I second your manifesto. It’s always been a mystery to me that so many people seem to enjoy wallowing in misery and anger and negativity and helplessness. It really seems to be the essence of much of social media. I’m guessing it’s something to do with catharsis, and release of frustration. But there must also be a certain personality type that is attracted to social media - and apparently we’re the odd ones out. Just downvoting is a mystery to me TBH (I see it as pure toxicity and obviously antithetical to civilized discussion) and I know from bitter experience that quite few people here agree with me on this. But there are a few who do and I take heart from that.

It just feels we’re squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site

It can’t ever be that bad as long as there is no advertising. That’s my positive spin.

Just the fact that this beautifully written contribution got zero engagement for three whole hours is enough to bother me!

Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing.

So well put. People responding to headlines alone really is the bane of social media. Personally, I’ve begun to systematically add a quote from the source article, even when it doesn’t add much to my comment. As a way of subtly showing others that I actually read the article and that perhaps they should too.

Could have written almost all of that myself, to the letter. Yep, now I remember your amusing description of the “responsible centrist” or whatever’s the term of mockery. Personally I am that odd type (possibly not so rare these days) who finds the left extremely annoying while never voting for anything else.

I was also banned from another community BTW (relax, there are only 2!) for objecting to the egregious community rule “No Zionism”, which IMO was very close to literal racism given that none of the other rules concerned specific countries or nations. The mods there would do well to read this piece just out today, by an Israeli pacifist, and consider again the value of open debate and speech, not to mention empathy (something they are always so keen to ask of others). Absolutely heart-rending.

PS: I’ll add a quote from the cited article because it’s so uncannily relevant to this whole thread:

So I ask myself: Where should I go, as an Israeli pacifist?

My own relatives question whether I belong in Israel, because I criticize the troops in Gaza for the killing and starvation of Palestinians. Abroad, a theater colleague once told me to “go back to where you came from”—that I don’t belong in the land where I was born but in the lands where my ancestors faced pogroms and the Holocaust. Nuance has no currency in a world addicted to absolutes.

Of course, there are far greater tragedies than mine. Palestinians are being killed in Gaza, and Israeli hostages are still in captivity. I carry the weight of those horrors daily. I’m not comparing my suffering with theirs. But I do believe that if we want a different future, we need space to speak from wherever we are—even from the uncomfortable middle.

I really empathize with your take BTW. Over the last year I have been unsubscribing from mainstream communities one by one for pretty much the exact reasons you cite: acute groupthink, dogpiling, purity testing, incitement, celebration of violence (the Luigi Mangioni cult was why I unsubscribed from “Uplifting News”, for example), vulgarity, basically all the things you find in a school playground.

So I get you totally. And yet the “ban 'em high” zero-tolerance strategy only goes so far. I was myself banned for the cardinal sin of racism after making a subtle (but entirely innocuous) point which happened to challenge the prevailing groupthink in an otherwise pretty decent community. That community now has one less moderate centrist.

The best possible solution is surely hands-on moderation in line with what happens at Hacker News (where the quality of discourse is incredibly high despite, as I understand it, very infrequent recourse to bans). But that community is full of literal-minded geeks and has a full-time paid moderator, yes.

Not OP but go peruse the links they posted in this thread. Everything is explained there, it’s well-written, we can’t ask them to lay it all out again here.

Some very perceptive observations in those comments. To others - click thru and have a read! This is clearly a mod of unusually high quality, if they’re really bowing out then we really owe it to them (and ourselves) to understand why.

Needed elaboration.

In the Disasters and Policy Stagnation scenario, a series of natural hazards affects all European countries, starting with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in 2026, followed by a combination of floods and storms in 2027. The compounding effects of these hazards could lead to a decline in euro area annual GDP of up to 4.7% by 2030.

It reads like self-parody. We need to remember that economics is a pseudo-science.

Perhaps you’d consider writing a paper to detail all this. And then submitting it for peer review, of course. I am not a climate scientist so I will content myself with trusting reliable secondary sources.

Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.

Yeah, no. To be clear, the source I referred to is Our World in Data. It’s widely respected and I have better things to do than second-guess it.

And yet reliable sources say what seems to be generally accepted, namely that stopping carbons emissions completely in a short time frame (a couple of years) would land us with “1.5 degrees by the end of the century”. So, as I said, something is off with this “10 degrees”. Perhaps it’s the “end of the century” bit.

That’s helpful. These estimates do tend to vary a bit depending on assumptions (type of plane or car, what occupancy etc). The 2t I quoted was slightly high. My point was that there’s no other way to emit 1 tonne in 6 hours.

And yet, says the same article:

Equilibrium warming is not ‘committed’ warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring.

So something’s off.

Apart from the methane problem, all livestock farming takes, by definition, a massive amount more land than arable farming to produce the same amount of food. On a stressed planet of 9 billion people, there simply is not enough land to feed everyone with red meat.

First, well done for taking it seriously and doing your bit.

The point of the post (I think) is simply to illustrate that certain actions are much, much more important than others. Anecdotally, there are still plenty of people out there who believe that, say, turning off a couple of (low-energy) lights, or “recycling” a plastic bag, are somehow major good deeds that allow them to kick their feet up and celebrate with a steak. There’s still way too much ignorance about all this, IMO.

In reality (as you seem to understand), some gestures are far more important than others. Ditching red meat (and dairy) really is a big deal. Everyone who claims to care about this problem should at least consider doing it.

This is a nice articulation of nihilism.

The paradox being that the attitude is both justified and… certain to only make the problem worse.

lasts much longer which is important as a single household

This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.

Roughly true, but you’re eliding a very, very problematic activity into “travel”: aviation.

Per kilometer, flying is pretty carbon intensive (about the same as driving - basically: the extra efficiency of being packed into a tin can is offset by exponentially higher wind resistance at high speed). The problem is that airplanes allow you to burn up massive distances really quickly.

A single transatlantic flight will blow a 2-ton1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That’s 10-20% of an average European’s annual footprint - or 100% a very large chunk of a sustainable annual footprint. For anyone who flies more than once a year (i.e. likely a bunch of people here), cutting down on flying is likely to be the single biggest thing you can do for the climate.

In theory, no. There’s actually a tiny bit of runway left. If carbon emissions continued as today for about 2 or 3 years (extrapolate figures) and then stopped, the temperature would plateau at 1.5 and then very slowly fall.

Of course, the problem is that emissions are absolutely not going to stop in 2027.

BTW: current average projection is around +3.5 by century’s end. That’s actually a bit lower than it was a few years ago, due to faster than expected roll-out of green tech. But it’s obviously still way, way too high. Especially because of the risk of tipping points.

dog ownership dog ownership

This sure sounds like your bugbear! It’s because they eat lots of meat? What if (devil’s advocate) the dog were owned in replacement of a child?