Plastering your trollop over it, you mean.
`` "I enjoy my internet access and a warm comfortable home but I don't believe in any way that they are rights."
If they weren't a right we could demand then you're saying it is OK to take them away from people.''
Plenty of people do not, in fact, have access to internet, comfy homes, or even much income at all. Yet, you say they're rights. Pensions and benefits are a right in that sense, and yet they're being taken away because nobody is around to pay for them. Clearly, that logic is flawed. I think we need to stop thinking that way.
What we have is incredibly privileged lives to the point that we can not now and likely not ever extend that ``right'' to everyone on the planet. Or at least not the same and incredibly wasteful way the Americans have it and as vociferously as you demand to keep it.
We could try and fix some of that through technology, but be prepares that some things must change before we can scale up further. As noted, we're currently scaling down as important components are *breaking* down. That's right, our precious rights are taking themselves away.
``Yes, they were pretty ill, died easily and they committed genocide quite often for very minor things that today are in abundance and available to many.''
A point, though nowadays ``we'' just do UAV strikes on fuel trucks, killing indiscriminately over the internet. Saves washing out the blood from *your* uniform, to be sure, but still.
The medical improvements are welcome, of course, but we still have a contingent of people bringing the ``good news'' to where it wasn't before, incidentally also bringing other ``good news'', and, reducing child mortality but, uhm, not child birth rates--rates that are high exactly to counter high mortality. So you get an explosion of people that do to the land exactly what rabbits or locusts do to the land when their population explodes. Yes, you could argue hunger crises are caused by missionaries.
My point? Mostly that with greater power (better tools, knowledge, etc.) comes greater responsibility. You did it, you fix it. Or, rather, we did it, we fix it. We're still in this together.
Yes, we might possibly find ways to ``fix'' our use of oil, though at this rate it looks like it's going to be too little, too late, and worse, it's by no means certain we will. I don't think you quite grasp the time scales involved, but you're welcome to back your assertion up by some numbers. We've been busy burning up the oil for a hundred years or so, coal a bit longer, and forming that stuff cost what, couple million years? couple billion? I forget. I think the rates aren't as optimistic as you pooh-pooh them to be.
``The so-called harmful chemicals in petrol fumes are measured in the billionths parts of air and in real world terms would only harm your health if you were extremely weak or stuck your mouth on an exhaust pipe.''
This is a bit of a canard and a nasty one at that. Cities with permanent smog covers, anyone? And that's not just the soot-black east German ones before they got around to cleaning them up.
``If you have no self-interest then you're not interested in survival, by your own hard work at least. A person who gives up on their self-interest is a person who has given up their rights, even their life, to the authority of either a make-believe being, a megalomaniac political ideology, or the state.''
Of course! If we don't keep up the race to see who can out-consume each other, we lose our basic human rights! Why didn't we think of that sooner?!? *facepalm*
The self-interest you advocate is that of the American Individualist Consumer, with a God^WCorporation Given Right To Consume. Which incidentally is good for everyone else's bottom line, though you might need a second or third job to pay for it all. That's certainly not the only definition of self-interest. Another would be to have enough of the right things to get by, raise happy kids, and leave them a lush green earth to frolic and raise kids in. I'm sure that, if not you plenty others here, could come up with alternative definitions of self-interest.
For the record, I'm still using a nokia 6310 someone gave me years ago. Getting a replacement battery (which is, arguably, a consumable) is proving to be a bit of bother, and there's some things that its firmware could do better but won't ever be fixed.
Still, the new backup (a cheap samsung with a solar panel in the back) replacing a 6210 that only does single-band these days was a bit of a disappointment. It's new, shiny, has a colour screen and a find-the-keyhole LED, but has deliberately been cripled (no putting appointments in the calendar and a few other things), has clearly more bugs in the firmware --glaringly, many of those visibly increase energy use--, and, uhm, no updates.
I *so* want a phone that a) has all the hardware interfaces I care for and b) comes with an open-source OS plus open-source toolchain so that I can fix this kind of flaw myself. Might take me a year or more to get around to it, but I'll get to it eventually, or someone else will. Oh, and c) be as sturdy and long-lasting as or better than a 6310.
Come that time I'll happily spend another six to ten years using the same hardware. If enough people do that, there'll be a reasonable market for ``consumables'' too. This is more important to me than whether it's the latest model, most of which seem to be roughly the same to me anyway. But then, I'm not a connaiseur of ``fashion phones''.