- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/collapse/p/1433733/humanity-is-on-path-toward-climate-chaos-scientists-warn
Industries and individuals around the world burned record amounts of oil, gas and coal last year, releasing more greenhouse gases than ever before, a group of leading scientists said in a new report, warning that humanity is hurtling toward “climate chaos.”
The surge in global use of fossil fuels in 2024 contributed to extreme weather and devastating disasters including heat waves, storms, floods and wildfires.
My brother in christ, it is wild how many people on here talk about shit they don’t know about. I did not say it is a national thing, nations are bullshit anyway. The US is an empire, and yes, that empire operates in the best interest of those at the top of its hierarchy, i.e. its wealthiest. No, the borders of the actual United States are not real, they’re made up and do not represent the actual boundaries of its influence or power. This may be surprising to you, but maybe the way you think about states and nations came from the systems of power you are currently subject to and are imagined in such a way so as to occlude how this system actually functions. Maybe there is some benefit to capitalism to imagine it as natural and therefore inevitable, hm?
The USA is the dominant capitalist power because it is an empire that modern capitalism emerged through. There are debates about where capitalism actually begins, maybe in property relations in 15th century England, maybe through the mercantilist economies of Euro colonialism generally in the 16th through to 18th centuries, but there is never doubt that the specific property relations and dominance of wage labour in the 19th century industrial shift as the definitive moment where we recognize the capitalism we live in. Capitalism would not have survived the 20th century without the US empire – which was at that point the industrial capital of the world – and they defended it brutally. There is nothing in history that can compare to the scale of violence the US has enacted in its campaign to maintain the power relations of capital. Yes, the United States of America as in the state, not as in the American people (which isn’t a thing anyway) or as in the land which is confined within the US borders, but as in the state with a military, economic, and political coercion network that dominates most of the planet. When rich US citizens like Mark Zuckerberg own a disinformation platform like Facebook, and that platform explicitly promotes fascism in its algorithms, and that platform then incites a genocide in Myanmar, that is a series of actions only made possible through US defense of private property and capital globally. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_leak)
Also, we “let” them? I have an MQ-9 Reaper drone in my garage you see, I’ve simply not made use of it to free myself from the chains of capital. Do you get why this is an issue? You cannot imagine it as “people aren’t doing enough” because that is fundamentally a liberal, moralistic argument that resorts to ideas of purity to judge the value of human life.
We should be using different words to separate the abstract empire from other manifestations of state, see, we are confusing each other. But the state is just a bunch of people. A bunch that another larger bunch of people just tolerates. Many, many people who do the oppression. Share your data with suckerberg? You just helped him. Buy cheap chinese electronics? Support genocide sweatshop and global capital network. Drink a coffee? Sure your neighbor grew it and got a fair price on it, right?
The only way capitalism managed to pull itself out is through bribing the people. Sure, forcing us to do slave work was involved too, but let’s not deny that this scheme has layers and fooled benefitiaries stacked on top of each other, nobody enjoying a fraction of joy and life that being free and real brings. Taking out the head inevitably involves getting through these layers, making them collaborate with all the sane people. You wouldn’t need a raptor if an army regiment who has them did their stated job of defending people by targeting somebody harmful instead of killing innocents half globe away.
I can make a tool on par with a raptor, so can many engineers at lm and raytheon and boeing and roskosmos, there are doctors who treat putin, cooks for kim choke whatever, whores for trump. We are all people with powers and choices. And I wouldn’t say we should kill ourselves overturning the system, no, if I’d think so, I’d be dead long time ago, in a large pool of dead bodies. But we can at least stop collaborating with it, and I’m quite certain that should be enough. Best time for that was 400 years ago or so, next best is now.
After all, capitalism IS a natural order, by the fact that we do empirically observe it as dominating phenomenon in nature. Which does not mean we can’t change that, humans are really good at things like that. The question is - who will do the work towards this change, and I haven’t seen anyone who wasn’t a punk actually doing meaningful work ever. Maybe not all at once, but building the society one community at a time is great rate if done by many people around the globe. It’s just that focusing efforts on resisting USA easily turns into supporting your local oppressor instead of building the right thing. I’ve seen it myself, even with my family. I’ve seen people in US ignoring the things you write too, and that was terrible, but this colonial stance and focus on US local problems is not cool at all. The whole system is corrupt and there is no single state that supports it alone, there is an abstract empire, but it’s wider and deeper than whatever just usa could mean.
I seriously didn’t read this. Why the fuck did you write so much about something you clearly haven’t studied? You guys don’t know what youre talking about and the mods on this community started targeting me for not using gloves with you. If you care about this, why is it more important to pretend to know and not just learn about it? Would take less effort ffs.
DM me if you want a reading list, I’m not paid to provide a course on what the world is and you clearly just think YouTube and Twitter is the best way to learn.
Bro, you are arguing with a poorly-constructed strawman. The commenter you’re replying to said nothing about borders being real or Americans constituting a people (which, for the record, you are wrong about on both accounts - these are real, albeit non-physical, emergent phenomena). Yes, the US is an empire, but the destruction of the world does not depend exclusively on them. Do you really think that over-exploitation of Earth’s resources would stop abruptly if the American empire was destroyed tomorrow? It would help, sure, but you’re in no way addressing the clear connection between human psychology and exploitation. Greed is not exclusively American.
Jfc you people are so dense. Ask yourself about how a movement or event that deconstructed the US empire would do so without deconstructing capitalism. You think I’m talking about nuking the shit out of a global empire to save the world? Think before you talk. Capitalism is not just “greed” like it’s some incomprehensible being from Pandora’s Box. It is a system that thousands of people have spent a century identifying and defining.
Won’t be responding again, you guys have no fucking clue what youre talking about and I think this is actually the first time you’ve spoken to someone who studies the shit you pretend to know about.