Everything is a complicated series of complicated things, with a zillion moving pieces and interlocking mechanisms. Climate is the hugest of these extremely complex entities, and the most obviously gone sideways. Donald Trump’s plan is to ignore it. He doesn’t believe it’s even a problem.
Other systems are wobbling, too — the economy, the food supply, the electric grid, even the parts of American health care that actually function. Most of what keeps America going are things like that, things you don’t even think about, but it’s all precarious. If one or two factors go kablooey, it’ll make other things go kablooey, too.
And here comes Donald Trump. He doesn’t understand or even want to understand the intricacies and subtleties of anything, but he’s eager to “make America great again” by ‘fixing’ everything.
Let’s deport millions of immigrants, and dismantle the Federal Reserve, and deregulate everything, and put high tariffs on imports, and shutter the Department of Education, and pull out of NATO and fire a lot of Generals and make the military uncertain of its mission … and more and more, and so much more.
Trump is about to start the biggest tear-down and re-build of American government in the history of American government, and what’s his first step? Get rid of everyone who knows how things work, and instead put crooks and cronies in charge.
That’s where we are, and Trump isn’t even president yet. We don’t know what wackiness he’ll decide next week or next month, but we know that Republicans will acquiesce to anything he wants, and Democrats will say “Oh my” but offer no resistance.
Since we don’t know what’s coming, we can’t guess the specific consequences and irreparable damages, but have you ever played pick-up-sticks? Remember the way things topple when you mess with them, if you’re not careful? Well, careful is something Trump has never tried.
I’m a senior citizen, and my ‘escape plan’ has always been to die of old age before everything goes completely to hell. That strategy is in peril, unless I get cancer real quick.
Complete collapse is coming sooner than even we pessimists had anticipated.
Yeah, most of us had societal collapse pegged for ~2050 but it’ll happen before 2030 at this rate.
Might not be a bad thing. We’ll have to rip the bandaid off at some point. Might as well be sooner than later.
That’s maybe not the best approach to take unless you’re wealthy enough to hop on your jet and fuck off somewhere stable while it happens. Things are going to get ugly when people can’t get their medication, food, energy to heat their homes, etc.
Oh I don’t even expect to survive. No need for long term planning. I never fancied living in the world of The Walking Dead sans zombies.
I mean, given how many people live we already kinda do
It’s a predicament. One way results in longer, slower suffering of more people as things decline, the other is suffering of less total people, but far harsher with less time to adjust.
I apprecate the perceived benefits of accelerationism - the problem is that it creates a lot of needless suffering.
In other words, we’ll have a lot of pain we don’t have to have. That’s why I’m against it even though theoretically we’d get to a better system faster. There’s also no guarantee of that, however. So it could just be a living hell for nothing.
I say let’s maintain and fix what we can while we work on a better day.