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by meibo 58 days ago
Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
5 comments

Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.

Officially it's because reportedly they've achieved their goals locally, but I can't help but think that it was really because the POTUS Just Stopped way more Oil than they ever imagined they could.

The man is an overachiever.

He is in the process of killing the rise of neonazism, exposing those religious extremists that want constant wars on the Middle East, creating a multipolar world commerce chamber, turning the EU into a federation, popularizing socialism (and even outright communism) in the US, dismantling the US's foreign government overthrowing apparatus, creating actual diplomatic relations between the Eastern Asia governments...

He's also making the case for radical downsizing of the US military, since he's shown the military's take that it won't obey illegal orders was a sham.
Illegal orders?
The world's most effective ecoterrorist.

Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.

In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.
A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.
You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
Let me rephrase: You can't really attribute to someone something they did accidentally while trying to do the opposite.
That depends on your use of "attribute". We shouldn't give them (positive) credit (use 1), but we can recognize them as the cause (use 2)
We can, but ironically.
I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.

If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?

Accidental evil? No.

Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others.

According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals.

This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive.

0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

That sounds very tin foil hat to me. Yea, people who are angry don't act super rationally, and when losing Hitler acted like a toddler having a tantrum. That doesn't mean the failure and suicide was the point.
Yes, the entire fascist project is one big tantrum.
If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.

Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.

Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.

Both mistakes led to mass deaths.

We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.

Both of them also killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.

> We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.

What is the analogue here for attributing the rise of alternative energy sources to Trump? Being too incompetent to avoid harm isn't the same as being too incompetent to avoid benefit, because your job is to create benefit.

It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes. If he creates positive outcomes by accident while trying to create negative ones, he should get panned for trying to create negative outcomes.

Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened. The problem is that it hasn't.
> It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes

For whom?

> Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat.

I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.

I'm not trying to make a distinction. I'm saying that they didn't kill millions of people accidentally.
Mao certainly did. So you're wrong there.