Maybe the problem with this kind of thinking is that not all humans are the same. Living beings aren’t interchangeable units. I don’t think it’s a math problem. Mechanistic thinking (as I’ve heard Mattias Desmet call it) is limiting because it doesn’t accept the mystery of the universe.
Comprehensive, this article touches all the bases.
The fundamental premise of environmentalism is that it would be better if humanity had never existed. But it does, and the solution is to minimize human impact on the environment, the moral problems of a forced extinction being evident. So far so good.
One of the proposed methods is to limit growth, both economically and through a gradual process of limiting the human population by reducing births below replacement. For example the North Atlantic nations of the Fifties are often presented as living in a kind of Golden Age, although material welfare was far lower than today. Against this we see that international trade has lifted a good percentage of the world population out of abject poverty. Yet again, prosperity, agricultural progress and medical advances have allowed population to balloon. Back to Square One.
We could say that the material welfare of developed nations is far higher than it needs to be, while undeveloped nations could do with a lot of uplifting. The problem shifts from global to regional.
To address this the environmental way requires that developed nations voluntarily adopt policies that will reduce material welfare to a somewhat arbitrary level where all will be happy, as their survival and shelter needs are adequately covered. Meanwhile the developing nations will be allowed to grow. This could be carried out by massive redistribution of income from rich to poor countries. A typical Westerner would have to live a less prosperous, more planet-friendly life, as disposable income would be trimmed by taxation to the minimum necessary. The income redistributed would be paid to the people of poor nations as a universal basic income, or by a world government regulating that a bus-driver in South Sudan (which Google names as the world's poorest country) must earn the same as a bus-driver in New York.
I hope that I have managed to make these solutions sound plausible, and drop them in here not because I subscribe to them, but to provoke discussion.
Hi, Fox. Read your article and it was brilliant and compelling. Especially how racist Kirkpatrick Sale was. Wow! Well researched, and I applaud you for this. It made me do a double take and reconsider....
If I can play Devil's Advocate for a minute, and please hear me out: this article comes on the heels of me recently becoming a Secessionist myself. Before I say this, I HATED secessionism and was dead against it. However, there was one thing that I have to bring up that changed my mind: Elon Musk.
As you know, we have a large Baby Boom population, and millions of people who rely on Social Security and Medicare as their only income and healthcare. Following in Milei's footsteps, Elon Musk with his DOGE has committed to taking a hacksaw to Social Security and Medicare. My mother, who recently had lung cancer, would not have had the ability to get her cancer treated if it were not for Medicare and Medicaid.
Elon Musk, I believe, is a twisted kind of eugenicist and Malthusian because, though he DOES advocate having more children, I get the feeling he wants to cut short the life of the old in order to bring the American population into what he feels is "good age structure," an ecological structure where there is a balance between the old and the young.
Cutting social security and Medicare or privatizing it would have disastrous consequences, as few today even can afford basics. Why do I get the feeling Elon and Thiel consider Humans as nothing more than data digits and numbers to be crunched, rather than real, feeling, Human beings, that have contributed much already to society and now deserve the retirement that they worked and paid all their lives for? Not to mention his austerity could cost the lives of millions, not unlike the West and Yeltsin's "shock therapy" which, I recently heard, may have killed 5 million Russians as a result of cutting pensions.
So, the above being said, what would you think if I said I advocated that California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska seceded to form one large breakaway state called "Pacifica?" Perhaps we could invite British Columbia to also join? We could build a railway to Russia then through the Bering Strait, and also work on nuclear fusion. And use that economic idea to fund social safety nets as well, for a more humane orientation.
It has become clear to me that there are just irreconcilable differences between states in the Union. It isn't a matter of the US being too big. It is that there are just states that are too committed to the Milton Friedman delusion that you can cut your way to growth, or are still too committed to the pro-Confederate view that viewed the New Deal as bad and socialistic. When a few courts and senators in Kentucky and other places can block or filibuster entire programs such as student load forgiveness, the irreconcilability of the situation just becomes so obvious.
What do you do when remaining in a Union requires that the whole ship suffers drastic cuts to life-saving programs? Do you stay on the ship? Or do you get a life raft?
Again, I ordinarily would agree with you that Secession is generally bad, but this is a dire situation. Perhaps it is being engineered to do just that purpose: with Elon trying to provoke the country to want to split along Blue/Red lines?
Scott, thank you for the thought provoking comment! I'm in agreement with the issue you've brought up, specifically that dismantling social safety nets such as Medicare is a terrible idea, and yes, Elon Musk is most definitely a eugenics-endorsing Malthusian, (despite the seemingly positive soundbites he crafts regarding population).
Let me throw a question back to you: How would secession prevent the demolition of federal safety nets designed to protect the welfare of the population?
Also, I would not be so quick to write off states of our Union as having irreconcilable differences. Just because their representative government is help captive by Anglophiles who would love nothing more than to break up our great nation, does not mean that the people of these states want this as well.
Before we cast aside the work that people gave their lives for, let us revisit the words of Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Thank you so much for those nuggets of wisdom! And thank you for Lincoln's words. Guess what: You have won me over! You're right; we must not let everything we have worked for die in vain, otherwise those men who fought the great fight in the American Civil War and Revolution will have died for nothing.
So I have changed my mind again. You are absolutely right: just because those representatives from those states may endorse a return to feudalism and a rollback of social safety nets and reforms doesn't mean that the people of those states are in agreement with that.
I say this with much sadness, and, I want you to understand that what I wrote before was from a point of despair, sad and despondent to see my country falling.
By the way, as it turns out, Secession might already be the agenda of Musk anyway, without any support from my part. Today I found this article about a Tech manifesto, written for the Right, in the 1990's, advocating for a breakup of nation states through cybercommerce and Internet and Data. What Elon is doing (dismantling the govt) is right in line with this. Not only is he dismantling Social Security and Medicare but also Education, and Air Traffic Control, disease prevention, and just about every government infrastructure he can get his hands on. Peter Thiel, his partner at Paypal, was influenced by this book, The Sovereign Individual, which was written by a British lord and Baron, by the way.
So, I guess, if we are all are going to go down, then we will have to go down together. So that all of us, in our various states, will perhaps find the truth and remember our great nation and rebuild it from the ground up. We may have to reinvent the wheel (find out why Democratic Republicanism rather than corporate dictatorship, works, and find out why public infrastructure works better than private infrastructure.) But in the meantime, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous about someone who goes out and drinks again and their life falls apart again as they go out, we will have to "do some more research." But there's an Internet lingo phrase that is equivalent: "Fuck around and find out."
So we are probably going to have to live under some local fiefs and kings and dictators in our little Crypto Fiefdoms and "freedom cities" and John Galt-topias to figure out that our former republic was more desirable. Just as Russia had to "fuck around and find out" and "do some research" during the days of the Shock Doctrine of Yeltsin before they finally figured it out under Putin...We're going to have to now do our OWN research and see what decentralized feudalism is like. It makes me sad, but, perhaps we will come out stronger on the other side. I don't know.
By the way, when you read these articles, tell me if they don't scream out to you: "The Right Wing MAGA, version of Bioregionalism."
destabilizing Exceptional America as been the Sole objective since it’s incarnation
Maybe the problem with this kind of thinking is that not all humans are the same. Living beings aren’t interchangeable units. I don’t think it’s a math problem. Mechanistic thinking (as I’ve heard Mattias Desmet call it) is limiting because it doesn’t accept the mystery of the universe.
Comprehensive, this article touches all the bases.
The fundamental premise of environmentalism is that it would be better if humanity had never existed. But it does, and the solution is to minimize human impact on the environment, the moral problems of a forced extinction being evident. So far so good.
One of the proposed methods is to limit growth, both economically and through a gradual process of limiting the human population by reducing births below replacement. For example the North Atlantic nations of the Fifties are often presented as living in a kind of Golden Age, although material welfare was far lower than today. Against this we see that international trade has lifted a good percentage of the world population out of abject poverty. Yet again, prosperity, agricultural progress and medical advances have allowed population to balloon. Back to Square One.
We could say that the material welfare of developed nations is far higher than it needs to be, while undeveloped nations could do with a lot of uplifting. The problem shifts from global to regional.
To address this the environmental way requires that developed nations voluntarily adopt policies that will reduce material welfare to a somewhat arbitrary level where all will be happy, as their survival and shelter needs are adequately covered. Meanwhile the developing nations will be allowed to grow. This could be carried out by massive redistribution of income from rich to poor countries. A typical Westerner would have to live a less prosperous, more planet-friendly life, as disposable income would be trimmed by taxation to the minimum necessary. The income redistributed would be paid to the people of poor nations as a universal basic income, or by a world government regulating that a bus-driver in South Sudan (which Google names as the world's poorest country) must earn the same as a bus-driver in New York.
I hope that I have managed to make these solutions sound plausible, and drop them in here not because I subscribe to them, but to provoke discussion.
Hi, Fox. Read your article and it was brilliant and compelling. Especially how racist Kirkpatrick Sale was. Wow! Well researched, and I applaud you for this. It made me do a double take and reconsider....
If I can play Devil's Advocate for a minute, and please hear me out: this article comes on the heels of me recently becoming a Secessionist myself. Before I say this, I HATED secessionism and was dead against it. However, there was one thing that I have to bring up that changed my mind: Elon Musk.
As you know, we have a large Baby Boom population, and millions of people who rely on Social Security and Medicare as their only income and healthcare. Following in Milei's footsteps, Elon Musk with his DOGE has committed to taking a hacksaw to Social Security and Medicare. My mother, who recently had lung cancer, would not have had the ability to get her cancer treated if it were not for Medicare and Medicaid.
Elon Musk, I believe, is a twisted kind of eugenicist and Malthusian because, though he DOES advocate having more children, I get the feeling he wants to cut short the life of the old in order to bring the American population into what he feels is "good age structure," an ecological structure where there is a balance between the old and the young.
Cutting social security and Medicare or privatizing it would have disastrous consequences, as few today even can afford basics. Why do I get the feeling Elon and Thiel consider Humans as nothing more than data digits and numbers to be crunched, rather than real, feeling, Human beings, that have contributed much already to society and now deserve the retirement that they worked and paid all their lives for? Not to mention his austerity could cost the lives of millions, not unlike the West and Yeltsin's "shock therapy" which, I recently heard, may have killed 5 million Russians as a result of cutting pensions.
So, the above being said, what would you think if I said I advocated that California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska seceded to form one large breakaway state called "Pacifica?" Perhaps we could invite British Columbia to also join? We could build a railway to Russia then through the Bering Strait, and also work on nuclear fusion. And use that economic idea to fund social safety nets as well, for a more humane orientation.
It has become clear to me that there are just irreconcilable differences between states in the Union. It isn't a matter of the US being too big. It is that there are just states that are too committed to the Milton Friedman delusion that you can cut your way to growth, or are still too committed to the pro-Confederate view that viewed the New Deal as bad and socialistic. When a few courts and senators in Kentucky and other places can block or filibuster entire programs such as student load forgiveness, the irreconcilability of the situation just becomes so obvious.
What do you do when remaining in a Union requires that the whole ship suffers drastic cuts to life-saving programs? Do you stay on the ship? Or do you get a life raft?
Again, I ordinarily would agree with you that Secession is generally bad, but this is a dire situation. Perhaps it is being engineered to do just that purpose: with Elon trying to provoke the country to want to split along Blue/Red lines?
Scott, thank you for the thought provoking comment! I'm in agreement with the issue you've brought up, specifically that dismantling social safety nets such as Medicare is a terrible idea, and yes, Elon Musk is most definitely a eugenics-endorsing Malthusian, (despite the seemingly positive soundbites he crafts regarding population).
Let me throw a question back to you: How would secession prevent the demolition of federal safety nets designed to protect the welfare of the population?
Also, I would not be so quick to write off states of our Union as having irreconcilable differences. Just because their representative government is help captive by Anglophiles who would love nothing more than to break up our great nation, does not mean that the people of these states want this as well.
Before we cast aside the work that people gave their lives for, let us revisit the words of Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Thank you so much for those nuggets of wisdom! And thank you for Lincoln's words. Guess what: You have won me over! You're right; we must not let everything we have worked for die in vain, otherwise those men who fought the great fight in the American Civil War and Revolution will have died for nothing.
So I have changed my mind again. You are absolutely right: just because those representatives from those states may endorse a return to feudalism and a rollback of social safety nets and reforms doesn't mean that the people of those states are in agreement with that.
I say this with much sadness, and, I want you to understand that what I wrote before was from a point of despair, sad and despondent to see my country falling.
By the way, as it turns out, Secession might already be the agenda of Musk anyway, without any support from my part. Today I found this article about a Tech manifesto, written for the Right, in the 1990's, advocating for a breakup of nation states through cybercommerce and Internet and Data. What Elon is doing (dismantling the govt) is right in line with this. Not only is he dismantling Social Security and Medicare but also Education, and Air Traffic Control, disease prevention, and just about every government infrastructure he can get his hands on. Peter Thiel, his partner at Paypal, was influenced by this book, The Sovereign Individual, which was written by a British lord and Baron, by the way.
So, I guess, if we are all are going to go down, then we will have to go down together. So that all of us, in our various states, will perhaps find the truth and remember our great nation and rebuild it from the ground up. We may have to reinvent the wheel (find out why Democratic Republicanism rather than corporate dictatorship, works, and find out why public infrastructure works better than private infrastructure.) But in the meantime, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous about someone who goes out and drinks again and their life falls apart again as they go out, we will have to "do some more research." But there's an Internet lingo phrase that is equivalent: "Fuck around and find out."
So we are probably going to have to live under some local fiefs and kings and dictators in our little Crypto Fiefdoms and "freedom cities" and John Galt-topias to figure out that our former republic was more desirable. Just as Russia had to "fuck around and find out" and "do some research" during the days of the Shock Doctrine of Yeltsin before they finally figured it out under Putin...We're going to have to now do our OWN research and see what decentralized feudalism is like. It makes me sad, but, perhaps we will come out stronger on the other side. I don't know.
By the way, when you read these articles, tell me if they don't scream out to you: "The Right Wing MAGA, version of Bioregionalism."
https://www.thenerdreich.com/trumps-weird-freedom-cities-and-the-network-state-cult/
https://www.thenerdreich.com/the-sovereign-individual-radical-bible-of-techs-cognitive-elite/