June 2016 – Underlore

The Right Wing

The Right Wing: Children of all ages asking as crassly as possible, why is anything other than their needs their problem.

Society already recognizes that entire school of thought as inhuman and parasitic. It’s an obvious appeasement reaction in the face of the 1%. It’s stockholm syndrome. You know you can’t beat them, so you internalize their lies in a futile effort to join them.

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary”

The neocon/4chan/Ayn Rand attitude is simply the natural consequence of the altruistic groups rising to power, in turn being attacked and torn down from within by the selfish groups.

But whatever, I have no illusions. You’re all beyond the reach of reason. It’s all about dogma for you. That’s why you’re all here white knights for a redpill asshole fat shaming as an argument against sharing.

An argument in favor of the idea that we are all ants and that the ideal human future is one of eternal drudgery and service to the 1%.

I’m speaking to the historical record, I’m not speaking to any of you.

http://underlore.com/bait-and-switch/

Is being too late really so bad?

July 2016 was the hottest month in recorded history

The main advantages of runaway climate change being here have to do with food, opportunity, war, and general change.

We’re going to end up with more food for a couple of reasons. Firstly, mild winters. Secondly, rainfall changes are going transform a lot of deserts. Thirdly, more co2 in the air means more for plants to work with. Fourth, there will be far less reason to discourage mechanized farming in lower income and developing nations. All of that adds up to more food for more people.

The developing world is going to have access to the same industrial revolutions that the UK and US got. Frankly it’s only fair and it’s morally urgent to raise their standard of living and that means consumption of fuels.

If climate change is annoying to us enough it will force us to shift from prevention to cure which is important for a lot of reasons. Carbon capture and storage is a skill we as a species should master anyway and is the most accessible tool we have for starting to control the weather, which we really should do anyway for a whole boatload of reasons.

Also pulling carbon out of the air allows us to make fuels. All we need to do it is process heat and that’s gonna be abundant once we embrace 4th gen nuclear reactors, or we figure out fusion. Liquid and solid fuels will always have a place in our society because of energy density and relative size. It doesn’t make sense to use a heavy battery when you can use a light tank. And we’ll always need carbon based materials for fertilizer and plastics and polymers etc.

This will all also inspire the deployment and develop desalination technologies. Change rainfall patterns will see to it that making ocean water drinkable becomes a human strong suit. We can already do it well with air craft carriers, (two hundred thousand gallons a day each) so imagine what we can do with purpose build nuclear desalination ships.

I think there will also be a general trend towards less conflict as a shared problem tends to unite people. Humanity’s slow and collective retreat from the coast lines is going to get us working together more than usual I think. Sure it will cause conflict also, all change does, but on balance I think it’ll be better than what we have now. It’ll break ruts and stalemates all over the planet.

Generally change is good and I think modern humanity needs to embrace the fact that nature isn’t kind. Or evil. It simply is. We’re going to realize that an important choice has been in our face for a long time but we put off making it: Take control of nature, or be killed by it. No matter what our time on this planet is limited and believing we can just freeze it in place with environmental protection and conservation is objectively wrong.

There are life forms that we need to wipe out. Fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes spring to mind, not to mention a whole host of bacteria and viruses. Before climate change our general attitude was that everything was all interconnected in a massive natural system designed for our benefit. That never was the case, and climate change is going to wake up a lot of people to that fact.

We rose to our position by changing the world, not preserving it’s current configuration. Ironically climate change itself is a strong demonstration for how badly we needed it. The very attitude that nature will find a way to make everything ok for us is what allowed us to complacently dump megatons of CO2 in the air every year thinking nothing would happen.

We have command of this planet’s weather, one way or the other. It will change because of us, and it has, and it is still. This means we have the power to fix whatever we deem to be broken. Nature doesn’t care either way. Nature is perfectly fine with mass extinctions and sterile planets. It’s humanity that isn’t. Ironically nature blindly demanded this tactic of us via evolution. It’s only natural that we use it.

This effort over the coming decades will unite us like nothing has ever before.

On a personal level… Honestly I feel better. There’s a cynicism to that feeling, but it’s like this:

We’ve had nuclear power as an option for decades. We instead chose to embrace fear and greed for no good reasons.

Since the climate has reached the tipping point, then the damage is in a sense already done. And there’s a freedom in that.

We no longer have to tell the third world they have to wait to embrace a better western style of life.

Nuclear advocates have tried, as hard as we could, to wake up the species. We failed. We failed vs liars, fools, and the 1% but we were on the right side of history, are on the right side. There’s comfort in that. History will definitely record that had we embraced nuclear power sooner we’d never have faced climate change. But then again, climate change may well force the widespread adoption of nuclear power and maybe that is the greatest silver lining of all. For all we know mastering fusion is another 500 years away for us for some reason.

Fission by comparison is so easy that is has happened spontaneously. It really is a lot like fire. Sure it can burn us but look at what can be accomplished when we handle fire properly. Fission is fire only 1000x better.

With China and India embracing nuclear it seems like we’ll eventually get there, but avoiding climate change is no longer the priority since that ship has sailed. Oil and energy scarcity are the root of most conflicts. Climate change is going to address that, through nuclear power.

Now it’s just about all the other advantages to nuclear, not just climate change prevention, which obviously for humanity at large was never a good enough argument. Now it’s about the space probes, cancer cures, desalination, and lifestyle upgrades for the billions of lives directly impacted by Chinese and Indian energy policy.

I like the idea of selling hope for a high tech future, instead of fear of climate change. The cruel are better at selling fear than we are. One whack job with a book accomplished more socially than benevolent informed nuclear advocates ever did.

Now it’s about what nuclear can do to make climate change survivable. Winter is more lethal than summer. A slightly warmer planet is better for technological humanity.

Climate change means centuries of new weather and new ecology. This will force us to change things, and preventing climate change was essentially all about keeping things from changing, which given how screwed up things are, never sat well with me. Humanity survives far more often than it really lives, and that’s been a solvable problem since we became tool using humans.

My whole world view’s hope value centers on change. I despise how things are. Change is badly needed, and there seems a definite upside to change being more or less imminent.

I feel like there’s more human opportunity than threat here. It’s like a coming slow motion war. A true world war with an enemy we can truly feel good about fighting. We needed this reminder as a species that nature is not our ally. It’s a blind machine that would compost us literally without thought. And now we get to find out if we’re really capable of freeing ourselves from it or taking command of it.

We need to close the loop. And we can. And soonish on global weather time scale, we’re going to have to. I think I like the idea of having to invent new forms of life to survive. I like the idea of converting nuclear silos into nuclear vertical farm robots. I like the idea of growing cloned meat instead of cows. I like the idea of humanity finally embracing the new fire. And learning to treat this planet like what it actually is. A space station.

There’s a huge political I told you so coming down the line here and we might well be able to parlay that into a substantive compassionate shift in human policy. I can’t help but feel hopeful.

I could see this ushering in the end of neocon libertarian thought. The profit above all attitude has driven us off the road. It’ll finally be time to take the wheel from the selfish and let the compassionate ones drive.

I can’t help but feel like we’re already seeing it. Something changed long ago and politically humanity is catching up. I feel like ISIS and Brexit and Sanders and Trump and Corbyn etc etc all came from the same source. The same titanic shifting under our feet.

As I see it there are two real drivers for change in human history: Environment and technology. Everything else stems from them in my opinion.

I feel like the massive political changes of the last decade were likely sourced by climate change and communications technology. And while some of those changes have been bad, I think there’s a pretty clear trend towards the good. The future of humanity seems united in the direct of change we’d like to see.

It is only the old and the foolish and the pathological screaming for austerity and death and torment and exile and all the right wing blame for victims. That bodes well for our collective future.

All the political craziness to me smacks of desperation on the part of the more cruel and dismissive elements of humanity. Their way of life is approaching the end of its viability.

They are rats cornered on a sinking ship. The future no longer belongs to them. We’re going to have really start doing what we uniquely evolved to do in order to live. Commanding nature, changing it, is natural for us. If we really want to worship the natural order we must accept the fact that there is no order beyond the laws of physics and what we impose.

Insects survive because they adapt to the environment. We survive because we change it. It’s time to start changing it on purpose and with commitment.

I say we start by wiping out the mosquito via genetic engineering.

BLM and a Defense of Riots

In response to a conversation a friend and I had about BLM’s relationship to rioting I am writing this post as a kind of general statement of opinion.

There’s plenty to criticize people for. But blaming BLM for riots isn’t reasonable because It’s not like BLM are the Illuminati. The entire existence of BLM is a response to a lack of power. And without power there can be no responsibility.

So first we must think about what BLM is and isn’t actually capable of.

They don’t have the power to start or stop riots.

So knowing that, questions spring to mind. Should BLM denounce them, encourage them, or stay silent on them? Knowing they can’t prevent or cause them. Are riots justified?

In my view BLM is automatically an ally of any one who feels the police have become an oppressive, regressive, violent mafia. I’m not saying they think that, I’m saying anyone else who thinks that should see BLM as allies.

In terms of political strategy, if BLM were a monolithic organization, which it isn’t, I don’t think they should denounce rioting because if they did, and riots happened anyway, it would expose that weakness and set them against any elements of the community that have (perhaps rightfully) concluded that the time for peaceful response is at an end.

If you start to think of the police as an invading army, rioting becomes a rather merciful option. I can’t help but think that if the police here acted like the police in those areas towards my community’s children a riot would be the least of their worries.

Essentially I view riots as warning shots preceding open revolt. And open revolt has to be on the table if we expect to effectively negotiate with the state. Which is what all activism is.

This is a huge part of why I think anti-gun progressives are outright foolish. It’s like starting a game of chess by asserting that violence is wrong and banning the use of pawns.

Some describe a riot as a kind of political or economic cannibalism, as burning “their own” city. But how do you define your city as opposed to your prison? It isn’t their city when their lives are ruled by people that don’t even live there. And that’s true of all of us so long as 62 people own half the planet.

If anything a riot is the burning of a company shanty town. And let’s be honest, they aren’t that destructive anyway. A few fires, a smashed car, and some rubble in the street. They aren’t a hurricane.

Mostly they are symbolic, and a great way to force the police and the press to show their true colors, which as Gandhi has shown us can be quite effective political currency.

I could see it being described as burning collaborator businesses that demonstrably don’t care about them. Business in my view rarely helps a community. First of all the vast majority of it is corporate, which means it’s parasitic and corrupting. Corporations clearly own the press and the government, that’s the root of the problem. Rioting to destroy corporate business interests in my community seems on paper like an extremely valid response.

And don’t talk to me like jobs are inherently a good thing. They aren’t.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that what BLM fights for is 100% justified. Cops keep getting cleared and acquitted for killings that are often on video. If there is no legal recourse, and the economy is completely unresponsive to both activism and political engagement, then a riot is a reasonable next step in my view.

Tell me things aren’t bad enough to justify revolt in the streets and I’ll tell you you’re not paying attention.

Even if BLM denounces rioting, I would not. Rioting is a valid compromise when trying to avoid a revolutionary civil war.

If that war happens, it will be the police who history shows declared it.