Tag Archives: environment

Fools on the Left. Fools on the Right. No End in Sight.

Foolishness on the political LEFT:

Soft on crime is no stereotype and Democrats keep proving it, as we’ve seen in the 2020/2021 riots. Law enforcement is essential but it’s always messy business, especially when criminals fight back. Those thugs come in different colors and oppress or kill their good neighbors on a daily basis. Slogan-based, quasi-moral gangs like Antifa and Black Lives Matter never riot over those casualties. Using a related professional metaphor, they’d rather attack firemen than sources of ignition.

Socialism in its purest forms can’t work because human nature won’t allow it to. People operate on greed, self-interest and lies as a survival strategy. Power structures will always re-form over time if you destroy them, so why waste energy and resources to return to the same realization? “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is another way of stating the obvious. College students, fresh on history from the classroom, often understand it less than alumni who’ve forgotten minutia. Elected leaders should ideally not be under 30 because they’re naive about social processes.

Identity politics and woke historical shaming can’t force life to be fair on this unforgiving planet. All that does is irritate people trying to live their lives. Adults should understand that striving for equality of outcomes has been tried before. Future attempts will fail for the same reasons earlier ones did. Any idealistic youth who’s been on a disappointing date or lost a football game should know you can’t always be welcome or successful. It would take a species without human traits to manage full equity among races, classes and genders.

Foolishness on the political RIGHT:

Global warming is a “hoax” is the default Republican attitude on environmental topics, even if not put that bluntly. They keep assuming CO2 molecules must respect their narrow definitions of freedom and patriotism. They had the same canned skepticism about acid rain, the ozone hole and other forms of man-made pollution, all because avarice and industrial hegemony was questioned. They tend to see nature as beneath them, the height of arrogance, tying into religion (below). Being willfully ignorant of evidence essentially makes people stupid. The Right often operates with reason but builds logic walls around specific topics.

Gun worship is generally a juvenile phase but some people never outgrow it. They get bored with just looking at guns, so they take up crass hobbies like “sport” hunting and rationalize owning far more firepower than needed, which inevitably gets into the hands of criminals. Sometimes, they become those criminals, freaking out and shooting up public places after years of drooling over weaponry. They miss the hypocrisy of gun-fetishism when they complain about crime, gangs crossing the border with stolen firearms, and so on. You can tell they’d rather keep the world violent just to have an enemy to shoot at.

Founded on supernatural beliefs, churches have formed societal structures and inspired morality, but they’re also a venue for ignorance, dwelling on an ancient book that needs major revisions. Many new things have been learned over the centuries in medicine and science, improving life, along with some trade-offs. But knowledge gets selectively interpreted by people of faith who wall themselves off from evidence. As the world gets more crowded and interdependent there’s less room for rigid, dogmatic beliefs. The most dangerous faith-based views involve resource-scarcity denial, like “God will decide when oil peaks” rather than geology.

Summary:

Humans are too innately tribal to solve chronic social and environmental problems. Many of them enjoy having enemies more than cooperating with each other and nature. Members of each tribe claim that “only those people” have flawed logic. This could be seen as a lack of education or critical thinking deficiencies, but schooling hasn’t worked. Some of the worst offenders are well educated and presume they can’t have biases.

The publicity-shy Center must speak up to prevent the fringes from controlling narratives. Still, not all the best ideas come from the Center; they’re often too bland or stoic. A wise society would choose the smartest concepts from each side and vote on them. It’s doubtful this will happen until an intractable resource-crisis forces it (see other posts on this blog).

This page may be updated and reworded at random with new information. If you cite it, please post the link instead of a pasted snapshot. *I’m not sure how others stay motivated to write when nihilism seems inevitable!

Rush Limbaugh: Social Sage, Environmental Lout

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The February 17, 2021 death of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh shouldn’t be made light of, as predicted when he first announced his terminal cancer. Despite his legendary crassness, he was a significant figure in America and deserves a mixed eulogy, if not a Medal of Freedom.

Wisdom:

Limbaugh exposed a lot of hypocrisy among the irrational Left, which played out in the worst way when nasty reactions to George Floyd’s arrest ignored the full context of his behavior and medical conditions. Limbaugh had been one of loudest voices to hit back at a culture of naive “fairness” at odds with the facts of crime and human nature. People say Republicans are mean-spirited but Man is often a mean animal under a veneer of politeness. Criminals who fight police are a brutal lot, yet Leftists only want to talk about their “unfair” treatment as if nothing precedes it. Goons like Antifa magnified this beyond all reason after Trump’s election.

Limbaugh spoke a lot about crime and the welfare state, and conservative blacks mostly agree. The Left’s treatment of minority races (soon to become majority) as “victims” of everyone else has always been a guilt-laden fable. A look at black & Latino crime rates in America and their native lands proves it. They’re constantly trying to emigrate from tyranny, crime and poverty endemic to their own cultures (typically loud and unstable). Aside from the evils of slavery, America has been foreigners’ top destination for good reason: We are consistently fairer than their homelands! Dwelling only on America’s past sins ignores global history. No race has earned sainthood.

Irrational people believe extreme socialism is workable, based on denial of pride-of-ownership and people’s innate desire to be autonomous. They also try to force genetic flukes and weird lifestyles into the realm of normalcy, which would only work sans legislation if it felt natural. Only a small segment of the populace – unusually kind and forgiving – could manage full tolerance, cooperation and sharing with others, yet they insist entire societies could do it “if only” their perfect social order was enforced. They can’t see that very need to enforce such a plan renders it hypocritical and unworkable. Human nature requires laws and regulations to control self-interest, which leads to Limbaugh’s dark side….

Arrogance:

Throughout his radio, TV and writing career, Limbaugh never grasped nature’s importance to life itself, or people’s utter dependence on finite resources that growth-economies keep depleting. He wasn’t overtly religious and seemed mostly motivated by greed and hubris. His famous “undeniable truths” were a laundry list of human arrogance, carried out by Presidents like Reagan, G.W. Bush and of course Trump.

It’s unfortunate that Limbaugh didn’t live long enough to see his Florida mansion flooded by global warming but it may not have mattered to him. He was stuck on the worst aspect of the GOP with his staunch indifference to the laws & limits of nature. Conservatives should be on the forefront of conservation, not pushing foolish gluttony. Nature doesn’t care about ideology, just physics and time.

Limbaugh’s disrespectful “Born Free” segment mocking endangered species was one of his low points. Here’s a full post on right-wingers versus nature to avoid redundancy in this section. On the closely related topic of fossil fuels, Limbaugh and the GOP have told many lies over the years, covered here. To be fair, many Democrats have also sold out to industrial sprawl they spin as clean and green.

Improving the GOP:

What used to be a values-centered party, tainted by greed, has morphed into mostly greed and willful ignorance of science. Tucker Carlson of Fox News is similarly thickheaded on environmental topics, but comes across as more decent than Limbaugh. A new sense of fairness and (true) balance is badly needed in the Republican party. They need to stop seeking profit over morality and supporting crass populists like Donald Trump. QAnon fools like Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t help their image, either. Tolerating such people in your ranks is like “peaceful protestors” mingling with Antifa. Republicans could get more votes from centrists if they stuck with solid views on human nature but stopped disrespecting nature itself.

This page may be updated and reworded at random with new information. If you cite it, please post the link instead of a pasted snapshot.

COVID-19 is a Symptom of the Primary OVERPOPULATION Pandemic

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“Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich nations, economic growth is the disease, not the cure.” – Paul Ehrlich

The widely-viewed JHU COVID-19 curve looks like a graph of world population growth. Why has the latter been normalized by society?

A wise species would spend far more time and energy trying to stop human overpopulation than cleaning up its endless symptoms with planning commissions, biologists, catalytic converters and medical disinfectants. We’d be in much better shape if the main driver of wilderness destruction, pollution and new contagions was itself contained. This has been discussed for decades and seems like a lost cause but it’s worth repeating amid extreme measures to stop a virus that barely registers on the scale of species annihilation, including human wars & famines. It also applies to climate warnings that treat CO2 as a tangential byproduct we must vanquish to maintain economic growth while pretending the scale of fossil fuels can be replaced. It’s a mental illness when people flail around reacting to side-effects while treating root causes as inevitable and desirable. “We need more economic growth!” say the politicians & business leaders, but we really need frugality, self-control, and more thinking, not tinkering in this over-engineered world.

The acronym COVID could also stand for Chinese Overpopulation Virus Disease. Around 1978 the Chinese government allowed wildlife to be farmed as a means to curb hunger among its 950+ million people, and in 1989 they further loosened restrictions on endangered species protections, calling it the Wildlife Protection Law (typical growthist apologia). Today, China has over 1.4 billion people and constantly boasts of economic growth, meaning more people, more consumption, more pollution and more heinous food sources. It’s considered racist to call SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” but it’s a highly accurate description of the origin. People should not be eating pangolins, bats, or shark fin soup. It’s disgusting and unnatural, just like the mindless overpopulation that spawned such desperation.

Attention China: When you reach a point where you’re eating pangolins, bats and other sick protein sources, you might want to retry stricter birth control.

The Internet also has physical limits to growth and its infrastructure can’t be endlessly expanded or supplied with adequate power. Data centers use a lot of electricity and water, and companies have been throttling bandwidth to accommodate more users working or video-conferencing from home. A lot of bandwidth is also used for arguably frivolous social media sites, plus spam. The impact of COVID-19 sheltering could be a preview of future overload as more people are connected, including a big increase in space junk if low-orbit Internet satellites get fully deployed. People need to know that the world is a physical place, not a spreadsheet with endless rows to add.

Reactions to any mention of population overshoot range from “How dare you say that about our Godly species?” to “It’s just a matter of inequitable food distribution” (treating hunger as the sole issue) to “Go kill yourself and lighten the load!” Few of those people bother to give counter-evidence, and are stuck on religious dogma, naive leftism or business greed. Another aspect of overpopulation-denial is ignorance of land-use and the scale of food production, physical infrastructure and energy sprawl. Those people claim there’s still “plenty of land” to fill up with farms, homes, roads, factories and wind turbines. They either won’t do the math or show little concern for what Man has already smothered. Acolytes of the late Julian Simon claim that human ingenuity can overcome physical limits, and see the Earth as not truly finite. They never prove it but they don’t care to because they view it as “optimism.” All that matters is attitude when you’re selling growth bubbles.

A big topic in mid-April 2020 was reopening economies after oppressive shelter-in-place restrictions and social-distancing. It’s understandable to want our freedoms back but the very economies we “need” to restart have been destroying nature for too long already. Scientists and laymen noticed less air & water pollution, roadkill, noise and other environmental impacts during coronavirus lock-downs. It gave a temporary glimpse of what the world might look like if we got serious about saving the planet vs. maintaining stock prices and compound interest. That wouldn’t mean building more “clean energy” sprawl, rather, scaling down human activity and limiting future births with government incentives and personal accountability. Nobody has an individual right to crowd the world to death, and all behaviors add up.

Old industrial scars and new sprawl branded as “clean energy” are compounding damage to nature. Viral machine overpopulation is no way to replace dense energy sources.

Stalling the global economy for COVID-19 has also revealed the truth of non-essential jobs and general economic bloat. Restaurants are a luxury unless your only food source is a cafe in the desert. For better or worse, film and music industries replaced people making their own entertainment. Energy-intensive sporting events are essentially showboating, with millionaires mimicking old hunting and war tactics. Other species put their energy into direct survival with little impact on their surroundings. Bears, moose, eagles and whales don’t need job-creation schemes, money or debt. People should question the true value of “passion jobs” enabled by fossil fuels, and interdependent (skilled and unskilled) professions that fall like dominoes in survival mode. Many of the highest paying jobs are non-vital, which says a lot about money itself. People seem to understand this when viewing apocalyptic dramas, but they lapse back into modern normalcy. When shale oil & gas production peaks (likely this decade) COVID-19 may be recalled as a mild economic preview.

This isn’t a call for returning to crude ancestral living, but we clearly ought to reduce wasteful labor-redundancy and ditch growthist ideology that seeks “More, more, MORE!” as it wrecks nature 24/7. People have been the main invasive species for centuries and should permanently back off to let the planet recover, just as we’re trying to recover from this virus.