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I preach to the choir too much.
This is for people who aren’t already onboard.
Now, most humans when they find something like this, they’ll find one sentence that they see as flawed and then dismiss the whole thing.
There are nuances to everything. This is just super broad strokes.
Capitalism’s two biggest problems are exploitation and externalities.
Capitalist proponents argue that exploitation is a good thing. Aspirational. It’s a well-known political cleavage.
I’m not a fan. But it’s a well-discussed problem—I’ve talked about it in the past and will in the future.
A more urgent issue is externalities. When capitalism determines the price for a transaction, it doesn’t normally account for things external to that transaction, such as pollution or monopolies. This is a huge problem and even Friedrich Hayek agrees that it is, and that we need regulation.
(If it's any consolation, a lot of proposals from the left also fail to address the externalities issue. If I give you a can of gas for free it's still bad if you burn it.)
Even small changes would be better than letting it run amok as it is. If capitalism destroys the planet, as it is looking to be doing, that’s pretty damn strong evidence for how it was the worst system ever tried.
“But, Sandra, there are things we can’t change since personal freedom is an untouchable inviolable principle”. Sure. Good. OK.
We do need to operate within a framework of reality, that’s true.
But sometimes we get tricked into accepting a part of it as if it were just “facts of life” when it isn’t, when things could be different. For example, imagine a town were people shoot each other to death for the smallest slight. It sucks and people are terrified and don’t wanna die and when you bring up suggestions to change it, I go “But it’s our legal right to do it! It’s been that way all my life!”
That’s how our brain works. We see the system we’re in as if it were as real as grass and earth and sky. The system is a prerequisite for all our other thoughts. A blue pill, as you’re so fond of calling it.
Sometimes this feels like such a radical thought, but maybe my right to swing my fist should end where your nose begins.
Skeptical Science is gonna be much better at addressing climate myths than I am, but, let me add something.
Climate myths appeal to those who have benefitted from them; who have built their wealth on reckless unaccounted-for externalities.
It’s in their interest to keep on plundering the Earth.
We all think there’s too much talk of race and pronouns and such, that it’s a complete waste of time while the Earth is burning. We all wish people would just accept the obvious and then move on with their lives.
But. Let’s be explicit about what that “obvious” thing is:
Anti-woke is worse than woke, anti-SJW is worse than SJW. Become cool with diversity and stop wasting our time.
The origin of these wedge issues, this “culture war”, is that right wing politicians drummed them up to scare workers into voting for rich-gets-richer politics. That has been their strategy for decades. They wanna fool you into hating each other.
We have the biggest wealth gaps in history where the top two richest US citizens own as much as the 133000000 poorest combined, and they’re trying to make the case that gay marriage is the problem.🤦🏻‍♀️