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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28977 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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With younger people especially, a lot of climate activists seem to lean towards an extreme, almost fatalistic view of the situation and consequently advocate things like mass deindustrialization and other civilization-suicide-adjacent solutions. As much as I appreciate the writings of Kaczynski, these solutions seem absurd without even getting into practicality.

The number of people with these views seems to be steadily growing at a rate I'm not sure I can fully credit to media coverage. Is it cyclical? Can anybody here that was around in the 70s provide some context? Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.

See also: this stonetoss edit. Being nuclear-optimistic is now right-coded somehow.

/images/16914338578218443.webp

Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.

I have non-edgy barely online friends in their 30s who seem to think a local political party's throwaway idea of the government rationing car and plane travel is what we need. These friends do travel more than they would be allowed under that scheme and they do admit it, but they basically just say "it'd suck, but that's the kind of decisive action we would need" and excitedly talk up the idea to everyone.

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