If humans weren’t greedy dicks then capitalism or any other form of government would work perfectly. You can’t force humans to not be greedy dicks. No matter what system is being instituted it is susceptible to greedy dicks.
Yes we can, via laws & regulation (which are also laws). You have no clue about what unrestricted greed does to people especially, on the recieving end
Nope, doesn’t work because power obsessed sociopaths worm their way into government and change the laws
How naive are you?
Yes if you don’t enforce it, but you don’t want to enforce it now, do you. You love greed until you are on the receiving end
You can’t even understand your own mother and here you are making bold assumptions about the personal values of someone you met on the internet half an hour ago. Fucking classic reddit right there man
Greed is the source of nearly all human misery and it is not necessary for life at all, and I have personally witnessed what it has done to people
I do not love greed in any form and the fact you just stated that with such effortless confidence tells me our society really isn’t worth saving.
And now these statements, despite being only minor glimpses into my value system will of course immediately fill you with ten thousand assumptions as to who I am or what I think.
That’s mental illness friend
<Complaint about bold assumptions of individuals values>
< Bold assumption about all of humanity >
<Assertion of personal perspective>
<Further complaints about assumptions>
<Name calling/Labelling>
They’re coming out with some really weird blazor libraries these days.
Dammit, missed the code tags
@page "/lemmy-reply" @using HypocrisyManifest <p>Complaint about bold assumptions of individuals values</p> <p style="font-weight:bold">Bold assumption about all of humanity</p> <p>Assertion of personal perspective</p> <p>Further complaints about assumptions</p> <p>Name calling/Labelling</p>
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I mean, nobody has to reply on a public internet forum.
Unless you are being forced to reply…wait…that would explain a lot.
Ok, if you are being forced to reply to internet messages against your will, try and add some sort of code in the replies so we can try get you out of that environment, it sounds awful.
Also electrons don’t die, don’t be silly.
There is, of course, the electron cycle of transmigration of states.
It’s like they don’t even teach basic electrotheism in school anymore, smh.
Are you familiar with anti-trust laws ? Anti-corruption laws ?
According to you they shouldn’t exist, because a crafty psychopath will get in anyway & yes you do love being greedy as long as it benefits you, why else would you be defending capitalism.
Socialism HAS been tried & it works. You see I want everyone to get welfare, because with it you can have a safety net against the abusive owner-class. BTW, I’ve never been on reddit (I don’t even have a twitter account)
So I’ll be upfront and say i don’t know shit about socialism as a concept.
Do you have any examples of socialism that has worked (or is currently working) at modern nation scales ?
I’m genuinely not picking a fight, just looking for examples to read up on.
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Cuba, Laos, Vietnam & the state of Kerala in India. China too (but they shifted to state-capitalism). Most of Latin America were electing socialist leaders as well. (Until some coup came along)
We can regulate greedy dick behaviour
Madame Guillotine can help with that
Your generalization is false
The majority of humanity are not greedy or obsessed with profit
The problem is that the few ridiculously greedy sociopaths that do arise per-capita are just so FUCKDAMN good at amassing power and wealth that we assume it’s the natural lot of all people
So we just test and dispose of sociopaths at birth, problem solved. We already have the tests for it.
Don’t look at me like that
and thankfully those sociopaths have enough money to get rid of idiots with those ideas that get too close to power.
Yep, which is why we need to use nontraditional power tactics like leveraging drones and cyber attacks as well as flashmob tactics and social media control
Money buys you a private army but not loyalty, we need to start early and get idealists positioned in those private armies
Make inroads with the children of billionaires tired of their parents’ excesses, this was a valuable vector during the French Revolution that almost no one talks about
More than anything we need to accept the fact that no amount of signs or shouts are going to stop the ultra wealthy from destroying everything for more imaginary numbers in an already unspendable bank account
It’s still objectively eugenics to target people based on genetic conditions, especially if the genetic condition has a not wholly undesirable result.
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capitalism or any other form of government
But capitalism isn’t a form of government tho.
Nor is communism of even feudalism.Oops you’re right I meant economic system
There are human societies were greed is not accepted.
Which ones? Which ones don’t damage their land or steal children from enemies or rape or steal? Please don’t try to say any indigenous tribes because they are all guilty of one or more these.
Any indigenous tribe. But seriously it was not long ago that no professional fishermen anywhere would ever overfish.
Only because they weren’t capable of it lmao.
There’s at least some evidence supporting human driven extinctions as far back as some of the earliest ‘modern’ (ie Homo sapien) hominid populations.
Amish
The Amish are highly discouraged from getting an education of the high school level and beyond.
Members are shunned by the community and family of they decide to leave the faith.
this is only true to the smallest of extents, there were plenty that had those behaviors, survivorship bias is not a good footing for an argument.
Survivorship bias is so important to remember when talking about human societies. Even our perceptions and knowledge of indigenous tribes is limited by survivorship bias. Consider that there may have been many more “peaceful” or “non-greedy” tribes, but they were conquered by groups of people that were more violent and selfish. There must be so many tribes that have been wiped away without a trace, tribes we know nothing about.
But the real barrier to this hypothetical “non-greedy population” idea is the matter of scale. A peaceful village of 100 people is easier to create and maintain than a peaceful global population of 8+ billion. Even if indigenous villages managed to build such utopias where greed doesn’t exist, their models wouldn’t easily scale to the world we live in now.
Proof that lemmy is a failed experiment already, this asshole has five upvotes
I welcome you to inform us of this utopia you speak of.
duck chasing meme Which human societies?
Our entire schtick is co operation, it’s literally why we’re the dominant life form
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism uses the threat of poverty and the profit motive to condition humans into being greedy dicks.
I’ve been called eco-fascist for suggesting anything that might help the environment, no matter how small. I’m not impressed by this buzzword.
I feel like you can’t blame the corpos 100% and then proceed to do nothing to help the environment. Like I get that capitalism and unnecessary waste driven by it are by and large the problem, but it feels like people just use that as an excuse to put in zero effort personally and continue to live their lifestyle of overconsumption. It’s very defeatist imo.
“Humans are the virus” is related to the racist “overpopulation” myth which leads straight to eugenics. Sure, many words are overused, but “political ideology that combines environmentalism with fascist principles, often advocating for authoritarian measures to address ecological issues” is a bad thing.
When I am ill with an infection, I care not that “Not All Bacteria” cause the illness, I still take antibiotics all the same. If I have cancer, I do not give a shit that Not All Cancer Cells will destroy my organs, I still seek chemotherapy.
Capitalism is entirely a human invention, and the most widely adopted ideology. I care not that “capitalism is the problem” because if humans can’t get their shit together, then they are the root cause of the problem and Capitalism is just another symptom.
Put another way, in the words of Jesus Christ (paraphrased): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they don’t destroy their home and then pretend like they aren’t the problem because ‘Lily Capitalism is the actual problem’”
Oh, btw: Misanthropy != Fascism. Ecofascism is a belief that all people should stick to their racially segregated “homelands” and live in harmony with nature. Whatever people who say “‘Humans are a virus’ is literally ecofascist rhetoric” believe it to be may be the actual solution to the oncoming apocalypse we’ve gotten ourselves into. I’m a misanthrope who loves the biosphere more than humanity’s right to do whatever it wants and get away with it because “it’s the ideology, not the people who participate in the ideology.” I’m not a fucking racist.
That’s ok, we are not all born to fight, let alone see the enemy.
Could dumb shit like this be in lemmy.ml exclusively?
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Big “and yet you participate in the system” energy.
No?
What the fuck gave you that impression?
I’m saying the comic is shit because they are just multiplying causes, not that they’re being hypocrites.
Everyone just makes up shit to hear their own voices
You need to chill the fuck out dude.
No one has to suffer your existence but you.
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If you can’t chill out then you maybe need to not be on social media.
I find it hilarious that you have zero clue how much of a fragile bigot that makes you
Holy shit dude… stop trying to be a victim all of the time.
I’m not being a bigot, you dweeb. I’m saying social media isn’t exactly known to improve one’s mental health and it seems, judging by you tirade through this post’s comment section, you could stand for a break.
Wat
are you just randomly putting words together now
Oh wait the comic was earnest? I literally thought it was making fun of people who say things like this. Goddamn.
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humans invented capitalism, soooo…
humans also invented socialism, communism, fascism, monarchy, democracy so on and so fourth.
like, you can’t just take the worst and be like “you see this is why we need to get rid of them!”. its literally the point of the post. thats what is going on right now in the US with literally any person below the top square on the family guy race card. Would you say just because less than 1% of immigrants that are in the US have committed violent crimes, that all of them are violent criminals? If you do, I have bad news for you.
on the other hand when a virus like flu or covid replicates, it produces thousands of its variants but it is only defined by the one that causes the most damage
That metaphor doesn’t work. It be more accurate to compare humans to in general bacteria and most bacteria are not harmful, there are even some know useful viruses
good point on the usefulness, I agree the analogy is not an exact one between humans and viruses as an individual per se but the fact that in both populations damages caused takes precedent over damages not caused (and in the case of humans also takes precedent over the good things humans try to do)
Right… so less than 1% of immigrants being violent criminals, makes them equivalent to a virus?
I mean sure. yeah. You have an opinion. I won’t be continuing this conversation.
nope I am talking about the top billionaire class, %1 immigrant criminals are nothing compared to the damages caused by these people. you are forcing a racism twist to the topic to win the argument but local level criminals are unfortunately irrelevant in this conversation.
As we all know, communist countries would never harm the environment for productivity.
Ah yes, the only two systems. Capitalism and communism. There is nothing else or any form of nuance out there.
Of course, thanks for admitting it
Destruction of nature & unwise use of resources, or even just multiplying to a point where even the most prudent resource management & minimal environmental impact per capita is the absolute goal could still destiny biodiversity.
This has to do with economical tendencies of living beings, not a particular socioeconomic system.
(Yes, capitalism is accelerating the process by taking away freedoms from the masses - but even a commune can decide to chop up the whole forest for wood. World is a fuck.)“Virus” might not be the best word for it tho (infestation maybe? Fits the capita growth statistics), but successful animals that oversaturate their environment (eg lots of food, no predators, longevity after procreation, tech) cause biodiversity loss (anything from local collapse to a global extinction event with cofactors like climate change or air structure change - what is novel with humans is how rapidly we are developing in our last 0.5% of existence, and how rapid the global impact we case is, it won’t take us 10s of thousands of years, we can speedrun in less than a millennia).
The lack of empathy and true understanding of reverence is the issue.
People do not respect the meat that befalls their plate, the bacteria that ferments their beers, the trees that warms their homes.
Capitalism has two routes, horde through meekness or horde through exploitation. When you horde through meekness, any worth is solely yours - you submit and embrace this moment of life wholely separate from you. You cannot control the world.
Humans are a virus, because we reach for the stars as we eviscerate our host. Lest we learn compassion and empathy, we will consume this earth. The flooding isn’t biblical this time, it’s predicted by science as man decays.
hoard
Thanks!
If there are no more humans than no one will care about the environment.
Sometimes I get frustrated with people and I think this. But then I quickly snap my mindset out of this because I know really what’s the problem. Capitalism.
They are the same piece of generic rhetorical label you slap on or argue you can’t slap on whenever it conveniences you. If your solution is just a sentence long, you are an over-simplifying things.
So what happened to the ancient civilizations that collapsed before capitalism existed? Ducks. It’s the ducks that need to be shot.
Easter Island comes to mind. They showed up, took every tree on the island, then the vegetation went away and the island had nothing left to give.
Humanity: Living with nature and not causing global ecosystem crisis for thousands of years. Capitalism: Starts the industrial revolution and the need for eternal Exponential growth, resulting in massive environmental destruction over the last ~250 years. “Clearly, the humans are the problem.”
I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.
Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.
But the current crisis wasn’t, and isn’t, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.
Our distant ancestors weren’t some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.
Capitalism wasn’t even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn’t always in place.
The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it’s a progression that was damn near inevitable.
I just don’t buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there’s nothing saying it wouldn’t have been worse either. It’s a big game of what if, and there’s no current way to test technological progression theories. We can’t just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.
Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn’t exactly reject it all.
Ok, I’ll say that I’m being too myopic. But I do believe the scale is definitely different from back before technology was a major concern. Humans caused destruction to the environment, but I don’t believe we had the capacity to make it a global existential crisis for our species until modern production and infinite consumption was considered the best practice for humanity. I don’t think nixing capitalism will solve the problems overnight, but reigning it in with reasonable expectations isn’t a bad idea.
The good old slavery and crusade days.
Just because you can pronunce a word it doesn’t mean you understand it. By definition eco-fascism is fascism, because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise.
I don’t get the meme but allow me to clarify: if you think this meme will prevent me from punching a fascist in the face, you are wrong.
It’s clear you didn’t understand the meme because your reply is almost a non-sequitur. The comic is saying phrases like “human are the virus” fail to understand a lot of damage done by humanity was incited, sustained, and furthered by capitalism. Those phrases are pushed for “eco-fascist rhetoric” about controlling or even eliminating humanity when ecological/societal damage could be remediated by swapping to an economic system that nutures less destructive and more pro-social tendencies.
I don’t know where you got the sense that the comic was telling you that fascists were okay. Honestly, I don’t even know what your first paragraph is talking about.
Yes, I think the meme is dumb and I didn’t get it, I wrote it too. “Eco fascist rethoric” is normal fascism. You don’t “swap” economic systems like you swap pants.
A true fascist doesn’t go back to normal, like true antivaxer will die cursing vaccines, like nazi dying doing the salute.
So, yes some “humans are the virus” and it’s not eco-fascism. It’s called resistance.
You don‘t get it, that’s too bad. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with that meme.
I’m here to understand more, you can try eh. I’m happy to embrace a different theory that doesn’t involve wishful thinking and forced optimism.
If I’m not wrong, English is not your first language. I think you should look up “eco-terrorism” and “eco-fascism” as words and try to understand them. “Eco-fascism” is meaningful different from normal “fascism” and can’t be swapped out as you want.
I did and I think you should too.
Ecofascists often believe there is a symbiotic relationship between a nation-group and its homeland. They often blame the global south for ecological problems, with their proposed solutions often entailing extreme population control measures based on racial categorisations, and advocating for the accelerated collapse of current society to be replaced by fascist societies.
Maybe I’m dumb 🤷♂️
…
Thanks for cherry-picking the one paragraph I expected you to. Instead of the many other lines stating how eco-fascism is a subset of fascism concerned with authoritarian control of populations for the “presumed” betterment of the ecosystem. While a normal fascist state can use ecological rhetoric to propel their fascism ideology, eco-fascism also provides a trap for radical environmentalists. The difference, and prime point of conflict, is that protecting the global ecosystem is a good thing and passionate environmental activists run the risk of radicalizing into, or being derogatorily labeled as, eco-fascists. Whereas, I don’t see a well-meaning person falling into traditional fascism.
But you seem pretty intent on misunderstanding so this will be my final comment to you.
To reiterate. The comic is not espousing fascist thought or telling people to let it slide. It’s saying: don’t say shit like “humans are the problem” because you sound like a(n eco-)fascist when a less genocidal solution is “give up capitalism and try a different way of trading for necessities and luxuries.” I hope I don’t have to explain that “humans are the virus” is not a phrase easily carried by connotations, so a listener cannot just infer “oh yes, the speaker clearly means ‘all the fascists unrepentantly making the world worse are the virus and should be purged’.” They will instead hear “humans are the virus” and think ‘this weirdo wants all humans to die.’
If you want to (paradoxically) use eco-fascist phrases to espouse your anti-fascist ideology, you are allowed to but you’ll waste a lot of time, like today, trying to confirm that you and they are on the same side. Because you’ll just sound like an eco-fascist.
Yeah but… Humans created capitalism, so again the root issue is that humans suck. Just think of it this way: No humans, no capitalism.
so you’re just saying we should all kill ourselves? yeah that sounds great, i assume you’re willing to go first since you believe it so strongly?
I for one don’t want me or others to die, and so i don’t go around saying poorly thought-through things on the internet.
You are still shifting the blame away from capitalism. If we acknowledge capitalism as the problem, then we can change things. If we claim humans are inherently the problem, then it seems pointless to improve.
Thank you for putting it well, I had similar thought that I wanted to express but I can never write it so coherently.
And it’s not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn’t capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or “communist”, but that definitely wasn’t capitalism) regime.
It’s definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.
People often conflate capitalism with greed because the core of capitalism depends on people acting selfishly. But other systems can also reward the greedy.
I completely agree, other systems have the potential to screw the environment as well. But capitalism is inherently like that and reached environment destroying records. I believe these things are simultaneously true.
I think it even goes beyond that. e.g. the sowjet union genuinely had issues with food security, but they still fucked up when they dried out the aral sea because they were acting shortsightedly.
Supporters of socialism/communism/anarchism/whatever-ism don’t believe that their system will never make mistakes or that it prevents all bad people from having power. But it lessens it, hopefully. If a capitalist nation were in charge during the time the aral sea disappeared, you can bet your sweet ass it would have just the same or faster.
But it lessens it, hopefully
It’s true that capitalistic societies don’t do any better for the environment (which was the point of my comment, they’re BOTH bad in this aspect), but at least in capitalist Europe the common people got relative wealth out of it. In the soviet union, people were oppressed by the state, poor, and got their environment destroyed.
And now that is happening in capitalist societies.
We have many decades to go until our common people are as poor as they were in the soviet union (at least in countries that were on the capitalistic side of the iron curtain), though that does seem to be the general trajectory. But soviet poverty went beyond not being wealthy - there was always a very distinct risk that the local store was out of basic necessities, and I really don’t think this is going to be common in most western european countries in this century.
There are a lot of people who do believe that these systems could do no wrong or repeat the narcissist’s prayer to justify any wrong doing.
True. But I suppose I should have clarified it as “intelligent, thoughtful supporters of those ideas”
Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?
Nature makes a lot of things that suck, including viruses
Point still stands. Nature doesn’t owe anyone a logical explanation.
Its actually my point. Just because we dont like it, it does not mean that nature is wrong.
Nature is a product of atoms. So atoms suck, right?
For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.
Some people just don’t get nuances.
