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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith. A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, villanizing is counterproductive.

I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people.

There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been able to take advantage of extraction yet, etc. But it's not like I'm interrupting that conversation to point this out here.

This is straightforwardly admiring the artifacts of a destructive practice and preemptively shaming & dismissing people who would find that distasteful.

A lathe can turn precise bores. Those can be used to make guns, which can be used to kill people. From my perspective, the analogy is you're anti-gun violence, but going after the people who admire the precision of the metalworking tools.

If you want to move away from fossil fuels, yes that's great. I'm with you. You're going to want the people with an appreciation for this kind of engineering on your side, as it will be necessary for transitioning any advanced economy.

If the problem is as bad as we all seem to agree it is, maybe we should cooperate to solve it instead of playing king of the hill for the moral high ground.

Applying this metaphor to this case, you're admiring the weapon, not the tool that made the weapon.

It's very presumptuous for you to be telling me what _I_ admire. I get to make that choice.

I admire feats of engineering. I've toured facilities that pump carbon out of the ground, I've toured facilities that capture carbon and pump it into the ground. They're both impressive in their own right, and it's the same skillsets and technologies required to build both.

I didn't pick the analogy here friend.

lathe : gun :: _____ : oil drilling platform, you put your own words in there if you want.

Regardless I'm within my own rights to tell you that what you admire is bad and your admiration of it is obscene.

I did pick my own words. "Feats of engineering". You are well withing your rights to tell me whatever you want sure, I'm also within mine to tell you what your saying doesn't make sense.

Appreciating the field of engineering isn't "bad" or "obscene" just because some instances of engineering lead to real negative consequences. That's a descent into the exact "society has parts that are bad, yet you participate" logic you were originally clowning on.

Great switch to "for profit" from the general "

You do realize that petroleum is not just for fuel but plays a major part in every part of our lives?

E.g. fertilizers. This kind of zero-order thinking without thinking of higher-order effects is what lead to this:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Real life is not Captain Planet (the cartoon) where everything is as binary as you point out.

The machinery looks the same regardless of the economic system. (I suppose a Soviet oil rig might have looked a little different, but basically the same thing)

Your argument equally applies to people, since we collectively cause all of the environmental problems you mention.

Are you consistent? Do you admire people? Do you find it distastful if others do?

It really is not. There’s a difference in seeking improvement in a system in which you participate and the current mainstream nihilism that demonizes our past achievements and seeks its destruction.

This puts it in a way I was struggling to do so. The "we are just saying we should improve society somewhat" counterclaim is disingenuous because the "we should improve society somewhat" is usually expressed in criticism and not solutions, and when solutions are suggested they are pretty vapid and full of wishful thinking.

On an even more fundamentally ridiculous level too. The people being (Alanis Morissette) "ironic" here have absolutely no choice in the matter of literally being born.

For those unfamiliar it's this comic that was simplified to the final panel [0]. It's a great send up of a whole arm of bad faith debate tactics that tries to invalidate any criticism of topic X because the person benefits from it.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Water is very destructive and yet, where would be be without it. Same goes for oil and gas.

Water isn't oil though, the former is biologically necessary and the latter is socially necessary. It also wasn't really what I'm talking about but I'll bite none the less.

I'm not really saying we get rid of it fully but we don't need anywhere near the oil and gas industry we have. About 67% [0] of extracted oil used in the US goes into the transportation sector in one form or another and an additional 6% goes into power generation.

We could eliminate a lot of that consumption through building things like nuclear plants and various green energy sources and by reducing the reliance on cars in the US. Unfortunately that latter option is going to be fighting against decades of culture and choices built into our cities, but we could also shift away from gas cars as well and it fortunately seems like we are at least headed that way though I'm betting we'll encounter a plateau in electric car adoption well before they outnumber gas vehicles.

Even if we only shifted most consumer vehicles over to some gas alternative we could probably eliminate at least a third of all oil products consumed in the US. More if electric trucks pan out though that's a trickier proposition just due to how they're used. Those two changes don't even really require large changes to how we operate our world today just shifting the energy demand away from fossil fuel onto electric.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

Oil is now biologically necessary for this population to survive: the Haber-Bosch process.

You skipped the whole bit of my comment where I talked about the percentages that go into industrial uses vs transportation I guess? Only 27% of the oil extracted goes into the entire industrial use of oil.

No, I don't think you quite understand the implication. Something like 60% of the bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, including that in your human body, is created industrially via the haber-bosch process. Over half of all human beings and land biomass would be dead without it. Human beings and this industrial process produce more bioavailable nitrogen than all the nitrogen fixing microbes in the world combined. This process is a very important part of the earth's biosphere now with human presence taken into account, bioavailable nitrogen production is the bottleneck to biomass production. It is probably our only viable tool to actually reduce carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.

I don’t think you understand the comic or you overlooked the thread above. It’s ironic because calling something as basic as “machinery” inherently evil has an inherently evil implication, which is that 95% of the population would need to die.

This is nothing like “you participate, how curious”. This is “I’m against literally every piece of technology required to feed any non-negligible portion of the humans on earth”.

Funnily enough, your response fits exactly these two memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/201/090/208...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/222/974/b91...

Especially given the context of the thread, where your reply barely makes sense. There is a difference between criticizing extreme industrialism and rabid growth and villifying the very thing we all depend on. Which is totally different from just wanting to improve society somewhat ;)

But westerners are so detached from everything that goes into sustaining their lives so there is oddly little awareness of the massive industry needed since it is all outsource over seas. Makes it very easy to dislike it from far away, especially when memes can be used to rationalize away the hypocrisy and pretend the privilege they enjoy doesn't exist

(the meme basically amounts to "yes I'm privileged, but stop pointing it out! There's nothing I can do about my own privilege, I HAVE to own that iPhone too bad for the workers lol" and is the ultimate witty retort from privileged, usually white liberal people. Which is funny since those are the people who usually like to speak about privilege, but obviously not when they are called out on it themselves.)

No, not really though. Phones are not necessary for survival but food made more available and cheap is necessary.

Why yes, I do participate in society. Curious!

Why, yes, I do moralize every time I get the chance without offering true alternatives! Who cares if poor people suffer?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Are you asking me a question about this 'joke comic'?

I haven't heard of it, so you'll have to explain.

someone else posted it in this thread check it out https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Real, canonical, link: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Huh according to popularity metrics that site doesn't even rank in the top 200000 globally, and only in the 70000s for just the U.S.

If this was a top 1000 site I might get why there's an expectation to know about their 'joke comics', but when it's so obscure, I doubt even 1% of HN readers would know anything about this site.

It seems odd giraffe_lady would phrase it in that way.

Like many pieces of modern internet culture, this image has been detached from its real source and context, and propagated memetically through the various social media platforms.

It doesn't seem like the large majority of the HN audience would participate in this, so it's still a bit weird to assume other readers would know the reference.

The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media? I'm not sure what dividing line you're trying to draw here.

Communication is always in part a game of references. They are a form of compression of larger and more specific ideas, and of humor, which itself is a primary vector of communication.

I'm not sure what demographic I'd belong to, but I understood the reference just fine, and it seems like many of the other participants in the thread did too.

I'm sure you've got references that I'd miss completely, that you believe to be obvious.

> The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media?

For the spreading meme 'joke comics' portion, yes.

I highly doubt even a quarter of the reader-base would participate in this.

Its an extremely common meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Probably literally 1,000x as many people have seen that comic, as have ever visited the site it originated on. And that may be an underestimate.

I think it would be far more engaging and interesting to respond to the point being made rather than the noteworthyness of the source? I think we can maintain a critical distance to the force that allow us to live the way we do, and i do not believe this reduces us to mere hypocrites. The ability to admire and admonish these practices is deeply human!

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