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

[steveoffice]

I agree the neoliberal model for development doesn't work for poor countries.

doesnt work for not poor countries either

 

[circumspice]

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I suspect these charts look the way they do is because they presume that $7.40pp/per day is the agreed upon definition of poverty. The World Bank has it at $1.90...

 

[cb200]

I just worry about the rise fascism with a "green" face. I mean if there's limed resources and it's an existential threat best the state controls and protects the resources of the nation. Mondays...

 

[Pangolin]

Is there a proxy that can contact Japanese stores directly on Instagram, or send an email to ask if something posted on Instagram is available? Zenmarket won't do it and the stores in question won't answer me
(Or better even, is anybody here able to help me?)

 

[LonerMatt]

Sustainability is made a lot easier by:
- Reducing waste (in the US something like 20-25% of emissions are attributable to things that are thrown out or used unnecessarily)
- Reducing wealth gaps (the rich disproportionately use way too much, in the USA if the top 10% of wealthy people used as much as the next top 10% of wealthy people there'd be a reduction in emissions by ~15%), conversely poorer people buy less, waste less and are largely buying products involved in economies of scale
- Protecting natural areas and making these resilient through removing human interference, guarding against pollution, etc
- Changing habits en masse (ie, restricting beef, ending fuel subsidies, etc)

None of these are particular to any ideology, well perhaps reducing wealth gaps is anti-capitalist but oh well.

 

[dieworkwear]

Sustainability is made a lot easier by:
- Reducing waste (in the US something like 20-25% of emissions are attributable to things that are thrown out or used unnecessarily)
- Reducing wealth gaps (the rich disproportionately use way too much, in the USA if the top 10% of wealthy people used as much as the next top 10% of wealthy people there'd be a reduction in emissions by ~15%), conversely poorer people buy less, waste less and are largely buying products involved in economies of scale
- Protecting natural areas and making these resilient through removing human interference, guarding against pollution, etc
- Changing habits en masse (ie, restricting beef, ending fuel subsidies, etc)

None of these are particular to any ideology, well perhaps reducing wealth gaps is anti-capitalist but oh well.

Isn't reducing the global wealth gap inherently unsustainable in terms of taxation on natural resources? I don't want to pose this as being black and white -- I think you can have degrees of sustainability. But China's development, for example, has been incredibly taxing. I say this as someone who would like to see even more economic development (and specifically industrial development) in poor countries.

I'm sure a lot of people here have seen this, but the environmental Kuznets curve posits that post-industrial societies can be as green, or closer to being green, as pre-industrial economies. And it's only industrialization that's heavily polluting. Which may be true since one is about services and the other production (industry). But how do you get pre-industrial economies to post-industrial without actually industrializing? And what do you do for the manufactured goods that the rest of the world needs? In poor countries, people need actual things.

If silo'd agrarian economies could get the global poor out of poverty, they wouldn't be in their current situation in the first place.

 

[Newcomer]

Man, reading the last few pages has made me realize that I should shift my reading away from the most recent Jack Reacher book.

 

[LA Guy]

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.

I agree with most of your points, though I would not use the same language. Also, um, how can you possibly leave China out of the discussion? I don't know how old you are, but I visited China first when I was in grade 4, so... 1984, and bears basically no resemblane to what it is now. And that's 1.6 billion people who came out of the cultural revolution to fairly quickly become one of he largest as well as most populat economies in the world.

My point is that while a rising tide doesn't necessarily raises all ships, and lowering tide is going to ground pretty much every freakin' one of them.

I'm saying that regardles off how we redistribute progress, we are fucked because of a fundamental, intractable problem, namely that there is a thermodynamic imbalance that we have no way of solving using earthly resources alone, and the rate at which we consume energy is exacerbating the problems.

People talk about carbon balances, and this is because this our our immediate problem. It's shortsighted. There is no earth based energy source that we can turn to that won't **** up the environment, used at the scale that we need it to sustain our world. Wind energy? That will completely change atmospheric transport used at scale. Hydro? We've already seen how that ******** up river ecosystems. Solar panels would **** up the world's albedo. All the energy in the world ultimately comes from the sun, save nuclear. We can't escape that fact.

And nuclear energy is great, except that the power is so great that it risks destroying the actual world in basically an instance. And no technology can prevent accidents 100%, not stop human carelessness. so basically, we would just be substituting a relatively slow death for a white knuckle ride into oblivion. We were able to somewhat contain Chernobyl, and still, that was a huge disaster. Now imagine if we had a ton more nuclear reactors, and the increased risk with each one. It wouldn't take too many nuclear reactor accidents to make the world literally uninhabitable, by anything.

I suppose that we could try to use geothermal energy, but who the **** knows what will happen if we start ******* with the actual core of the earth. Sounds like a bad bet.

Personally, I think that we are probably good and fucked. But maybe, just maybe, space is the answer. It is the only place where we can avoid the energy balance of the earth. Maybe we can put a bunch of nuclear reactors into orbit and use the energy from those - at least it would take the accidents away from the planet that we need to live on. I don't know. The solutions will require a much smarter person or persons than am I.

I'm just pointing out that the problems are not solvable by any of the solutions bandied around already.

 

[LA Guy]

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.

Aside from the obvious fact that I put enough ideas to fill several tomes into a post that I wrote in ten minutes, mainly because I think about this stuff a lot, I am making an a priori argument, which is naturally reductivist, but the fact of which doesn't make it incorrect. In fact, that's how most ideas start.

The paper that first posited the problem of CFCs and the polar ozone layer, for example, was a four page letter that had just one cycle of reactions in it. Sherwood Rowland (RIP) was the lead on that paper, but really, it was primarily work of Mario Molina, who was one of the three scientist who won the Nobel Prize for that work in 1995. I was lucky enough to work in a related field in the same general area (UC Urvine is a hop, skip, and jump away from Caltech), and a lot of my doctoral work made use of an obscure paper written by the third in the trio of winners, Paul Crutzen.) And that one paper spawned an entire literature. My postdoctoral mentor, who is one of the most meticulous scientists that I have ever known (as opposed to me, who always had the tendency to play it fast and loose), was instrumental in resolving the apparent contradiction between satellite data and ground based data, the former of which initially seemed to show that the ozone layer above the Antarctic circle was juuuuuuust fiiiiine.

 

[erictheobscure]

I know you know a lot about the science when it comes to climate change. I don't know if compressing a lot of that info into a few paragraphs requires sweeping claims about history. If it does, then that goes along with my complaints about appeals to history and their political effects.

 

[lawyerdad]

I just worry about the rise fascism with a "green" face. I mean if there's limed resources and it's an existential threat best the state controls and protects the resources of the nation. Mondays...

 

[dieworkwear]

Sometimes I wonder if you guys are having as hard of a time understanding what I'm trying to communicate, as I am trying to get through your Judith Butler writing.

On the topic of economic development, we've already had one person write: "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."

My guess is, yes, my posts are also not very clear.

 

[LA Guy]

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.

I don't disagree with Jane Goodall, and that was one of the unthinkable solutions that I was talking about.

I simply don't believe that sustainability is possible in the world we live in today, barring solutions like "Kill them all", or at least "let them all die", which I think that we can all agree is maniacal and not generally considered okay.

I also agree with the second part of your paragraph.

We basically have an overconstrained problem here. I honestly think that we have to think beyond the ecosystem of the earth to sustain the earth.

I don't know if you guys have watched "The Expanse", but I sorta think that if we are lucky, and don't completely blow everything up, or simply just die fast enough that we don't have to worry about the basic thermodynamic quandry that we live in, that our "world" could look something like that. Appparently, Jeff Bezos is interested in space for similar reasons. I'd love to talk to him about that. I left academia in part, as I've written before, because I was tired of all the bureaucratic bullshit, but the second part was because of the timidity vision in the minds of those who are supposed to be our best and brightest. But if Jeff Bezos can get nuclear generators (or something else) into space to either produce energy without risking continental scale devastation, or to harness more power from the sun, I'd be up for the adventure.

 

[dieworkwear]

I don't disagree with Jane Goodall, and that was one of the unthinkable solutions that I was talking about.

I simply don't believe that sustainability is possible in the world we live in today, barring solutions like "Kill them all", or at least "let them all die", which I think that we can all agree is maniacal and not generally considered okay.

I also agree with the second part of your paragraph.

We basically have an overconstrained problem here. I honestly think that we have to think beyond the ecosystem of the earth to sustain the earth.

I don't know if you guys have watched "The Expanse", but I sorta think that if we are lucky, and don't completely blow everything up, or simply just die fast enough that we don't have to worry about the basic thermodynamic quandry that we live in, that our "world" could look something like that. Appparently, Jeff Bezos is interested in space for similar reasons. I'd love to talk to him about that. I left academia in part, as I've written before, because I was tired of all the bureaucratic bullshit, but the second part was because of the timidity vision in the minds of those who are supposed to be our best and brightest. But if Jeff Bezos can get nuclear generators (or something else) into space to either produce energy without risking continental scale devastation, or to harness more power from the sun, I'd be up for the adventure.

Thank you for using a sustainable number of clauses.

 

[LA Guy]

I know you know a lot about the science when it comes to climate change. I don't know if compressing a lot of that info into a few paragraphs requires sweeping claims about history. If it does, then that goes along with my complaints about appeals to history and their political effects.

We can throw out the sweeping claims about history part, then. My main clarion calls are:
1) The world we want is fundamentally unsustainable without some serious thinking outside the box.
2) Man, are we ******* vulnerable right now.