If democracy is running out anyway, I wouldnt mind living under a dictatorship whose aims were militant arrestation of climate change. That really seems like the only way this is going to happen at this point.
Force me to go solar, own only electric cars, keep my thermostat at 68F, plant trees, and work from home. As long as it’s applied to everyone fairly from the corporations down, I will be a loyal peon.
ETA: This was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and unserious, but was not received as such. The discussion, apology, and subsequent understanding was deleted by admins as off-topic, so I’m left with no other recourse than to explain here in an edit.
ETA2: My failed attempt at levity and the ensuing aftermath has been subsequently branched and reconstituted as its own thread memorializing my shame, here. Don’t forget to visit the gift shop.
No thanks. We as a society can phase out fossil fuels, phase out ice cars, mandate maximum thermostat settings, etc. without a dictatorship. Give someone those kind of powers and they always start deciding not just who’s a peon but who deserves to exist at all.
I get the criticism and acknowledge that tongue-in-cheek doesn’t translate well here. I thought the idea of a dictatorship telling me how to set my thermostat and making me work from home in my pajamas was silly, but it went over like a lead balloon - my bad.
But please don’t take my words out of context to invent new ways to vilify me. The rest of that sentence was “…whose aims were militant arrestation of climate change.” So, no, I wouldn’t want to live in China where they’re building coal-fired plants because, even in my poorly-conceived thought experiment, that’s the opposite of arresting climate change.
Nor would I really want to actually live in a dictatorship, just for the record. Mea culpa already.
It also doesn’t translate well in the larger world where, as I noted above, eco-fascism is seen by an increasing number of people (on both the right and left) as a serious solution to the climate emergency and where existing laws mandating draw-downs of coal power and internal combustion vehicles and even planting more trees are seen as signs of an impending dictatorship by the Know-Nothing 27%.
As a gay Jew with family who died in the Holocaust, I can pretty much guarantee that my Mel Brooks-style conceptualization (at least in my head), however inept or ignorant, wasn’t intended to actually imply white supremacy, antisemitism, or anything otherwise seriously fascistic.
I did not know of him. Thanks for posting, I’ll add some of this to my (long!) to-read list. Sometimes being flippant and jokey gets something of value in return.
