The onerous burdens are put in place to foster discussions like this blog—ridiculing people for following the rules put in place by political losers, who seek to make people do ridiculous things so that their political opponents can be made the subject of ridicule.
The anti-climate movement is a political loser in Denmark for now, but it’s true that sensible and reasonable people will question the onerous burdens forced upon them, and seek to bring into power more of the very people who always secretly hated them.
Yes, splitting things up into very many bins is inefficient, and robots can do this better. Why is that effort not being pursued? Robots can also wash and recycle trash better, why isn’t that effort being pursued? Because the goal isn’t to solve problems, but to create burdens (and discourse) which result in justified pushback against those burdens, so that more authoritarian and less democratic policies can be implemented.
Robots are not a silver bullet for recycling. If anything, they impose stricter requirements on what you are required to do before recycling and what you can recycle. For example, you have to rinse food residues even more thoroughly to prevent them from contaminating paper and cardboard. And smaller pieces of recyclable materials often cannot be recycled, because it's not efficient to run the conveyor belts slowly enough to sort them.
I think an AI-enabled recycling solution is sorely needed, but you’re right that if there’s a worldwide culture of using less efficient fuel, then anything else one does is useless.
Climate change isn’t necessarily due to human activities, but is also partly caused by the natural changes of global climate conditions.
So my concern isn’t climate change or environmentalism (the only just action for a human is to kill themselves if they don’t want to harm the environment; note that I am not saying someone should do this, but taking anti-harm thinking to it’s logical conclusion, which is the insane bit).
My concern is energy efficiency. Nuclear has always been efficient and powerful, and we should have already found solutions for its issues. All the bad energy policies we continue to implement exist because technological disruption against inefficient industries is not allowed.
I think a more generous reading of the article is that he's saying religion satisfies a human need, and in the absence of formal religion, something else has arisen to fill that need. He's not saying washing trash is a religion, he's saying that, in this case, the thing which satisfies what religion once satisfied for people is climate anxiety, and that the behavior around that takes on some of the broad behavioral characteristics of religion.
That's a good point. Perhaps I was a bit too hard on it. I was reading it through the lens of the title, "We wash our trash to repent for killing God". But frequently titles are a bit more florid than the essay proper--to get people to read it.
Community for community's sake seems hard in late stage capitalism/developed economies. Something else beyond religion and war will be needed to bring people together, and the workplace alone is not it (based on the evidence).
Thanks for the links. Certainly, when I became an atheist, the hardest thing to come to grips with was the loss of community. There are lots of little communities--WOW guilds, school sports teams, etc. But there's nothing like a universal religion which everybody belongs to.
https://www.sundayassembly.org/ is the closest organized effort I've found, besides local community groups around volunteering, philanthropy, and hobbies/shared interests.
The onerous burdens are put in place to foster discussions like this blog—ridiculing people for following the rules put in place by political losers, who seek to make people do ridiculous things so that their political opponents can be made the subject of ridicule.
The anti-climate movement is a political loser in Denmark for now, but it’s true that sensible and reasonable people will question the onerous burdens forced upon them, and seek to bring into power more of the very people who always secretly hated them.
Yes, splitting things up into very many bins is inefficient, and robots can do this better. Why is that effort not being pursued? Robots can also wash and recycle trash better, why isn’t that effort being pursued? Because the goal isn’t to solve problems, but to create burdens (and discourse) which result in justified pushback against those burdens, so that more authoritarian and less democratic policies can be implemented.
Robots are not a silver bullet for recycling. If anything, they impose stricter requirements on what you are required to do before recycling and what you can recycle. For example, you have to rinse food residues even more thoroughly to prevent them from contaminating paper and cardboard. And smaller pieces of recyclable materials often cannot be recycled, because it's not efficient to run the conveyor belts slowly enough to sort them.
I think an AI-enabled recycling solution is sorely needed, but you’re right that if there’s a worldwide culture of using less efficient fuel, then anything else one does is useless.
Climate change isn’t necessarily due to human activities, but is also partly caused by the natural changes of global climate conditions.
So my concern isn’t climate change or environmentalism (the only just action for a human is to kill themselves if they don’t want to harm the environment; note that I am not saying someone should do this, but taking anti-harm thinking to it’s logical conclusion, which is the insane bit).
My concern is energy efficiency. Nuclear has always been efficient and powerful, and we should have already found solutions for its issues. All the bad energy policies we continue to implement exist because technological disruption against inefficient industries is not allowed.
Washing trash is not a religion. God is so dead that nobody even knows what a religion is anymore.
I think a more generous reading of the article is that he's saying religion satisfies a human need, and in the absence of formal religion, something else has arisen to fill that need. He's not saying washing trash is a religion, he's saying that, in this case, the thing which satisfies what religion once satisfied for people is climate anxiety, and that the behavior around that takes on some of the broad behavioral characteristics of religion.
That's a good point. Perhaps I was a bit too hard on it. I was reading it through the lens of the title, "We wash our trash to repent for killing God". But frequently titles are a bit more florid than the essay proper--to get people to read it.
Washing trash is more akin to a religious obligation than a religion itself.
Community for community's sake seems hard in late stage capitalism/developed economies. Something else beyond religion and war will be needed to bring people together, and the workplace alone is not it (based on the evidence).
https://web.archive.org/web/20250315160759/https://fcsinterv...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250119135738/https://www.hhs.g...
Thanks for the links. Certainly, when I became an atheist, the hardest thing to come to grips with was the loss of community. There are lots of little communities--WOW guilds, school sports teams, etc. But there's nothing like a universal religion which everybody belongs to.
https://www.sundayassembly.org/ is the closest organized effort I've found, besides local community groups around volunteering, philanthropy, and hobbies/shared interests.