Power, Ethics, and Global Crisis: Part 1, Population / Footprint

(00:00) Intro and T-shirts

(04:56) News: Joe, Sean and Christophe discuss the meaning of Pride Month, and the state of the quest for LGBTQ equality. The past struggle for equal rights. Don't be afraid of recognizing majority privilege. Transgender rights are the current frontier.

(10:53) The tension between compromise and progress. Ethics don't allow us to compromise on principle, but political realities often intervene and require us to be satisfied with less than what we want. Poisoning climate action with the culture war. Post-liberalism as a response to "progressive" purity ethics that result in the dreaded circular firing squad on the left.

(18:07) People who want to push ethical change forward must consider questions of power. Violence, domestic and otherwise, is ethically unacceptable. Ethically there's zero tolerance for it. But being able to prevent it through better policy takes having political power. Power in a democracy must have checks and balances and feedback, and that makes quick and ethically perfect solutions politically impossible. Democrats are terrible at playing political hardball. The balance between ethics and raw power.

(29:05) Transgender sports bans. Bans on gender-affirming care. Republican hypocrisy. Culture war issues as pure power grabs. The science strongly supports gender ambiguity. Absolute gender binaries don't exist. Gender is also one of the bedrock categories of hierarchy, which is what makes this battle so fraught.

(38:08) Population and the lifeboat metaphor as the ultimate climate trolley-problem. Neo-Malthusians vs. Cornucopians. Footprint as a an upgraded measurement for resource calculations, that have previously only considered population. Options for managing footprint without depopulation (killing people). Bringing the business community on board. The Exxon proxy fight.

(54:28) Wrap up and outro.

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Show notes:

The Science of Transgender Humanity

The Tragedy of the Commons

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