It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends ...

[K-Dog]

We agree to disagree, but the idealistic frame leads to passivity.

To get what I mean this might help.

Hopium is not the same thing as hope.  Hope is what people who are DOING SOMETHING have.  Hopium is what people who are passive and don't DO ANYTHING have.

Hopium is internally generated to maintain a passive do nothing attitude.  Hopium imagines the power of ideas will triumph in the real world because they have an independent existence.


The materialist knows that the only thing that matters is what we do. 

The contrast is real.  The idealist will tolerate injustice thinking karma will fix shit.  IMHO, that attitude is full of shit.

[RE]

Hopium is not the same thing as hope.  Hope is what people who are DOING SOMETHING have.  Hopium is what people who are passive and don't DO ANYTHING have.

Hopium is internally generated to maintain a passive do nothing attitude.  Hopium imagines the power of ideas will triumph in the real world because they have an independent existence.

Well, all you need to disprove this hypothesis is a single example to negate it.  I have one.  It's ME!     

I'm an idealist, but definitely not a "Do Nothing".  I write a whole lot and make videos to inform people about collapse.  In both cases a good deal more than you.

I also don't have have Hopium.  I have what I consider the very realistic HOPE that collapse will lead to a very extreme population knockdown of 99.9% or greater in the near term, which I define as within 100-200 years.  After that either stabilization or a rebound until we finally do go extinct, which of course is inevitable.  I have set the date for extinction also.  In the Year 2525. 

Most people would consider this very Doomerish, after all it postulates the death of more than 8B people over a very short time.  It also postulates a return to stone age technology and living standards, barely different from the way Bonobos live.  Which makes sense since we share 98% the same DNA code.  But NOOOOOOO.  Not good enough for you and Dr. McStinksion, you gotta have every last fucking Homo Sap stone cold dead shortly after the oil drops off the map.  Meibee so, but it's not written in stone and it ain't ovah till the fat lady sings.  She sings to you, but not to me.



I doubt either of us will live long enough to even see the end of the first halving year when 4B people die.  We'll be with that cohort for sure.  5 years later with exponential negative growth 2B, and at 5 years there's STILL 3% of the original population left.  That would be 240M people for those of you with weak math skills.

So, we'll never get that question resolved on these pages either, which leaves us only with another equine to tenderize.  Do we really need to waste everybody's time with this one also? 



RE

[RE]

The contrast is real.  The idealist will tolerate injustice thinking karma will fix shit.

One more thing.

Since when have I ever been considered tolerant or a fan of karmic justice?  My form of Justice is well known.   

No problem so big that rolling a few heads won't solve. 

RE

[K-Dog]

ince when have I ever been considered tolerant or a fan of karmic justice?  My form of Justice is well known.

You are taking it personally, and I don't mean any of this to be personal.  So think about someone else besides yourself.  People who take Karma seriously are everywhere.  Their idealism is destroying the world.  Some idiots even say this is all "gods' plan".

I do not know why you are going on about extinction.  When half the people are gone, reality will have folded several times over on itself.  The future is unpredictable after it folds.  It can't be known.  I am serious about folding.  Reality folds when something like COVID comes along or a war starts.  A few such game changing events makes the future unpredictable.

Technology has extracted all easy oil.  This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, even by doomsters.  Oil extraction requires high technology,  and social shocks will disrupt the ability to supply needed high technology as finance fails.  This crisis will result in a hard crash, with 10s of millions of Americans starving to death.  This hard crash can be avoided with a planned economy, but that is not going to happen.  We will have the hard crash instead.  From my point of view this is just as much suffering as going extinct.

People obsessed with extinction need to get a life.  They should be supporting people who are trying to make change instead of deciding everyone else is mentally challenged because they don't know 'the truth'.  Most people are watchers, few will do anything to make change.  That is most people.  But all people obsessed with extinction do nothing but watch.  They do nothing to mitigate things.  Extinction people say other people are stupid and smoke hopium.  Extinction people do not understand that hope is reserved for people who actually do something.

And now I will repeat myself because you failed to pay attention earlier.  I have specific objections to people who concentrate on extinction.  There is no difference between near extinction and absolute extinction from the point of view of human suffering.

"Extinction baby, the Seneca cliff"

Same difference.  The house burns down.  Some smoking embers can remain, but things will never be the same.  The house still burns down.  Obsession with absolute extinction is narcissism.  Please don't compare me to McStinksion again.

I write a whole lot and make videos to inform people about collapse.  In both cases a good deal more than you.

That's great.  Keep up the good work.

[RE]

Since when have I ever been considered tolerant or a fan of karmic justice?  My form of Justice is well known.

You are taking it personally, and I don't mean any of this to be personal.  So think about someone else besides yourself.  People who take Karma seriously are everywhere.  Their idealism is destroying the world.  Some idiots even say this is all gods' plan.

Not taking it personally, no worries there.     Just doing what's necessary to refute an argument, and in that case all that was necessary was to provide a single example that was contrapositive to the premise.  The example happened to be me, since you had made me an example of idealistic thinking.  Remember, I taught the Arguments portion of the LSAT for the Princeton Review.  It's a gift.  lol.

I do not why you are going on about extinction.  When half the people are gone, reality will have folded several times over on itself.  The future is unpredictable after it folds a few times.  It can't be known.

People obsessed with extinction need to get a life.  They should be supporting people who are trying to make change instead of deciding everyone else is mentally challenged.  Most people are watchers, few will do anything to make change.

You are the one who has been insisting that this collapse will end with extinction, and ZERO people will survive the Zero Point of Oil availability.  I don't accept that argument as fulfilling necessary & sufficient conditions for extinction.  So as long as you maintained that it would end that way, I would make arguments to show otherwise.  Just as I continued arguing the position that ideas don't exist without Homo Saps around to think them.  I don't buy that one either.  So we agreed to disagree after it went on long enough to become tiresome.  Now that you have backed off and left it open ended as unpredictable, we have come to an agreement.  Arguments complete from both sides,  it's up to the jury (our readers) to decide for themselves which way it will end, Extinction or Knockdown.

Using helicopters to shoot goats in the Galapagos islands worked as expected until most of the goats were gone.  The last 10% learned to hide well enough to avoid getting shot.  Special techniques needed to be used.  Judas goats with radio transmitters.  The extinction of the Galapagos goats turned out to be more difficult than anticipated.

Indeed.  Extinction is really, really difficult to achieve with any species, and Homo Sap is a highly adaptable one that has survived both major climate changes and catastrophic volcanic explosions.  We populated the entire globe from the desert sands in the tropics to the frozen tundra above the arctic circle.  From sea level to 3 KM (16.000 ft) up in the Andes and the Himalayas, nearly halfway up to the Death Zone above 8 KM (26,000 ft) where the oxygen is too thin for any life at all.  Human corpses up there don't even decompose with nothing there to feed on them.

When we are knocked down the population can go really low before there is no turning back.  75,000 years ago the were just 10,000 Human Souls left still walking the earth encased in meat packages, and from that group with just 1000 breeding pairs, we rebounded to 500M in 1600, before the Age of Oil.  Will we ever rebound that far again?  Unlikely in my estimation since it took 75,000 years to get there, and I believe the Prophets Zager & Evans that we only have 500 years left, In the year 2525.  Or maybe 10,000, going to the final lyrics. lol.

Please don't compare me to McStinksion again.

As long as you don't insist on extinction as the obligatory outcome for the end of the Age of Oil in the near term, I won't.  Once you take that position, you climb into bed with Dr. McStinksion. Long as it is a known unknown, , you aren't in that rathole.  That's up to you.

I write a whole lot and make videos to inform people about collapse.  In both cases a good deal more than you.

That's great.  Keep up the good work.

I'll do my best.  Keep on Truckin'



RE