not exist, but filmmaking certainly would, I think cites would still exist, but as more shifting and open things.
Agreed, cities would need to undergo major changes, as their modern iteration is unsustainable. This process could lead to societal tensions that cannot be wished away just by abolishing capitalism.
@jackofalltrades@Loukas@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@jlou Having mega cities is a symptom of overshoot. Cities aren't inherently the problem as you seem to be dancing around. Cities were around before global overshoot and will be after. Ending capitalism also wont end overshoot, it just exacerbates it. The only way to truly end overshoot is more people die than are born.
I specifically mean modern cities as they exist today, not all cities as they existed in pre-industrial times. Note that this thread is in the context of "would coercion go away once we abolish capitalism". I pointed out that we wouldn't be able to keep cities as they are and that this transformation would be a major societal flashpoint.
One important point is that the ecological footprint doesn't just include resources, but also waste.
In our theoretical post-capitalism society, I don't see a way that people living near mines, oil fields, industrial farms, recycling plants etc. are going to say that it's a fair trade to get their water and air polluted, so that they can occasionally get their doctor's appointment in the city.
Without all that fossils, minerals, packaged and processed food, and the pollution that comes with it (but is conveniently happening "somewhere else") I can't imagine how cities could survive and how these material conditions (regardless of the economic system) could be maintained without coercion.
@jackofalltrades@Loukas@HeavenlyPossum@thesquirrelfish@jlou what is your definition of coercion then? I have seen/read plenty of people/towns being persuaded to do things not in their best interest. There wasn't a threat of force (violence/coercion) but the end result was a willful acceptance, granted not in their favor. You seem to see cities only as a violent existence with no hope of being anything other than violent and thereby equating rural or hunter-gatherers as non-violent.
A town agreeing to things not in their best interest is obviously possible. However, the threat of violence underpins capitalism, so that's not how things usually go. Currently it's the state designating sacrificial zones and local population having to deal with it.
"If local communities object to proposed oil sands projects it makes no difference. Projects are always approved by government. (...) First Nations communities have become partners in oil sands projects, in return for jobs, grocery stores, housing, and public facilities (including a health center). When a community wanted to build off-grid solar for electricity the industry stepped up to help."
So what seems to be implied in this conversation is that this exchange would just continue, as if the local populations are getting a good deal here.
They obviously aren't. This is literally happening all over the world and this is what makes modern cities possible. My view is that once you abolish these coercive deals you can kiss modern cities goodbye. There's no way to make this work from an ecological footprint perspective.
Not in their current form. That's my point: once you abolish coercion deurbanization seems inevitable. Doesn't mean cities would disappear completely, but would need to be radically scaled back, perhaps to the sizes they were before industrialization.
What do you imagine is the coercive mechanism for transferring resources from the countryside to the city right now? Can you walk us through how that process works?
All human beings require a steady flow of resources “from the outside.” They will all go hungry if any disruption interrupts that flow. Your household will go hungry if any disruption interrupts the flow of resources “from the outside.” This conversation boggles my mind.
Even if you get rid of all employee - employer relations (i.e. capitalism) and make all workers owners of their companies this does not in any way fix this rural-urban divide.
A sidenote to make this more concrete: in terms of resource consumption, each city occupies between 100-1000x more land than the actual land it sits on.
The way I see it, you either keep this unequal flow going through some other form of coercion, or you get rid of it leading to deurbanization and ultimately deindustrialization. Even that is problematic though, because without industrialization there's no way humanity could maintain current population levels. We seem to be in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I hope you can see how this problem is fundamentally material in nature.
@HeavenlyPossum@jlou@thesquirrelfish@jackofalltrades I think Murray Bookchin and his social ecology college did some fairly detailed sketching out of a hypothetical permaculture densely populated population with greater biodiversity.
Yeah, smarter people than me on ecology have been working on that. I just mean in a broader sense that industry is not a synonym for urbanization, and vice versa. The Industrial Revolution started in the English countryside where it was possible to harness water power to operate mills. It moved to cities because centralizing production made it easier to control workers. Andreas Malm argues in Fossil Capital that water power was more efficient than coal, but coal won out because it enabled more centralized control.
The one I'm talking about in this context of supporting massive urban populations like the Haber-Bosch process, refrigeration, packaging, etc. definitely does require urbanization.
@jackofalltrades@HeavenlyPossum@jlou@thesquirrelfish I don’t… what? “Parasitic” to what? Oppression is about people, not about land area. You can’t “oppress land”, unless you’re oppressing people on the land. Note that your post 1/4 talks about land ratios and in 2/4 it smoothly conflates into oppressing people. Why does 1/4 imply 2/4?
It’s a really antiquated view of the city as host to an unproductive elite that periodically sends out armies to raid and pillage the countryside, rather than being a dynamic node in a web of relationships.
@HeavenlyPossum The people don't want to be seen as overreacting or looking foolish thing also applies to COVID. So many people aren't masking or taking precautions now because no one around them is masking or taking precautions and it would be embarrassing to do so.
Once, when I was living in DC, there was a fire in the metro system. A train stopped in the tunnel and started filling with smoke. An announcement came on over the speakers: stay in the train, for safety.
Eventually people were evacuated, but not before one woman died from smoke inhalation and others became sick from it.
There was a discussion on a local blog: what went wrong? I suggested that being trapped in a box filling with smoke was bad, and that I would have exited the train and tried to make for safety.
No no, I was told: that would have been dangerous. Anyway, someone in authority provided instructions. Stay in the train. Don’t leave. That might have gotten someone killed! We should listen to The Big Voice on the loudspeakers.
But staying in that box filling with smoke, at the instructions of someone in authority, literally did kill someone. She died in that train. This fact didn’t seem to register for them: the uncertainty of taking action, vs the certainty of following orders.
The fear of being embarrassed about overreaction is more powerful than the certainty of death for some people.
@HeavenlyPossum I remember hearing about a ship in another country somewhere, authority said for the passengers to stay where they are. Those passengers died to drowning. Most of them were kids.
I have a nature to not follow authority. I follow my heart instead.
@HeavenlyPossum It's puzzled me that I've heard recorded reminders to stay on the train, when you can see the escape routes and emergency telephones in the tunnels.
It feels like the civil engineers are being overridden by administrators.
DC metro trains have clearly posted instructions for evacuating to a walkway inside every tunnel that’s on the opposite side of the train from the third rail.
Meanwhile, staying on the train did actually kill someone.
I read this story years ago, about the sinking of the MS Estonia in 1994, and it had a life-altering effect on me. I saved a guy’s life once as a result! Anyway, this is the key passage for me:
“Survival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death.”
Among those who survived were the ones who, at the first sign of trouble, took immediate action to get to the deck. Among those who died were the ones who waited to see if the initial danger had passed, or was a false alarm, or listened to the crew announcements to stay put.
@HeavenlyPossum i live in California near where the San Bernardino ISIS shooting took place in 2015. It was holiday season, and a few days later I was in the Tyler Mall in Riverside one night, and suddenly we heard loud crashing noises. Everyone stopped, the whole mall was quiet for a moment while people looked around, and someone said "They're shooting!!" And a stampede began. I've never run so fast in my life, we all thought we might die in a shooting & i didn't wanna die in a stampede either.
@HeavenlyPossum the ENTIRE POLICE FORCES in Riverside AND San Bernardino turned up at the mall. I had a friend who was working in the mall & they die had to go into lockdown. No one knew what was really happening for hours.
Turns out, it was a smash-n-grab robbery at a jewelry store. But everyone who was there is just walking around with that trauma of believing they were in another shooting, & gets constantly & explicitly gaslit because "it was just a robbery" to everyone who wasn't there.
@HeavenlyPossum people being told their instincts were wrong & their response was wrong, because they didn't fuckin wait around to find out if they were in a "real shooting" or were in any "real danger." Imagine saying this to a MALL-FULL of people, FOUR DAYS after the at-the-time worst terrorist attack since 9/11, which happened just in the next city over. 🙄
@HeavenlyPossum Damn this article was intense as hell, but thanks for posting it.
I ride on ferries all the time and I am never going to be able to look at any of them the same 😂 This should be (and maybe is?) required reading for all Naval Engineering courses.
This line in particular really touched me: "in a strange way he was in his element now, a man who knew ships, acting logically and alone, with no need to explain himself and nothing to do but survive."
It wasn’t anything spectacular. I was at an event and noticed an older guy waiting by his car, like he was waiting for someone. When I came out of the event, he was still there and I thought, that’s weird—it’s super cold out and if I saw him then and now he’s probably been out here the whole time.
I went over to check on him and he collapsed. I got the EMTs on the phone and helped him up; they got there real quick and warmed him up.
He had gotten separated from his wife and had a senile episode, didn’t know what was going on. Probably would have died out there, passed by hundreds of people on their way in and out of the event. I just thought about that article, about taking action without worrying what it looked like. It’s a legit rule I live my life by.
That’s the thing—a whole lot of people passed by him and probably either ignored him or assumed everything was fine, he was fine or someone else would take care of it. But I took that account to heart. I don’t know what happened after the EMTs got him, but I know he wouldn’t have made it at all if I had just shrugged it off too.
@HeavenlyPossum In the James Bond book "You Only Live Twice", a character tells an anecdote, apparently true, about people showing up at a bank saying they were from the Minister of Health, lining all the workers and management up to drink a "vaccinating" drink, and they all keeled over and died, and the thieves looted the bank.
@stevewfolds@HeavenlyPossum@TomSwirly Edward Abbey was a racist who loved borders, so let's maybe avoid quoting him when talking of the ills of mindless conformity.
Taking a quote from a book on your shelf, Confessions of a Barbarian page 307, what do you think he meant when he said this?
> According to the morning newspaper, the population of America will reach 267 million by 2000 AD. An increase of forty million, or about one-sixth, in only seventeen years! And the racial composition of the population will also change considerably: the white birth rate is about sixty per thousand females, the Negro rate eighty-three per thousand, and the Hispanic rate ninety-six per thousand.
>
> Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.
>
> Garrett Hardin compares our situation to an overcrowded lifeboat in a sea of drowning bodies. If we take more aboard, the boat will be swamped and we’ll all go under. [We must] militarize our borders [against illegal immigration]. The lifeboat is listing.
What the hell is it with these types and the damn lifeboat analogies?
I don't even know how many times I've run into these guys and they say shit like, "If you're on a lifeboat at sea and somebody refuses to catch any fish, is everybody else on the boat supposed to feed him?"
Fortunately I think some of the first references to him that I came across pointed out some of his problematic aspects. I never learned much more about him, and when his name comes up once in a great while I usually have to look it up to remember who he was and then it's like oh yeah, that guy, movin' along now...
@HeavenlyPossum Fire alarm in an office, which we knew was a practice.
I followed the signs to the fire exit, where there was a crowd of people milling around a closed fire door that could only be opened by breaking some glass. "Are we really supposed to break the glass when it's only a drill?" they were asking each other.
FFS. I pushed the bar, the glass link broke, I left the building, and the rest followed me, treading the broken glass into the carpet.
The difference? I was a contractor and they were all permies - they were worried about what their boss would do if they made the wrong decision, I didn't give a shit what their boss would do.
And nothing was learned except perhaps by some of those individuals - there was no post-drill briefing saying that those people had got it wrong.
@HeavenlyPossum@TimWardCam When Gorsuch was appointed, wasn’t there reporting on a previous decision of his where he decided a company had rightfully fired a truck driver who had abandoned his cargo to escape certain death when his truck broke down in deep freezing temperatures and no help was forthcoming after several hours? And Gorsuch said, yes, the guy had to leave to save his life but the company was right to fire him anyway?
@HeavenlyPossum
I watched a documentary about deadly conformity that covered this issue. Also the ferry boat that sank in Korea where a bunch of high school students died. The boat was sinking and they were told to wait in their cabins. All the crew got off but the kids were still below decks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVyQo4zkiDs
@HeavenlyPossum I forget where I read about the restaurant fire where people died who queued up to pay instead of getting the hell out of the burning building.
@HeavenlyPossum WRT the fear of overreacting: I have heard — and I believe this is certainly part of it — that fire alarms not only exist to alert people that the building is on fire, but to provide cover for people that smell smoke, but don’t speak up because of embarrassment.
@HeavenlyPossum
I don't have a car. I wouldn't own one if it were given to me for free, but drivers can be dicks and cars are dangerous weapons. Sometimes it may be necessary to remove a dickhead from their car to keep yourself safe.
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