not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
Where in the Arctic is it “100°”?
Temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic occurred on June 20, 2020, in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, hitting 100.4°F (38°C).
It’s extinct species per minute not year, there are a lot of unique species most of them still undiscovered going extinct.
Tbf, jupiter looks sexy and huge , so gas chamber planet is novel idea that worthy to pursue.
Earth is turning into more of a Venus situation.
Which has beautiful persistent flesh eating clouds, I fail to see the problem
Capitalism only works when there’s a big bad Soviet state that they have to compete against in a popularity contest in the global stage, and if they go mask-off it scares all the fence sitting nations into communism.
If 2008 had happens in 1968 everyone involved would have been tried as Soviet saboteurs or something in a big red scare purge. “Using capitalism against itself” or something…
Not to say anhydrous communism is the solution either. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle of ⅔ communism for natural monopolies and necessities, and ⅓ capitalism for luxury goods and comoddities in purely elastic markets.
A tank of gas and a TV cost the same amount of money because competition legitimately worked for the TV, and fucking didn’t for the gasoline 🤣
It’s not capitalism per se. It’s the lazy, stupid populace that allows the system of regulatory capture we have.
The fossil fuel industry also gets a metric fuck ton of tax payer funded subsidies. That’s not capitalism. That’s a quasi state economy.
In a true capitalist system, we’d see more competitive forms of energy taking off, like solar and wind which are cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But because the government keeps fossil fuels going, we’re not getting off them.
Genuine question. how are the voters supposed to keep their leaders accountable?
By voting. The US has set term lengths at every level. If the leaders are not fulfilling their job properly, they get fired.
For representatives it’s every two years.
That requires having an informed and active constituency though, which we do not have.
And it will never happen because the people who control the resources also control the narrative. They promote their candidates, who change the laws in their favour, and progressively make things worse for your average person.
The system you describe is a pipe dream, and it’s a nice dream, but it’s not reflective of the world we live in today.
It’s literally the only possible system that could work. The alternative is just giving unrestricted power to politicians, and the people have no say at all.
Their power is ultimately derived from the voting public. That’s it. That is the power. You either have the ultimate power rest with the people, or the people have zero power.
It’s a cop out excuse to not put in the effort to be active and informed in the system. “It’s pointless anyway” is just defeatist bullshit.
I really wish I could believe in the system as much as you do. I think I’d be happier that way.
However, all the power lies with the capital. The capital controls the narrative, which in turn leads to people voting against their interest. The capital promotes their politicians. The politicians enact politics in favour of the capital. Then ultimately, capital controls the forces.
See for example how Murdoch and Thatcher completely destroyed the newspaper unions in England during the 80s. They went from having really strong worker rights and collective power, to being completely powerless and literally shot at by police within the span of a few years, all due to processes the workers were purposely locked out of.
It’s not about believing in the system.
It’s the only system we can have that the people will have any power. It’s either democracy, or being ruled over. And we will always trend towards the latter if the people abdicate the power they have.
There will NEVER be a time where we can just sit back and say “cool, things are good now, we don’t need to participate in politics anymore”. It will ALWAYS be either fighting to enforce our own power, or fighting to get that power back through revolution.
The power may lie with capital right now, but that’s because >1/3 of people (at least in the US) simply sit at home on their fat asses and don’t even try to participate in the system. And that’s for the biggest elections too. Where things really matter, at the state and local level, primaries where you get a say in who is even on the ballot, turnout is even worse.
Where I am, we have mail in voting, and a ballot is automatically sent to you, along with a booklet with everything on the ballot. The full text of what you’re voting on, a plain English explanation of what it will do, any tax changes that would happen from it, and arguments for and against. For primaries, if you’re not registered with a party you get both ballots and get to choose which one to vote in. It literally could not be any easier to vote. Our primaries this year? Thirty-fucking-six percent. 36%. And that was a “surge” in participation.
You can vote in your underwear at home, for weeks before the election date. And 64% of people still said fuck it, they don’t care enough. **That’s **entirely why the wealthy are able to control things. The people do not give a shit enough about it to even do their basic civic responsibility and exercise their vote, from their goddamn couches.
And what happens when the elections are not-so-subtly influenced by corporate lobbyists and whoever has more money to spend on campaigning?
Then the people need to put even more effort into exercising their power. It’s that simple.
And how do you propose they do that, since it’s so simple?
Well, voting for one. The US has abysmal voter turnout. More people stayed home and said they don’t give a shit in 2024 than either candidate got in votes.
The highest turnout we’ve had in over 100 years is 66%. A full 1 in 3 people that can vote put literally zero effort into voting.
That would be a decent start. Just actually doing anything to participate in the system.
And why don’t people want to participate in voting? Could it be that they feel like their vote doesn’t matter for some reason? Tell me, who should I have voted in 2024 if I’m pro-palestine?
I hear the French have ideas
I think it’s inevitable of any human system that it eventually is undermined by greed and selfishness. Some systems are just more prone to it.
If a system were to work, it would have a way to deal with the psychopaths and other cluster b folks. It’s always been us vs them, throughout history.
Let’s be fair, we’ve made plenty of species extinct just for the love of the game.
The planet won’t die, but we will
Not a fan of comments like this because it ignores all of the species that we are taking with us. Sure the planet will bounce back eventually but we really fucked the ever loving shit out of it.
Even if humanity doesn’t go extinct, we are one of earth’s big extinction events. If anything it could be argued that humanity being wiped out would save more species in the long run.
To e clear I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t see the point in enshrining species alive now as the most deserving over potential species in the future simply because they have emotional value to humans that will be dead.
The dragons will rise again! (But in all seriousness, this whole situation does really suck)
200 species a day!
They lied to you. They made you believe the end goal looks like Coruscant or Trentor. Told you modernity and civilization will sacrifice nature but that something more beautiful will emerge. That it won’t be easy for everyone, but overall, all will benefit from a planetary society. That is the lie. The end goal is Salusa Secundus. You will live in hell. We will turn on one another. You cannot escape. If you survive you will be fit enough to fight for the emperor. The emperor and his nobility don’t live here, they are tucked away on Elysium. Good luck.
To be fair, taking Coruscant of all places as a golden centre is pretty laughable considering that even in the movies the planet was presented as a shithole for galactic politics.
Expanded material basically affirmed that there was entire landmasses of galactic shitfills underneath the surface.
unregulated captialism…
it wasn’t always unregulated.
It’s hard to know if the world would still suck the same under a different system.
But I agree lol
To be fair, what we have in most of the world isn’t actually raw/pure capitalism, most of the time called Laissez-faire capitalism. Most of the world has a mixed economy of different capitalism implantations across the board in different areas: state/regulated/corporate capitalism and best of all crony capitalism.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws. But I don’t have that much faith in human nature to not keep fucking it up like we’ve done so many times.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Here’s the thing…that’s true for literally every form of governance/economic planning you can conceive.
The problem with socialism will always be “the ones with all the de facto power”.
I’d go one further and note that environmentalism isn’t exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.
The real virtue of socialist policy is in it’s ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn’t see the benefit of a good policy, there’s nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.
The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?
At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It’s us or them, over a long enough timeline.
I dunno man. “Capitalism” exists because it’s what we as a people just kind of decided to do. We picked it out of all the options available. I’m pretty sure that we would be doing the same thing regardless of whether or not something called “Capitalism” was ever actually named.
If we want to change that, we have to find a way to entirely change human nature, and that’s a really big ask. I’d love it if it actually happened, but I’m not betting on it.
A basic course in psychology would tell you that’s not how human nature works. “We” (those in power) “picked” (enforced) capitalism because it is the system that benefits them the most.
Some guy didn’t suddenly one day say “let’s do capitalism”. It evolved slowly from ancient barter systems from individual decisions made by everyone in society. These are complex interconnected systems of actions and decisions that evolved over time, fed in to each other, and grew in to capitalism.
Uh, yeah? that doesn’t disagree with what I’m saying. Naturally, as different people and groups came to power through the actions and decisions you mentioned, they acted in their own self-interest. Around late 19th/early 20th centuries, the property-owning class (the Bourgeoisie) started gaining power and the Aristocratic class started losing power, particularly due to the increasing importance of capital and industry in a country’s economy. Eventually, the Bourgeoisie overthrew the Aristocracy in many countries, and began developing and enforcing the ideas that worked the best for their interests, which we know today as capitalism. As for your belief that capitalism evolved from ancient barter systems, here’s the result from a very basic internet search:
The concept that humanity evolved from a pure barter economy to a monetary one is widely considered a myth by anthropologists and economic historians. Adam Smith popularized this narrative in The Wealth of Nations (1776), arguing that money emerged to solve the inefficiencies of barter, such as the “double coincidence of wants.” However, there is no historical or ethnographic evidence that any society relied exclusively on barter as its primary mode of exchange.
Instead of barter, early societies operated on credit, debt, and gift economies. In these systems, resources were distributed through social trust and communal obligations rather than direct, simultaneous swapping of goods. For example, if a baker needed meat, he would receive it from a butcher based on social expectation, with the debt settled later through various means, not an immediate trade of bagels for steaks.
Barter did exist, but it was not the precursor to money. It typically occurred between strangers or enemies who lacked the social trust required for credit, or as a temporary substitute for currency in times of crisis (e.g., post-Roman Europe or modern economic collapses). The “barter myth” persists largely because it serves as a simplified thought experiment in economics textbooks to illustrate market efficiency, not because it reflects historical reality.The only disagreement we seem to have is that you claim it was a decision made only by those in power, and I claim it was decision via systemic interconnected feedback loops that everyone in society participated in over an extended period of time.
Hammer and sickle … I grew up in post communist country, trust me, commies were raping the nature and people even more then capitalism. Find something else to blame.
IDK if capitalism is evil on its own. It’s just an idea. I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think if a better system is implemented in the future, that that would be a permanent solution for all of our problems either. It’s all just the same cycle repeating with different faces and places.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t still strive for a better life for those who come after, and to take care of this planet like we can and should, but I think it’s kind of silly to blame some ideas when we can just look in the mirror and see what the problem really is.
Well… what the past hundreds of years of capitalism has shown us is that it has many faults in practice and is causing the destruction of the environment, no? You can have the greatest, most amazing idea in the world, but if it sucks in implementation it’s not a good idea. You may be on the right track though, I would recommend you watch some videos by the youtube channel Second Thought on socialism
The issue is there’s no real reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism. Countless societies over the ages have faced environmental collapse. The Maya were hardly devout capitalists. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea. Prehistoric stateless humans drove most of the planet’s megafauna to extinction.
We seem pretty capable of decimating the environment regardless of our economic system. A worker-owned co-op can tear down a rainforest just as well as a regular company can.
There is actually plenty of reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism, given that capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences. The two prehistoric examples you gave don’t really make much sense anymore, given that we now possess significantly more knowledge about how our actions affect the environment, as well as the tools to alter the environment in general. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea because they were in need of cotton, but this doesn’t really have much to do with what economic system the soviet union used, just that they were a country that made mistakes. Simply put, capitalism actively incentivizes the destruction of the environment while socialism does not. The People’s Republic of China is the world leader in renewable energy production, has significantly increased its forest coverage, and its CO2 emissions have already peaked.
A better question for the last example you gave might be, would a worker-owned co-op, with the interests of its workers in mind, want to tear down a rainforest to the same degree as a regular company? Or would they deforest at a more responsible level, planting replacement trees in order to guarantee a stable resource and not destroy the environment the workers live in (assuming the workers are owning a co-op in their own rainforest)?
In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there’s no reason that worker-owned co-ops can’t also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You’re not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren’t Captain Planet villains; they don’t pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I’m sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the ‘forests’ are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don’t mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I’m not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It’s Occam’s razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that’s a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.
