Philosophy International Technocracism - The Ideology of the Modern Elite

S'task

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International Technocracism – The Emergent Ideology of the 21st Century
Introduction
Over the last decades since the fall of the Soviet Union but seeming to accelerate the most in the decade of the 2010s, there has been the rise of a new ideology among the elites in the Western World. Many see this new ideology as a merely the continuation of older 20th century ideologies like socialism or progressive liberalism; however, it has strong components that systemically reject many of the core values of both those ideological systems. While it does draw ideas from those prior systems, it also has other roots that draw from ideologies not just of what most would consider the left, but also of the right. This emergent ideology I have taken to calling “International Technocracism”, or “Intec” for simplicity, and I will attempt to explain core its beliefs, look at the origins of its various strands of thought, and finally explain how many of the current political pushes regarding everything from gun control to the ongoing pandemic tie back to these core values.


Core Beliefs
International Technocracism is, firstly, not a systemic philosophically ideology like socialism, libertarianism, or classical liberalism; rather, it is an emergent, observational, and pragmatic one. Those who adhere to it hold certain core values about humanity and the world that they believe are derived from scientific and historical observation and seek to govern the world according to those values because they believe it is the best thing for themselves and humanity. These core beliefs come from a different sources but all mesh together to create a systemic view that seeks to govern the world. These core viewpoints are:

War and Genocide are the Greatest Evils
War and genocide are the greatest potential evil that can happen. Thus both are to be avoided at nearly any cost. Peace, as defined as no ongoing military conflicts between nation-states, is a core goal of the Intec ideology and anything that prevents war and ensures peace is morally good. The only time a war may be justified is to prevent a genocide (though if the war could result in greater loss of life and prosperity than the genocide does, it should be avoided), at any other time use of military force in a non-policing manner is highly suspect and likely immoral.

Blank Slate Status of Humanity
Intec beliefs reject any form of biological determinism or influence on what an individual’s identity or interests might be. Rather peoples’ personalities and beliefs are constructed by the intersection of their social conditions (including their race, class, and gender), education, and individual experiences and thus anyone COULD be anything they desire regardless of their biological status.

Radical Individualism
Intec holds that the ultimate authority on what interest and identity for a person is that individual’s own to determine. Definitions and restrictions imposed by those outside of an individual (including by social standards, religion, or other beliefs) are immoral and to be rejected.

Hedonism
The ultimate moral good for individuals within the Intec system is the pursuit of personal pleasure, and that anything that hinders the pursuit of pleasure via interest and identity are immoral and oppressive and thus should be prevented or minimized.

The Non-Harm Principle
Intec does hold there is a limit on the values of Radical Individualism and Hedonism; that is that those are only allowed insofar as they do not cause harm to other individuals. Harm is broadly defined and is not simply limited to physical or economic harm, but also emotional or statistical harm.

Humans Are Hierarchical
Humans, while not having any biological differences, still end up with different capacities due to social conditions, education, and personal decisions; as such, hierarchies develop. Most hierarchies cause harm, because they are based in ideologies that create oppression of the individual, and as such, they need to be destroyed or usurped by people who hold Intec values so that they can be used to properly guide society and enable individuals to pursue pleasure via interests and identity.

Experts Over All
As the majority of people do not have the time, interest, or the will to study how best to order society, they should have only a minimal role in ordering of society. Rather experts who have taken the time and effort to study and learn or have otherwise shown themselves to be experts should be privileged in structuring how society is run and ordered. Further, these experts should be shielded from populist backlash or criticism and should never have to suborn their expert opinions to the opinions of others who are not experts, while non-experts should be closely regulated to ensure their non-expert opinions and actions do not harm other people.

Radical Agnosticism
Intec holds that religion is fine for people to believe in, so long as it does not influence beliefs outside the religious (esoteric) sphere. Religions that hold influence outside that limited, esoteric sphere must be marginalized and persecuted or converted to hold to the expert’s opinions.

------------------

I am working on further parts of this, explaining the history of this ideology as best I can construct and highlighting specific political and policy positions that they hold, but I've been sitting on this essay for far too long, and feel that folks should at least read what I have so far.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
How does endless campaigns in the Middle East and Africa square with InTech's abhorance of war? I see how Syrian campaigns can be squared away as an attempt to prevent genocide, but what about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya?
 

S'task

Renegade Philosopher
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How does endless campaigns in the Middle East and Africa square with InTech's abhorance of war? I see how Syrian campaigns can be squared away as an attempt to prevent genocide, but what about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya?
They're still part of preventing genocide/large scale war. Something to bear in mind is that one of the major political positions of Intec is that open (AKA "Free") trade is one of the greatest ways to prevent large scale war. Thus any group that threatens that status quo or remains out of the international market is inherently a threat to that order (this is also why they have such negative reactions to nationalistic / anti-"free" trade movements) and must be brought into alignment with said order.
 

Marduk

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I'd say that once few of these points get analysed in more detail and compared to certain historical ideas and their associations, this does not seem like an emergent ideology. It is a rebranding, or perhaps even unbranding, as International Technocratism is an assigned name;
the proponents of the ideas in question do not believe in accurately naming and identifying it, and often aggressively react to having names assigned to it by other ideological movements.
What is it really? International Socialism 2.0 - some lessons learned edition.
Those who adhere to it hold certain core values about humanity and the world that they believe are derived from scientific and historical observation and seek to govern the world according to those values because they believe it is the best thing for themselves and humanity.
Why does it sound curiously similar to the general idea behind scientific socialism?
War and Genocide are the Greatest Evils
That one is one of those infamous "public opinions". It is addressed to the social groups most willing to support this ideology - useful idiots orphaned by the fall of International Socialism 1.0, and the people which were educated by the likes of them who took positions in media and education. Feel good pacifism (when it comes to the "wrong" kind of governments) of course was notoriously combined with total disregard for military operations done by the "right" kind of governments. That is what explains the curiously shifting levels of outrage over sometimes the same US wars depending on who controls the government, combined with very limited outrage, if not excusing of outright war crimes by the "right" kinds of factions.
What's the private opinion of InTec? War is expensive and unpredictable, and as such should be done for no other reasons than interests of "InTec", and not as a first measure either.
When it comes to "selling" such wars to the public of useful idiots, copious amounts of "Non-Harm Principle" based argumentation shall be used, see: Hillary Clinton's pro-Libya intervention media campaign with its "Responsibility to Protect", and later, less successful argumentation for Syria intervention.
Blank Slate Status of Humanity
Clear case of International Socialism 1.0's elementary beliefs in there. If it wasn't believed to be true, the internationalist idealism of this ideology would be inherently flawed - if people are different, then obviously there is no one, correct set of scientific socialist plans that will work equally well for everyone.
Radical Individualism
Half accurate. Its a case of "out with the old, in with the new". International Socialism 2.0 wants to replace old identities with new, just like 1.0 didm and as such, the old ones need to be done away with, and its hard to do, as 1.0's experiences show. InTec does not shy away from making up whole new standards, and tolerating their enforcement by screaming mobs. But for those to be relevant, old standards need to go, or else they are going to gridlock each other.

Again half accurate. InTec has a whole set of "approved" exceptions to hedonism. Like "racial justice", nevermind the elephant in the room, InTec approved green ideology. Nevermind the next point:

The Non-Harm Principle
Yeah, it is very loose and adjustable principle, with the definition of "harm" to be manipulated in every case as seen proper by:
Experts Over All
Also known as the new, semi-formal party leadership. Of course the party likes having competent people as its executives, and learning from the past faults and experiences of CCP, it does offer the highly competent corporate leaders a seat at the table, if they are willing to be cooperative that is. After all, its not like competent managers of large systems grow on trees, got to take what you can recruit, like them or not. Even the CCP is favoring corporatist style economic governance, as opposed to the plain centralized economy so stereotypical of International Socialism 1.0. Other than that, the rule of experts is the new "divine right of kings", a claim of legitimacy by the ruling power - claiming itself legitimate on account of its expertise (again, why does it sound a lot like... China, and not even its modern incarnation, but previous ones, who held their administrative state in great respect?) The public is supposed to believe that everyone InTec supports is an expert, and all experts support InTec - reality be damned of course. That is how aggressively political far left talking points and people most famous for pushing them can easily become InTec approved "experts", while some credentialed experts (like several Nobel prize winners) can be discredited by them at a whim for the mere act of disagreeing, even on matters directly related to their expertise.

Humans Are Hierarchical
Another case of "out with the old, in with our new and correct alternative, that means us at the top, and those we approve of in the middle".
Radical Agnosticism
A great case of learning history's lessons. State enforced atheism was always more of a burden than a boon to International Socialism 1.0. In some scenarios it could outright control and subvert a religion, but on the global scale, well, which religion, sect, church to aim for? Meanwhile leaving religion alone is also not an option with how ambitious International Socialism is in remaking societies. So the best one could come up with is optimized to western society's circumstances version of the strategy used by "competing" experts from the CCP. Less aggressively enforced for pragmatic reasons, but the general idea is the same - religions that do not get in the way of the party and cooperate in everything it needs them to cooperate are tolerated, those who do get suppressed.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
Yeah, this is completely wrong. The ideological operating system of the modern elite is 'whatever maintains and ideally increased our wealth and power'. Everything they're doing is fundamentally to stockpile authority and resources for themselves so that in a couple decades when the inevitable resource wars kick off, they'll be in a winning position.

Resilient Accelerationism from over on nationstates is a much more plausible look at what a future history textbook might have to say about them.

Fact: It'd require five earths worth of resources for everyone to have a first world quality of life.
Fact: Technologically advancing automation is continually decreasing the number of people actually required for civilization to function and meaning that a small elite percentage of the population could rule over the rest, so long as they'd automated the labor force and their own defenses against the have-nots.

The elites don't care about stopping oppression and genocide and war unless there's money involved. Saudi Arabia can be as oppressive as it likes, not their problem, so long as the saudi royalty keep selling oil in american dollars, but Gaddafi tries to start a rival currency backed on a hard value, suddenly, there's a urgent need to invade his country 'to help the population', which ends up making things worse for the population by turning their country into a failed state with slave markets.

They don't care about 'stopping hate' unless they can use it as a justification for giving themselves authority to censor. People who supported the middle eastern forever war are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, far more than any ideologue kooks on the internet And yet, they still have media "platforms." Nobody is threatening to deplatform them or take pro-war/neocon sites offline, even though those ideologies are responsible for mass death on a scale the internet peanut gallery couldn't hope to match. Or professional bankers, they've done orders of magnitude more damage to the economy than a bunch of shitposters singing sea shanties about chicken fingers could ever dream of, but nobody with the power to actually do so is calling for their persecution for financial crimes and banning them from banking.
 

prinCZess

Warrior, Writer, Performer, Perv
War and Genocide are the Greatest Evils
The immediate counterexamples which come to mind are the UN and broad international lack of animated response to certain genocides while heavier response to other ones. Ignoring the elephent-in-room of the 'People's Republic of China' and the Uighurs (which can be explained under your proposed setup by the greater harm war with the communist-bandits on the mainland would unleash on the world), Myanmar's genocide against Rohinga doesn't get the same portrayal or treatment as ISIS' campaign against Yazidis...And there's trend of African genocides inviting little reaction even as 'International Technocracism' could leverage a lot of power to stop such genocides at little apparent cost or risk of greater harm occurring (at least, arguably, since prolonged occupation and guerilla-fighting ala Iraq and Afghanistan could result in more harm...But the technocrats typically wouldn't make that argument).

So it would seem there'd be another factor at play? An element of hostility to opposing ideologies that 'tips' the calculus perhaps, even? You could point to international intervention in Bosnia as hostility to one form of nationalistic impetus in favor of another but that sidelined the opposition to religious affairs. But then intervention against ISIS was hostility to religion...even as in the accompanying Syrian civil war you see intervention in favor of certain nationalistic impetus and against another, broader one (and against Russian influence).

Which, jumbled together...Seems like it's notable and some kind of pattern...Perhaps even 'International Technocracism' actively NOT perceiving how closely related nationalism and religion are or can be in states that don't have the same agnostic impulse within them? That would go a ways towards explaining the apparent hypocrisy, and the lack of a very identifiable religious or nationalistc 'bad guy' in many of the intertribal ethnic conflicts in Africa might explain Intec's reluctance to intervene there (and even then, you get some agitation against splinter ISIS groups or people like Joseph Kony who run the Christian angle).

I dunnow. Purely spitballing here and playing with the idea as I write.

The Non-Harm Principle
You note how this is broadly interpreted so it interferes in ways with 'hedonism' and 'Radical Individualism'. I'd just add that in the manner it's presented by those who'd probably fall under this 'InTec' ideology, it often interferes with the 'Blank Slate' idea as well. Harm is held to carry on through generations, and while there's usually a handwaved 'cultural' or societal explanation for it, people either unfamiliar with the ins-and-outs of those arguments (or who 'let the mask slip', depending on how charitable you are being) can often mimic arguments of racial or biological determination of things like the most storied of early-20th progressive intellectuals that hyped-up eugenics.
 
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Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Well, this is an interesting topic.

I think the InTec label and breakdown are...not completely inaccurate, but that as was pointed out in this post:
Yeah, this is completely wrong. The ideological operating system of the modern elite is 'whatever maintains and ideally increased our wealth and power'. Everything they're doing is fundamentally to stockpile authority and resources for themselves so that in a couple decades when the inevitable resource wars kick off, they'll be in a winning position.

Resilient Accelerationism from over on nationstates is a much more plausible look at what a future history textbook might have to say about them.

Fact: It'd require five earths worth of resources for everyone to have a first world quality of life.
Fact: Technologically advancing automation is continually decreasing the number of people actually required for civilization to function and meaning that a small elite percentage of the population could rule over the rest, so long as they'd automated the labor force and their own defenses against the have-nots.

The elites don't care about stopping oppression and genocide and war unless there's money involved. Saudi Arabia can be as oppressive as it likes, not their problem, so long as the saudi royalty keep selling oil in american dollars, but Gaddafi tries to start a rival currency backed on a hard value, suddenly, there's a urgent need to invade his country 'to help the population', which ends up making things worse for the population by turning their country into a failed state with slave markets.

They don't care about 'stopping hate' unless they can use it as a justification for giving themselves authority to censor. People who supported the middle eastern forever war are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, far more than any ideologue kooks on the internet And yet, they still have media "platforms." Nobody is threatening to deplatform them or take pro-war/neocon sites offline, even though those ideologies are responsible for mass death on a scale the internet peanut gallery couldn't hope to match. Or professional bankers, they've done orders of magnitude more damage to the economy than a bunch of shitposters singing sea shanties about chicken fingers could ever dream of, but nobody with the power to actually do so is calling for their persecution for financial crimes and banning them from banking.
...'InTec' goal are more about the elite gathering power and material at any cost ahead of likely resource wars than anything else, because the believe the environmental situation is more dire than many on the Right are even willing to think about seriously.

The fact is the Right often worries more about thier soul's status in the afterlife than the practical realities of the material world, and have been losing the culture war because of this. They ignore environmental issues, or label them as 'watermelon' issues, and have let the Left drive the conversation on that for a long time.

The fact is resources on this planet are finite, and entropy gives no fucks about your politics or religions.

The InTec's believe a lot of the environmental data the Right often either ignores or tries to pretend isn't real. Thus, thier desire to consolidate power and material before the resource wars kick off, and why they are fine trying to shrink the human population by a lot of methods over the years.

It's tempting to try and build a ideology like 'InTec' to understand the situations we find ourselves in, but it's also pretty much a self-indulgent philosophical exercise that tries to make things more complicated than they are.

If you want to fight the 'InTec' groups effectively, start focusing on environmental issues, on how data can be bad or overblown, how we have solutions for environmental and social issues that don't require a subtle genophage/population reduction/elites controlling things. If conservatives can take control of the environmental arena, they could break down a lot of the fears driving the people who support InTecs.

Quoting scripture or US Constitutional law/concepts won't work, trying to 'start the fight back locally' won't work because conservatives are shit at long term planning compared to the Dems/InTec's, and refusing to change or evolve tactics will doom conservatives to effectively becoming the modern Whigs, at best.
 

Marduk

Well-known member
Moderator
Staff Member
Well, this is an interesting topic.

I think the InTec label and breakdown are...not completely inaccurate, but that as was pointed out in this post:
...'InTec' goal are more about the elite gathering power and material at any cost ahead of likely resource wars than anything else, because the believe the environmental situation is more dire than many on the Right are even willing to think about seriously.

The fact is the Right often worries more about thier soul's status in the afterlife than the practical realities of the material world, and have been losing the culture war because of this. They ignore environmental issues, or label them as 'watermelon' issues, and have let the Left drive the conversation on that for a long time.
Not all right wingers are any more religious than you are, and most of those do share the view of "watermelon issues", because that's what they are. After all these issues rarely interact with religion, they tend to be more of economic, technological and national security issues. If you look at these issues from these perspectives, at least 90% of them are indeed more or less ideologically guided watermelon issues, or some other leftist, international or corporate scheme for political or economic benefit of someone else. And those someone elses tend to not be the right's friends, clients or sponsors, so why the hell support their schemes.
The fact is resources on this planet are finite, and entropy gives no fucks about your politics or religions.
Lets say you are right, in a way you are, more or less, and as such lets treat this with total seriousness as a national security issue - after all, strategic resources always were, and always will be. If you angle these issues like that, you get most of the right, from hardline nationalists to neocons, listening with great focus and piercing attention that will make all sorts of internationalists, globalist idealists and third world warlords feel a shiver of fear.
What do you want the right to do about it that it isn't doing now?
Which resources, when will they run out, how do you know they will, will it happen in foreseeable future (its pure theorizing if later because that means unforeseeable future) what to do to secure their supply or alternatives to them.

In another way, you are wrong. Atoms are atoms. Nearly all of these resources are just that. They get moved around, extracted from deposits, made into goods, then left somewhere with the trash. Only few cases have atoms split, fused, annihilated, or fired off into space. But vast majority of resources don't "run out". They are still on Earth. Somewhere. Probably the trash heap. If for some reason it gets very scarce in the future, its going to be worth pilfering that heap for this resource, just like many sci-fi settings have scrap mining or concepts like that. Many others are just a matter of rearranging chemical bonds on industrial scale and providing the energy, raw resources and tools for it.

What can you do now? Perpetuate the green idealist way of dealing with it and save the currently cheap on international markets resources... so that China can buy more of them cheaply before the depletion of current, cheap deposits kicks the prices up, while undercutting the competition on material prices? That is not a smart way of dealing with it, everyone can see that.


The InTec's believe a lot of the environmental data the Right often either ignores or tries to pretend isn't real. Thus, thier desire to consolidate power and material before the resource wars kick off, and why they are fine trying to shrink the human population by a lot of methods over the years.
If that's what they are are doing, then they are doing a terrible job. They whinge about it a lot, that's sure, but when it comes to consolidating this stuff, China is making much clearer grabs for it, and has increasingly more to show for it.


If conservatives can take control of the environmental arena, they could break down a lot of the fears driving the people who support InTecs.
That sounds less like environmental problems in themselves, but arena of public perception of environmental problems... And that indeed has been a problem of media propagandizing for the watermelons, and the right wingers complaining about watermelons will be the first to complain about the media doing that.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Not all right wingers are any more religious than you are, and most of those do share the view of "watermelon issues", because that's what they are. After all these issues rarely interact with religion, they tend to be more of economic, technological and national security issues. If you look at these issues from these perspectives, at least 90% of them are indeed more or less ideologically guided watermelon issues, or some other leftist, international or corporate scheme for political or economic benefit of someone else. And those someone elses tend to not be the right's friends, clients or sponsors, so why the hell support their schemes.
...maybe because not all 'watermelon issues' are illegit.

Look up ocean acidification, or bioaccumulation of pharma products in the biosphere.

Alex Jones was right when he said chems in the water were turning frogs homosexual.

Or look up how the ocean is going silent in many areas, because of how much sealife has been lost.

Biome issues affect the whole world, and often don't care about borders; the Left understands this.
Lets say you are right, in a way you are, more or less, and as such lets treat this with total seriousness as a national security issue - after all, strategic resources always were, and always will be. If you angle these issues like that, you get most of the right, from hardline nationalists to neocons, listening with great focus and piercing attention that will make all sorts of internationalists, globalist idealists and third world warlords feel a shiver of fear.
What do you want the right to do about it that it isn't doing now?
Which resources, when will they run out, how do you know they will, will it happen in foreseeable future (its pure theorizing if later because that means unforeseeable future) what to do to secure their supply or alternatives to them.
The things I would point to and suggest to address these things are things the Left does not like, but which I think the Right could easily champion if they wanted to.

1) Nuclear Power; this is a big one and is being done in some quarters.
2) Off-planet mining; you yourself seem to have assumed we should only think about resources on our on planet. This is the same mistake the Left makes.
3) National security should include bio-security, and not just against virus like the Wu Flu.
4) Giving exact estimates on when things may 'run out' is not possible, but we can look at known reserves of materials, look at usage rates locally/globally, and make some rough guesses.
5) Endorse recycling subsidies; this can help mend the Right's PR image in many ways.

In another way, you are wrong. Atoms are atoms. Nearly all of these resources are just that. They get moved around, extracted from deposits, made into goods, then left somewhere with the trash. Only few cases have atoms split, fused, annihilated, or fired off into space. But vast majority of resources don't "run out". They are still on Earth. Somewhere. Probably the trash heap. If for some reason it gets very scarce in the future, its going to be worth pilfering that heap for this resource, just like many sci-fi settings have scrap mining or concepts like that. Many others are just a matter of rearranging chemical bonds on industrial scale and providing the energy, raw resources and tools for it.

What can you do now? Perpetuate the green idealist way of dealing with it and save the currently cheap on international markets resources... so that China can buy more of them cheaply before the depletion of current, cheap deposits kicks the prices up, while undercutting the competition on material prices? That is not a smart way of dealing with it, everyone can see that.
You are still stuck with the idea that I'm aiming for 'green idealist' ways because I, unlike many on the Right, actually care to deal with environmental issues as legit when they are such.

You are right about scrap/garbage mining though; it would help reduce some of the issues.

I will fight bad data, dumb plans, and woke 'intersectional' theories regarding the environment. Shit, just liking nuke power makes me a huge outcast in environmental circles.

But that does not mean I am going to act like environmental issues do not exist, or that I am going to let the Right off the hook for they way many of them have handled these issues.
If that's what they are are doing, then they are doing a terrible job. They whinge about it a lot, that's sure, but when it comes to consolidating this stuff, China is making much clearer grabs for it, and has increasingly more to show for it.
This is about so much more than completion with China, and you need to realize that.
That sounds less like environmental problems in themselves, but arena of public perception of environmental problems... And that indeed has been a problem of media propagandizing for the watermelons, and the right wingers complaining about watermelons will be the first to complain about the media doing that.
The media didn't need to do much, actually; the Right did a lot to itself in this arena.

Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton were not something the Left created for propaganda purposes. 'Free market' worship and basically ignoring all environmental issues as legit for years before Bush did not help either.

The Right hasn't been on the 'right' side of environmental issues since the Roosevelt's, though Trump tried to change that, and I am fighting an uphill battle to try to get people on the Right to take this shit seriously, instead of just whine about 'watermelons'.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
What do you want the right to do about it that it isn't doing now?
Throw funding at asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing to produce powersats for the energy crisis, solar mirrors for the global warming crisis, o'neill cylinder lebensraum for the not enough room crisis. Do so in quantities at least rivaling the military/industry complex. Make doing so a security issue.

Currently, the mainstream 'right' is composed of sociopathic libertarians whose idea of a 'solution' is private bunkers for them to wait out the various disasters they caused. Meanwhile the mainstream 'left' solution is merely propaganda claiming 'sure you won't have as high a quality of life, but That's A Good Thing™', which is equally useless.

We have finite resources, not enough for everyone to have a first-world quality of life. Therefore we have the following options:

• Keep ignoring the problem and kicking the can down the road until the resources completely run out and everything collapses. Popular among baby boomer plutocrats who know they'll be dead of old age by the time the consequences hit.
• Get used to a lower quality of life/live in the pod, eat the bugs, etc.
• Use force to monopolize the resources for our use (IE, what the elite are trying to do, that's why they're so concerned with acquiring increased authority).
• Have fewer people so there are enough resources to go around. Disadvantages should be obvious.
• Get more resources.
 

Marduk

Well-known member
Moderator
Staff Member
...maybe because not all 'watermelon issues' are illegit.

Look up ocean acidification, or bioaccumulation of pharma products in the biosphere.

Alex Jones was right when he said chems in the water were turning frogs homosexual.

Or look up how the ocean is going silent in many areas, because of how much sealife has been lost.

Biome issues affect the whole world, and often don't care about borders; the Left understands this.
That's 4 issues you have listed. All of them are pretty much global, and only 2 being meaningfully a problem both affecting and sourced in US.
If, for example, China and its client states decide to overfish their EEZ waters and decide to tell off anyone who objects, what can US do besides begging, pleading or threatening, probably with no effect besides making a show of impotence, or paying hostile nations to not harm themselves?
Unlike the left, the right are not a big fans of "global village" style politics and don't believe in the power of strongly worded letters from the UN.
1) Nuclear Power; this is a big one and is being done in some quarters.
What can the right do there that it is not doing already? Does the right propagandize against nuclear power like the watermelons? Probably not. Its mostly money problems and watermelons with their friendly media, lawyer funds and propaganda.
2) Off-planet mining; you yourself seem to have assumed we should only think about resources on our on planet. This is the same mistake the Left makes.
What is there to do in that regard besides developing general aerospace tech? As things stand now, its future business.
3) National security should include bio-security, and not just against virus like the Wu Flu.
Not very glamorous area. Look at world map of BSL-4 labs. What do you want done that isn't?
4) Giving exact estimates on when things may 'run out' is not possible, but we can look at known reserves of materials, look at usage rates locally/globally, and make some rough guesses.
My point exactly. Rough guesses about what will happen in few decades (or centuries) are not something that anyone smart would ever throw massive resources behind.
5) Endorse recycling subsidies; this can help mend the Right's PR image in many ways.
Are you familiar with this kind of angles on recycling?

www.medium.com/climate-conscious/here-are-5-reasons-explaining-why-recycling-is-a-scam-6cf7d943fe4
Recycling of the kind that needs subsidies, with current technology, is an economic Sisyphean work. The right would be idiotic to fully endorse it "for PR reasons". The right would be correct to campaign to reveal what scam this is and denounce the watermelons as the scammers in chief, but that runs into the usual mainstream media problems. Ideologically motivated idiocy leads to nothing good, and anyone who cares for it will believe the watermelons in the rest of their claims anyway.
You are still stuck with the idea that I'm aiming for 'green idealist' ways because I, unlike many on the Right, actually care to deal with environmental issues as legit when they are such.
There is no place for "caring" in this matter. This is a matter for hard science and calculation.
Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton were not something the Left created for propaganda purposes. 'Free market' worship and basically ignoring all environmental issues as legit for years before Bush did not help either.
What's that about besides general left wing memes hating on defense industry?
Throw funding at asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing to produce powersats for the energy crisis, solar mirrors for the global warming crisis, o'neill cylinder lebensraum for the not enough room crisis. Do so in quantities at least rivaling the military/industry complex. Make doing so a security issue.
So, combination of science fiction technology solutions that few countries that are not USA may need in a century or two, long before USA needs them, if ever, and ignoring the problem of dimnishing returns in research investment. Real world science does not work like computer games, you don't spend X sum of money to get Y research points, so that you can dump a lot of funding into research, generate a lot of research points, and zip past the research tree 3 times faster than the other guy. A lot of things just have their schedules of testing, their required base technologies, or just plainly are not nearly feasible on economic grounds with current technology and trying to make them work is 99.9% certain to result in very expensive and spectacular failure. Only time can fix that, if ever.
Military/industry complex deals with pushing the base support technologies of that already anyway because everyone wants to hold the ultimate high ground. Before countries can afford space military bases for thousands, there is no point in planning space lebensraum for millions, its pure speculation at this point.
We have finite resources, not enough for everyone to have a first-world quality of life.
Well here's your problem. There isn't much you can do about *everyone*, other than nuclear apocalypse that is. Worry about yourself, perhaps allies, but no more. Whatever you do, will have only limited to no effect on what everyone else chooses to do, including consequences of their choices, and you can trust most of everyone else to not worry about you back either.
 

Battlegrinder

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Throw funding at asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing to produce powersats for the energy crisis, solar mirrors for the global warming crisis, o'neill cylinder lebensraum for the not enough room crisis. Do so in quantities at least rivaling the military/industry complex. Make doing so a security issue.

Currently, the mainstream 'right' is composed of sociopathic libertarians whose idea of a 'solution' is private bunkers for them to wait out the various disasters they caused. Meanwhile the mainstream 'left' solution is merely propaganda claiming 'sure you won't have as high a quality of life, but That's A Good Thing™', which is equally useless.

I have several issues with this. First off, there isn't a "not enough room crisis", there is plenty of habitable space left. at New York city population density, you could fit everyone on earth into a city the size of Texas, or 0.13% of the earth's surface. That you think otherwise, that there is in fact such a brewing crisis that our only choice is space, least we subject mankind to the apparently unlivable, horrific fate of "living in new york"....well, that has me questioning the rest of your logic as well. I'm fairly certain that orbital power satellites and energy transfer from space to surface is a horrifically inefficient and wasteful system, for example.

As for the "mainstream" solutions, I'm not at all convinced by your claims or sources. "Some dude claims that a cabal of evil bankers are totally planning to bunker down in apoc bunkers to ride out The Event", or your interpretation of it (for one thing, the alleged evil rich dudes are bankers, and I don't generally seem them accused of ruining the world. Oil companies, yes. Bankers, no), and even so 5 bankers are not "the mainstream right". Presuming this alleged incident even happened, which I do not believe it did.
The left's response is slightly more on point, but only just, and frankly they seem more interested in using the "crisis" as an excuse to push forward on other bits of their agenda (Eg, stuff like the green new deal) rather than actually solve the underlying issue.


We have finite resources, not enough for everyone to have a first-world quality of life. Therefore we have the following options:

• Keep ignoring the problem and kicking the can down the road until the resources completely run out and everything collapses. Popular among baby boomer plutocrats who know they'll be dead of old age by the time the consequences hit.
• Get used to a lower quality of life/live in the pod, eat the bugs, etc.
• Use force to monopolize the resources for our use (IE, what the elite are trying to do, that's why they're so concerned with acquiring increased authority).
• Have fewer people so there are enough resources to go around. Disadvantages should be obvious.
• Get more resources.

One these points.
1. By the time "everything runs out and everything collapses", boomer plutocrats will not be dead of old age. Boomer pluocrats great grandkids will be dead of old age.
2. I think that, and point 3, are less about solving the "crisis" and more about just monopolizing power for their own sake, with any long term benefits as incidentals.
4. Not exactly. There's no particular reason that having more people running around is, in and of itself, a net benifit.
5. Yes, that's an option, but so is "use the resource we have more efficiently".

Space exploration and the like are useful and benificial, yes. But it's not a choice between "go to space" and "die/cyberpunk distopia".
 

Bassoe

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4. Not exactly. There's no particular reason that having more people running around is, in and of itself, a net benefit.
True, 'fewer total people but better quality of life' is preferable to the alternative, but that's not the problem. Our current numbers are already seriously over the 'sustainable population' limit given our current available resources and expenditure of resources.
 

Battlegrinder

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True, 'fewer total people but better quality of life' is preferable to the alternative, but that's not the problem. Our current numbers are already seriously over the 'sustainable population' limit given our current available resources and expenditure of resources.

Yes, but first world birth rates are also trending down, so it seems as though that's possibly a self-solving issue as living standards rise and technology improves.
 

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