'Climate Apartheid': UN Expert Says Human Rights May Not Survive (theguardian.com) 364
The world is increasingly at risk of "climate apartheid," where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said. From a report: Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law. Alston is critical of the "patently inadequate" steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are "entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat." His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: "Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval."
The report also condemns Donald Trump for "actively silencing" climate science, and criticises the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for promising to open up the Amazon rainforest to mining. But Alston said there were also some positive developments, including legal cases against states and fossil fuel companies, the activism of Greta Thunberg and the worldwide school strikes, and Extinction Rebellion.
The report also condemns Donald Trump for "actively silencing" climate science, and criticises the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for promising to open up the Amazon rainforest to mining. But Alston said there were also some positive developments, including legal cases against states and fossil fuel companies, the activism of Greta Thunberg and the worldwide school strikes, and Extinction Rebellion.
They're terraforming (Score:2)
Politically Motivated FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to be taken seriously you really need to drop the emotionally charged rhetoric, it has the opposite effect that you think it does.
As soon as you say somthing is "the holocaust" or "apartheid" people just switch off.
And when you sum up with "bleep bloop orange man bad", nobody will listen to you next time you talk either.
You wont save the world via virtue signalling.
Wait a second... (Score:2)
But this is not it (Score:3)
Quick, give the UN more power! (Score:2)
No time for reason, lest everybody die.
Now then, will the UN do something about actual Palestinian apartheid? Or is that just harder to understand than climatology?
"Disasterbation" (Score:5, Funny)
My compliments to whichever Slashdoter came up with this tag...
feeding frenzy (Score:5, Insightful)
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False dichotomy. Climate change is real, but people promoting utopian tax plans or planetary-scale de-industrialization are not serious about solving it.
Acknowledge problem. Find solutions. You need both.
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Is this the same vast right wing crowd who dominated the discussion this morning in favor of Iran?
Thers are tons of trolls, true astroturfing ones sponsored by various states, as well as simple angry isult response trolls designed to dissuade thoughtful participation.
Slashdot is not keeping up. Further, state trolling probably dominates the mod system as well.
Gaming online discussion thanks to anonymity has reached the state of the tail wagging the dog.
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Has /. always been this right leaning?
Belief in actual science as opposed to fear mongering is neither left nor right leaning. Slashdot has always had an above average number of readers able to think for themselves and study a topic in greater depth than most of the populace. That is what is happening here.
Wasn't the leftists (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you'll find it was right wingers supported by fossil fuel companies that politicised this inherently scientific issue.
Also, if you have any alternative to government solving this issue, I'm all ears. As far as I can tell, no government anywhere is moving even half as fast as they need to and a lot are going backwards.
By the way, it's too late for nuclear energy to "save" us. It always was, because there was never a safe variant to use.
Selection (Score:2)
If this idea gets out, you might suddenly find, oh, for example, cities having distinct 'rich' and 'poor' neighbourhoods.
Voluntary or less voluntary self segregation has existed for thousands of years.
Maybe Donald is secretly a climate realist (Score:2)
not how it works (Score:2)
But that's not how it works: magnitude of response is ideally keyed on the opportunity cost of failing to intervene with an effective intervention—where the proposed intervention does invoke fictitious levels of political ingenuity and human collective will.
The alarmists always treat human collective will
A UN tax on wealth (Score:2)
How much redistribution of wealth under the cover of "climate" will make the UN happy?
Nation getting too cold? Thats climate change. Get some more UN grant money for that.
Nation too hot? Thats global warming. Apply for a huge UN grant.
Nation not getting colder/hotter? Get free UN money to get "ready" for climate change.
Free UN wealth for everyone in poor nations.
Wealth nations have to pay more and more to stay in the "UN".
Time for some wea
If he wants people to give up their rights... (Score:2)
Then he can be the first volunteer.
Then everyone else at the UN.
Then the government leaders who backed this sort of stupid-think.
democracy has failed us (Score:2)
The real reason isn't climate change, that is just the occasion on which things will break. If it weren't for climate change, then inequality or toxic products or something else would do it.
The real problem is that our political system has been captured and perverted as a safety net for incompetent and corrupt political parties whose purpose has long since not been to actually promote any policy and represent those who support it. Instead, parties today will say whatever they think gets them the most votes,
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Oh, the world owes us a living. ...
Oh, the world owes us a living.
You shouldn't soil your sunday pants
like those other foolish ants.
Come on, lets play and sing and dance.
Oh, the world owes us a living.
Re:Dude's watched too many movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are adaptable, but the rate at which societies adapt is finite. Adapting to a +4C global temperature increase is a very different proposition if it takes a hundred years, a thousand years, or ten thousand years.
While there is a fairness aspect to how the pain of that adaptation is shared, it's not at all like apartheid. The cost will be apportioned by a combination of luck (where you happen to be living) and the mobility of your livelihood. People whose living is made almost entirely from financial assets will experience no sacrifice whatsoever; by rebalancing their portfolios they'll make money creating the problem and then make money selling things to people who have to adapt to the problem.
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The cost will be apportioned by a combination of luck (where you happen to be living)
In apartheid, it was apportioned by luck, too (to whom you happened to have been born).
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Humans are adaptable, but the rate at which societies adapt is finite. Adapting to a +4C global temperature increase is a very different proposition if it takes a hundred years, a thousand years, or ten thousand years.
Actually, if the adaption is a matter of survival, societies will adapt very quickly.
Re: Dude's watched too many movies (Score:2)
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Replace government with corporation and you're there.
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Look, the world has been warm before
True, but it's not just the absolute temperature, but also the rate of temperature change. In the past, temperature changes happened over thousands of years. A rise of 4C over 100 years would be catastrophic to ecosystems, but over 10000 years, they could adapt. At that timescale, even forests could move along with shifting climate-zones.
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The level of ignorance and sheer non-understanding you display is staggering. Your mindset is pretty much why this problem is developing into an existential threat: The last few decades, where we reliably _knew_ this was coming, the human race did basically nothing.
Re: Dude's watched too many movies (Score:2)
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A possibility of what? That someone would rather bash your head in than die peacefully? You don't need a probability calculation to find out whether that will happen, do you?
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So instead of listening to people who spent their life studying what they are talking about we should do ... what instead?
What do you do for a living? I'm a security consultant. I analyze people's IT security setup, then offer a risk analysis and tell them how they could improve their security. What do you think would be the sensible thing to do for them? Do what I tell them to do? Or instead stick their fingers into their ears and go "lalalalala, why should I do that, nobody ever hacked me!"
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Idiots gonna idiot I suppose.
Re:I don't see it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't see it because you're not thinking about it. Ponder how much energy is required to move the entire lower atmosphere of a planet the size of Earth 1 degree celsius.
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For bonus points, use standardized cow farts as units in your final answer.
They're cow burps, not cow farts.
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You don't see it because you're not thinking about it. Ponder how much energy is required to move the entire lower atmosphere of a planet the size of Earth 1 degree celsius.
That flaming ball of gas in the sky is pretty impressive hey.
Re: I don't see it. (Score:2)
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Recently I heard someone say it's only a few miles away and shouldn't be that big, maybe a few miles in diameter, so that should be far from impossible.
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Thermodynamics. Welcome to the real universe, the one where increasing the thermodynamic equalibrium of a system means more heat.
Oh, and grow up.
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I'd urge the IPCC reports, which go into great detail as to the evidence.
But like it or not, thermodynamics is king. If you feel Earth's lower atmosphere and oceans are exempt from thermodynamics, present YOUR evidence. There's a nobel prize in there for you if you demonstrate there's a region of the observable universe where increasing thermal equilibrium doesn't lead to increased heating. I know from observable evidence that when I put a pot of water on the stove and turn the element on, low and behold, t
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The temperatures haven't been games, and thermodynamics ain't theory
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If you don't understand how mean temperatures are calculated and used, please don't criticize it. This is physically painful to me.
In a nutshell, you can safely throw away the leading and trailing end of normalized curves that factor in rolling averages over years, which is necessary when you're doing temperatures because yes, there are outliers, years where it's incredibly warm or incredibly cold for that single year. Doing a rolling average means that you smooth out those outliers and hence get a better c
Re:I don't see it. (Score:5, Informative)
And CO2 has increased by 1/100 of one percent
CO2 has gone from 280 ppm to 400 ppm in last 200 years, that's an increase of more than 40%.
Misleading Statistics (Score:2)
If you have 1ppm of something in 1 cubic mile of something else and you increase it to 2 PPM, that's a 50% increase, yet still insignificant relative to the overall volume.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
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Yes, but that isn't the rate we are adding today. We are dramatically cleaner today than we've been for a good chunk of the last 200 years. The earth can naturally sequester and handle a certain growth rate of CO2. What we need to focus on is removing the built up concentration more so than reducing our output. Reducing out output doesn't hurt but it is actually more expensive and has great opposition.
Stop telling people to make great standard of living sacrifices and start focusing on public effort and fun
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Yes, but that isn't the rate we are adding today. We are dramatically cleaner today than we've been for a good chunk of the last 200 years.
Unfortunately, the population has increased even more dramatically over the last 200 years.
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No, sadly they are more dependent on technology use. In other words, if you think China and India waking up was bad, wait 'til Africa decides it's time to join the 21st century.
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Ever build a big snowball by forming a small one and rolling it down a huge moderately steep snow covered hill? Now imagine it is a mountain. That is sort of what is at play here and the bigger it gets the more it takes to slow or reverse it. That much is definitely true, we know that much from the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in soil that get released as average temperatures warm.
This guy is also right in that the reason to ignore most of the climate change measures is that they wouldn't have any so
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Europe is about to be hit with a heatwave pushing some areas up to 40C. Every year we hear more and more of "most extreme since records began" (including extremes in winter due to various knock on effects) and I'm honestly surprised that anyone with eyes isn't alarmed at how much all of this is accelerating. Attempts to prevent mass panic appear to be remarkably successful, to the point that I wonder if when everything's on fire around us everyone is still going to be in this state of denial.
Re:The only solution is to breed less (Score:4, Informative)
The countries with the highest population growths are also the ones polluting and contributing the most to this.
No... In terms of per-capita pollution, Oman is the only country which has both a high rate of pollution and a high rate of population growth. In terms of total pollution by tonnage, China and the United States are still at the top by a large margin and both of them have fairly low rates of population growth. India and Indonesia also have fairly low rates of population growth.
China and India both have high populations, arguably their population growth rates should be negative. That should really be the case globally, but it's not reasonable to single out China and India: they have taken steps to curtail their population growth, and they're doing fairly well with that compared to most other countries.
Re:The only solution is to breed less (Score:5, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Socialism is what subsidizes breeding. (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm curious how you decided that state universities had anything to do with the Constitution. Since the Constitution is about the FEDERAL government.
Yeppers, if any State wants to have free schooling up to age 95, there's nothing in the Constitution that could be used to stop them....
Nor is there anything in the Constitution that could be used to mandate schooling in any way, shape, or form.
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I'm curious how you decided that state universities had anything to do with the Constitution. Since the Constitution is about the FEDERAL government.
Lots of "small government" types want ALL government to be drowned in the bathtub, not just the feds.
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Or it's a sign that the previous poster made an "absurd absolute" argument and the speaker is being sarcastic by responding with another equally ridiculous argument.
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This is the "absurd absolute" argument, when the speaker advocates a ridiculous solution that is supported by literally nobody. It's a sign that the previous poster has made an excellent point that the absurd absolute poster cannot answer.
Or he's just chuckling...I did.
Re:Socialism is what subsidizes breeding. (Score:4, Informative)
Also, under purer forms of capitalism, the well-being of a person is sufficiently devalued that breeding increases due to the demand for child labor and increased child mortality. See: histories of rural families as well as family size and child mortality during the industrial revolution.
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Capitalism with no checks placed upon it inevitably results in some people having power over others, who can coerce their capital away from them without due compensation. A trivial example is a rich landowner who buys up all property surrounding a poorer family. They then build a fence, entirely on their own property, encircling the family. Then they tell the family "if you want access through my property you'll have to pay me X or work in my fields until it's paid off". The price is whatever the rich lando
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And capitalism is tyranny of the minority. Whoever has the money to pay a private army can do whatever they want to those poor smucks who don't have enough capital, including taking everything they own after writing laws to make it legal.
Like so many things it's counter intuitive (Score:3, Insightful)
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It is also wrong, on so many levels. Oh and thanks for equating Socialism with "bloody dictators".
It makes it easy for everyone else to ignore everything else you opine.
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Wasn't it capitalism that saw rich Europeans steal all the property in the new world, including yours?
Shit. by Columbus's 3rd voyage,. he was chopping the arms of the natives for not being productive enough as he needed to raise capital (gold) to pay off those who financed him.
The Congo was an example of a capitalist country, and cutting of the arms of those who weren't productive enough was also a solution to maximize their investment in capital.
Then there was slavery, the American capitalists took it to t
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The economic system that is indifferent to ecological destruction and human suffering and will crash without infinite growth in a finite world (including growth of the human population) is the only solution? LOLWUT?
low-quality single-mothers
With a healthy serving of just-world fallacy and eugenics on the side, delicious!
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No, please give me an example of how you could use "stronger property rights" to fight pollution, especially air pollution such as GHG release.
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Take a look at a slightly easier case to quantify. Under capitalism, you might buy a riverside property with rights to river water. If someone upstream of you pollutes the water, you can sue them for damages and restoration of water quality.
With modern technology, the same principle could be applied to air rights, although payment for damages (such as China's dirty air circulating to California) would probably have to be handled by government.
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You've made a good start but I haven't learned anything new yet or seen any detailed plans, so explain how property owners can use these strong property rights to stop polluters. I imagine some collective bargaining will be required to allow a majority of property owners to impose their will on a minority of wealthy polluters. How will investigations and inspections of suspected polluters be carried out and paid for?
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"You get less of what you tax, and you get more of what you subsidize;"
Exactly, which is why we should tax the unproductive who subsist off their wealthy and subsidize the income generating working class.
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Factory owners don't invent the machines, build them, decide to build them, or even decide to build the factories they are in. People in the working class do all the above. All the owners do is contribute money and extract interest (aka private tax) to hinder their productivity and when it comes to the wealthy they rarely make those decisions themselves either but pay others to do the work for them.
Re:Socialism is what subsidizes breeding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course if you ask an actual *socialist*, he'll say that under capitalism workers pay for themselves and for the wealthy classes.
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Under unbridled capitalism, we revert back to a slave/master relationship between the poor and the rich, with eventually rebellions that end in blo
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If you build your society around theft, then that's what you'll get: Theft.
Democracy without principles (such as voluntary interaction) is just a Tyranny of the Majority. It doesn't matter how many millions of people vote to cut off your foreskin; they shouldn't be allowed to do it without your consent—you either own something or you don't, and no democratic vote should change that fact.
By the way, all of your examples of successful "democratic" socialism involve ethnostates, with a European (especially Anglo-Saxon) heritage or heavy influence (including Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). Go figure.
And capitalism isn't about theft? Even Trumpkins call Wall Street, the temple of capitalism, a den of thieves. And do have the courage to post that tripe under your real nick you spineless git.
Re: Taxation is theft. Your examples are ethnostat (Score:2)
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False. Under capitalism, you are not allowed to have a legally enforced perpetual monopoly. You can have a temporary legally enforced monopoly based on trading the intellectual value of your novelty for a time-limited protection. If you have a great product at a great price, you can have a monopoly based on individual choice, but you can't have the government enforce the monopoly.
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We're talking capitalism, not free market. Who ever has the most capital can use it to steal what they can. Actually once we get rid of laws and such that slow down capitalism, is it theft?
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So just like pure capitalism, though it did range from whipping to death to cutting of limbs for those that weren't productive.
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From this article, we can conclude that the real problem is that doom didn't come to everyone on the island equally. Please amend your tale of tree chopping to reflect that equality between different people and populations is the most important thing.
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I see, when a civilization collapses, every last person who's still alive leaves the area. Do they do this voluntarily or by force?
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I suggest edible landscaping as well. Image if all the trees and bush on city streets produced food that could be taken for free by anyone or maybe was left for those who are impoverished. If there were flower pots and windows pots that had attractive and edible berries and vegetables for anyone in need? I'm not saying it would save the world, but it might just help a little.
Re:More Uselessness from the Useless Nations (Score:5, Insightful)
And I see a lot of people in active denial, imagining that thermodynamics takes leave when it's inconvenient for their way of life, or where helping their fellow human beings itself proves inconvenient. It's sociopathy masked in contrarianism. If you can convince yourself that it isn't physics, but some vast scheme to screw you over, then allowing other people to suffer, even die, and force our descendants to have to deal with our inaction.
This whole issue allows people like you to take part in an exercise in intellectual masturbation. You get to feel special because you imagine somehow that you have some line on the truth that no one else does. It's the arrogance and stupidity of the conspiracy theory, all to the service of temporary enrichment. It is, as these things always are, a combination of extraordinary idiocy and selfishness.
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The sad truth is my personal choices and actions probably have a greater affect on climate change than anything the Useless Nations has done to date.
Re:More Uselessness from the Useless Nations (Score:4, Insightful)
Under the auspices of the UN, a considerable body of research has been organized. Whatever you think of the UN, it is the perfect venue for gathering researchers and policy makers together. So no, the UN has done more than any individual could ever do.
The problem is that the UN is not an actual government, and therefore the best it can ever do is bring the horse to water.
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By your logic, the laws of physics are anti-white.
The Universe doesn't care about you. It doesn't give a fuck about your skin color, your political ideology, or which brand of brown skinned person you blame for your problems. Thermodynamics and the properties of CO2 means the lower atmosphere and oceans will inevitably receive more solar radiation.
Whatever your views, they are absolutely irrelevant. They mean nothing. King Canute at least had the wits to know he couldn't stop the tide. Perhaps you should ga
Re: More Uselessness from the Useless Nations (Score:2)
Calling complex process of global climate change "thermodynamics" is technically correct, with propaganda implications.
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they want to pay more to live where it's cold
Yeah. It's called air conditioning. How about just not living in a desert if you don't like the heat. If California wants to 'go green', unplug the AC units.
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This summary rolls in....compassion for the poor,
You reject compassion for the poor? What is wrong with you?
Re:We have rights to food, water, and housing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is it that the same people who don't believe in human rights to "water, food and housing" also believe that YouTube owes them a platform for neo-Nazi gamer videos and fake news?
Because they're orthogonal? Human rights inherently can't be in conflict, so a human right to food implies someone else doesn't have property rights over that food. A human right to health care means someone else doesn't have liberty rights to not provide that health care (read: slavery). This is the positive/negative right distinction.
Platform access, if it is a right, is a civil right only -- not a human right, or even a constitutional right.
This is Poli Sci 101 stuff.
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That only applies when there is scarcity. That's Economics 101 stuff.
Hint: it's not.
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Whether I have a little food or a lot, whether food is scarce or common, does not determine whether I have rights to it. If I grew it, or traded for it, it's mine by right. If I have a lot when food is scarce, I can use my rightfully acquired food to trade for other goods or services I want. Since I value friendship, I will make such trades in a fair and possibly generous manner.
If I am short on food, I hope to live in a capitalist society where others would be willing to trade food for something else. I wo
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Look in the mirror.
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I gave you my answer. You wanted a name and I name you. Did you not get that? Was I too subtle for you?
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That doesn't make it right.
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Your cheap shitpost gives me the opportunity to point out the important fact that the problem isn't wealth itself, but greed and aristocracy. Wealth is the lifeblood for those ideas, and on rare and unfortunate occasions, those ideas lead to wealth.
There are rich people who aren't part of the problem, who keep their wealth from feeding these ideas, such as Anand Giridharadas and Abigail Disney.
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We're also violent, rapacious, murderous, and tribalistic by nature, but we've managed to keep a lid on those urges through civilization, why should greed be any different? What suffering and death has been caused by suppressing - not changing - these urges? See also: appeal to nature fallacy.
Sadly the extreme psychopathic greed our society suffers with now isn't entirely natural, such levels of greed would've got a primitive hunter/gatherer or even an early farmer exiled from their tribe, easy prey for the
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Worst case scenario AC the wealthy nations become poor. The poor nations stay poor.
AC "mass famine, lack of potable water, civil unrest, insane expenditures" are all part of living in poor nations.
The money given to "upgrade" water pipes, educate police, stop corruption never reaches the engineers/police/gov/mil in that poor nation.
Let rich nations enjoy the wealth they had they had the skill to create.
Poor nations wil