this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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me_irl
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A generation's fault =/= the fault of every individual in that generation
Correct. But climate change is specifically the fault only of this Grandma.
Correct. What many don't know is that this Grandma used to be an Exxon Executive.
She also burnt our crops, poisoned our water supply and sent a plague unto our houses.
And that grandma's name? Ronald Reagan.
Ftr industrial era started in 1700s. First car was 1886. Petroleum 1859. First combustible engine 1876. Lead in gasoline was introduced 1920’s(and started getting removed in the 1970s). This Shit was doomed well before Reagan was even born let alone a president or anyone voting for him.
Ok.
If she voted for the cowboy, she's to blame.
So long as we’re going ‘generational’ logic: Trump is considered the millennial president. Good luck explaining on how you let that one get in to future generations. Get comfortable with getting accused for voting him in. Even if you didn’t. You’re ‘of a generation’ and that’s all it will take.
No snowflake thinks they're responsible for the avalanche
Except it literally is the fault of like 30 people. We can directly pinpoint the cause of the problem onto the actions of specific individuals.
Everyone else could have voted for regulation to prevent them from doing those things. You can't just expect corporations to not do evil if you allow them to. They're heavily incentivized by the system to be as evil as possible. The solution is to limit the amount of evil they're allowed to do.
Money isn't real. The government isn't real. Those two things are made real by belief. Everyone made a choice to believe in those two things.
If you spent the 80s working for communist orgs then you're not guilty, but everyone else who did nothing during Reagan and Thatcher deserves the hate.
I lived in a socialist state (GDR) as a small child (and my parents all their lifes until the state disolved). The government destroyed nature just as much, if not more.
And the CCP actively denied climate change as a means for the West to stop their modernization until the last decade or so.
Industrialization was a priority for most Marxist-Leninist based states because that was considered the best means of both defending themselves from the "NATO aggression" and, in theory, increasing quality of life.
It's a relatively recent trend that ecological conservationism and climate action has become a major actual leftist talking point. Obviously you could find individuals who were concerned but the governments are largely M-L and simply didn't care that much compared to building industry.
That has no bearing on what I said.
Communism isn't a magic wand to excuse blame.
Grow up and realise communist countries extract and burn petroleum.
The Haudenosaunee did not use petroleum.
How common was petroleum fuel at that time?
It didn't exist yet. I don't believe that petroleum fuel existed at the same time as any independent communist society, which contradicts your claims. If you would like to support your claim that some communist civilisation used petroleum, it seems to me you should name a communist society which maintained independence after the industrial revolution.
So, you might want to look into oil seeps as well.
You went and found the one indigenous group that actually did have access to petroleum. https://stacker.com/business-economy/history-oil-america
Not an exhaustive argument, but really points out a flaw in yours
That article lists it as a mosquito repellant and a salve, not as a fuel. I was careful to use the phrase "petroleum fuel". Oil as a mosquito repellant doesn't contribute to global warming.
Not in your first comment, and kind of a bad faith argument, because as you have stated, fuel hadn't been distilled at that time. And there are arguments as to whether they meet the definition of communist.
So, what communist state that had access to petroleum didn't harvest for any reason. And which ones after the advent of petroleum fuel didn't use it?
We may have made that choice, but there are some pretty sure consequences if you don't go along at least a teeny bit.
No but snowflakes are arguably more equal in their role and function than humans in society are. Powerless people exist, and it’s most people.
In democracies people have the option to vote for people who will regulate businesses. A business will only optimize for profit, if you want them to make environmentally friendly choices you must either make those choices mandatory or profitable. The way to do that is through politics, and people who voted for the avalanche share the blame for it.
But snowflakes literally aren't responsible for an avalanache. A cow in a stampede has no choice but to follow the herd, it's the whoever or whatever started the stampede/avalanche that's responsible.
Except for cows at the edge and back, who could get out.
Which makes a new edge of the herd, which lets more cows out, and all of a sudden the stampede is just one angry bull.
No metaphor is perfect, but I think this one demonstrates rather handily that much of the "stampede" is social pressure that would dissipate rapidly if the people who could leave it did.
I wish people would see it that way. But on Lemmy when it comes to climate change the majority seems to be in favour of not doing anything personally, because it wouldn't have lot of an impact.
Making jokes about how not using plastic straws is a scam, a vegan diet too hard for the effect it has or how the cars of individuals don't matter in the greater scheme...
That's exactly like people in past generations thought as well.
If snowflakes aren't responsible for an avalanche then what is?
The thing that causes an avalanche, the loud noise or whatever it was.
You could try and blame the snowflake for being there, but even if that was a valid criticism it would only give them limited responsibility for the avalanche happening. Blaming the snowflake is like blaming tinder for the fire, when without the spark no fire would have happened.
An avalanche cannot occur without an outside force acting upon it?
Yes, something needs to trigger it.
Thinking a bit more though, I was only thinking of a snowflake in the avalanche, rather than a snowflake falling on the top causing everything to fall down - like messing up the last card in a house of cards. If that's what they meant then it makes a little more sense, but still doesn't really hold true. 90% of all avalanche disasters are triggered by humans.
An avalanche requires that certain types of snowflake form a "weak layer" in the snow. Some snowflakes are kind of smooth on the sides, these don't have the jagged edges that hook onto other snowflakes. When a force is applied, this weak layer breaks and the snow on top of the layer slides down the slope. A single snowflake will not apply enough force to break the weak layer - the amount of force it applies would be negligible even compared to things like the wind. Something else will trigger the avalanche before a snowflake ever could.
The snowflake provides the conditions for an avalanche, but doesn't apply the force that triggers it.
That's because they literally aren't.
All this rhetoric does is make people feel good about not doing anything, though. If your government is ruining the world and you blithely sit by and even actively vote for that very same government, you are absolutely to blame.
We all have a moral obligation to fight for what's right, obviously not everyone can be an armed revolutionary but almost everyone can organize and spread knowledge.
Well passing blame to the parallel tangent and doing nothing upstream is still being compliant. That’s this generation’s decision to act this way.
And not voting just to be compliant to a trump monster making shit worse was also this generation’s decision.
This generation will have a lot to answer for until the day they die.
Especially what with their memes like this one boasting inaction while they just sat on their phones blaming the random parallel tangents of generations of people while they do absolutely nothing to face these political issues head on.
Blaming a geriatric in a wheel chair who probably burned more bras than they ever did doesn’t make waves in the political sea. But these people know that cuz they have absolutely no intention of doing anything productive. This meme is just further disappointment of the absolute trash and failure of the current generation inaction. It screams how they refuse to do anything effective. They like their life the way it is. They just don’t want any responsibility of the choices they make that could be different. So it’s just easier for them to pretend it’s the previous generation (each and every person of it) somehow withholding their power of choice.
The oil production sure didn't help
Yeah but my grandma in the peace corps wasn't responsible for that
Your correct. The USA is a democratic country and climate change was known about for a while now. So it's probably more accurate to say that most of the individuals in that generation. Had a responsibility to address it and they didn't.
Now, I sympathize. A lot of the corporate pressure to do nothing about it back then is still here today. But it doesn't change the fact that nothing was done.
I am not placing morale judgement on anyone here. Life is hard and complicated and when you have big business working against you it is doubly so. But that doesn't change the fact that they messed up and it's causing a lot of damage.
Let's learn from their mistakes so we don't mess up in the same way.
I've seen some videos where US citizens are proud that it is not democracy and does not have national elections, instead it has electoral college. Well, at least USA did something good and sanctioned putin's rocketmaker.
I mean, it's reasonable to say they could have done something and failed to do so. However, when you start to dig into what they could have done, it's hard to think of anything particularly effective and easy to see why they could have been convinced into inaction. So you could say they made a mistake, but were not fully at fault. The ones at fault are the ones who have been convincing them.
I like to say that responsibility isn't neatly divided up into percentages. Someone can be fully 100% responsible for something that happened, but other people can have some minor responsibility also. There's no threshold between being responsible or not, either, it's a sliding scale. When assigning responsibility and blame it's important to remember these things.
A communist revolution. And don't give me that "they didn't know" crap, there were communists fighting the good fight back then.
Hey man, I love communism as much as any far left lemmy user, but can you explain how a communist revolution would have impacted climate change?
The primary motive to pollute was the profit motive of fossil fuel companies, and automotive manufacturers. Today, the biggest argument against closing mines is jobs, and the biggest argument for cars is getting to work. A communist system has universal basic income. Better planned neighbourhoods such as the Soviet 15 minute cities would also reduce transport emissions, though the soviets were not communist. There should exist no such thing as mining or energy companies, and under communism, that's the case.
Hmm. Under communism, even with UBI, people would still have jobs, or hobbies, or would go on road trips or vacations, so you'd still have people driving cars.
I agree that better, more walkable city planning and functional public transit is important for reversing climate change, but lots of people think that, not just communists. I don't see what a communist revolution has to do with that - even your example is of Soviet cities, not communist cities.
And even if there are not energy companies under communism, there still need to be power plants, electricity would still need to be generated. What about communism would make those power plants be powered by renewables instead of coal?
Isn't it obvious that a people who work to better society would do more altruistic work?