The fall of the Tory party

I don't have much idea what the best way to go about it is, but I'd have thought finding a few like-minded folks to bounce ideas around with would be a start.

I've pondered these issues pretty heavily for a few decades now, and I think maybe I have the bare bones of a plan to reach that ventilation shaft in the death star - use the system against itself.

Big corporations get to push governments around, right? So politics is a dead end. Save the world, paradoxically, with a corporation. It's a cell, with a protective membrane of lawyers and accountants, and inside, once it's grown to a certain size, you can do basically whatever the fuck you want.

So you dedicated the corporation to raising all its members up Maslow's hierarchy - maximising their potential. Via the flattest possible organisation, where nobody's voice is unduly ignored. Consider Ramanujan - dude was an epic mathematical genius, but only just escaped obscurity in a little Indian village. How much more latent potential goes untapped? We've never bothered to find out.

Get a bunch of hackers together and task them with devising a phone OS which can be flashed on a variety of old phones, to operate as the foundation of a society which eschews the extremely problematic KPI of money, able to bypass the cellular network and operate peer to peer - a fractal software echo of the whole concept. Don't ask permission to create a future worth living in, seize the means of its production.

If there's a future, the currency will be kudos, anyone and everyone a journalist creating the records to judge each other's contributions, and everyone will be the government.

Either we roll up or sleeves and start implementing some fucking clues, or just keep lying in the middle of the road and wait for the hit.

But do you think the way you're going about this is helping your cause?

Finding some like-minded people to bounce around ideas is great, but that's not what you're doing i'm afraid.

sadly, this takes some serious effort in real life, not on a couple of politics threads on the internet

Yeah, well, obviously - but how does it start? Everything we ever achieved as a species, we did it by cooperating. Which begins with communication.

Have you ever actually changed someone’s opinion? I’m not sure I ever have. This shit takes decades, and I’m sorry, it just does.

My theory regarding that aspect is that on the whole, neurodivergent folks are the ones to make it happen. We tend to click, and arguments are more likely to be hair-splitting, interesting, productive ones rather than screaming abuse over an unbridgeable void. Caring more about facts and words than status and nonverbal cues goes a long way.

So changing opinions isn't really the immediate goal - gather a bunch of like-minded peeps who tend to say hell yeah to each other, and get on with hammering out a bunch of details necessary to get the ball rolling. When it starts snowballing, folks on the edge of the spectrum get interested, and their skillsets can be utilised to bust out the semiotic bullshit necessary to attract the normies - ie marketing.

Finding some like-minded people to bounce around ideas is great, but that's not what you're doing i'm afraid.

Thanks for the unhelpful condescension. Anyway, I've got parenting to do

I wasn't trying to be condescending at all. It's likely that I'm neurodivergent too but you're not exactly bringing me along for the ride.

I'm not trying to sell you a monorail, mate. I'm just some random dude who's fed up with us all being so stupid. If you've got any better ideas, I'm all ears.

Delusional millenarianism

I feel like this viewpoint could use further debunking.

Anyone who's interested enough in science and psychology will have come across the notion that evolution has failed to equip us with much in the way of intuition for exponential phenomena; a large part of the scientific mindset is an abiding scepticism towards common-sense intuition, given how riddled our reasoning machine is with glucose-saving hacks developed to suit a largely pre-agricultural context.

If your intuition is to be worth a damn, you need to literally steep yourself in counterintuitive facts, and second-guessing your first thought should be second nature. A simplistic reasoning process whereby you assume doomsaying has to be mistaken because it's self-evidently always been mistaken in the past, displays motivated reasoning to my eye; it's cherry-picking.

On one hand, as snotty put it, a stopped Nostradamus is right twice a... millennium? Ie, sooner or later the end will come, without respect to the perspicacity of any contemporary doomsayers.

On the other though, is the fact we're sitting on the near-vertical slope of so many exponential curves. So many ecosystems wiped out in my lifetime. So many crucial parameters, drastically plummeting into a state of alarming decay. But hey, there's a cognitive bias or six helping me imagine that life will just continue on as before, despite the reality that we're living through the most dramatic era of compressed change the planet has ever seen, and that I have actually witnessed vast changes in our way of life, and only recently saw the house of cards given a serious poke by covid. Hard to ignore the fashion for ever more sheer emperor's clothing, though...

But never mind, she'll be right

Corporations are obliged to make profit for their shareholders, so they can't do whatever they want.

Perhaps find a framework on a local scale that brings about positive change in your local community then find a way to scale that? It's far easier to solve lots of small problems, you can only focus on one thing at a time, etc.

Excellent and lively discussion, Kimmo and Slippers. You are both correct, sadly, in affirming that argument and discussion never changed anyone's mind. Only lived experience can do this. Perhaps this will start to happen soon, on a practical level with the failure of both political parties. The Tories f***ed up, no
doubt Labour will follow. Ridding ourselves of these two zombie parties may prove to be a start.

despite the reality that we're living through the most dramatic era of compressed change the planet has ever seen,

The dinosaurs might want to have a word about that.

Mate, no-one is in disagreement about the wider point that we're fucked if things plough on the way they are but there's two options, we make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves, get wiped out and ecosystems recover eventually (win for the planet) or we (through a combination of technology and social changes) find a way back from the brink.

Discussion is good but what do you expect to achieve by just screaming 'we're all doomed!'? Live a good live, try to enact change at a local level, push for parties/politicians that what to enact change, protest, raise your child to be a better person than you are, keep taking about change, but don't rant at people like you've been up all night on booze and whizz.

The sun will engulf the planet in a big firey death eventually anyway right?

Too many words, I probably missed many of them.
But joining and encouraging people to join any of the many existing organisations may be more productive than trying to magic a new movement from a cycle forum - XR, JSO, transition projects. Join the biggest ones related to your line of work - change your sector. Lobbying policymakers or changing the minds of those who influence them is often the most effective route to change. Hell, writing to your MP. Hands-on local neighbourhood projects or global disruption - whatever floats your boat. Do it.

Is it working? Not really. Not many great successes to be seen. But unless you want to just give in to fatalism, taking action means persevering in the face of continual failure. At least this is what came to mind last week at a "5th birthday" of a climate action group, where the person speaking was like "look at all these things we've done - great success! Celebrate!" and I just thought - if we succeeded, we wouldn't need to exist. These are not successes.

Getting people engaged, and giving them a space where they can feel they're contributing and not just lost, isn't a small thing. Modern life tends to put people in a context where they feel lost and powerless, which is not a context where they're the best people they could be. Enabling them to work together constructively isn't trivial.

if we succeeded, we wouldn't need to exist.

You're needlessly dooming yourself to despair if that becomes your outlook. Even a healthy society would be one that requires regular engagement and action. New challenges arise, existing ones turn out to be more complicated than you thought. Society is a thing people create and participate in.

I think attempting to use few words misrepresents me. I'm all about making space for collective action. I'm all about not dooming to despair. But the celebration aspect has always irritated me. I think many activists give up when they don't see short term "success" and I guess my point in this is you have to move beyond that and keep going. But for me (I realise this is personal) branding things as successes when they are not is not helpful and not motivating.

And, I'm not taking offence, but your second half comes across quite patronising.

In fact my post was an encouragement to get engaged, join groups, find your space for action. Wasn't it? Mainly aimed at @Kimmo but anyone else who feels like they have no agency in the way things are going, or looking for a way to get involved.

Perhaps second paragraph was redundant, was intended to answer the obvious pushback that these groups don't work.

but your second half comes across quite patronising.

Wasn't meant that way, sorry if it came across like that, no offence taken here either.

This isn't strictly true.

The Companies Act 2006 section 172 covers the "Duty to promote the success of the company".

(Even in the US, it isn't true. There's a good Stackexchange answer on this that in have bookmarked somewhere.)

Making money is not mentioned.Part (d), however, describes a duty to consider " the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment."

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Corporations are obliged to make profit for their shareholders, so they can't do whatever they want.

That's for publically-listed companies. A co-op answers to its members.

the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other

We're embedded in a hierarchical structure mostly devoted to preserving the hierarchy, so like good livestock we tend to be convinced that very little agency is available to us. Which is true enough, if you accept these arbitrary limitations.

But clever folks have shown us time and again that it's possible to hack the matrix and make a dent in the wall instead of your head. That with sufficient nous and audacity, what was once considered impossible can be made today's reality.

Well, the challenges facing us demand extreme cleverness and audacity - nothing else will cut it. When the system is the problem, you can't solve the problem working within it, but it's all-pervasive... so we make a bubble. A snowflake's chance in hell is better than no chance. And when you think about it, your very existence is so incredibly unlikely it's gob-smacking.

So who's to say whether you can make a difference or not? Has anyone in history ever been in a better position to knock it over? Who determines your ethical responsibilities to all future generations?

Is it ridiculously egotistical to imagine you could matter that much, or is it a vast crime to deny some extant possibility of it? I don't know the answer to that.

But I'd rather be ridiculous than turn my back on a chance to get out of this dark timeline.

Discussion is good but what do you expect to achieve by just screaming 'we're all doomed!'? Live a good live, try to enact change at a local level, push for parties/politicians that what to enact change, protest, raise your child to be a better person than you are, keep taking about change

Not sure if I expect to achieve it, but the intent is to make the point that such advice as you're offering there is an order of magnitude less drastic than the situation demands. The stakes and urgency are vast, so maybe we should be trying to think a bit further outside the box.

Is it ridiculously egotistical to imagine you could matter that much, or is it a vast crime to deny some extant possibility of it? I don't know the answer to that.

It is hard to get the platform but not impossible. Even those who manage later get lost swimming against the tide as the news cycle moves on.

E.g.

Q: What's Greta Thunberg upto these days?

A: Probably some 'good'* stuff in the cause but the media has moved on so we the people don't get to hear about it unless we go seek it or are lucky with our algorithm.

'* anti war / climate activism has large crossover. I appreciate the Palestinian situation is a very emotive one on all sides.

Be more Luthen.

https://youtu.be/-3RCme2zZRY

But then you still need a specific set of circumstances for people to rise-up seriously.

https://youtu.be/TaKrm5txGCQ

There are real world examples too across history.

I don't want a platform as such; I want the search for a better way to have a platform, in the IT sense among others.

search for a better way to have a platform, in the IT sense among others.

If only Greta had thought to buy Twitter.

I appreciate I have confused 'mattering' with being high profile.

We will never matter, in that sense. The world is too imbalanced.