Flippanarchy
Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Rules
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If you post images with text, endeavour to provide the alt-text
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If the image is a crosspost from an OP, Provide the source.
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Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
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Absolutely no redfash jokes. This includes anything that props up the capitalist ruling classes pretending to be communists.
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No bigotry whatsoever. See instance rules.
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This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
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No shaming people for being anti-electoralism. This should be obvious from the above point but apparently we need to make it obvious to the turbolibs who can't control themselves. You have the rest of lemmy to moralize.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
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Except… the “eco-fascists” are also not wrong.
The healthy carrying capacity of a pre-modern civ Earth has been estimated at 2 Billion humans at a totally vegan diet. Bring a Western diet into the picture, and that drops to somewhere between 1B and 500M people.
I mean, yes, you can put every arable square meter of soil under agriculture and feed many more billions than exist. But this would utterly destroy the ecosystem within a few short years, causing a subsequent collapse of humanity to zero. A healthy ecological balance has 80+% wild areas - defined as anything more than 10km from any human access - and by comparison less than 2% of CONUS meets this definition.
And having overshot the planet’s carrying capacity by more than 4×, we have also caused a corresponding decline in that carrying capacity via ecosystem degradation, pollution, soil erosion and innumerable other stressors. If humanity is to see a significant collapse that includes tech collapse (fertilizer production, etc.), we will be exceedingly lucky to come out the far side with more than a few tens of millions of people planet-wide.
And for reference, before European colonization North America was likely to have had as many as 300M natives before Western diseases emptied the continent.
But, don't we already make way more food than even necessary? We just don't transport it where needed. Instead we grow a shit ton of corn and make it into ethanol for fun and profit.
Source: I'm on lunch break and can't be fucked to look again. Though yours isn't sourced either so I don't feel bad.
Yes. Don't listen to them. The problem isn't population. It is distribution. We overproduce for the sake of capitalism to such an extent that we can cut it in half tomorrow and our quality of life would not change in the slightest.
We have alternatives available. We simply do not use them because those who control the world economies would not be able to make obscene profits from it and it necessitates them giving up their ownership over the means of production in order to facilitate these collectively beneficial alternatives.
My understanding is the food production excess is "thanks" to unsustainable, damaging methods that rely heavily on synthetic fertilizer and have massive downsides like agricultural runoff and topsoil erosion (in addition to the wide-scale habitat loss required for those acres upon acres of farmland).
This. Truly sustainable practices require a considerably lower profit margin per acre, thereby forcing the parasitical middlemen to give farmers more without utterly hosing the consumer for all that they are worth.
And some overproduction is required to handle lean years. While you cannot keep fruit fresh for years, you can convert it into almost-analogous forms like flash-frozen in the field, within minutes of being picked, such that it can bridge the gap in lean years.
So there always will be some overproduction and some waste in the system, but not to the point where it needs to be intentionally made inedible so it cannot be given away, in order to create artificial scarcity to sustain market prices.
You're wrong. The issue has never been a lack of resources; it's the distribution of those resources that's the issue.
We currently produce more food than is required to support the current world's population
not disagreeing with your point but just wanted to bring attention to this..
the overproduction of food (beef, pork, alfalfa, tree nuts, mono cultures in general) is precisely what's driving multi-crises and mass extinction.
yes, there's a lot of food, which capitalists then commodify and export globally for their own enrichment. workers don't own the means of food production and food distribution, as you point out, is managed poorly (or not managed at all).
but at what cost? topsoil degradation. dependency on fertilizers. river and streams becoming irreversiblly polluted. overfishing the oceans. insects and birds going extinct at accelerated rates. loss of biodiversity. unfathomable levels of carbon emissions. worker exploitation. growing inequality.
the agricultural industry is pretty fucking evil. we shouldn't be talking about food production as some great untapped resource when it's literally contributing to ecocide and climate catastrophy.
we have to change how food is produced to actually be less productive because modern agricultural practices are killing the planet and contributing to the immiseration of the 99%.
reducing the production levels would reduce the amount of food, which in turn reduces the size of the population that can be supported.
to be clear; human lives are not a virus, people are not problematic. modern food production methods are problematic though and changing them should be a parallel goal to reducing world hunger.
And current levels of production are the very stressors that are eroding the planet’s carrying capacity. When you have so much land taken up for agriculture, which poisons with herbicides and kills anything that gets into the fields and pollutes the waters with fertilizers and eradicates any biodiversity with monocultures, where is the room for a healthy ecosystem?
Again - CONUS has less than 2% “untouched ecosystems”. This is largely to mostly thanks to agriculture. It should be 80% or more.
So you ... agree with the post that indigenous people were on the right track before colonization, according to your number goals/analysis, and that eco-fascists are wrong to call all human disease rather than pointing out capitalism ?
But moreover, i'm interested in where you get your numbers from. I'm convinced that being less would make solving problems easier, but i'm also convinced that being less alone would not solve anything and that it cannot be an ethically reliable goal/tool with so much people caring so much about having kids, and most importantly every person with knowledge on the matter told me that we have the capacity to feed all 10B people, so i'm quite intrigued by your take.
My guess is that everything lies in defining "healthy" and "pre-modern civ". What about modern sustainable-ish agricultural practices ? From what i know, they're not that far behind conventional production yield-wise.
Source?