When you meet a schizophrenic on the side of the street, who starts arguing to you that the sun is following him around, you generally don’t bother arguing against him. There’s just no point.
I kind of feel like that about the climate change “skeptics” too. I include among those ranks essentially all idiots, including the idiots who think we can just adapt to the changes. We know that every previous major episode of warming induced by the Milankovitch cycles triggered various positive feedbacks, that were responsible for most of the warming. In our case fossil fuels caused the initial warming, but it will continue with these positive feedback loops that are now starting to reveal themselves.
The planet can adjust to global warming, sure. It preserves life, by covering its surface in trees that absorb excess moisture, create shade for animals, fixate the soils, sequester carbon and reduce temperatures beneath their canopy, through evapotranspiration. But since our civilization depends on a handful of cereal grains fed to humans and to the animals we eat, rather than on mature trees in biodiverse forests, that means one of us has to go.
When people don’t want to see this, they’re just like Vatican officials who refused to look into the telescope at the moons around Jupiter. There’s no point in constantly arguing with them. The thing with wisdom, is that most of it is found in hell. And so when you wander into hell, when you look at the disgusting demons torturing people there, you gain insight into the human condition.
But when you’re standing there, as you try to untie a prisoner knee deep in blood in a demon’s lair and shout to someone above you “hey look at this!” “this is missing from your model of reality!” you find that people don’t want to hear it. “Nah uh-just have happy thoughts. Focus on the positive man. Your thoughts create reality, those Jews in Auschwitz should have tried manifesting a better reality.” or “Nah, I think Al Gore and the Rothschilds invented that, they want to deindustrialize our country. This is what Klaus Schwab wants us to believe, so we will eat the bugs, which he seeks to feed to us for no real reason whatsoever!”
This is essentially true for the e/acctards too. These are the most delusional human beings you will encounter. They imagine that developing superhuman level artificial intelligence will somehow solve our problems. This is insanity. To start with, you could not have true freedom, in a world that is being rearranged by a computer that is smarter than us human beings. It would subject us all to a kind of totalitarian technological determinism, where we are left making no meaningful choices of our own. It would be the end of human dignity.
Artists are already running into that problem. In a world where any moron can make an algorithm rearrange combinations of other people’s photographs and drawings, people who actually have the talent to use their own brain to produce new art, are left with lives stripped of meaning and dignity. There is exactly nobody out there whose life has been improved by the endless streams of junk now produced by these algorithms, which is just sophisticated plagiarism. But there are plenty, who had their purpose and calling taken away from them.
But more importantly, the e/acctards don’t want to recognize the limits to growth. They imagine there must be some sort of global conspiracy to suppress nuclear energy, rather than our society discovering the simple problem that safe reactors are expensive. If you have had seventy years to demonstrate your nuclear utopia, but nuclear capacity is being phased out around the world, the reality is that your fantasies are just indistinguishable from those of people peddling cars that run on water and cold fusion.
Any sort of AI system you create, would still have to obey the laws of physics. Those laws dictate that the most effective form of computing is through use of quantum effects. Our brains are capable of effectively using quantum effects, but efforts to develop quantum computers run into the problem of noise being introduced that makes the outcome unreliable.
You can’t just throw our neurons into a petri dish and build superhuman intelligence in that manner either. With enough neurons communicating, you’ll need blood vessels that supply them with oxygen and remove their waste. Those blood vessels will need some mechanism to pump blood around. The laws of physics are fine-tuned for biological intelligence. You can not just replace a human being with a computer, the self-driving car experiment that Mr. Musk has kept promising will be complete next year for over a decade is a good example. He got rid of radar from his cars, because “anything a human can do, a computer can do”. He was wrong.
There are other aspects where you can recognize the laws of physics are fine-tuned for biological intelligence too. DNA is capable of storing information at least eight orders of magnitude denser than our own best technologies. Your brain can store more memories than a Facebook data center. And your brain is able to use energy more efficiently. The most powerful supercomputers consume a million times more energy to perform the same tasks as a human brain.
So the jig was up, before it started. You can rearrange art and images made by human beings with an algorithm. You could even try spreading brain-damaging viruses to make people dumber, in hopes of making computers appear smarter than them. But you can not change the simple fact that the laws of physics favor biological intelligence over the inventions of ugly men with bald heads.
And for the love of God, do me a favor and try not to be the sort of moron who thinks these people are your friends. Elon Musk is not your friend. Marc Andreessen is not your friend. It doesn’t matter if they quote the FBI crime statistics or not. These people became so rich, by exploiting low status white males, peddling pump and dump cryptocurrencies and assorted scams. These people are evil, but because you people have low intellectual self-confidence, you think they are “on your side”.
My suggestion to all the effective accelerationists, would be to sign up for another booster shot.
Five shots will do the trick bro.
“There is exactly nobody out there whose life has been improved by the endless streams of junk now produced by these algorithms, which is just sophisticated plagiarism. But there are plenty, who had their purpose and calling taken away from them.”
incorrect. the shitbags flooding the internet with this garbage for quick profits–how i make $3gazillion a month selling ai-generated art on etsy!–probably had their lives improved for now. i’d like to think they feel bad about it, but i can’t give them that much credit.
Granted.
In that sense, there were people who had their lives improved by the invention of land mines too.
AI porn is the best for coooming however. I can edge for hours watching AI femboys.
There is still something about climate change science that I have yet to fully understand.
Under the IPCC’s “business as usual” RCP 8.5 scenario, we are looking at approximately 4°C of warming by the end of this century, which would be sufficient to trigger a mass extinction event similar (or even potentially worse) in magnitude to the End-Permian mass extinction, which killed off around 95% of species. In such a scenario, only animals such as fast-breeding hibernating small underground rodents in Siberia would be able to survive. It would then take tens of millions of years to recover all of the lost biodiversity and ecosystems. Let’s call this “scenario A”.
But there’s an even worse theoretical possibility where ALL LIFE on earth becomes extinct, as our planet starts to resemble that of Venus. James Hansen discusses this potential scenario in chapter 11 of ‘Storms Of My Grandchildren’, where the oceans are literally boiling and all of the land (even Antarctica) is barren desert. Let’s call this “scenario B”.
So, I still don’t understand how the planet could hypothetically go from scenario A to scenario B.
These scenarios are not really worth worrying about. They require us to continue using more and more fossil fuels, not peaking before 2100. Under those scenarios you could eventually render life on Earth extinct.
But that’s just not going to happen. We’re already in the process of societal collapse. Within the next few years fossil fuel use will peak and begin its irreversible decline, simply because we won’t be able to keep the machine going.
https://mailchi.mp/caa/uh-oh-now-what-are-we-acquiring-the-data-to-understand-the-situation
Quote “Elon Musk is not your friend.”
But also not my enemy. He smoke joints in front of a camera. Which other superrich do this?
I’m way more disappointed from our old heroes, the film actors and music bands. They sang and told us so much stories about being a revoluzzer, but they all failed to say something in the covid crisis. Not one word of them. And they are all millionaires, would have been easy for them to withstand.
But they got their punishment, many of them are now disabled or dead. And they will never again be credible.
Van Morrison wrote three anti-lockdown songs: “Born To Be Free”, “As I Walked Out” and “No More Lockdown”. He also collaborated with Eric Clapton on another anti-lockdown song called “Stand And Deliver”. Unfortunately Eric Clapton was badly injured by the Oxford-AstraZeneca chimpanzee gene therapy.
There was also (admittedly not on the same level as the two musical giants mentioned above) Nicki Minaj who turned out to have more common sense than Boris Johnson and Chris Whitty combined:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C7Jww3qp4Io&pp=ygUZTmlja2kgTWluYWogYm9yaXMgam9obnNvbg%3D%3D
I knew that thing with Eric Clapton, with his lame “enough is enough song”, where he only made hints but no clear words. There was also a dystopian video clip from Roger Waters or Pink Floyd, also only with hints and no clear words.
You all rememeber this scene from a concert where the singer said to the crowd:
Pfizer.
Yeaaah.
Moderna.
Yeaaah.
Astra-Zeneca.
Yeaaah.
Johnson and Johnson
Yeea.
This broke immidiately my music fan heart. They all printed “Entrance only if vaccinated” on their concert tickets, they were all co-offenders in this crime.
The thing with Van Morrison was new for me, I noticed only tennis star Novak Djokovik as only Revoluzzer. Sorry, Van Morrison is not enough to rescue the ruined reputation of the music business.
Yeah Djokovic is a legend, 24 Grand Slams now, more than Federer, Nadal and Williams. Those smug Australians who were ecstatic when he was deported from Australia during the 2022 Australian Open and who were yelling at him to “get vaccinated” at this year’s tournament won’t be so smug when the more virulent variants unfortunately start spreading down under. The majority of Australians will sadly be sitting ducks because they were vaccinated prior to exposure. Their #ZeroCovid experiment will backfire catastrophically.
The jurno who initiated the scandal with Jokovic’s waver for AusOpen died few months ago (he was 45-50 years). Of course he died suddenly and unexpectedly. Jokovic sent condolences to the family
Quote: “When you meet a schizophrenic on the side of the street, who starts arguing to you that the sun is following him around, you generally don’t bother arguing against him.”
The problem is more that the monophrenes naturally can’t change their viewpoint, while this is very easy for schizophrenes and multiphrenes.
The AI worship is very perverse, but functionally it’s no different from any other machine that makes human labor obsolete. I think it also removes human dignity to ride around in metal boxes and then dying because one person in another metal box wasn’t paying attention for half a minute (Not even mentioning the animals that die from cars) Where’s the dignity in enslaving yourself to a factory or getting gunned down by a machine gun? Where’s the dignity in sitting in-front of a screen and putting numbers into a spreadsheet until you die? The machines have dominated the majority of humanity for a long time now. What the artists are facing now is the struggle people have faced for millennia. Scientific progress has always been about making humanity obsolete.
The technocrats are worshiping the most ridiculous idol that has ever existed. Yes, the computer is actually a person, you’re a child. A cockroach is more of a person than chat GPT 6000 or whatever; it’s obvious if you put literally any thought into the nature of consciousness or even just biological life (which these creatures haven’t) I hate them all. If these subhumans want to jerk themselves off thinking about robots blowing out their bussies, I say they deserve to experience as much. An automaton raping humanity, forever. It’s what they deserve for destroying our world and being retarded automatons themselves.
Economic Growth will solve global warming according to this guy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N8-gxBZaLXQ&pp=ygUYSm9oYW4gbm9yYmVyZyBkZWFkIHdyb25n
These types are so annoying and they never stops nor change their minds.
economists lost me when i was channel surfing in a motel and happened on a cspan channel broadcasting some econ talk. the guy said, with a straight face, something like “conservative estimates put our [descendants’, can’t remember how many generations, maybe 5?] income at $1M/day, so they will have the means to deal with ecological issues caused by maximizing economic growth today. therefore it’s immoral to reduce economic growth for ecological reasons.” WTF??!?
later, i worked for a year at one of the transnational organizations that figure prominently in LSWMs’ fever dreams about reptilian overlords. that experience killed any illusions i had about economists knowing what they are talking about.
Great post. I like this realistic techno-pessimism, if I can call it that. It’s not Ludditism, it’s just pointing out the ridiculousness of the childish logic of the techno-utopians.
One of my favorite quotes from your post here is “If you have had seventy years to demonstrate your nuclear utopia, but nuclear capacity is being phased out around the world, the reality is that your fantasies are just indistinguishable from those of people peddling cars that run on water and cold fusion.” Love it.
This makes me realize that I’d love to hear more from you on this subject. What’s the deal w/ nuclear power? The previously-contrarian but now emerging “take” among a certain group of techno-utopians is that nuclear energy is great because of no emissions, and that it was previously unfairly demonized by incoherent liberals whose commitment to low emissions was trumped by anti-nuclear sentiment related to toxic waste worries and military associations. And that seems interesting/plausible.
But your point here seems even more plausible–that it’s not cost effective and never was in spite of 70 years spent trying (and failing) to prove itself. It seems like it’s now being put forward by techno-utopians out of desperation. They are starting to see that renewables alone can’t power modern soeiety, that fossil fuel costs and negative impacts are rising. In the absence of any new (palatable) solution, they take a new look at old tech and make big claims for it.
So my questions for you are:
1) How big an issue is the nuclear waste problem? Was that overstated before, or is it being understated now?
2) Are these new environmentalist promoters of nuclear onto anything? Is it true that it was unfairly demonized and can be PART of a solution, or is it more of a non-starter?
3) Can you say more about why it’s not a good solution or partial solution? Is it really too uneconomical? Or are there other problems that make it not a good solution?
I just instinctively like and believe your point. Humans are flawed, the world is full of tradeoffs, and it’s highly unlikely that a cheap and easy solution was right under our noses all along. But I’d love to know a bit more.
Charlie, read this excellent piece about the limits of nuclear energy and why the great expansion of the nuclear fleet politicians are talking about won’t be feasible.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/no-nuclear-energy-wont-save-us
There’s no talking to them. I have tried, and tried. . .
Even those who could and should know better.
Just. Don’t. Want. To. Know.
It’s a mystery.
And it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s not a choice they can make, or if perhaps they’re just wired for denial.
One of the more compelling theories I’ve heard as to why this could be the case is ‘death denial’.
People evolved death denial at the same time as sapience, otherwise after learning they were mortal, they would be too scared to leave the cave to feed themselves.
It’s a potential explanation as well as to why ‘intelligent’ creatures like us are ‘rare’ – you need to evolve two things at the same time, because either one would be maladaptive on its own.
Most of the time the denial is a handy feature when paired with sapience, but we’re well into territory that we haven’t evolved for now.
Some of us might have more tolerance for the knowledge that we’re mortal than others, or perhaps we are a little broken, but it lets us see some things a little more clearly.
Take yourself for example Rintrah, who unlike most is able to see that:
– the “vaccine/virus” is a grave danger
– resource depletion is a grave danger
– pollution and consequences of same are grave dangers.
Etc.
Why?
Because there’s something wrong with your death denial mechanism man!
You have a ‘defect’ that lets you see reality 😛
As for faith in progress, well, at this stage in history it’s obvious to everyone but those in the deepest denial that it’s nonsense.
But that won’t stop them.
They’re going to make themselves immortal don’t you know!
Any threat to that conviction cannot, quite literally, be countenanced.
Their exploitation and money making are merely ‘coincidental’ to their desire to deny their own mortality and live forever.
Why else do they need to make more money than a human could possibly use in one lifetime, if not to pile it up endlessly in the hope that they’ll eventually be able to buy immortality, and then live comfortably for eternity?
> Their exploitation and money making are merely ‘coincidental’ to their desire to deny their own mortality and live forever. Why else do they need to make more money than a human could possibly use in one lifetime, if not to pile it up endlessly in the hope that they’ll eventually be able to buy immortality, and then live comfortably for eternity?
(((Who))) nose?
More to your point: it might be interesting to ask if you yourself might like to have “immortality” and “live comfortably?”
After all, life is hard for all of us LSWMs. Some of us would prefer the sweet release of death, given our present circumstances.
But wouldn’t it be nice if we could live forever in a utopia?
That just might be possible if you were the Right Person in The Right Place at the Right Time.
So how can you really feel hatred in your heart towards “The Elect” who might have figured out a way to realize a true “Heaven On Earth?”
Oh, right. There’s that whole “having to kill billions of people on the planet and usher in a technocratic AI superintelligence” thing which is the price that must be paid.
In that case, you might find yourself wondering “WHAT ON FUCKING EARTH KIND OF HELL REALM ARE WE LVING IN WHERE INNOCENT HUMAN LIVES MUST BE SACRIFICED IN ORDER TO REALIZE THIS UTOPIA FOR ONLY A SELECT FEW???”
Or, you might find yourself wishing you could somehow join that high-status elite for the sake of yourself and your progeny.
In which case, it might be illuminating to consider how you treat animals and people you “look down on.”
“ask if you yourself might like to have “immortality” and “live comfortably?”
Well, we’re all human, so we’re all kind of stuck with the human condition, which generally includes not wanting to die and to be comfortable.
Naturally enough (and let’s be real, not many of us have the stones to go full Diogenes or barefoot desert father), this leads to making a deal with Satan to live here in Babylon. Some of us get more out of these deals than others, but if you make a deal with the Devil, then you must pay no matter what.
And pay we do.
That said, sometimes the Devil wants to add a new clause to the deal, but it’s too much. For example, some of us refused “vaccines” when they were touted as being risk free life savers, no doubt suspecting that the physical and/or spiritual price was too high.
Some of us would also refuse to be uploaded into a computer to live forever, no doubt suspecting that the price of eternal damnation in an electronic prison hellscape is too high.
Some of us might even refuse to jump on a bandwagon with people spouting utopian ‘plans for everyone’!
Why do some people refuse those things? Do they believe that going along with those things would get in the way of a different kind of eternal peace and life? Perhaps. Or maybe they just take one look at the stupid muppets spouting these things, and the deceptive and disastrous things that they do and say, and they just recoil from them in horror out of nothing but common sense 🙂
Whatever the case, on general principle, I’d agree that it’s a good idea to treat people (and animals) humanely and with decency and respect, and to feel free to re-appraise and/or break your deal if you feel it’s no longer in your interests or is otherwise necessary.
> People evolved death denial at the same time as sapience, otherwise after learning they were mortal, they would be too scared to leave the cave to feed themselves. Most of the time the denial is a handy feature when paired with sapience, but we’re well into territory that we haven’t evolved for now.
https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contrivance/dp/0143133144
If you haven’t read it, the top-rated review gives a good feel for the themes involved.
When I was a young man, I prayed to meet angels – I’d been inspired by a book that is largely lost in the mists of time in my memory now. I can’t remember the title, or the name of the author, or anything about it other than the concept that angels are real, and they can look like normal people.
Shortly after, I met two men in succession.
The first, told me that he believed there was no meaning to life at all. Life was aimless, so that was how he was living. Drifting aimlessly.
The second, was a full-Monty Christian dualist. For him, everything was either good or evil. From Satan, or from God.
Nowadays I wonder to myself: ¿Por qué no los dos?
Why not a variation that’s the worst of both worlds 😛
> Nowadays I wonder to myself: ¿Por qué no los dos?
Just as with your previous observation that the uncertainty inherent life is a necessary aspect of the functioning of the machine we call “life”
…as well as our previous interaction regarding the interminable debates surrounding the exact harms of the Covid vaccines…
It’s all a binary game.
In the case of the Ligotti book — he is a hard-nosed materialist. Yet even he, as a writer of cosmic horror, intuits there is something deeply unsettling about the human condition. He often invokes the philosopher Zapffe’s observation that the Irish Elk of old grew antlers so large (12 feet wide) that their heads were pinned to the ground and consequently went extinct. Zapffe analogizes to the evolution of human consciousness, implying that we as humans have evolved a “too aware” consciousness, and that we too, should go extinct.
Against this materialist conception of the universe are all the various mystical, esoteric, spiritual conceptions of human life that rest on the notion of consciousness being the primary axiom of existence. These schools of thought tend to have an optimistic bias — that we are here for a “reason” and that this “reason” is in some way for our benefit.
The third option which includes and subsumes this seeming contradiction are folks like myself and Tryptie who recognize both the horror and meaninglessness of this world, as well as its mystical and supernatural component.
This perspective opens up many new avenues of thought…
“So this is the way
The game is played.
You can leave now…
But I think you’ll stay.
I am I!”
https://youtu.be/IWrYXvdcj8c?si=q8N8PKy7-jbQlhYj
Yes, there does seem to be a ‘binary dynamo’ that impels the great wheel of history.
That certainly comports with my experience – meaninglessness vs meaning etc. and I’m sure neither of us are the first to think of that.
And now, seemingly, both at once 🙂
We seem to be kindred spirits.
One minor quibble: I’m not so sure the possibility of AI art is a bad thing. Zero HP Lovecraft makes a compelling point here:
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1754987855804252269?s=46
One of your best posts. Firing on all engines. For the LSWM reading this, just go to a conservation area, bring some nuts and seeds, and feed the last remaining wild animals. Contemplate on your how life has been a lie fed to you.
Believe in climate change or not, it is still to the benefit of everyone to slow down rampant consumerism and wastage in the richer world.
Other reasons are making it necessary anyway.
Rad, what do you have to say about reducing plastic use and wastage?
Life was going on quite well just a few decades ago without using and wasting billions of plastic water bottles every day.
Why doesn’t Greta encourage European governments to build drinking water fountains everywhere?
I sliced up a russet potato with a large yellow onion into my Teflon pan and then added Walmart olive oil, garlic oil, sprinkles of parmesan, and ground pepper. When it was pretty well cooked I added in slices of Safeway cheddar cheese and anchovies (I know, right?? But I like anchovies and oysters, surprisingly.) I was out of eggs.
It wasn’t bad; a pretty tasty meal for a LSWM. It’s a little difficult to control the temperature on a butane stove.
Paying a lot for nuclear safety makes sense if you believe fossil generation is otherwise safe. If you believe in strong form of AGW catastrophe, should just accept occasional ~100s or even ~1000 deaths scale nuclear accidents.
The problem is that these accidents also effectively make your soil useless. The way they kept the death toll limited in Belarus is by abandoning vast swathes of agricultural land.
I realize there’s no point arguing ‘climate change’ with someone who’s mind is made up. But you might want to rethink your assertion that the warming began with fossil fuels. Yeah, uh, when was that? Because I can point you in the direction of multiple mountaineering accounts dating to the 1880s where climbers note how much the glaciers had already receded. In northwestern North America. Maybe you should read up on the Little Ice Age and ponder what happens to ice cubes left out on the counter.
Quote Bob: “I realize there’s no point arguing ‘climate change’ with someone who’s mind is made up.”
Yeah, he’s gridlocked and with his technophobia he sounds more and more like an Amish. But he can’t go to them because they eat meat.
Marc Andreessen, the egghead you used as a thumbnail, also backs the retarded idea of building an entirely new city in a place with no water, roads or anything.
https://www.businessinsider.com/flannery-silicon-valley-billionaires-build-new-california-city-solano-county-2023-8?international=true&r=US&IR=T