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I'm retired, full-time research, theory, and writing since 2009, formerly 50/50 residential construction and corporate I.T. (consultant, Boeing, Group Health Cooperative, King County Metro (WA), Dynacraft, and others). Lifelong social scientist (philosophy, religion, education, economics, politics). I fly very, very high.
I agree, things like relative cost/benefit, outcomes, etc., are crucial. The problem is that we're in no position to determine any of that intelligently until we've actually studied an alternative experimentally. To do that requires a good job of understanding it theoretically. To do that requires being agreement capable in order to think it through constructively. How many comments on this post would you say indicate agreement capability? If brainstorming is hobbled by notions of "realism" and "viability" and "morality" -- which by definition all hail from a collective knowledge base that's conservatively biased against the most novel alternatives without actually understanding them, you're guaranteed to miss the good stuff. How can you understand an alternative if you bat the spoon away when someone says, "Here, just taste it" ??
That's the codependence talking. The ball is ALWAYS in your court unless you've given up your game to play someone else's. Let's just say it turns out I'm onto something here, and within the next ten years it will become common knowledge. Tomorrow I'm going to bike into town to food shop. Let's say I get hit and killed by a car, and you never hear from me again. Where is the "ball" then?
This points out a basic difference between us. I'm not "proposing we collapse all of society". That's ridiculous -- not because collapsing society is ridiculous, but because pretending that I or you or the two of us together could do fuckall to collapse it. It's like people think that these discussions have significant, possibly direct bearing on what happens in the world. It's a fantastic assumption. I don't participate in that.
I'm as realistic a person as you could find. Totally fact-based. If you show me facts that contradict what I think, I adjust what I think. I'm doing what I do not only because I know I can have an effect, but because I've already had an effect. We could argue whether I'm riding the wave or am part of the wave -- I'm not interested. What I know is that I could see where things are going 10 - 15 years ago, and now we're there. My only serious fault (even still) is that I always underestimate how fast and how far and how deeply/seriously. I knew in the spring of 2019 that something (which turned out to be COVID) was coming. I had no clue it would come in a mere year. I would never have guessed how destructive it would be and how deeply and far it would shift collective consciousness (sociological sense). So, my personal challenge is to push myself further into radicalness, because my history has consistently proven that I never go nearly far enough.
I'm not here to discuss radical ideas for the jollies. I can only do so much as the one-man-show I've been for 15 years. We're never going to figure this shit out by deferring it to people strongly incentized to make sure it never gets figured out. My experience after 15 years: 90% of people are agreement incapable; 99.9% range from merely open to supportive but don't actively engage and contribute (lurkers, more or less), and I can count on one hand the number of people I can bounce things off of or mull them over with, but none of them have committed to pushing the fucking stone over the fucking mountain. They just don't want or can't go as radical as it's going to need to get, yet. And here I see I've never been radical enough. What do you think I should do?
Also, "proposing we collapse society" is based on huge, factless assumptions. One, like I said, that we actually could collapse it. Two, that if society radically changed, it would be catastrophic. But most important and factless of all, that for society to avoid collapse, it would need to resemble what it currently is to some degree. That's absolutely false in all practical respects. No one knows that. No one has any evidence at all that indicates that. Societies have collapsed, of course, but give me just one example, just one, that collapsed as the result of a failed experiment in radical change. Read social science and history experts and their explanations for the collapse of a society -- Greek, Roman, any other -- and you'll see detailed description of how their collapses were inevitable due to the nature of their own structure, ethos, and design -- NOT because they radically departed from them.
As far as Black, I promote him in the interest of expanding minds, not endorsing his views/"solutions". I don't think he has any solutions. He's an anarchist, we've corresponded, I've tried to engage him, but he demurs. That's basically when I realized I've gone far beyond anarchism.
While working in corporate IT when you have a basically working system if someone came up and informs you that the silicon in all the electronics you use is susceptible to solar radiation that can occasionally make calculation incorrect and that you should consider alternatives to silicon what would you do? Maybe if you had the time to kill you could kick around the idea with them, the fellow may even be right about the silicon being susceptible to solar radiation, you vaguely remember that something like that can occasionally cause a bit to flip here or there. But really, how seriously are you going to take this warning? It's not really been a big problem before, you even had some redundancies set up so even if in a freak accident it mattered it'd probably be fine. There are some experimental alternatives to silicon materials, Germanium, Graphene, cubic Boron but it's not even clear if any of them solve the original problem and you manage tons of electronics. You realistically cannot even source a single Germanium chip, let alone replace your servers. You express skepticism and they accuse you of being negligent. That's kind of what it feels like to see you morally load this conversation by call capitalism psychopathy with a makeover. It just kind of comes off as silly and frivolous. Maybe there is an alternative and maybe we can talk about those alternatives but I live in downtown Chicago, I'm looking around at these sky scrapers and millions of people moving about keeping everything running and it may actually be easier to switch every electronic in the city to graphene then get this working without ownership as we know it.
I'm happy to talk about this, but don't call my a psychopath for being skeptical.
We've been offered many spoons, some we have later verified were filled with dog shit.
I think you're mistaken of the dynamics here. There are tons of courts. If discussing this with you is tedious I can go up or down a thread and participate in the forum's 800th discussion on whether Trump is good or bad, the 480th thread on whether lgbtq2s+ acceptance has not gone too far enough or even spicy new topics like the India/Pakistan conflict. This topic is of special interest to you because it's been a brain worm for you for years, it's of special interest to us because we do actually appreciate the opportunity to engage with new views. If the engagement is not forthcoming, if the ball stays in your court we can and will move on. As we were counting assumptions earlier the belief that your perspective will win out is is an assumption you're making and it's on you to convince us of that.
Depends what your standard is for collapse. I'd argue maoist china collapsed in a way. The Weimar republic probably counts. The soviet union might count. Usually a society is able to survive and change course after the implementation of bad ideas, see Trump tariffs.
I don't know if you've gone beyond anarchism, but I don't know much about your views.
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
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