Crapitalism am I right folks?

Good thing there's a vaccine

Yeah. Beyond the obvious ecofash aspect of it, plenty of animals are murdery or selfish as well. We have the reason and capacity to do better though, so we should.

I for one welcome a world ruled by the Orangutan-Bonobo-Cetacean alliance.

If i could kill all gorillas to save 1000 humans i would, even though i think gorillas matter.

Humans are the only beings capable of being destroying the world. But we’re also the only beings capable of taking care of it, making sure it’s healthy and safe.

Our power is our responsibility. We were born, a long chain of infinite lives over billions of years, to be the gardeners of Earth.

Just the corporate ones

the whales aren't doing enough

I think the whales blame us.

Whales were happy after September 11th happened. They may have had a hand in it.

just think it sounded cool in the Matrix

The whole line was spoken by the arch-cop during an interrogation. Sometimes I wonder if that scene is an unintentional political Rorschach Test.

👆 this officer, right here. BMF is posting again.

But have you concidered this snowball I brought to the Legislative Floor in the middle of summer?

One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.

It's a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet's population. It's also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.

Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”

As @iridaniotter@hexbear.net said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn't (as) true before capitalism.

The feudal mode of production is inherently incapable of meaningfully changing the climate. It's a moot point.

Yes actually. We know full well what humans were like in hunter gatherer tribes, because we still have such tribes living today.

I suggest you meet the Hadza. A living demonstration of how different human beings are depending on the system you place them in. When humans have neither competition with one another nor a lack of material abundance they become something quite different.

Your interpretation of humans as assholes comes from never having known anything other than capitalism. If you lived in a burning building and never knew any different environment you would also believe that it is natural for humans to endlessly cough.

Do give that thread a full watch, and read the last couple posts. It will change your attitude.

There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it's had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there's no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.

Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic "old money" families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they'd be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.

Leftism is about claiming nothing meaningful ever changes or can get better. The more apathetic thought terminating cliches, the more leftist it is.

The bourgeoisie, who are a virus. Or more accurately, a parasite.

Hunter-gatherer societies started settling down with the invention of agriculture, and force began being used to grant ownership of the land to the strongest.

These societies began coalescing and creating the first cities, and these landowners expaned their power to take over as Kings and less powerful ones as the nobility.

With the use of that might, people belonging to other realms were forced to work as slaves.

Slavery became widespread (in western countries) and needed constant war to get more slaves as the economy grew, because less slaves = more labor needed to expand.

Expanding in that way is unsustainable and leads to stagnation or overextension, such as what happened to the Roman Empire. It was in a deep crisis when it collapsed in the 5th century and its slave based economy was becoming obsolete.

This system was replaced by armed nobles dividing the land and its subjects between themselves, giving them a small piece of land and protection in exchange of forced loyalty, taxes and the ability to be forced to fight for the lord of the land. An attractive proposition in times of societal collapse like Europe had.

Eventually, this rule of noble families started losing its power as improvements in technology and colonization gave inner city artisans a growing amount of influence and wealth from the ability to produce things increasingly fast and easier.

Peasants started moving into cities and leaving the lord's lands. This process accelerated drastically with the invention of the steam engine and the nobility began being seen as obsolete and parasitic. The revolutions of the late 18th century made this decline permanent. The remaining nobles were forced to either join the bourgeois and become businessmen with fancy titles, fade away into obscurity or fight back and have their country become a Target of capitalism.

Capitalism, the new system, is based on producing more and more, faster and faster. Because you need to outdo the competition to not go bankrupt, and the competition needs to do the same. You need to lower costs and increase profits. You have to produce cheaper so you fight to keep wages low and working conditions poor, extract resources in ways that are cheap (even if damaging the environment), find more places to sell your goods to (even if they don't want you to), drive your competition out of business, etc. Especially as new businesses are founded and join the same race to the bottom against you, making it faster.

It's not even that they necessary want to do this stuff. It's just the ones that "blink" and chicken out of doing one of these things is more likely to fail at doing business, go bankrupt, stagnate, exist as a niche only, etc.

It's the issue of "You have 10€ in your wallet. The product from the place workers are treated well and does everything by the book costs 15€ and the one where they dump trash in a ditch out back and don't clean the floors is 7€, which one do you buy?"