Though let us consider the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes that would actually be necessary for each of these to exercise real choice in the matter at hand:
The Public: Die, because that is the only thing that doesn’t actively destroy the biosphere, because you have no actual meaningful control over anything
Farmers: Change professions, likely losing everything (at which point they become “The Public”), because you can’t even control what seeds you buy (See: Agricorps), let alone anything else you do with the land, and it’s all a monopsony, anyway (See: Agricorps) so you can’t even choose who buys your crops or for how much you sell them.
Government: Literally the only thing required here is to take a long view and invest in infrastructure that also has huge short-term benefits. Realistically, the actual reason is because the politicians get money from the corpocrats (See: Agricorps), and don’t want to not get money from the corpocrats.
Agricorps: It is explicitly against their fiduciary duty to tank the value of long-term investment in their own business by making the planet uninhabitable. The only change required is to actually hold to fiduciary duty, rather than “number go up, STONKS”.
Huh, it’s almost as if there are very specific problems that can be traced to a single, specific spiderman here… interesting.
🇮🇱? /s
This is what a focus on short-term economics and short term politics brings us to. Governments across the world could have focussed on a more sustainable community-based(?) approach. But that’s too difficult. Instead, they prefer tooting the horns of their economic ‘developments’ that just makes things worse.
When and why do you think our time preferences have shortened?
That is a big question. Rectally sourced information here, but I would probably guess it started in the wake of the Dust Bowl.
Close. WWII America had to invest heavily in farms to feed soldiers who need 4,000 kcal diets to support marching around with heavy packs all day long in potentially cold weather. That investment drove up automation in the farm industry, particularly with corn and soybeans.
War ends, but the infrastructure is all still there. If farms weren’t heavily subsidized, they would collapse. There was real risk of fields going fallow on a mass level, resulting in too little food to feed the population. And then you have to keep subsidizing it, forever. Nobody has figured out a way out of that logic while maintaining a mostly capitalist production system.
I believe that’s the point of the original meme. I hesitate to say “whoosh,” as you did eventually get to the the same interpretation, but you definitely took the pretty blatant subtext and made it text.
Then again, I still upvoted you
I disagree. It seems to me that it’s equivocating and saying that all of these groups are equally bad and at fault, and are just pointing fingers at each other. I am trying to make it very clear that there is a hierarchy of blame, and it’s the same one as the hierarchy of wealth.
The message I got was that the system’s to blame for making this the equilibrium point
And the system was designed by, bribed into existence by, and enforced with violence and propaganda by…
More than agricorps
Oh absolutely! I was just working with what we were given.
I take great solace in knowing that for all the dirty tricks we play on one another to fuck each other over and get moar, greed made climate change itself cannot be bribed, discredited, scapegoated, cut in, threatened, me too-ed, or divided into attacking itself instead. That shit only works on other humans but it’s hilarious to see humanity try anyway, because it’s all we know to do for our problems.
I feel bad for all the innocent species we’re taking with us, and the ecosystem for the next 2 or so million years while the earth recovers from us as it has with other runaway metastatic mistakes of evolution that threatened the whole, see the trees of the carboniferous period, but Im glad our reign of terror on this world, the creatures on it, and each other will end soon, and no amount of human bullshitting will save us.
Don’t forget the anaerobes, which generated so much oxygen that they poisoned themselves nearly to extinction and made the entire atmosphere a toxic miasma for themselves, without which all multicellular life would not exist!
Didn’t the Proterozoic era happen a few billion years, and possibly a couple of snowball periods later than that? I thought the aneribic stuff happened pretty early and made Earth hotter than Venus, at the time.
Absolutely, but aerobic life is more able to harness efficient energy with the use of oxygen’s INSANE reactivity, and that change was only possible because the anaerobes turned 20+% of the atmosphere into the elemental molecular form of the second-most electronegative element in the universe. Even plants, which produce oxygen gas during photosynthesis, use oxygen to power ATP synthesis. Oxygenation of the planet was absolutely requisite to allow the evolution of eukaryotic multicellular life.
That’s why we just target the people with the most money and power and drag them down to our mortal world.
Comma splice party.
