ormr

Well that’s not the type of emotional argument that I was referring to lol. I don’t know why you would think I’m talking about myself. I don’t own a car.

I’m just trying to understand others that don’t live like me in order to find the necessary compromises. Because that’s what needs to happen in a democracy.

I understand that you’re desperate but not much good will come out of that emotion. It’s not that people are evil and care about nothing and that this is the reason why they don’t act in a meaningful way. This line of thinking is just plain wrong for the vast majority of the population. Yes, people are also lazy but they also have many many everyday problems and can’t make changing their lifestyle right here right now their top priority. Yes we have to fight for changes, in the media, on the policy level and also make the good alternatives a good deal to choose. But that won’t happen with accusations and self-righteousness, I’m sorry.

You can try to teach people what a good consumption decision is w.r.t. global change. But it won’t work in 99% of cases. People are often emotionally attached to their way of living and many have tied a part of their identity to it.

I don’t care about what counts as excuses because there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. What I care about first and foremost is reducing GHG emissions effectively, within the system that we’re currently living in. And for everything else you have to offer people real alternatives if you want them to change their behaviour. And changing that behaviour will not come true by only making factual arguments but by understanding people’s emotions and identities and accounting for those in your argument. It’s clear that people in rural communities (and a large share of the population lives there) will drive cars for many years to come and these cars have to be EVs.

Thanks for telling me again. Very helpful but besides the point.

Well it’s baffling to me to have “pollution” as the first point of that list. It’s just beyond my comprehension how one could state that a non-combustion car doesn’t help with pollution problems. Yes alright, there’s still microplastics… But hey, please visit a city like Beijing and tell me again that EVs don’t combat pollution on a massive scale.

It’s nice to be critical and yes, cars are shit for our society. Nevertheless our society has been built around them and people will drive cars. They might do so less in 50 years but right here right now with the way society is organised EVs do definitely play an important part in reducing emissions. Change takes time. And people like the ones protesting against the Gigafactory prefer to ignore this context. To me this line of thinking is naive to say the least and can also be seen as self-righteous and delusional by those for whom no alternative is available now. Lecturing people about their lifestyle is not going to change anything.

I hate that people try to lecture others on how bad the last pandemic was handled but they haven’t even understood this very basic and intuitive property of infectious diseases.

To me it’s just ridiculous to somehow speak for “rationality”, “facts” or “the science”, only to proceed to ignore basic facts and evidence and resort to fearmongering instead.

Tongue brushing is underrated.

Humans have a history of violence as well as altruism. And with an increasing degree of societal complexity, humans also have a consistent record of violence reduction. See e.g. “The better angels of our nature” (Pinker, 2011).

Painting humans as intrinsically violent is not backed by evidence.

We should never forget that it’s not an evil country or evil people, but evil or mad leadership.