Jordan Peterson Generates Millions of YouTube Hits for Climate Crisis Deniers
Muehe @ Muehe @lemmy.ml Posts 9Comments 243Joined 2 yr. ago
Muehe @ Muehe @lemmy.ml
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How would Lanchester's law apply? I admittedly never heard of it before, but I don't see equivalents for army size and damage ratio here...
Anyway, the answer to your question is probably just population growth. We needed a critical mass of "useless" people not preoccupied with subsistence for science-y stuff to gain enough traction and spread.
There were democracies before industrialisation by the way, e.g. in ancient Greece.
Okay, thoughtful argument but still…
Well thanks, however this compliment seems a bit like a poisoned chalice considering the rest of your replies.
Who gets to decide when to use violence then? For what reason? When is it okay and when is it not? What is the line?
We have been through this, the line is that it has to be a last resort. FYI, this concept is literally enshrined in our constitution:
Article 20
[...]
(4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.
You say it’s okay when people have opinions that you disagree with. Granted, those options are really very shitty opinions, but they’re that: opinions. This person you’ll be punching hasn’t hit you, hasn’t attacked you. He said or displayed things you don’t like.
No, I say it's okay when people have opinions that are a clear and present danger to a tolerant society. Again, we have been over this, it's know as the paradox of tolerance. What these people do is attack civil society by abusing its rules, and you seem to propose we let them without keeping violence as a last resort, except for immediate self-defence of your person. Saying for example that all Jews or Muslims should be killed or that refugees deserve no asylum is technically an opinion, but it is also an attack on human rights and civil society. And you should stand up to that, if you deem it necessary with violence.
And yes, answering intolerance with intolerance seems like circular logic, because it is. That's why it's called a paradox. But IMHO you should consider that we are talking about something where our language, also a system of circular logic by the way, breaks down.
So where is the line? You can punch him if he displays a swastika?
Well this one is easy in Germany at least, because it's literally illegal. I'll report them to police and they will get up to three years in prison for it pursuant to § 86a of the criminal code (display of anti-constitutional symbols).
How about me displayjng a swastika, you punch me and oops, it’s a religious symbol from India…
Those are usually turned the other way and not displayed at a 45° angle. Nazi iconography is in most cases clearly distinguishable from Hindu and Shinto iconography, and if it's not you can ask first. I will say however that when you claim to display an Asian religious symbol while being white, having a shaved head, wearing a bomber jacket and jump boots, I'm not inclined to believe you.
Doesn't matter for my locale though, people here usually chose to just not display it outside of temples to avoid this obvious misunderstanding.
Who gets to decide who to punch? WHO?
The one doing the punching. If it was justified will be decided by the courts, as you said. And yeah, unless you have a very good reason you will probably be convicted of assault, since the state claims a monopoly on violence. However some would argue, including me, that sometimes the only way to defend the existence of civil society lies outside its rules. It's called civil disobedience.
Nazi’s exist as much as roman legionaries exist. The Roman Empire is gone and so is Nazi Germany. That somebody would love to be one is a different thing. I’d love to be a samurai but those too no longer exists. Slapping a label on it doesn’t change that. I can dress up and play one but that’s not the same. There are neo-Nazi’s out there for sure, wannabees. There are no Nazi’s.
Yeah ok, first off the time frame and circumstances are a little different here. The Roman Empire and the samurai caste have been gone a bit longer than Nazi Germany. Every single member of those organisations is long dead. This is not the case for Nazis, and they had ample opportunity to pass on their ideology to later generations, which they did. There aren't, to my knowledge, any large groups of people self-identifying as Roman legionaries or samurai, except for LARPing purposes. There are however a lot of them seriously self-identifying as Nazis. I don't see what you or I would gain by denying that they are.
Secondly, to classify them as neo-Nazis instead of actual Nazis, and maintaining that there is a relevant difference in that regarding their level of intolerance towards other groups is bonkers. In context, i.e. whether they present a clear and present danger to civil society, it's a distinction without a difference. And if you want to hold on to this ridiculous premise this entire discussion is kind of pointless.
You seem to be of the persuasion that liberal democracies aren't endangered by fascism or other forms of totalitarianism anymore, I fail to see why that would be the case. On the contrary, history teaches us that this is a constant danger. There is a reason the principle of defensive democracy was made into law by a lot of nations after the second world war.
Stop with the dumb slogans. Everybody knows that Nazi’s were bad and “punch a Nazi” only leads to assholes calling others they don’t like Nazi’s.
It also leads to Nazis being punched. I don't think we will reach agreement on this, so thanks for the - mostly - respectful discussion. At the risk of being accused of using dumb slogans again, I'll leave you with a quote from a German pastor who was put into the concentration camps for his believes:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller
Nur zur Info, du kannst auf Lemmy Bilder direkt einbinden mit folgender Markdown-Syntax:
Man beachte das ! vorne vor dem [](), sonst wird es nur als Link mit Text statt Adresse angezeigt.
Recognising sarcasm depends a lot on tone of voice in spoken conversations, thus a tradition in internet discussions has developed to put a /s behind the statement that is intended to be sarcasm. The slash is in imitation of closing HTML tags, i.e. it is to be read as "end of sarcasm". Putting it behind instead of before the sarcasm grants the added benefit of many people still falling for it at first.
I agree that attempts at enlightenment should always be the default option. Not least because of the passage I purposely quoted along, that separating first and second degree of intolerance is an intractable problem.
I get your point that being called a Nazi while you are not isn't fun. This rhetorical move is known as a "Totschlagargument" in Germany by the way (literally translated: manslaughter argument, i.e. it kills discussion). Maybe don't throw out the baby with the bathwater though, and keep your only way of effectively resisting against them, abhorrent though it may be.
Case in point...
the vast majority of them are just followers going with shit they got from Facebook, some personal bad experiences, shit they learned from their parents, etc. It’s not easy to talk with them, make them understand that hey have warped view of the world
These sentences are literally applicable to historical Nazis, just replace Facebook with pamphlets and radio. And this is the sense in which I mean that their ideology is far from dead, there are plenty of people that espouse fascism in general or Nazism (as in national socialism) specifically today. They all have their subjective reasons and none of them matter in the end, because their conclusion is fascism, an inherently inhumane ideology.
make them understand that hey have warped view of the world, but if at the end of the conversation they see even a tiny about of light, it was worth it.
So what if they don't, if they remain blind in the face of the light that is humanism? If they remain intolerant even after being confronted with the error of their ways? I'd argue, and you would seem to agree, that violence is the only real option left in that case, because the other option is surrendering society to them and their misguided ideology. These people can vote, Hitler was elected by people such as this. Some of them are in positions of power right now.
So to extend your conclusion: Violence is bad, but it is also necessary sometimes. As a last resort, yes, but still.
Veering off to what you said earlier and expanded on in a sibling comment:
Nazi’s don’t exist. They haven’t existed for about 80 years now. What do exist are people with varying degrees of being a racist cunt.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Denazification in Germany stopped pretty much with the upper echelons being brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials. Both German states had a metric shit-ton of actual Nazi war criminals in their administration, because they needed administrators due to the cold war shifting geopolitical priorities, and they had to use the ones available. There was a criminal trial against a former concentration camp secretary happening last year (because there is no statute of limitations on genocide, she was 17 at the time apparently), although given her age and health it might indeed have been the last one of those. But over the decades the career of quite a lot of high-ranking German officials stumbled upon their past as Nazis, on either side of the iron curtain. They weren't magically exterminated on victory day, quite the opposite actually, many found their way into the power structures of the victors, sometimes poisoning them from within.
And there are literal Nazis in the current generations too, here in Germany as well as abroad. People who espouse Mein Kampf and all that kind of shit. Who say Hitler was right. Granted, the general movement mostly mutated into a white supremacy idea rather than the "Arian" (i.e. German) people being the master race, so maybe not all of them are Nazis in the strictest sense of the word, "Nazi Classic" if you will; But the ideology is there, it's fascist, and many of them worship actual fucking Nazis and follow their ideals.
And while all of those people already deserve to be fucking punched just by virtue of being whatever somewhat coherent definition of Nazi you may apply, for many of them it's also the only recourse you have, because words will simply not convince them.
So in conclusion "punch a Nazi" is a valid statement of political discourse in my opinion, as long as it uses an appropriate definition of what a Nazi is (i.e. a fascist, racist, national socialist, etc. pp.). Notwithstanding the fact that you were apparently mislabelled as one in some online discussion.
This person was just as intolerant as a Nazi themselves and didn’t even realize it.
No they weren't, this is what Popper defines as intolerance of the second degree. Taken from the German wiki page because this aspect is better explained there than in the English version (translated with deepl):
In intolerant people, Popper distinguished two categories:
- intolerance of the first degree: intolerant of a person's customs because they are foreign.
- intolerance of the second degree: intolerant of a person's customs because they are intolerant and dangerous.
Popper therefore rejected universal tolerance:
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unrestricted tolerance leads with necessity to the disappearance of tolerance. For if we extend unrestricted tolerance even to the intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant social order against the onslaughts of intolerance, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them."
However, since we as human beings are not capable of knowing the true motives of our counterparts, a fundamental, unsolvable problem now arises: It is difficult for an outsider to distinguish whether a person who expresses intolerance belongs to the first or second degree.
In other words the intolerance against Nazis is justified because they are the ones being intolerant in the first place, and sometimes this is the only way to fight them on that.
I'll grant that this is disregarding your premise of Nazis not existing, but to be quite honest if I may, that's a pretty stupid premise. The Nazis did exist, they were the poster child for intolerance of the first degree, and their ideology is far from being as dead as they are.
Assuming you are talking about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, there's also CollaboraOffice (although this may be counted as another half one, since it's a online fork of LO) and OnlyOffice in the FOSS sphere. Probably more out there I'm not aware off.
Or, and hear me out on this, you create an unholy mixture of MD/HTML/Latex documents in a plaintext editor and then you use the Pandoc CLI to make it into a PDF/DOCX/website/whatever.
Well the problem with defeatism is that it's a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you believe everything is lost you will not try to enact change.
Now I acknowledged already that it might well be too late, but I also maintain that there isn't enough certainty in that prediction to base your actions around it.
So the reason to not be defeatist is twofold. There might be a chance to reverse or at least lessen the impact of climate change, and by being defeatist you are robbing yourself and future generations off that chance.
Well not with that attitude. Defeatisms doesn't become you my friend.
I meant we can only hope we haven't crossed a tipping point yet without knowing. Carbon cycles are thousands of years long. We might have already killed our species.
But I agree, we should do what we can to fight climate change.
You people think it will be a night and day collapse? Get real.
You know that's the thing, nobody really knows. It's all predictions based on necessarily flawed models. And they range from relatively mild changes until the turn of the century on the one hand, over methane released from thawing permafrost leading to a steep acceleration of warming in the middle, to having crossed an irreversible tipping point decades ago that will lead to an algae bloom in the oceans which will render the atmosphere unbreathable on the other hand. We can only hope it's on the former end of the spectrum, but I wouldn't bet on it personally.
All true, and maybe I have been understating my negative estimation of the whole ordeal a bit, but we are like five levels of escalation deep at this point, and all I'm saying is it's getting harder and harder to gain a nuanced understanding of the situation. Which is important.
Anyway, given the totality of what I have seen so far LTT has either always been or just devolved into an entirely toxic work environment. Their reaction so far doesn't inspire any confidence in the slightest. On the contrary, it reinforces all of the accusations.
This isn’t “something”. This is a “we’re sorry (not really)” video. If you watch it in the context of “I have no favorites in this game” and look it it pretty objectively, it feels like just a bait to try to stop the bleeding.
Yeah that's what I meant with "Southpark-y 'I'm sorry' vibes". For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
P.S.: And that's... "something".
A week? To refine all the processes in that size of a company?
No, a week without videos to get started with reviewing processes. I agree with you in general though, if it stops there it's nothing more than PR. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but the allegations by that former employee are certainly a dampener on an optimistic view of the situation.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY
There are some steps mentioned that they will take, like not making any videos for a week and reviewing internal processes. Getting some Southpark-y "I'm sorry" vibes there, at least it's something though.
But the video (at least its creation if not its release) seems to predate the Twitter/X thread of a former LTT employee alleging sexual harassment and other toxic workplace behaviour: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741
So not very surprisingly most Youtube comments I've seen refer to that bomb dropping.
Assuming you mean this thread, I find it hard to see how this could be a bug. It doesn't happen with curl, unless you make curl pretend to be a browser. And only happens on certain target websites known to be despised by Musk. I mean it's still possible that it's a bug, but not very likely given these circumstances.
The possibility of a tipping point cascade is generally without dispute as far as I know. It is likely based on what we do understand, however predicting how likely exactly, the severity of consequences, and the interaction with positive and negative feedback loops from other climate systems is not well understood.
The consensus seems to be that it's virtually certain with a warming of 4-5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels.
Ignoring an existential risk like that because one lacks understanding doesn't seem wise.
Does this mean we’re all going to die?
No; at least, that’s unlikely.
Well that "unlikely" there merits some debate I would say. Yes there is reason for cautious optimism, but there is also the very real possibility of climate change becoming an extinction level event for humanity, specifically by a cascade of tipping points through several globally relevant climate systems being triggered. The damages that will be caused just by optimistic projections of warming are not well understood either:
Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).
Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. [...]
There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered.
So is the extinction of humanity through climate change certain? No. But is it possible? Yes, and the likelihood is very poorly understood.
Another aspect that is often overlooked in this debate is that the beginning of the holocene mass extinction is very much pre-historic, insofar as the spread of homo sapiens over the globe closely matches to the extinction of mega-fauna wherever we appeared, unsettling ecosystems millions of years old, and reducing biodiversity further and further. Other ecosystems will only be able to compensate for so long before they go extinct, and so on, and the explosion of complexity that usually follows after a mass extinction happens on timescales longer than humanities existence. If or when this cascades to the top of the food chain is anybodies guess.
Climate change is probably the most clearly a “big fucking issue” for mankind. I’m fully aware it’s going to kill a huge portion of the population before the end of this century and that I’m probably going to be one of them. I don’t expect to retire or have any kind of life beyond MAYBE 60 because we’ll be locked in famine wars and constant civil unrest.
Can't say I haven't wandered those paths of thought, but what keeps nagging at the back of my mind is the possibility of a positive feedback loop of ecosystem collapse, cascading through all of it. From my limited understanding it's somewhat likely to happen but nobody can tell the exact likelihood or outcome. Best guess likelihood of it happening climbs exponentially between 1.5°C and 5°C of warming, which is why limiting warming to 1°C was determined as a threshold initially and subsequently raised to 1.5°C because 1°C became a pipe dream. Depending on how pessimistically you want to do your measurements we have now already reached those 1.5°C of warming.
For reference: Wikipedia:Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system#Cascading_tipping_points
The rise of global fascism and it’s persecution of “the other” or “enemies of the state” as seen in the USA, Israel, China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, The Philippines, and many South American and African nations is another major issue that’s being largely ignored and/or actively progressed by an alarming number of people today. Is another thing that is being underplayed in the media and it going to ADD TO the major global instability that climate change is going to cause.
Yeah tell me about it, the far right party in Germany keeps getting new poll records, now breaking 20%. In fucking Germany! Thought I'd never see the day. And therein lies the crux. I think the move towards the right on a global scale is in large part reactionary towards the largest problem on a global scale happening right now, which is climate change. Of which we keep seeing incrementally bigger symptoms, chiefly among them in this context migration as well as economic problems related and unrelated to that. The sensory information of our society already indicates how vast this problem will be. And unless the underlying cause is fixed, this trend won't reverse itself; On the contrary, we will see democracies collapse left, right, and centre, pun intended.
OP is in their mid-40s.
Ok, this is too ad hominem for me, so I'm going to disregard that part of the argument.
Heh, you reminded me of that one time where Fox News lawyers argued in court that nobody in their right mind could believe Tucker Carlson was relaying actual news... and apparently succeeded with that line of argument.