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last century was where all the bio, stem people got jobs, 2000s, much more difficult since the turn of the century, made worse by job sites.
The betrayal of generations from the 20th century against the future quality of life of humanity will be remembered for thousands of years.
That is not hyperbole, this period of human history is alone in its murderous intent to erase the human race and it can never be surpassed for if it does humanity will go extinct.
Boomers lived through the easiest, most rewarding period of American history and immediately and repeatedly ensured that no cohort following them would ever have the same again.
As a group, they are the weakest, most selfish, and least adaptable generation in modern history.
remembered for thousands of years.
Remembered by whom? Big assumption there…
We’ll now begin our unit on “the time the people who wanted to end the world got control of the world, and how that all happened in spite of them not even being fucking subtle about it.”
Just call it the century of greed
Greed can at least account for the future. The most powerful government in the world is lead by people who actually think wrecking the world for everyone else will help them reach paradise.
we could call it the century of buttholes and you’re going for greed? REAALLLY
Butt holes have a positive function, I do not agree with being that kind to our centuries.
Not just one…
Very good point. It is a noble hole.
The only reason “shit just works” for y’all is that noble hole!
I’ll compromise
The century of greedy butthole
That’s not a compromise, that’s fucking synergy
Nah, I’m pretty sure it’s regular synergy
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It’s very interesting that the nukes dropped will be mentioned, but the real death toll of the century was plain simple greed and selfishness. Those two working together have and will kill countless more in the upcoming century
Yes, how disturbing is it that the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan will be most useful to historians not as a hyperbolic tragedy that stood alone but as a way to explain the much broader mass slaughter of humans that the 20th century perpetrated and locked in for thousands of years?
TBF the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immediately preceded by far larger slaughters of humanity using more conventional methods, a fact which somewhat minimizes their significance. I’m referring mainly to the Holocaust and the Japanese genocide in China, but even the US firebombing of Tokyo in early 1945 exceeded the death tolls of the atomic bombings.
But how will we get more money to the shareholders if we stop pushing humanity towards extinction!?
see there’s your problem. shareholders. thinking of them as plural.
Not if MechaHitler’s daddy has anything to say about it.
I think of them as The Buffet, which is singular.
Are those generations really worse than those before it? Yes the environmental destruction is unparalleled but so were also the tools that enable that. In the Stone Age people could not have even come close to doing what we are doing right now to the environment even if they wanted too.
The term the tragedy of the commons originally referred to English cattle herders letting their cows overgraze public land because if they don’t overgraze it some other herders would do it instead. Stories like this are everywhere in history. The Vikings cut down every single tree in Iceland and the Faroe islands when they arrived with no care for the environmental whatsoever.
Whaling, the clubbing of seals, the extinction of the dodo. There are countless examples. And if we are talking pure human to human cruelty, no war in the 20th century comes close to what the mongols did.
The people of the 20th century were not more cruel or selfish than previous ones. They were simply the first ones given the tools and ability to pollute the whole earth.
Are those generations really worse than those before it?
[…]
The people of the 20th century were not more cruel or selfish than previous ones. They were simply the first ones given the tools and ability to pollute the whole earth.
Yes, that’s what makes them worse.
The real significance of the term “tragedy of the commons” was that it was part of a campaign of PR bullshit used to justify Enclosure, where wealthy elites seized common land as their private property, land that had in fact been used and managed effectively as a public resource for centuries prior.
I am uninterested in comparing the moral qualities of generations. Humans are humans.
I am interested in the scale of the violence done by these generations against the earth as it will never be able to be surpassed without fully annihilating the human race.
800 years from now no one is going to care how sorry everyone was now about the damage they have done, what matters is the impact and for the destructive impact generations such as Boomers have done to the earth they will be remembered for thousands of years as a calamity.
By the way the “Tragedy Of The Commons” has largely been discarded as a useful way of understanding societies, it is a political narrative with an interest in specific ideologies more than a serious tool to understand humanity.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html
As Mildenberger points out, this isn’t a case where a terrible person had some great ideas that outlived them: Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons was a piece of intellectual fraud committed in service to his racist, eugenicist ideology.
What’s worse: the environmental movement elevates Hardin to sainthood, whitewashing his racism and celebrating “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a seminal work of environmental literature. But Hardin is no friend of the environment: his noxious cocktail of racism and false history are used to move public lands into private ownership or stewardship, (literally) paving the way for devastating exploitation of those lands.
By contrast, consider Nobelist Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, whose groundbreaking insights on the management of common resources are a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.
…
(Hardin quotes that didn’t make it into his seminal paper: “Diversity is the opposite of unity, and unity is a prime requirement for national survival” and “My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster…we should restrict immigration for that reason.”)
I did not know the history of the term tragedy of the commons. Thanks for educating me on that, I will now reconsider using that specific term in the future. However overgrazing is a real issue historically and still today. Overgrazing in the modern Sahel is a great contributor to the advancing of the sahara for example.
Oh definitely, my issue with the concept of the Tragedy Of The Commons is not that shared wealth is not vulnerable but rather that the idea that humans innately cannot function in an environment while preserving and growing a shared commons without some kind of system of authoritarian control and violence actively preserving that shared commons is a deeply political, problematic and scientifically incorrect way of understanding people.
i dunno. the community garden run by the local MS-13 has the weirdest red drip system, but my begonias have never looked better.
I would imagine a system you’re suggesting would first have to eliminate scarcity of resources. We certainly have the ability to do that with our technology today but choose not to do so. Wouldn’t it require a turn to benevolence by all involved in the society to achieve that? If so, that doesn’t sound like a likely outcome. What, in your opinion, would it take to escape the Tragedy of Commons that is likely to actually occur?
I would imagine a system you’re suggesting would first have to eliminate scarcity of resources.
Provide evidence for this claim.
I understand this has been established as our cultural intuition but it is a near axiomatic assumption that upon examination has very little evidence to support it, whether we look to the natural world or to human societies.
Provide evidence for this claim.
I can provide zero evidence. I’m trying to imagine a world where your proposal works. Scarcity elimination the best possible way I could come up with.
I understand this has been established as our cultural intuition but it is a near axiomatic assumption that upon examination has very little evidence to support it, whether we look to the natural world or to human societies.
If your proposal doesn’t need to eliminate scarcity, I’m even more interested in how it is done. Whats the secret sauce has society-at-large been missing? You mention examining human societies. Do you have a human society to point to where your proposal exists successfully already?
Provide evidence for this claim
i would imagine
NO! You must prove the world in your mind to my satisfaction! Everything is an argument!
I think you are overselling it’s incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it’s truthfulness. Yes, the tragedy of the commons is misleading if taken in isolation, but something being misleading does not automatically make it scientifically incorrect. Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn’t the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?
I think you are overselling it’s incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it’s truthfulness.
I am not.
Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn’t the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?
Here you go
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
https://news.osu.edu/the-tragedy-of-the-commons--minus-the-tragedy/
https://news.cnrs.fr/opinions/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons
https://landscapewanderer.link/tragedy/
https://discardstudies.com/2019/07/15/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
To be clear, I agree with you like 95% of the way, it’s that last 5% that I still think you are overselling and would like you to be more careful with.
The problem is that Hardin’s argument simply isn’t much of a scientific one in the first place and is instead much more of a logical one. (I was being sloppy when I asked for direct evidence, so sorry about that.) Hardin made the massive assumption that people are wholly self-interested. If people are only trying to maximize their own share of the resources regardless of what it might cost others, then it is impossible to escape the competition that creates for the limited amount of resources that the commons provides. All of the examples and articles you’ve brought up attack that assumption and/or focus on the conclusions Hardin made based on those assumptions, but do nothing to actually disprove the fundamental argument behind the tragedy of the commons.
so like, people can have both bad ideas and good. i don’t know enough about hardin, but the basic concept is a useful model to get people understanding a basic concept. is it a political narrative? i mean it’s macroeconomics. the entire damn field is politics under a veneer. their best model is barely better than flipping a coin.
don’t get me started on micro though, that field is just gambling analysis.
i don’t have a chip on my shoulder or nothin’
We really need to stop throwing away useful terms and concepts because their progenitors don’t turn out to be role models. Knowledge doesn’t always come from perfect sources. “Tragedy of the Commons” has no basis in race as a concept as I understand it, I don’t see why the guy who coined the term being a racist POS means I should take a moral stance on it.
… but, you know, fuck that guy.
supersquirrel: “The betrayal of generations from the 20th century against the future quality of life of humanity will be remembered for thousands of years.” Also supersquirrel: “I am uninterested in comparing the moral qualities of generations. Humans are humans.”
we’re really just starting to feel the ramifications of the industrial age, we will not be the villains because at least we did try to do something. the robber barons are the true villains in this. they created annd exasperated the problem while creating the race to riches that continues with the oil industry ignoring the problems they create
the early years of just pumping coal exhaust from factories, acid rain from uncontrolled diesel fuel burning and the nuclear waste buildup will compound to create a truly ugly mess.
The Handford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is 586 square miles that is fucked for thousands of years. even if we find a clean way to power the world. It will keep polluting the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean for much of this time and the Federal Government keeps cutting funding for the cleanup.
in my opinion, the whole world needs to help South Americans restore the Amazon and we in North America need to develop a solution to the Pine Beetle, or start planting invasive trees to take over when they destroy all the pine forests. It should be every humans roll to plant a tree once a year. If we cared more about plant life, we’d make a huge impact now
We also need to find leaders who will embrace wind and solar as our future and tax the fuck out of carbon based energy
we can find ways to slow and possibly even reverse this process but unfortunately the current powers that be don’t give a fuck
when the oceans start consuming the big coastal cities, only then will it become a priority
when the oceans start consuming the big coastal cities, only then will it become a priority
Miami begs to differ lol, not that I can blame Miami, they are fucked anyways since everything is built on limestone which is very soluble to water… but I wish they would do their whole “stick their head in the sand” thing in a way that was less destructive to the rest of us.
will be remembered for thousands of years.
By whichever species takes over after we’ve rendered ourselves extinct via greed, stupidity, and stubbornness in a century or two.
it can never be surpassed
for if it doesbecause humanity will go extinct.Fixed it for you.
I don’t think it’s that justified to cast 20th century generations as villains as a whole. Most people definitely didn’t possess a murderous intent to erase human race. And I certainly can’t blame people for overdoing it with environmental harm when the increase in their own quality of life was tied to those technologies causing the harm. It feels like blaming a starving person who just got access to abundant food for giving themselves refeeding syndrome
Fuck.
Now our advertisement overlords won’t be pleased.
The word is fuck. Cannot process anything else about this post.
I’m also like this. The one stupid annoying detail just getting bigger and bigger on the screen and everything else fading away.
Best not to feed the Butterfly, at this point I think they do it on purpose to rile us up.
Yeah… it’s basically:
“I don’t see why you people get so mad about censorship that treats adults like babies!”
But isn’t finding out their job?
We found out ages ago, told everyone, and no-one did anything
Well, some people did something, but it wasn’t to try and prevent this.
“oh so I’ll be 80ish when the consequences start to happen? Drill Baby Drill!!” - oil executives etc.
If you live in Russia or Canada, global warming is a gift from God that will convert useless tundra into a fertile paradise. Everything is relative.
…are you familiar with mosquito clouds thick enough to kill?..
Let’s see about that paradise when the bacteria and other bad stuff in the permafrost gets unfrozen.
Let’s also see how people currently living in those areas feel about the “paradise” when everybody else who has the means will try to go there since it’s the only livable area.
Not to mention how “livable” it actually would be, with extreme weather, flooding from icecaps melting and other weather effects I have no idea about.
Don’t forget about all the methane that will be released as it warms, accelerating climate change.
At this point the countries in temperate climates would seal their borders. The people living near the equator will become stuck, dependent on the the richer nations for their very survival. Once the effects of global warming began creeping up toward the United States and Europe, we will use our superior firepower to force an oil embargo on weaker nations.
It’s going to be fucked up and evil, but it’s unlikely to be uniformly bad for everyone. From an economic perspective, alot of people will benefit.
The wealth of industrialized nations is only possible through exploitation of developing countries. When conditions there become literally unlivable, everything collapses and everyone loses. maybe russia could slightly benefit since they aren’t doing super well as is and have a lot of land that will become pretty good. Even then, they can kiss goodbye to seafood forever, and it certainly won’t be easy.
There’s a whole lot of Canada south of the tundra. We don’t need to make the north “useful” at the expense of the rest of the country.
I just used Tundra as a filler for “cold as shit” areas. The temperate region will basically move further up north from the equator.
…granted, having more valuable land isn’t necessarily a good thing once you consider your neighbors.
Don’t look up.
That movie was criticized because it was on the nose, but if there’s one thing the last 20 years has thought me its that there may have been a time for subtle implications, subtext, and understatement, but it’s long over.
If you aren’t screaming it, they won’t hear you and even if they hear you they won’t do anything…
People who don’t like to think or be told they’re wrong are convinced their stupidity is equal or greater than facts and logic.
I think thats part of the joke, they know enough to confirm it.
So close to getting it right with Merman Heckville
how the fuck was a century with 2 world wars, the cold war, iron curtain etc. a fuck around century
Because exactly those things you describe (as well as some other factors/events) were reckless, violent experimenting (ideological, military, technological). And now we’re finding out. Like I’m not sure if you’re aware but the world changed ridiculously fast during the 1900s and now the early 2000s compared to the rest of history.
They burned coal like crazy in 19th century, killed all the whales, soaked everything in mercury, genocide was the name of the game.
America invented income tax in that century to tax the rich, before that it didn’t exist. Low end was taxed little, anything over $500k was given to the country. Now it robs everyone but the rich. Also, for some reason they structured it so citizen->country->state rather than citizen->state->country (I believe the EU is structured in the latter) yet nobody has questioned this terrible error. An American citizen can’t skip paying Federal taxes, as they are imprisoned. Even though debtors prisons America purports to not have. Yet when their own Federal government destroys their state via many means, they can’t do anything about it as an individual.
America sat around while Nazis and their prequel happened, thought about doing it. Set up a honeypot for Japan to attack Hawaii, then “saved” the world, made movies about it for decades. The hero that did nothing until we found it convenient.
America pushed nuclear power so hard as it would revolutionize everything…in the 1950s era. We wouldn’t have to be so desperate for “efficiency” if inefficient processes like resistive heat, electrolysis, and other things to generate things we need were throwaway bonuses. Power bills would be a thing of the past, every energy bill would be, natural gas, fracking, etc. would be unnecessary. Nuclear power would be safer than it already now is. They inflated the bad incidents like 3 mile island, and enlisted the Simpsons to poison a generation. (Hopefully people pick up that the Simpsons bit was a joke, ish.) Even ozone-destroying chemicals (theoretically) could have been reduced because the refrigerants used in every heating or cooling pump could have just been Peltier devices instead of a chemical. At scale, massively inefficient. Unlimited power? Why not?
America liked oil like it was crack and decided that was the better choice. We needed to fund airlines and cars. Backed by taxpayer-funded airports and roads. Move over trains, we have a bigger way to delete your money.
So, tl;dr, omitting a lot of details that could span a week of typing, we in the FO part now dawg.
now they ensured that only middle income gets taxed forever and heavily too.
easy, google
wet bulb temps not supportive of human life
everything else short of the cold war nuke apoc is lol and at least that had the option of not happening
we’re already in a positive feedback loop
Many STEM grads are class traitors, we can’t act like academic institutions didn’t play a direct role in funnelling skilful students into military and private medsci employment while working diligently to instill as much punishment for empathy as possible into their programs.
100%
…Yeah…
