I had to mentally send myself a reaction image the other day. I ran up the stairs on all fours, said to myself “i’m such a locationpilled scampercel” and then perfectly envisioned this image
you finally confess your attraction to the hot priest and he’s like “oh darling, I thought you’d never ask” and proceeds to bite your neck and turn you into another catholic priest
a lot of self professed socialists and left wing people have absolutely no consciousness on imperialism and when it comes down to it could easily be convinced of being fascists
seriously when the reaction to people making very realistic observations on how the structure of the global economy is unsustainable, especially for the first world, is “great way to make people support socialism by telling them their lives are gonna be worse under it”…
if you define quality of life and freedom in terms of access to cheap commodities and convenience at the cost of others, you might not be a socialist!!
People who are against both fossil fuels and nuclear really need to read up on their early modern history. Even at a bare minimum subsistence level humans need energy for cooking and (in a great deal of the world) heating and if you want to support a certain level of population (I.e. a level that most of the world passed by 1900 and and the rest by 2000) in most of the world you’re gonna need the products of industry to produce sufficient food (like have fun doing earthworks on heavy soil without metal tools). By 1800 much of Western Europe and Eastern Asia (especially the more densely populated parts like like England and France in the former and Shandong and the Yangzi delta in the latter) were facing severe ecological stress due to the high wood demand for both household and industrial uses(even while they imported large amounts of it from less dense areas like the Baltic coast, North America and South East Asia). This loss of forest lead to a range of issues like soil erosion, rising water tables, increased flood damage and even localised climate change (many people believe that the “European Monsoons” of the late 18/early 19th century were the result of deforestation while forest loss is used to explain north Chinese rainfall patterns to this day).
Southern China was only barely able to stabilise the situation through developments in cooking/hating fuel use efficiency and the use of a range of alternative fuels like dung and crop residues (and maintaining this level of crop and livestock production required yet more imports like beancake fertiliser from Manchuria) while the situation in the North continued to deteriorate into the 20th century. Meanwhile forest cover and soil health in Europe only began to recover when use of coal both fully displaced wood as an an energy source and allowed the development of other technologies to reduce the level of land clearance necessary to support society. That’s not to say this solution was perfect of course (I’m sure we all know what effects this use of coal has had on the global climate, while part of the return to forest in Europe was the result of Europeans importing land intensive commodities from other parts of the world; essentially exporting the forest clearance) and we are in desperate need of an alternative, but when deciding on which alternative you need to reckon with this. Flat out “de-industrialisation” is not only an intensely cruel solution in human terms but simply isn’t environmentally viable either. Wind, water and biofuel could barely support a planet of 1 billion people how well do you think it’ll fare with almost 8 billion. And if you think modern renewable technologies can make up the difference you’re gonna need the number to back that up; good vibes is no substitute for the quantity of kilojoules humans needs to survive
Like all these people who romanticise artisanal handiwork production clearly have never heard of proto-industrialisation or the putting out system. The social and environmental effects of these production systems were not nearly as pretty as these people like to believe
