Comments by "Dan" (@Dan-ud8hz) on "The Damage Report"
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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Solution: An Aggressively Green New Deal
Since business-as-usual industry and technology are contributing to the degradation of the planet's life support system, priority number one is to stop the practices that are causing mass extinctions.
An analogy comes to mind: The first step in the casualty procedure for flooding aboard submarines is to isolate and stop the incoming water flooding the compartment. The other steps of the procedure following the first, such as dewatering the compartment and repairing and restoring damaged equipment, are actions made to recover from the flooding and will not be effective unless the flooding has stopped. If water comes into a space faster than it's being removed, the space will fill with water.
Excessive carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human activity may not be as urgent an issue as a flooding submarine to its occupants, and the life-support systems of a submarine are much less complex than the natural ecological life-support system, but if carbon dioxide is being emitted into the atmosphere faster than it can be removed, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase until critical thresholds are exceeded and irreversible effects will occur.
However, on a submarine, it's not likely that you'll encounter active resistance from a person who insists on allowing the flooding to continue the same way we encounter active resistance to cutting carbon emissions. Almost like a passenger in a car traveling on a highway attempting to grab the wheel and steer the vehicle into oncoming traffic, there is a short-sightedness in corporate large-scale industry that seeks short term gains over long term sustainability (and existence) that won't stop unless regulated to stop, and even then will continue to try to cut corners wherever it can. This has led me to think that the "Gordian Knot" to cut is an socio-economic and political one that redistributes the wealth accumulated from profiteering off of environmental destruction to first remove control from the passenger who's trying to steer the car into oncoming traffic, and to fund a variety of concerted technological and social efforts beyond the crumbs they're currently allotted to sequester carbon and get to real recovery and restoration work.
To save the 'camel' from the final 'straw that breaks the camel's back,' the 'camel's' burden should have nothing more added until it can be unburdened to a manageable load.
Supplements:
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
(Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z (Links to an external site.)
"Innovation has slowed in the U.S., stymying economic growth. To get back on track, the U.S. needs more low-income children, women, and minorities to become inventors — but that won’t be easy."
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors (Links to an external site.)
"For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it."
(The constructal law of design and evolution in nature)
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0302 (Links to an external site.)
"Whenever we make even the smallest change within a complex system, we risk dramatic unintended consequences. The interconnections and dependencies within systems make it almost impossible to predict outcomes—and seeing as they often require a reasonably precise set of conditions to function, our interventions can wreak havoc. The Precautionary Principle reflects the reality of working with and within complex systems. It shifts the burden of proof from proving something was dangerous after the fact to proving it is safe before taking chances. It emphasizes waiting for more complete information before risking causing damage, especially if some of the possible impacts would be irreversible, hard to contain, or would affect people who didn’t choose to be involved."
https://fs.blog/2021/06/precautionary-principle/ (Links to an external site.)
Atlantic Ocean: Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers (w/ Dr. Michael Mann)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxu--0oE8Ag (Links to an external site.)
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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