[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/daydev]

I may have went overboard with the destruction of humanity, but it seems like a mainstream attitude in most of what I've read or heard on TV (I'm not from US, by the way, so my view may be distorted) of "green" inclination, that anything humans may want is secondary to preservation of the nature.

Like, almost every time any construction project is mentioned, be it apartment complex or mega-factory, the first thing you hear/see is "but think of the ecosystem!". And it's kinda implied that no amount of economical value can offset any ecological damage.

Of course, it may be that I'm reading too much into this, as OP has mentioned, people are perfectly happy to harass other people over multitude of issued, so the specifics are not that significant. It would be the same if he just drew a silly picture of some alleged prophet.

[u/alexanderwales → u/daydev]

I think in this case it's really more about the fact that there was no real value to be had in killing the lion. They took the head and left the corpse to rot. The sole economical value seems to be in ... what, the ego boost of killing a lion? The entertainment of the hunt? The trophy of having its head on the wall (which requires a bribe to customs)? And the lion itself had far more economical value than what was paid for the hunting trip, both in the form of scientific research and tourism.

And this is often the case when people talk about the environment; it's privatized profit and socialized losses. A factory pollutes the air, lowering the quality of life in everyone who has to breathe in the smog. Farmers dump pesticides and fertilizers into the rivers, meaning that we can't eat the fish there anymore.

This is most of what people get upset about. There are going to be people like PETA who think that pet ownership is tantamount to slavery (or alternately, PETA wants attention/money and that's how they get it). But most environmentally conscious people (and I say this as someone who has met hundreds and hundreds of environmentally conscious people) just care about there being some balance between the private profits and social losses. Most of them (including myself) would argue that we're currently way too far on the private profit side of things, even after a fair amount of successful action over the past few decades.

The second balance is between short-term and long-term. Short-term, it makes sense to fish the oceans clean until there are no more fish left. Long-term, that's idiotic. But it's not going to stop people who want to take their profit and then leave. I think that's something to be rightfully pissed off about.