Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-InfiniteResourcesInSpaceTerribleSpinoff

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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.