Thread

1. 21asdffdsa12 · 1789625927 · focus · HN ↗

   Look at life, or its systemic counterpart capitalism. Look at that attempt at an exponential. In that curve is all the cruelties, all the danger, all the colonialism, by eating other curves, all the failure because physics is linear on a sphere in the sun.

   Everytime somebody tries to emotionalize any discourse around any of these topics, look at the defining curve and think for yourself - "yeah, thats life, still preferable to death." - then go and solve that problem, or go an be absolved from that problem. Any vital system is expansive, the trees colonialize the grass by throwing shade. Equality - and thus peace can only be reached by having a equality of arms, by copying working mechanisms.

   1. tovej · 1789626064 · focus · HN ↗

      Capitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.

      1. 21asdffdsa12 · 1789643471 · focus · HN ↗

         Uncontrolled growth within a system- sounds like nature to me.

         1. tavavex · 1789659157 · focus · HN ↗

            Nature has existed at a relative equilibrium for billions of years. It changed, but there was never a single thing that could take over the entire system.

            It took humans a few hundred years under the current system to start a mass extinction event and begin dismantling the ecosystem we rely on. And we are ready to go 10x further if it means someone somewhere else makes a few more dollars.

            Cancer is the most apt comparison, actually. At a system level we don't care for survival or long-term viability, only immediate replication and exploitation.

            1. 21asdffdsa12 · 1789713874 · focus · HN ↗

               That is - a anthropomorphization of nature- assuming what is nice and "stable" to me, is not actually furiously attacking one another. Nature had buildup of warfare materials (the plastic that was trees before fungi digested it).

               Nature had campaigns ebb and flow, due to iceages and warmspells, had island holdouts being wiped-out by systems adapted to furious combat on continents (invasive species).

               Your picture of nature is very much distorted by a rejection of a rather cthullian reality.

               What you mistake for peace is a coldwar equilibrium, where all sites furiously roll the dice of research for new war-tech- and then humans came along. Humans are very much a natural system doing natural things, very successful though.

               1. tovej · 1789726927 · focus · HN ↗

                  Cancer is natural, "natural" does not mean good. This focus on things being "natural" is very strange when we're discussing artificial constructs like the economy or technology.

                  Technology and capitalism are not natural phenomena, they are political ones.

                  You are conveniently ignoring the comparison to cancer. Capitalism and cancer both demand growth at the cost of everything else. This is what leads to them destroying the systems they inhabit.

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