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Random Fashion Thoughts (Part 3: Style farmer strikes back) - our general discussion thread

dieworkwear

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View attachment 1329450
@dieworkwear your counterpart, jesse, lists among his followers, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Baron Davis, and Ken Jennings (to name only a few of the many celebrities). It is awesome to see the reach that PTO has achieved.

Donald Glover once wore a PTO launch party tee. T-shirt was made in collab with Rising Sun from way back in the day


EB4YJtcU8AI_TE7.jpg


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EB4YtavU4AARWZH.jpg
 

cb200

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Hope Jeese is getting some fat podcast money now. The Sound of Young America podcast was one of the first podcasts I was aware of back when there was about 200 of them and basically no-one, including me, knew what one was until Steve Jobs showed podcasts getting added to iTunes. Podcasting sure seems to have become much more of a thing today. For a long time, I thought as a medium it was going to languish at the margins forever.
 

LA Guy

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Thank you Noah for speaking some truth.

Sustainability is impossible unless the global economy contracts. Not a little, a lot. Like, to the point where the Great Depression looks like "A pretty nice time, though it started as a bit of a bummer at the beginning." Everyone will suffer, but the overwhelming probability is that the poorer you are, the more you will suffer.

It's not just fashion either. And it's not just capitalism. Our miraculous modern world - virtually no starvation, peace in nearly all places, nearly everyone is warm in winter, quotidian life is bearable nearly everywhere, and ridiculously luxurious in developed countries - is possible because of technologies and a globally connect infrastructure that is incredibly fragile and increasingly unsustainable. Just as an illustration, look at the new flu pandemic. It doesn't take too much to imagine what would happen if a virus with a similar trajectory but an 80% death rate instead of the currently reported 2% got into the world. And yes, it's possible. Or if a strain of weed that strangles wheat or corn got into agriculture.

A safe system is a siloed system, and we have the opposite of that. And that's just one thing. The way our economy is built, that allows us to live so richly, requires that we use resources (particularly energy) at a rate that the earth is simply not able to sustain. There are too many people consuming too much stuff. And the solutions are bone chilling. That, or fantastically out of the realm of our current technology.
 

g transistor

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“It’s not just capitalism” he says as he talks about the economy shrinking
 

erictheobscure

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Thank you Noah for speaking some truth.

Sustainability is impossible unless the global economy contracts. Not a little, a lot. Like, to the point where the Great Depression looks like "A pretty nice time, though it started as a bit of a bummer at the beginning." Everyone will suffer, but the overwhelming possibility is that the poorer you are, the more you will suffer.

It's not just fashion either. And it's not just capitalism. Our miraculous modern world - virtually no starvation, peace in nearly all places, nearly everyone is warm in winter, quotidian life is bearable nearly everywhere, and ridiculously luxurious in developed countries, is possible because of technologies and a globally connect infrastructure that is incredibly fragile and increasingly unsustainable. Just as an illustration, look at the new flu pandemic. It doesn't take too much to imagine what would happen if a virus with a similar trajectory but an 80% death rate instead of the currently reported 2% got into the world. And yes, it's possible. Or if a strain of weed that strangles wheat or corn got into agriculture.

A safe system is a silo'd system, and we have the opposite of that. And that's just one thing. The way our economy is built, that allows us to live so richly, requires that we use resources (particularly energy) that the earth is simply not build to sustain. There are too many people consuming too much stuff. And the solutions are bone chilling. That, or fantastically out of the realm of our current technology.

Chiming in as someone who works on a historical period (and on a period, more specifically, that marked a transition from early modernity to nascent capitalism):

Even if this post seems largely accurate, it nonetheless relies on a reductive view of the historical past versus our present moment. I don't mean to ignore that a lot of us enjoy levels of comfort and leisure time that were unthinkable for most in previous centuries. I also don't mean to ignore that the rate and speed of travel (both of people and of goods) are incredibly high now compared to the past. But the very fact that I have to make those caveats reveals the pressure of making absolute distinctions between our present and some sweeping gesture toward the pre-modern past. Not all life was miserable and wretched in the past. And people weren't as siloed in the past as this kind of remark implies. You can find a distinction between the ethos of insularity vs. the allure/dangers of travel in Virgil's poetry (and the distinction is sometimes clearly marked as a tenuous one, with the supposed happiness of rural life disavowing knowledge of foreign affairs that nonetheless registers clearly).

I'm not intending this as a pedantic correction. I'm suggesting that the kind of sweeping aside of historical lessons to demarcate our own era as so singularly different has political effects. That effect is to somehow downplay the constant work of renegotiating and recalibrating what we need to do--at both the individual and collective level. In this particular post, what we have is a kind of all-or-nothing claim. I do acknowledge that the all-or-nothing claim might be more appealing than feel-good responsible consumerism. But the all-or-nothing claim ultimately serves as an alibi for the same thing that the feel-good bullshit is appealing to: since we're not going to shut everything down and live as we did in a make-believe wretched past, then we might as well (shrug? buy stuff?).

To put it a different way, the flipside of this same kind of ahistorical gesture in the name of historicity is bullshit like pretend caveman diets. In that instance, the fantasy is that the (make-believe) past really was healthier and better. But the only way to replicate that past is through stupid individual acts of lifestyle choices and consumerism--since we're not all going to collectively revert to pretend caveman life on a mass/economic scale.

Maybe I'm indulging in my own fantasy when I believe that a more accurate sense of the historical past in relation to our own moment should facilitate more accurate political thinking. But I guess I'm kind of committed to that as more than a fantasy.
 

zxcvbn

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Thank you Noah for speaking some truth.

Sustainability is impossible unless the global economy contracts. Not a little, a lot. Like, to the point where the Great Depression looks like "A pretty nice time, though it started as a bit of a bummer at the beginning." Everyone will suffer, but the overwhelming possibility is that the poorer you are, the more you will suffer.

It's not just fashion either. And it's not just capitalism. Our miraculous modern world - virtually no starvation, peace in nearly all places, nearly everyone is warm in winter, quotidian life is bearable nearly everywhere, and ridiculously luxurious in developed countries, is possible because of technologies and a globally connect infrastructure that is incredibly fragile and increasingly unsustainable. Just as an illustration, look at the new flu pandemic. It doesn't take too much to imagine what would happen if a virus with a similar trajectory but an 80% death rate instead of the currently reported 2% got into the world. And yes, it's possible. Or if a strain of weed that strangles wheat or corn got into agriculture.

A safe system is a silo'd system, and we have the opposite of that. And that's just one thing. The way our economy is built, that allows us to live so richly, requires that we use resources (particularly energy) that the earth is simply not build to sustain. There are too many people consuming too much stuff. And the solutions are bone chilling. That, or fantastically out of the realm of our current technology.



The ideas that sustainability and ending fossil fuel dependence is anathema to global progress, that we can thank extractive capitalism and neoliberalism for 'our miraculous modern world', that everything is getting better all the time and we should all be grateful for the rising tide lifting all boats - these ideas are false and serve to further the profoundly unsustainable and unjust status quo by saying that there's no other way of ordering society and still providing people with a good life. These ideas have been promoted by big oil for decades to paralyze action on climate, even as there's an increasing recognition that the climate crisis is very bad.
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Our 'ridiculously luxurious' and 'miraculous' modern world is built on trillions in wealth transfers from the global south, trillions in natural resources stolen from Indigenous Peoples, and trillions in slave labour. Climate change is chickens coming home to roost, and rethinking the way our economy has failed to distribute progress equally across society is good, actually.
 

dieworkwear

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Our 'ridiculously luxurious' and 'miraculous' modern world is built on trillions in wealth transfers from the global south, trillions in natural resources stolen from Indigenous Peoples, and trillions in slave labour.

I mean, China is a perfect example of how this isn't true. To exclude China from your graphs is to take out a huge percentage of the world's population, and an important case study in understanding economic development
 

mmmargeologist

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90% of economists and scientists will tell you a revenue neutral carbon tax is the correct answer for combatting climate change, but it couldn’t even get passed in Washington State in 2016 (the progressives of all people shot it down). It’s not going to get passed anywhere else. At least not now.

The trouble with energy transitions is shear scale. Billions of people are making the choice between pulling themselves out of poverty and living with prosperity or dealing with climate. No one is going to choose to continue to live in poverty.

Unless everyone in the world agrees to pay considerably more for energy, there will not be an effective transition. Expensive energy is regressive and climate change effects are existential. Wealthy people may not have an issue paying more for goods and services (yes oil is in everything), but we are also asking the poor to do so. The question remains, how much do we decide pay for future generations, in low lying places, versus poor people now? We only have finite resources.
 

steveoffice

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Chiming in as someone who works on a historical period (and on a period, more specifically, that marked a transition from early modernity to nascent capitalism):

Even if this post seems largely accurate, it nonetheless relies on a reductive view of the historical past versus our present moment. I don't mean to ignore that a lot of us enjoy levels of comfort and leisure time that were unthinkable for most in previous centuries. I also don't mean to ignore that the rate and speed of travel (both of people and of goods) are incredibly high now compared to the past. But the very fact that I have to make those caveats reveals the pressure of making absolute distinctions between our present and some sweeping gesture toward the pre-modern past. Not all life was miserable and wretched in the past. And people weren't as siloed in the past as this kind of remark implies. You can find a distinction between the ethos of insularity vs. the allure/dangers of travel in Virgil's poetry (and the distinction is sometimes clearly marked as a tenuous one, with the supposed happiness of rural life disavowing knowledge of foreign affairs that nonetheless registers clearly).

I'm not intending this as a pedantic correction. I'm suggesting that the kind of sweeping aside of historical lessons to demarcate our own era as so singularly different has political effects. That effect is to somehow downplay the constant work of renegotiating and recalibrating what we need to do--at both the individual and collective level. In this particular post, what we have is a kind of all-or-nothing claim. I do acknowledge that the all-or-nothing claim might be more appealing than feel-good responsible consumerism. But the all-or-nothing claim ultimately serves as an alibi for the same thing that the feel-good bullshit is appealing to: since we're not going to shut everything down and live as we did in a make-believe wretched past, then we might as well (shrug? buy stuff?).

To put it a different way, the flipside of this same kind of ahistorical gesture in the name of historicity is bullshit like pretend caveman diets. In that instance, the fantasy is that the (make-believe) past really was healthier and better. But the only way to replicate that past is through stupid individual acts of lifestyle choices and consumerism--since we're not all going to collectively revert to pretend caveman life on a mass/economic scale.

Maybe I'm indulging in my own fantasy when I believe that a more accurate sense of the historical past in relation to our own moment should facilitate more accurate political thinking. But I guess I'm kind of committed to that as more than a fantasy.

hey go back to **** posting; i don’t like having to agree with a rais traitor.
 

dieworkwear

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i encourage you to click through to the article @dieworkwear

Just finished reading it. I'm not sure how this relates to the previous posts above regarding trade, production, and sustainability.

I agree the neoliberal model for development doesn't work for poor countries. Gerschenkron wrote a book called Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective that talks about the gap between rich and poor countries, and the importance of the speed of growth, not just the scale. China, Germany, South Korea, and Japan are all good examples of countries that have used the state to spur growth (which isn't very neoliberal).

But I'm not sure what that has to do with the previous comments about sustainability.

Perhaps I misread your post, but in the context of the previous posts, I read what you wrote as saying that poor countries should focus on inward development (as that's basically the outcome of dependency theory). That's indeed more sustainable. I've seen people who are really serious about sustainability basically call for this kind of thing, although less Marxist in character.

But there plenty out export-orientated developmental strategies that aren't about neoliberalism. And I've yet to see good evidence of any of the other strategies working -- inward development (a la dependencia), or a kind of "return to land" siloed economy. Germany, South Korea, Japan, and China were about export-led strategies, but by leveraging the state (and thus not neoliberal). But it's true that this model can be very taxing on the earth.

Jane Goodall recently said that sustainability wouldn't be a problem if we had a much smaller population. Which is true, but not very helpful unless you want to engage in genocide. When I read people like Fok write what he writes, that also seems unhelpful to me. What's frivolous consumption for some people (cheap t-shirts or whatever) is a matter of food, housing, and basic medical needs for someone in another country. And yet, it takes a lot of resources to make that t-shirt. I don't know how you square those things with sustainability, although I don't think it has to be a black and white issue. You can have degrees of sustainability.
 

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