this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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I don't blame religious people specifically. I would agree that a lot of the problematic people are religious, but I don't think they're a problem because of their religion specifically.
It's conspiracy theorizing nutbars who believe in crap like the earth being flat. Not specifically or exclusively flat-earth types, they're just a really good example of the climate/science denying fuckheads I'm referring to. That's one big group of problematic people. The other big group is capitalists, which are frequently conservative/right/religious types. Capitalists only give a shit about one thing, and it's disgusting. Money. If whatever is happening is not making them money, then they could not possibly give any fewer shits about it. This is the root problem in corporations. The fucking corpos who would never bother to care about anything that helps anyone, unless they can profit from it. There's very little profit in saving the environment.
Unless they're legally obligated to do something differently, and unless that difference will benefit them monetarily, they don't do it. Hell, if it wasn't for federally mandated occupational health and safety, they would still be sending folks into tunnels carrying nitroglycerin to blast open the next section (and other extremely dangerous and frequently fatal tasks). But because of shit like OSHA, they can't so much as order you to climb a ladder if they haven't met a minimum standard of safety.
Again, angry at the right people here.
Now, IMO, the conspiracy people need medication and therapy, and the capitalists need to be given a long walk off a short pier, while being told there's money at the end of the walk. Some people we would just be better without. To be clear, I'm more civilized than to take any physical action against them, but that doesn't stop me from wanting someone to do it. They're environmental criminals, every last one. The problem with their crimes is that everyone will suffer for them.
My main focus with my statements is that people shouldn't waste time arguing with their neighbors and countrymen (those who have no authority over anything outside of their personal lives), and focus their efforts on enacting systematic change. The former is kind of a waste of time, and who gives a shit if Walter believes that corpos can do nothing wrong, driving around in his F350... If we change the system and ban ICE vehicles, Walter's next vehicle will be an EV, whether he likes it or not.
It is absolutely the religious people who have caused the destruction of the global ecosystem and will lead to its collapse.
If you ask 100 atheists if environmental catastrophe is upon us, nearly all will say yes.
It is only the delusion that magical sky god and his special friends jesus and mohamud and budah look over the planet and are testing our morality that allows dipshits to believe the earth can't be destroyed by sufficiently altering the chemical composition of its atmosphere and by generating sufficient waste byproducts.
These people ARE the problem.
Religion allows the political problems to exist because philosophically people view existence and reality in a distorted fairy tale manner.
What I'm trying to say is that they're not like this because they're religious. It's very very likely they're religious because they're like this.
I'm not convinced on the cause and effect here. I've met plenty of people who are science deniers, or at least those that vastly misunderstand science, and/or believe in this ridiculous nonsense that are not religious. Those people exist.
My strong opinion here is that people aren't this dumb because they're religious. They're religious because they're this dumb. The implication that religion is the root of the problem precludes the possibility that someone is a flat-earth/climate-denier/science-denier, without first believing in religion.... So every last one of those people must be religious.
By turning it around as I have, you can have people who are climate/science deniers, separate from their religion.
The side effect of this is that it places personal responsibility on those that would deny science (it's to tiring to type out all the denials these people have so I'm summarizing to just science from here on out). It's their own idiocy that causes them to deny science. That idiocy may also lead them to religion, but they're an idiot first. They weren't conditioned to be an idiot through indoctrination. By pinning everything on religious types, it implies they're indoctrinated by religion to deny science, which, that kind of indoctrination exists, but IMO, it's not the primary reason why people become science deniers.
They have a foundation of (or lack thereof) knowledge which may or may not lead them to religion, science (or the denial of it), or belief in any number of things that are wildly untrue.
IMO, these kinds of people are the kind that don't want to ask the hard questions, or strain their brain trying to make moral or ethical choices for themselves. They desire a voice, whether divine or otherwise, to essentially tell them what to think. They want the answers to the questions, without doing any work to derive what those answers might be, or put in the effort to figure out which of their derived potential answers may be correct. They lack the ability, motivation, or desire, to put in any mental effort with regards to the big issues.
Religion gives them a warm, soft, comforting blanket of answers to questions they couldn't even be bothered to think of. So many people who lack the intellectual capacity for critical thought, flock to it in droves. Same with most of the pseudo science bullshit conspiracy theories. Same with just about every consumer crap you can think of. A good example of this in consumerism is with Apple. I don't want to throw shade at Apple users, there's plenty of very smart people using apple products, but their marketing for the masses was on point. "It just works". And for the most part, they've dummy-proofed the shit out of everything they make. So much so that a lot of the remotely advanced, or customization options of most of what they do, is hidden behind layers of bullshit dialogs, or squirreled away in some obscure settings menu most people don't even know exists. They've used the same design language for years in their UI across all platforms, so anyone who learns it once, can use it across all platforms and devices. Yes, they've made improvements, mostly adding to the experience in a way that's mostly transparent to the overall design language.
Apple treats their primary customer base like toddlers. Giving them more of the same but better (somehow). There's a simple set of rules to follow that have been the same, at least in concept, since the 80's. 40 years of regurgitation of the same design, over, and over, again. Standardization to the point of being nauseating.
All of this shit from Apple is design to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you know enough, you can get pretty advanced with it, but if you're intellectually stunted, you don't need to learn anything new to keep up with the latest and greatest products.
This is the kind of person that we're talking about. They want answers given to them without effort. They want to have others think for them. So when climate deniers make the case that they don't need to do anything differently, and all this science/climate doomerism is just FUD, they climb aboard, because doing the bad thing that they already know how to do, and change nothing, and being given permission to act like a complete fuckwad to the environment by some dickhead looking to make money, is a good enough reason for them to change nothing. Vehicles require gasoline. The furnace runs on fossil fuels, not any of this fancy heat pump bullshit (actually really great technology, but they think it's BS). Plastics make their lives easier and are easily recycled (ha. No), etc.... they want to maintain the status quo, and not think about all the horrible damage they've quite clearly and obviously caused.
There are many stupid people who realize they are stupid and look to the intelligent for answers.
Stupidity is not a flaw in and of itself.
The problem is religion enables people to easily have these moronic beliefs that make no sense and still fit in and be normal, and puts them in a position in which they are obliged to defend this stupidity as non-stupid to show loyalty to the sky god.
And although we can agree that Apple is terrible in every way, and that all Apple users have similar intellectual abilities to that of a flat-earther praising the sky god, that doesn't negate that religion is the cause of all problems in society and if all the religious proselytizers and preachers were put on a large boat that headed to Antarctica that mysterious "sank" just before making landfall, literally every problem in the world would be solved.