Euphoria is grappling with a key tension in modern western democracies: how can we stop desiring the thing that will bring about our own destruction, namely endless economic growth in an increasingly automated world?
It’s the word salad, the unthinking collection of cute phrases.
Sure, growth is regarded, over there in the green left, as being simply wrong and dangerous. That they’re wrong is neither here nor there. Automation, well, we’ve been doing that for millennia and also, yes, people do worry about that, not all of them Luddites. #
But what’s the connection there, other than word salad? “endless economic growth in an increasingly automated world?” it’s just “fasionable phrase, fashionable phrase” isn’t it.
Fashionable rubbish word salad for Lefties? In the tax dodging Graun? I’ll go the the foot of our stairs!
Well, the collapse of capitalism at least means we won’t be able to afford to produce junk like Euphoria any more.
It’s the fallacious notion that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world.
It’s a shame that these idiots are described as malthusians. Thos. Malthus himself was a really clever chap
If Malthus was clever we’d all be dead now.
Euphoria sounds like an increasingly common form of lefty bullshit, fearing and yearning for an apocalyptic end to capitalism, like all those wankers who use the phrase “late capitalism “. And they don’t even have a post-capitalist alternative, they’re all about the destruction.
the script has the epigrammatic feel of a book of quotes, aphorisms for getting through the death of capitalism.
OK. Here’s a quote for you:-
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Are they talismans or mute witnesses; mocking us or looking on with horror as we destroy the world?
What actually are we doing that is going to destroy the world? If we are responsible for higher temperatures (we’re not), the world has been much hotter in the past. Ditto CO2 levels which are currently towards the low end of their historical range. Locally, humans do damage the environment in certain areas, but the planet is doing just fine globally. We will no more destroy the planet than we will go extinct due to climate change.
Euphoria was at war with Eastasia. Therefore Euphoria had always been at war with Eastasia.
Sure, but you can be clever as a button and still be wrong because you fail to take account of something fundamental to the problem you’re worried about which completely changes the outcome.
Malthus was right to worry about population and food supply, since famines were a regular thing back then, even in good old England, but the answer was improvements in agriculture itself (automation, better fertilisers, weed killers), removal of restrictions on imports, better storage/logistics and good old capitalism itself making everything so cheap that food went from the vast majority of a family expenditure to about 10% of expenditure.
Sure, we still get famines in times and places, but that tends to be countries which still operate subsistence farming and have failed to apply the above improvements mostly because of kleptocratic/Marxist governments.
Yeah, so for how many hundreds of years have people been saying Capitalism bad, we must find something better? And yet no-one has come up with a replacement. Communism, fine once we become self-less drones – no fucking use for a human beings. Socialism, Communism bolted onto Capitalism, half works half doesn’t. It’s almost as if Capitalism is ther natural expression of being human.
gravely voice
“In a world that is endlessly growing, he must choose between automation and desire. The washing machine or mrs tiggywinkle”
I have yet to spank one out to an anthropomorphic hedgehog. Then again, if that is a leftist argument, it simply illustrates their delusion. A more accurate statement would be a choice between automation and a return to Dickensian lifestyles, although even that is probably too right wing for them, more like the joyless existence of a medieval serf before the Black Death.
As Sean Locke would say…that’s a challenging wank. Unfortunately if i do think of anthropomorphic washerwomen (not often though i have to say) Toad of Toad Hall’s image comes first to mind, so can’t be done i’m afraid.
I suggest that if a leftie assaults you with a word salad you squirt mayonnaise over him. I am happy to recommend Aldi’s.
“Euphoria sounds like an increasingly common form of lefty bullshit, fearing and yearning for an apocalyptic end to capitalism, like all those wankers who use the phrase “late capitalism “. And they don’t even have a post-capitalist alternative, they’re all about the destruction.”
The problem is that people like Mr Byrne don’t know shit about shit. Like I think people understand that there are often more economically efficient choices that cost nothing, but they don’t see that it’s happening everywhere. Like, you use the Liftshare app, you cut your driving cost in half. The cost of doing it is a few pennies worth of energy on your phone. Checking if a shop has something in stock online and reserving it rather than doing a trip and finding they don’t have it. How much energy has that saved?
And if people like Mr Byrne are surrounded by likeminded people, and they all talk about late capitalism, they slipstream into it. They get surrounded by bullshitters claiming all sorts of things that back up what they believe. And not what they don’t.
If today is late capitalism, when did we slip in from middle capitalism, and what is the defining trait of the transition?
As long as there’s endless economic growth, there’s opportunity for new jobs for the workers automation replaced.
If the leftists purposely stifle that economic growth, those workers are stuck relying on taxpayer-funded services.
Automation, from the wheel, the aquaduct and the internet, has been providing more utility for less energy for thousands of years.
Calling this process destructive is not just a category error it’s dumb fuck stupid.
@ philip
It’s destructive of hunger and poverty and many other things that enable “The Party” to rule, so it’s delays the advent of 1984.
‘those workers are stuck relying on taxpayer-funded services.’
Maybe the leftists want to be the bureaucrats shelling out the services, Fbfhfhjf?