politics

But have you concidered this snowball I brought to the Legislative Floor in the middle of summer?

👆 this officer, right here. BMF is posting again.

just think it sounded cool in the Matrix

The whole line was spoken by the arch-cop during an interrogation. Sometimes I wonder if that scene is an unintentional political Rorschach Test.

Just the corporate ones

I think the whales blame us.

Nuke the whales

the whales aren't doing enough

Whales were happy after September 11th happened. They may have had a hand in it.

Nah I explicitly mean my family lol

There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it's had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there's no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.

Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic "old money" families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they'd be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.

Ah, the human-caused climate change of 5000 BCE, truly a tragedy the likes of which we had never seen before and will never see again

Capitalists do not destroy the environment because of malice, no one wakes up one day and decides they really wanna fuck up some coral or drive a species of frog to extinction

Capitalists destroy the environment because of a specific profit imperative that dominates their thinking and behavior, profits go up when costs go down, and the maintenance of the environment is an external cost

So the snuggly or non-snuggly nature of humans prior to capitalism is completely irrelevant

Leftism is about claiming nothing meaningful ever changes or can get better. The more apathetic thought terminating cliches, the more leftist it is.

One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.

It's a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet's population. It's also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.

Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”

As @[email protected] said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn't (as) true before capitalism.

The feudal mode of production is inherently incapable of meaningfully changing the climate. It's a moot point.

Yes actually. We know full well what humans were like in hunter gatherer tribes, because we still have such tribes living today.

I suggest you meet the Hadza. A living demonstration of how different human beings are depending on the system you place them in. When humans have neither competition with one another nor a lack of material abundance they become something quite different.

Your interpretation of humans as assholes comes from never having known anything other than capitalism. If you lived in a burning building and never knew any different environment you would also believe that it is natural for humans to endlessly cough.

Do give that thread a full watch, and read the last couple posts. It will change your attitude.

I think I found the artist: https://www.reddit.com/r/learntodraw/comments/q4lbgc/i_havent_been_motivated_to_draw_recently_but_then/

not sure who made the edit tho