Protestation

And it's not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn't capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or "communist", but that definitely wasn't capitalism) regime.

It's definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.

Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?

For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.

Some people just don't get nuances.

You are still shifting the blame away from capitalism. If we acknowledge capitalism as the problem, then we can change things. If we claim humans are inherently the problem, then it seems pointless to improve.

Thank you for putting it well, I had similar thought that I wanted to express but I can never write it so coherently.

so you're just saying we should all kill ourselves? yeah that sounds great, i assume you're willing to go first since you believe it so strongly?

I for one don't want me or others to die, and so i don't go around saying poorly thought-through things on the internet.

There's a bit of a fundamental difference between capitalism and other systems. Mercantilism sucked but conquistadors got some level of pushback for their atrocities. The Spanish crown fought a war over illegal slavery and the vast majority of conquistadors died poor or in obscurity.

Modern capitalism has no such brakes. Naked avarice is the mathematically correct play, exponentially growing the power of an individual at the expense of literally everyone else.

It's not likely that other economic systems could result in this level of global instability and ecological collapse. A king used to have some incentive to keep his society functioning; his personal power was tied to the power his kingdom could project, not his personal wealth. Our modern overlords have no problem destroying their country or environment, their wealth is fungible and can be taken wherever they want.

Every system finds ways to shift the blame. What they need are folks who drink the cool aide. Currently it‘s capitalism.

That doesn't mean capitalism isn't any less cruel

In fact it allows for blind institutional cruelty that no one has to take responsibility for.

In a very real way, more people have died from capitalism than ever suffered at the hands of the inqisition

But go ahead and keep trying to handwave the horrors of capitalism

When I said "humans are the virus," I think people heard "so we should kill the people I don't like," and missed the part where I don't like all humans.

I don't say it anymore, because I don't want to be overlapped with fascists who apparently say the same thing.

I'm sure the rhetoric stems from propaganda, I won't disagree there. But I don't think that trying to logic the analogy itself is the way to outline the problem with it.

Calling humans a 'virus' may not mean an extermination is the intention of the person regurgitating it. You can control a virus instead of just exterminating it, for example. It's just a term people are familiar with that they associate with abusing resources and multiplying beyond a sustainable level, thus creating a toxic environment around them.

A better question is “when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?”

I don't propose to exterminate anyone. I think it's inevitable that the human virus will eventually kill its host.

Can I achieve something by exterminating myself? It should do something, right?

Maybe not having to live in depressing world itself would be a great achievement.

It's easy, mulch all the sociopaths. Problem solved

Ah, so just exterminate the correct people. Got it.

We can regulate greedy dick behaviour

Yes we can, via laws & regulation (which are also laws). You have no clue about what unrestricted greed does to people especially, on the recieving end

capitalism or any other form of government

But capitalism isn't a form of government tho.
\ Nor is communism of even feudalism.

Our entire schtick is co operation, it's literally why we're the dominant life form

There are human societies were greed is not accepted.

Your generalization is false

The majority of humanity are not greedy or obsessed with profit

The problem is that the few ridiculously greedy sociopaths that do arise per-capita are just so FUCKDAMN good at amassing power and wealth that we assume it's the natural lot of all people

So we just test and dispose of sociopaths at birth, problem solved. We already have the tests for it.

Don't look at me like that

You're putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism uses the threat of poverty and the profit motive to condition humans into being greedy dicks.

I feel like you can't blame the corpos 100% and then proceed to do nothing to help the environment. Like I get that capitalism and unnecessary waste driven by it are by and large the problem, but it feels like people just use that as an excuse to put in zero effort personally and continue to live their lifestyle of overconsumption. It's very defeatist imo.

"Humans are the virus" is related to the racist "overpopulation" myth which leads straight to eugenics. Sure, many words are overused, but "political ideology that combines environmentalism with fascist principles, often advocating for authoritarian measures to address ecological issues" is a bad thing.

humans also invented socialism, communism, fascism, monarchy, democracy so on and so fourth.

like, you can't just take the worst and be like "you see this is why we need to get rid of them!". its literally the point of the post. thats what is going on right now in the US with literally any person below the top square on the family guy race card. Would you say just because less than 1% of immigrants that are in the US have committed violent crimes, that all of them are violent criminals? If you do, I have bad news for you.

Blaming individuals is ok of course, but after we’re done we should look what situation gave their lacking personalities power to have any individual impact upon our society. And change that. The blaming of actors is one thing, but there are shitty scripts, too, you know?

We should blame religion, patriarchy, racism and capitalism.

blame is a nearly useless concept

How about we start fixing the problems instead of pointing fingers

if the structure of society is set up in such a way that practically every action I need to take to keep myself fed and sheltered ultimately contributes to climate change, then it's fucking inane to say it is the fault of individuals being stupid.

There are games that don’t cause brain damage in students and there is American Football.

What progress do you get by blaming humanity instead?

Capitalism is slavery with PR and programming to convince us to be helpless to change anything for the better and to look at various distractions instead of the reality.

I am not just talking about first-world exploitation, I am talking about literal slavery and child slavery, which our economies rely on — which we unknowingly rely on for many of our goods.

If you factor in 40% (or more) of US agricultural workers being undocumented immigrants, you don't really have to look hard to see that slavery is literally everywhere. It may not be the chattel slavery of past, but it's still modern slavery.

Almost all employment revolves around exploitation, hard hours, asking you to give more than you have for the sake of the business, and so forth, all the while many participating individuals are unable to afford health care or housing. I still liken that dynamic to be modern slavery, even if the individuals reside in the first-world.

We can rise above this, but we must identify what is blocking or stagnating progress to be able to change — such as accepting the reality at hand instead of turning our gaze away.

Doesn't mean we have to play the blame game or reduce nuanced issues down to word-play and labels. A new system is likely the best solution.

Yep, those are all capitalist states.

Gotta hand it to China. They're a few years away from being coal free. A decade at most if they stay on course.

There are some symbiotic bacteria, but I'm unaware of any beneficial viruses. Their entire nature is to hijack cells to replicate themselves, typically resulting in the eventual death of the host cell.

There actually is no way to change this. We can't do anything about it because we're just too stupid. People create systems of violence, and there's just nothing that can be done to help that because there is no way to change that. No sir, no way at all. It's pointless to even try.

We are all sinners filled with sin so anything that we do is bad. There is no hope. Your grandmother is a virus actually.

Yeah I know what you mean man. I gave a bunch of children some knives and the one with the biggest knife coerced the others into hurting a bunch of people. They still would have found a way to do that without knives! Don't you know that rocks exist?? Them having knives is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the outcome!

The lack of empathy and true understanding of reverence is the issue.

People do not respect the meat that befalls their plate, the bacteria that ferments their beers, the trees that warms their homes.

Capitalism has two routes, horde through meekness or horde through exploitation. When you horde through meekness, any worth is solely yours - you submit and embrace this moment of life wholely separate from you. You cannot control the world.

Humans are a virus, because we reach for the stars as we eviscerate our host. Lest we learn compassion and empathy, we will consume this earth. The flooding isn't biblical this time, it's predicted by science as man decays.

except eco-fascism isn’t "fascism but we save the planet! :D" it’s "fascism but to justify the genocide of brown people we add a bit of green sprinkles on the white supremacist rhetoric"

But also we could have neither, fascism isn't a fatality

Lizard people, obviously

If I'm not mistaken, Marx describes capital as "dead labour". So, to answer your question: who made capitalism? Vampires, zombies, liches. The undead.

It was a stop on our journey. Historians say it was a better stop than the ones before. But it doesn’t have to be our last one!

Ah yes, the only two systems. Capitalism and communism. There is nothing else or any form of nuance out there.

Of course, thanks for admitting it

Easter Island comes to mind. They showed up, took every tree on the island, then the vegetation went away and the island had nothing left to give.

I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.

Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.

But the current crisis wasn't, and isn't, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.

Our distant ancestors weren't some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.

Capitalism wasn't even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn't always in place.

The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it's a progression that was damn near inevitable.

I just don't buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there's nothing saying it wouldn't have been worse either. It's a big game of what if, and there's no current way to test technological progression theories. We can't just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.

Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn't exactly reject it all.

The good old slavery and crusade days.

It's clear you didn't understand the meme because your reply is almost a non-sequitur. The comic is saying phrases like "human are the virus" fail to understand a lot of damage done by humanity was incited, sustained, and furthered by capitalism. Those phrases are pushed for "eco-fascist rhetoric" about controlling or even eliminating humanity when ecological/societal damage could be remediated by swapping to an economic system that nutures less destructive and more pro-social tendencies.

I don't know where you got the sense that the comic was telling you that fascists were okay. Honestly, I don't even know what your first paragraph is talking about.