I can’t hear this degrowth strawman anymore. There are probably 20 people complaining about people wanting degrowth for everyone who actually advocates for that. It’s not like every politician in Europe is advocating for that.
Take any moderately educated Zillenial and ask them what they feel passionately about.
People are feeling more and more alienated from large scale projects of humanity. They have also given up on religion itself. What remains is a facade of religion where degrowth and Palestine take act as Pseudo Religion.
Here in Germany I see stickers and Graffiti all the time.
“Fuck the big Tech”
“Fuck big oil”
“ChatGPT bad”
These are the kind of flyers I see. Of course I’m leaving out the Palestine stuff here.
There are close to Zero educated people excited about the idea of growth. Ask them and they would tell you they’d rather have all capitalists done away with return to a past when we were all peaceful and not “destroying the planet”.
Obviously I’m not claiming degrowth is majority. I’m claiming that at least within my bubble, zero people are excited about the potential of growth. And non trivial number of people want to kill growth.
Bringing up Palestine in this discussion is definitely a choice. Relating them as you have is special.
The amount of public figures advocating degrowth is low and declining. And I follow a lot of climate voices.
Everywhere you go you see people’s homes hoisting Palestine flags. You see it in restaurants. Cafes. You see graffiti and flyers.
It is definitely not normal levels of interest. It is religious levels of interest. I’m not saying it’s wrong however.
The only other event that brings this much passion is maybe Kings Day or Pride Parade. Neither come close
Here in Germany, not a single person I know is excited about the idea of growth. And a lot of people, even in tech are disgusted by generative AI.
As a Dutchman, what do you think is the sentiment?
Here’s a pic a mate from uni sent me (probably from Den Haag) https://imgur.com/a/HlTdw4P
> The duck says: QUACK ChatGPT into the trash bin.
This would be considered ridiculous to even protest about in third world countries like Syria/Iraq.
I think some people are fed up with growth because it seems that growth will not bring the average person so much anymore. It'll definitely bring more and longer extreme heat in the future though. Are you excited about that?
Here the usage of GenAI has already been adopted by so many people. I see the ChatGPT app all around me. I work in an office and all my colleagues use it. I also see a lot of people skeptical about it. Reasons to be skeptical about it are readily available online. So is it weird that some people hold that position to you?
I'm indeed sure that people in third word countries are focused on basic human needs instead of protesting ChatGPT. Seems obvious. Why mention it?
https://www.wetenschappelijkbureaugroenlinks.nl/artikelen/gr...
They also advice Post Growth which is degrowth-lite, read the document yourself.
> In fact, the degrowth movement, which is rapidly gaining popularity among activists and scientists, advocates the deliberate scaling back of overproduction and overconsumption to bring the economy back into balance with the living world, in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being
https://www.wetenschappelijkbureaugroenlinks.nl/geopolitics-...
High on the political agenda of degrowthers is radical redistribution of wealth. Consuming less should be especially true for the 10 percent richest in the world, because they are responsible for half of CO2 emissions
Why not sabotage the world to fix the issue? Create some new diseases because that is definitely degrowth: diseases to kill the rich like gout ;)
Perhaps say yes to war with the US?
The Free Tibet "religion" was also a huge thing for a while in the 90's.
There are countless other examples. All with varying degrees of success.
The point is, there's nothing new about people being passionate about human rights. It has absolutely nothing to do with... well... whatever "degrowth" is.
What a miserable world that would be.
The rest of your post is what nutcases on streetcorners rant about. And its easy to see why there's resistance against Israel as Germany is one of its biggest supporters.