Donald Trump is completely unhinged. His statement threatening to eradicate an entire civilization shocks the conscience and requires a decisive congressional response. The House must come back into session immediately and vote to end this reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges our country into World War III. For years, Republicans have enabled and excused Donald Trump’s deeply dangerous and extreme behavior. Enough is enough. Our brave men and women in uniform have been put into harm’s way in the Middle East. Over a dozen have already been killed and hundreds injured. Gas prices are skyrocketing, the cost of living in America is out of control and billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted on a reckless war of choice. It’s time for House Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping this madness.

After Trump wrote, in reference to Iran, “A whole civilization will die tonight,” the entirety of the House Democratic leadership issued this joint statement:

The former. A description of time series.

I agree, it’s why GDP is a poor metric. But that doesn’t change the fact that degrowthers say they want to reduce aggregate production as measured by GDP, yet if that website is right, are mostly not proposing policies that would have that effect.

Universal basic services, universal basic income, job guarantees, debt cancellation, reparations are all likely to stimulate consumption.

Degrowth Policies | Explore degrowth Here, we explore actionable policies and strategies that challenge the conventional pursuit of economic growth, focusing instead on enhancing …

A whole bunch of the policies at explore.degrowth.network/degrowth/pol... seem to me likely to stimulate production.

If proposed degrowth policies aren’t actually going to cause a reduction in aggregate production, they aren’t actually degrowth by their own definition.

But there is no question the defintionally desired goal of degrowth would appear in standard economic statistics as a recession. There is a technical definition, and it fits. And economists have a decent understanding of what can cause reductions in aggregate production.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the niverse, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from

elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan,

Carl Sagan said it best. www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-...

Earthrise from Artemis 2

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.

The utter, horrid contrast

Absolutely incredible Nutella ad.

The Artemis II crew just reported several impact flashes—explosions from hypervelocity impacts of meteoroids with the Moon—during the solar eclipse.

We make a big effort to see a handful of these from Earth with telescopes.

That astronauts flying by the Moon saw >4 in tens of minutes is AWESOME.

And here’s the eclipse photo from Artemis II. I am in tears.

Earthset from Artemis II. I am overcome.

Degrowth Policies | Explore degrowth Here, we explore actionable policies and strategies that challenge the conventional pursuit of economic growth, focusing instead on enhancing …

Personally, looking at this list, I agree it is not oriented around conventionally measured growth as a priority, but need a little convincing that it would actually shrink conventionally measured consumption and production

As I said, it’s not very interesting, and would presumably there exist alternative economic metrics in which the degrowth program would actually aim to be a stimulus rather than recessionary. But if it’s not recessionary by conventional measures, it’s not actually degrowth

There not interchangable — recessions are generally not degrowth, but since degrowth necessitates a reduction in production, it tautologically necessitates a recession

social democracy plus phasing out fossil fuels, circular economy, and valuing unpaid labor and natural capital in economic metrics is a program that has broader appeal than reversing economic growth

If you know of any papers or books looking at this seriously and quantitatively, I’d be very interested. The policies I’ve seen largely seem to be weak tea compared to the rhetoric —

You’re right, I think I misspoke. It’d be a recession with no recovery (no return to growth), not a permanent recession.

Does this work? Degrowthers and green growthers both want policies and systems that serve as stimuluses to human and environmental welfare; where they differ is that degrowthers believe that is only possible through policies that create what conventional metrics would call a permanent recession

It is tautologically and not very interestingly a permanent recession by standard GDP-based definitions, though presumably not by alternative metrics that they (and many others besides degrowthers) would argue for

There was an order in which the US led a bloc of states that were mostly united by an at-least-rhetorical commitment to constitutional liberal democracy and fairly open trade policies, as opposed to a 19th-century imperial spheres of influence approach to geopolitics.

That minimally radical version is not that different from the position of non-degrowthers like, say, Joseph Stiglitz or Martin O’Malley, so if so it’s really the commitment to a revolutionary recession that would seem to make degrowth distinct

My crude, concise and minimally radical expression of the degrowth view would be “GDP is a bad indicator of human well-being; we should have an economy that grows in terms of human and environmental flourishing, and not care if it leads to a decrease of GDP” — is that fair?

but I just think if you choose words that clearly convey “reversal of growth”, you don’t really have a place to stand if the term gets used in ways that don’t reflect your paragraph-length definition of it

Just Jason Hickel’s, plus a few articles. Happy to take recommendations.

I do get how the degrowth movement actually has a specific type of economic restructuring in mind, not a gross reduction of economic output for its own sake —

Not true in general; these are high dimensional systems and points (especially in external forcing) don’t represent their critical thresholds well. See

The Trump admin is revolutionary in terms of aiming to overthrow the post-WW2 international order and to some extent the global neoliberal economic order — the Iran war in isolation might be standard imperialist fare, but not in constellation with the rest of US foreign policy

They are entitled. But I am perhaps colored by my experience with the term “tipping point,” where I am fairly confident virtually none of the misinterpretation is due to bad faith and yet the terminology still induces fairly substantial confusion.

That term would apply, intentionally, to the policies advocated by the degrowth movement and, unintentionally, to the Trump agenda.