: Stoller: Curious, this millennial reliance upon ecological catastrophe to initiate social change. SDF, I believe, has also touted ecological catastrophe as the midwife of revolution. What exactly is this belief based upon?: : Hardly millennial, Barry; the process of environmental destruction on a grand scale has been going on since the Industrial Revolution...[etc., etc., etc., etc.]...
: Thanks for the gratuitous examples of ecological depredation, hot shot, but that wasn't the point (I don't deny ecological depredation). The point was the 'millennial reliance' upon ecological disaster to initiate social change.
Look, Barry, I gave examples of pressing societal problems due to environmental destruction.
Are you really suggesting that hundreds of millions of refugees aren't going to cause some fairly radical social change?
Or that the desertification of large areas and spread of vector-borne disease isn't?
The present society is simply unsustainable; if the expected changes occur, it will physically not be possible to maintain an industrialised society. That's why it will cause social change.
You've repeatedly maintained that your state is an industrialised and up-to-the-minute state; how in Hell's name do you plan on achieving this if there's no readily available energy sources?
It is possible that the predicted environmental changes are so radical that the normal modes of production will not be maintainable; sure, a Communist state would be much more efficient without the capitalists sucking the cream out of it, but you require a significant energy outlay to engage in any change of state; the entire world isn't going to change just because someone waves a magic wand. And if the energy/resources aren't there, that change is simply not going to happen.
It's a mistake to assume that society inevitably progresses; it's just that the societies which don't progress tend to die out.
: For example, later in my post, I repeated myself: 'To posit, however, as some Greens do that oil shortages or other such ecological doomsday scenarios will instigate social change for the better is unclear.'
: To which you---apparently cooling off long enough to actually pay attention to what I am saying, responded: 'I doubt it will.'
...unless people work to make it that way. I think people (on the whole) learn largely by negative circumstances and suffering; that society will change for the worse before it changes for the better. However, I'm not content to just let this happen; I continue to try and get society to change for the better first.
I'll deal with the rest later.
Farinata.
