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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35546 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I continue to believe that the climate crisis and the resource crisis continue to cause a large (not existential, but still considerable) threat to the stability of the modern society

How does climate change threaten - at all - the stability of modern society? Let's say one of the worse posited outcomes happens, and hundreds of millions of africans or poor south asians are displaced - but europe, china, the US, etc manage any disruption technologically. How does this threaten 'the stability of modern society' at all? If 20% of the population dropped dead, or a dozen random cities got wiped off the map, inhabitants included, it'd be unfortunate, but society would survive - and climate change will do much less than that to the US or europe. (and we know this from history - plagues and wwi/ii).

Also: what's the "resource crisis"?

international human rights treaty framework to be an important fundamental stabilizing civic myth

What is the myth specifically? Most people believe less in 'international human rights treaties' and more in a general sense that rights and democracy are necessary for all that is good, and specifically all that is good for happiness and prosperity for the people, especially the disadvantaged. This isn't really a myth, just a set of values and claims about their benefits. Do you mean that individual or collective rights aren't independent goods but rough gestures towards things that are generally contingently beneficial, but it's better for people to believe that protecting "rights" has some independent meaning or value beyond that contingency in some deontological vs consequential sense? I think the difference is deeper - everyone ("progressives") wants happiness and prosperity and freedom from want for all, and the larger part of 'international human rights' are just direct attempts to accomplish that - as opposed to (variously) struggle, complexity, duty, nation, race, beauty, etc.

Since the particular purpose of my statement in this subthread was simply to shortly present my essential beliefs, I am in fact not going to engage in further discussion of them here.

Fair enough. Often people make tangential statements with the intent of inviting further discussion, often they don't, hard to tell which.

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