Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-InfiniteResourcesInSpaceTerribleSpinoff

Main entry

618. Q618/Q618

     Infinite growth is not possible

     -> I don't like interacting with this proposition because in order to properly argue it you have to successfully argue Bolshevism, and if you don't, then the conclusion you come to is that stopping infinite growth is not possible.

Infinite resources in space

618. Q618/Q618Reaching natural resources in space is insanely difficult [1] -> hard to argue with that one once you know about the concept of light-years. it should really say something that humans bothered to go through a phase of speculating on blockchains and NFTs that were worth nothing and acting like that useless amount of effort would sell for real money when in theory, a chunk of anything from space would sell for a ridiculous price if you were purely judging it based on how hard it was to get it and how few people can.
618. Q618/Q618Because it is so difficult to reach any natural resources in space, it is more likely the earth will run out of materials, technology, and life before it would realistically be achieved [2] [3] -> this is... physically plausible.
     the only problem with bringing up these issues is that you'll inevitably end up talking about the fact corporations are impossible to control in a world where civilizations are built on ethics and Freedom and the corporations will always call "freedom!" every single time you try to regulate them to stop the world from emitting catastrophic amounts of carbon. every single time. so until you defeat the entire idea of freedom and the entire concept of somebody trying to enforce laws or ethics on someone else specifically by bringing up a violation of freedom, you may as well just accept that the entire concept of the economy and politics are flat out done and it's no real use talking about them any more. like, quite honestly, as long as Liberal-republicanism continues to exist we may as well have people trying to mine asteroids or other crazy shit (pronounced censored) because those might be the only people that are able to gain any political independence from BidenTrumpIsrael while everyone else stands in a stalemate until everyone dies. not really in favor of the sector of technology freaks going to another planet but I'm only saying, history doesn't follow the laws of morality, it favors the groups of people that casually survive in chaotic situations where several groups of people die out or can't control each other.
     an actually more reasonable suggestion than that would be for several more countries to turn into North Korea. because nobody has to go to space to do that. if your country is isolated and well defended, and especially if it happens to be innovative, then it gets the advantage of being the 'other option' that survives and endures while all the individuals in First World countries fight each other. anarchism will never survive a world where First World countries can all team up and take down Cuba, unless it's casually aiding imperialism in abusing whole ethnic groups and breaking their spirits. but a heavily fortified hellhole committed only to internal unity and resilience probably will. so. Infinite Growth On A Finite Planet Is Infeasible. are you ready to become North Korea yet? or are you actually just a secret Elon Musk apologist?
618. Q618/Q618

     Why claim infinite growth happened?

     / If infinite growth is not possible, then why do people claim it has already happened? / If infinite growth is not physically possible, then infinite growth cannot currently exist at the moment people are talking about it, as things that are not possible at a given moment in time cannot also exist or continuously happen at that moment in time; if infinite growth does not exist, then people who are wanting growth to continue infinitely would not logically be desiring the thing they claim to already be happening, but a different thing they are not good at labeling, which means that when somebody tries to disprove an argument that growth as it occurs now will continue infinitely, it follows that they are not actually arguing against the right thing / Given that people arguing for infinite growth cannot be actually arguing for infinite growth, what are they actually arguring? ->
     

     usually I put a lot of value in good-faith arguments, but I make exceptions when it's so logically impossible for the person to actually be arguing for what they're arguing that you actually have to fix their argument and figure out what it's actually saying to be able to interpret it in good faith without distorting it. I think capitalism is one of those things. when people think growth can continue infinitely, they're very frequently already using cheats that modify the conditions they're operating in like creative destruction... or, you know, World War I. this fundamentally modifies what they're really saying. creative destruction or World War I could hypothetically not have happened, so you could say that what capitalists are actually arguing for is those things that change the conditions, not to "pursue" infinite growth (a thing that is either impossible or already happening, not something you actively do); these modifiers would be the definition of "pursuing infinite growth". so, the problem then becomes whether you can stop capitalists from putting down these modifiers they already do every day. can you actually stop capitalists from going through World War I to try to vertically get more money when they can't expand horizontally? can you stop capitalists from destroying each other's corporations just so growth can begin all over again? the big problem with stopping these things is that this same basic process happens whenever two groups of people don't agree with each other and have different laws and standards, they fight over the same territory and push each other out and undo what each other did; if you can't unify the Republicans and Democrats into a single Dengist party then you see why it's been so hard to stop corporations from "growing infinitely" over the top of each other and over other ethnic groups, over and over and over.
     yes, there is no infinite growth — because what happens instead is chunk competition.

618. Enshittified products can instead be run at cost [4] -> this is implicit in the claim that enshittification happens when a service is done actually growing. it could hypothetically be true.

Israel and socialism

618. Q618/Q618The United States could grant ostensible equal rights to any number of demographics without endangering its existence as the United States of America [5] -> honestly, I doubt that that's really true, specifically because the moment you try to grant Confederate people rights (or Cuban plantation owners who once exploited Cubans for the United States) they quickly start trying to tear back out of the country, and when you don't let them tear back out they try to take away other demographics' rights. I think a country trying to tear itself in two is one of the only times it has genuinely created a threat to its existence, don't you?
     there's also the fact that large countries easily start trying to break apart even if they aren't explicitly created as empires. you can easily say "the Soviet Union can grant equal rights to 14 nationalities and it doesn't endanger its existence as the Soviet Union", while in reality, trying to put all those nationalities in the same country leads to each population thinking that being tied to the others is causing a lot of "extra bureaucracy" and ultimately leads them to tear apart from each other because they can't stand the costs of supporting each other and being together. when you think about all the arguments that the Soviet Union was 'too bloated', 'too big', etc., they're actually pretty familiar to what a lot of U.S. conservatives say about any government programs existing, or when they try to push for individual state governments to be more independent and also defend the Confederacy for supposedly believing in that ideal. the same people that defend Confederate statues would defend compensating plantation owners or else destroying the Cuban government. but those people won all over Eurasia. so what does that mean?? are pluralistic societies officially dead since 1991? because whether the people that say it are Good or Bad people, there are absolutely material forces that tear countries apart and complicate the project of claiming that infinite numbers of subpopulations can share the same country without it breaking in two.
     why is there an article on this blog that argues against infinite growth on a finite planet, and then an article that argues for infinite nationalities per country? in any given situation either infinity is possible or it's an impossible singularity. I do not think this person understands infinities.
618. Q618/Q618If the proletariat are anyone who does not control corporate structures that carry out or control the ability to employ people, then people in other countries who have never been part of a given country's laws or culture are part of the proletariat -> Trotskyists see this contradiction and just nod and accept it as a fact. they probably shouldn't.
     serious issues arise when you think populations don't have borders. to take maybe the simplest example, trans women and Southern Baptist Christians may live in almost totally separate worlds interacting with totally different people. they'll be part of separate clusters of corporations working with separate clusters of people that might not buy each other's products. this makes it relatively easy to join together all the blue anarchists, or sometimes all the Southern Baptist Christians. but if you want both separate seas of people to unite together you'll get a really ugly interaction between them where they suddenly start arguing about which group of people has the "real" set of laws that should get to be law and which group of people is only seeking to dominate the other one. the problem arises at both of them being constantly fed the standard that they should get to be Free and get to be Themselves and nobody should get to tread on that and This Is Democracy but their very act of being their identity comes with inherent, required moral statements that require everyone in that group to be a certain way and anybody 'threatening' to merge into that group to also be the same way. at a certain point, culture becomes a limiting factor on forming republics because culture is subjective but if you're operating on a human rights framework then even if it's harmful you can't make anyone change it, and passing laws against harmful things becomes impossible. it becomes that to form Liberal-republicanism you kind of have to abolish cultures and tell people not to have cultures or else, but then the cultures inevitably get angry and try to break open Liberal-republicanism and form several separate anarchisms segregated by culture. trying to analyze Liberal-republicanism is insanity unless you step totally outside of it and just arbitrarily declare you want a world without the petty bourgeoisie, and then miraculously all the theoretical discussions fix themselves. of course... then what you get is a bunch of petty bourgeoisie flailing about 'imperialism' or 'marginalization' and how everyone is colonized if you don't let them have tiny territories constantly squabbling over the top of each other and all the individuals in them pushing each other off the island. you have to push back on that. you have to push back on the entire concept of products or businesses or fandoms being "communities" and not let them have it whatsoever.

Related

11890. Q11890/Q11,8,90Eternatus [6] -> so... I read over this Pokémon's article today for reasons. and good grief
       as far as I know, I don't think anyone really took the Galar / Rose storyline all that seriously or thought it was very profound. but you get the feeling the people who wrote it totally did. it is.... such an embodiment of the omnipresent anarchist consciousness you see absolutely fucking (pronounced censored) everywhere, that is one of the most blockheaded fucking (pronounced censored) attitudes I have ever seen but is totally convinced it's the most genius thing and if you, the stupid bumbling society-destroying can't-do-anything-right Communist wrecker refuse to accept it, it needs to carve its message into a big flashy visual production blaring speakers on top of a Starmobile to convey to you how "brilliant" it really is. goddamn (pronounced censored), Pokémon is just 'scary Communist reeducation' but for anarchists at this point, which is only made worse by it supposedly being voluntary even though if you don't know and accept all its messages the consequences will be steep so it may as well be mandatory.
       ok, you've jiggled the line at me long enough, I'll bite. Eternatus is a mysterious power taken from nature (an asteroid — which are quite common in the Pokémon universe, so it's not to be taken literally). the Pokémon itself emerges from a rock and puts out a power that makes everything around it big and uncontrollable and rampaging. it has been depicted in side media as able to affect humans and curse them with a senseless lust for power. [7] Eternatus absorbs Galar particles and becomes more powerful. within the narrative it's set up in kind of a Necrozma pattern where it was big to start with and is trying to reclaim all the bits it shed, but that seems to be a matter of plugging plot holes more than an actual important theme. the framing that is given within the story is more that Eternatus can put as much power into Galar as it wants to, but for every bit it creates by existing it will try to take it back and become more and more powerful itself. the subtextual implication which does not actually happen is that Eternatus wants to get more and more powerful infinitely. and either way, Rose looks at that and thinks, oh, sure, this can be controlled, and we are going to have everything Eternatus has created for ourselves. there's almost some thought there; it's almost a fable of how 'God made corporations' and capitalists thought they could be tamed and controlled before they led to global empire and wars over oil deposits but they couldn't.
       but it isn't. it really isn't that. there are many cracks in the story. the first one to notice is the triumphant hero moment where the legendary wolves show up and solve everything through friendship. the tone of a story says a lot about what it means. Eternatus doesn't have to be understood. nobody actually has to figure out why it seems to be an engine of infinite chaos. instead everyone assumes that Community can solve everything just because it's there. while in the real world Community spawns all the things that Eternatus is, and they aren't separate. the second crack is that the narrative implies that Rose and Eternatus each choose to be the way they are because they're thoughtless and they simply decide that Greed is better than its alternatives; Rose makes this 'decision', he is handed the worst friend in the solar system as his consequence. this is nonsensical. the image of Pokémon going mad, losing themselves, and reaching for infinity implies that there is some particular mechanism of why they become this way or that there is a particular thing they are doing when they exist normally that they can choose to do instead, but both processes are terribly ill-defined. the story says that Pokémon have no idea what they're doing, not that they've deliberately decided to do this. (which, hilariously, might be one of the most accurate moments in the entire thing.) so if, in fact, Greed is something people accidentally do without even thinking, does it even make any sense to treat it like it's the thing we think it is that we've always known and simply say 'oh there's Greed let's banish it'? it probably doesn't. it really starts to feel more like Rose is a scapegoat than that he actually caused any of this, and everyone is just blaming him for having caused bigger underlying problems that they refuse to understand so they don't have to realize in horror that it's also their fault.
       so let's recap. Greed is a disease. it comes from space and not from earth. medieval knights can get rid of it by attacking the Industrial Revolution after centuries ago they already fought it and tried to stop it once. (starts to remind me of Dugin when you put it like that.) after industry destroys the planet capitalists can stand by and say 'I didn't know what I was doing' and get forgiven. there are ways to be a capitalist and just casually decide not to destroy the planet despite the fact that capitalism is made of competing islands that must grow or die, so if you don't choose them you are very Evil and should be kicked out of industry despite the fact most people need industry to live or they will be completely denied all material resources and kicked out of society itself. Greed is a cycle of power building on power because power first comes to exist. there is a way for power-upon-power to simply not exist. ordinary Pokémon don't do this thing.
       but ordinary Pokémon are not peaceful. we know they fight each other, and we know they eat each other though it purposefully isn't depicted on the show. logically, Pokémon don't turn into empires because if you have a flock of Staraptor and a cluster of Pachirisu and the Staraptors start menacing the other Pokémon and eating them or taking their territory whenever they want to, to some small extent Pokémon are capable of rounding up all the Electric-types to obliterate the Flying-types. they are slightly intelligent, to the point it feels natural enough to just treat them like people in Mystery Dungeon and more like a tiny hyperbole than a huge hyperbole. but in the main games their 'society' doesn't run on peace. every Pokémon will fight you. real animals run away, but Pokémon fight. so like, the message naturally projected by Pokémon in general is that greed is good if everyone is equally greedy and if nobody is the most greedy then it doesn't evolve into capital-G Greed and it controls itself. Eternatus is the most powerful, it gets to do what it wants, but if its power is taken away then surely the problem goes away because surely only power can spawn Greed. but it's contradicted within the show because there are evil organizations and all of them want god-tier power but none of them have it yet, so clearly, they logically have Greed before they have any power. of course, maybe I'm the one that's reading this wrong and Rose had Greed like any of the rest of them but Eternatus did not. but if so, how does the narrative go together? Eternatus is the concept of a civilization digging up fossil fuels and turning into an empire that only goes looking for more energy and tries to violently overturn other countries for oil. and the narrative definitely thinks Greed exists. so it has to go somewhere in the middle of that. and the way the story reads is that capitalism rose up out of the ground (or actually fell from the sky) and then society beat it back so it wasn't so bad and that's where it should have stayed but then it started winning again. logically there is an implication here that it's okay for capitalism to exist no matter how toxic it is because everything can coexist with everything. Arceus set everything into the world to coexist, or simply was the world and contained everything, so everything has to coexist in balance. hmm. I had never fully uncovered that specific logical fallacy before. it's like, how do you know every entity you can name is a necessary organ of Arceus that's capable of balance? it's Hegelian in the wrong direction. there is a really weird contradiction in the premise of this story in that it is depicting the concept of 'being uncontrollable' within a setting where that should be physically impossible. you know, ironically, the more you try to take Pokémon at its word the more it feels like it's going to snap in two and end up in a conclusion that actually you do have to understand Eternatus to stop it given how Eternatus being uncontrollable is exactly the way things are supposed to be and you can't fight the way things are supposed to be, trying to control the uncontrollable is what's actually going against Arceus.
       oh man. watch me eventually start inverting Arceism through its own logic and producing the "historical materialism" that would be produced inside the Pokémon universe. I didn't even think it was possible to do things that route, and the prospect of it is frankly hilarious.
       how would you get around the way that every concept is actually a god and they're only not because it's been secularized into the world simply being made of concepts? would you just, show the Legendary Pokémon metamorphosing into new forms? it has to be that, doesn't it? but it's very funny to imagine Eternatus turning into something else totally different. maybe that means I'm on the right track though. because I can actually completely imagine some organization in the Pokémon world saying, see, we only need to transform Eternatus, and everyone absolutely flipping out and calling them crazy. and that's exactly the way anarchists respond to Communists, they often try to pull these 'state capitalism' arguments that Bolshevism is justifying the evils that created capitalism and it will surely fail "because it's capitalism" — though whenever they try to explain what isn't capitalism it always sounds indistinguishable from capitalism and none of it ever sounds like a coherent explanation of how capitalism was prevented. god yeah. I love the reading that the most important event in Sword/Shield was an off-screen event of Communists trying to transform Eternatus and like Zacian and Zamazenta crushed them into the ground and this led to the second Darkest Day. it's tragic but it's also really funny when you have that moment of discovering that the bourgeoisie are patting themselves on the back for a disaster, in real life or in fiction.
618. Q618/Q618greed is like a pet ... the more you feed it, the bigger it's going to get (The Lorax) -> this quote came to mind while trying to explain the concept of Greed in Pokémon Sword/Shield. it's like we've got basically the same idea here. Chairman Rose is the Once-ler! there. now you can't unsee it.
618. Q618/Q618Everything before Marxism is anarchism / ... this is to imply that anarchisms do not require getting rid of hierarchy or class society to be anarchisms even though getting rid of hierarchy is always their "idealistic dream", and the actual minimum requirements to create an anarchism are that the underlying social structure forms without state intervention and the underlying social structure forms under conditions of self-determination rather than under the intervention of a larger containing society which has swallowed and asserted control over a particular countable culture -> yeah.... the typical error anarchists make is thinking that when "power" pops up at the edges of their anarchism that hierarchy always appears because it wants more power, rather than noticing that most of the time hierarchy actually appears for defensive reasons and only a few loci of power take offensive actions. anarchists can't tell Deng Xiaoping from Alexander Dugin but it's actually a really big difference — it's the difference between observed behavior anarchists don't want and observed behavior anarchists want. the Dugin-style Archon truly wants power, believing that knowledge can't improve the world while only material things bring happiness so the most effective path is literally just to take them without thinking. the Deng-style Archon is specifically there to bring consciousness to an unconscious object, and cannot be dethroned until anarchists are smart enough to achieve that same level of Materialist, non-ethics-based understanding of their population as a whole population. there is a real obsession in some anarchisms with basically trying to prevent consciousness from coming to a population at all and hoping that the inanimate collision of populations will somehow lead to something good when it never ever does, and monarchy is about the best thing that's ever come out of it. the unconscious collision of populations leads to war, and a lot of the time, Archons actually appear to head off war, not to advance it. in that sense blue anarchism is an anarchism run by Archons — conglomerate anarchy by a circle of Archons to prevent a larger Archon from being created. but there are still Archons. this means that, ironically, even from an anarchist point of view Trotskyism should be better at getting rid of Archons than blue anarchism. like, the process of Trotskyism is to get rid of millions of Archons across the world and then create an efficient state that actually makes decisions for the purpose of building things and doesn't make them a second time and has fewer and fewer things to do and in doing that takes away its own power. that sounds more like anarchism to me than most of what I hear out of anarchists.
     I wonder if there's a way to just totally ruin the word "anarchism" like anarchists ruined the word "communism" so that the vast majority of people starts believing anarchism means Trotskyism and there will never be any anarchist groups that believe in stuff like Proudhonism ever again