27 April 2022

That the good do nothing

That bit about the triumph of evil is a cognitive trap.

Good and evil, as ideas, are a cognitive trap.

Trying to be good will fail.  Always, at all times, in all things.

Morals can function on very small scales; sometimes individuals, maybe immediate family groups, just possibly some kind of voluntary association with few people.  Otherwise, the belief that one must be moral produces post-facto rationalizations.  It doesn't produce uniform or cohesive conduct and it does produce a lot of murder as people make attempts to make other people be moral out of fear.  (Because if you're not moral, anything bad can happen to you and be correct.  It's a mutation of a social control mechanism.)

What you're seeing is the pursuit of a simple material optimization versus a bunch of people saying "but it's complicated!". Of course "it's complicated!" is losing; it is complicated, but that doesn't matter today.  Complicated matters tomorrow.  The simple material optimization matters right now.

This is the great and intractable problem of money; money abstracts interaction.  (Not production, not wealth; money has value because it's exchanged.  So you get a proxy for agency and thus security.)  Once you have this abstraction, "I want all the money" is simple, material — it's not money if you can't count it — and uniformly destructive because things are complicated and tomorrow comes.  More and more agency is required to maintain the illusion of security, until you've got the present, where it's explicitly policy to cause extinction in preference to acknowledging any idea of in-principle limits on the amount of money one person can have.

An effective response cannot arise from "it's complicated!"; maniacal single-mindedness in pursuit of money is unable to care that it's complicated.

It needs a simple material rule.

There are a bunch; life expectancy, agency, security (of person, food, place...), all function as positive rules.  Bounds-driven instead of norms-driven society.  The necessary negative rule is that if you try to get rich, the civil power will prevent you.  (Because you can have security by collective means, or you can have the possibility of security by wealth; you can't have both.  Observation makes this painfully obvious.)

This goes with a supremacy of the civil power approach in politics; your belief doesn't matter, you must argue for a material outcome.

Trying to be good will fail.  Always, at all times, in all things.  Pick a measurable material outcome; that has the possibility of success.

24 April 2022

And the shape of the world is changed

We are going to stop using fossil carbon.  (Maybe intentionally, maybe as a consequence of collapse, but one way or another, fossil carbon extraction is going to stop.)  Presently, fossil carbon is the foundation of all power; the global hegemon is the Oil Empire and the global economy is comprehensively dependent on fossil carbon inputs for everything.

Thwaites Glacier is going; the sea shall rise.  Rebuilding every container port in a decade is not an option.

It's generally acknowledged that we're going to overshoot 1.5 C average warming; we are very likely now inescapably going to overshoot 2.5 C of average warming which means field agriculture stops working. (You have to know roughly when and roughly how much about the rain to farm.)

If COVID-19 has a one percent chance to kill you and you catch it every year, we may observe that 0.99 to the 50th is 0.605.  That's three hundred and ninety five chances in a thousand that you'll be dead by fifty.  This is an indefensibly optimistic number; subsequent cases are worse, it looks a lot like the two constants of COVID-19 infection are brain shrinkage and cellular ageing, and you can catch it again in twenty days.  Plus that one percent is only the prompt lethality from the acute disease.  The expectation that this is the whole lethality is not well founded.  (Plus the charming possibility that the 1980s theoretical prediction about a sufficiently infectious disease that does not confer sterilizing immunity on the survivors leading to chaotic modes of spread is correct.  That would pretty much guarantee a steady supply of new variants at unpredictable times.)

The status quo ante pestis is gone; the Peace of Dives is gone, too, to whatever extent those were different things.

Politics is locked in a sort of "preservation of the existing order versus overt and immediate genocidal white supremacy"; insecurity management by "I have it good, keep it good" versus insecurity management by  "it's getting bad, kill every identifiable outgroup so I have relatively more".

Neither can possibly work; the good will not persist, on the one hand, and war is waste and desolation and loot does not last, on the other.  Some politics of resiliency — this is code for banning great personal wealth or anything else that functions as a "I'm rich, I'm fine" approach to insecurity management — would be nice, but of course it has to win the fight with the incumbent power structure, and there's no sign of anyone in politics with "maybe we could all live in the future?" views having escaped the desolation of morals to start talking about material outcomes.

Me, I'm going to take advantage of a startling warm day to go see if I can look at some birds.  (Our agricultural practices and nocturnal over-lighting having not yet rendered all of them extinct.)