121–130 of 970 posts
The fracturing isn't the subject or metaphor. The metaphor is people attempting to create their own salvation in a very ignorant and shallow way and being punished for it.
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I think the question shouldn't necessarily be who started the fire, but if it is a good idea to just let the fire burn, even though you weren't the one igniting it.
Yes, that is how I think about it. Billy Joel's generation didn't start the fire, but they also sure as hell didn't put it out. Don't get me wrong. Some people are carrying buckets of water towards the fire, but there are other people poking holes in the buckets, or shoving them so that they spill the water, or whatever other metaphor you would like to use here. And also some people standing around and telling the pe…
The worst thing is feeling defeated, even though you could actually be helping. Doesn't even matter if you're carrying a shot glass or a whole barrel full of water, at least you're doing the best you can.
The constant theme since the dawn of civilization threaded through all of history is that everything is falling apart. Change is continual. History is more like the seasons. Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt. Sometimes there's peace. There's a continual game of King of the Mountain being played at all levels. So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up! Enjoy this phenomenon called life. Yo…
Eh, there have been institutions with almost absurd longevity in history. The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II. Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens. It's very easy to forget that the revolutions of Britain, France, America, Russia; it happened just a few generations ago, and upended most of t…
You have a very flexible definition of "unchanged" then. The Catholic Church pre-Charlemagne is going to be very different from Saeculum Obscurum-era, itself different from Investiture Crisis-era, itself different from the one familiar in the Late Medieval, different from Counter Reformation-era one. It's absurd to me that you think the first time it changes significantly is Vatican II!
> Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.
My knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history is extremely poor, but what little I do know strongly suggests that considering it as a single stable form of government for thousands of years is even worse an error than claiming the Catholic Church was so stable and unchanging. Perhaps akin to saying that the Holy Roman Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and modern Germany are all one single country that has lasted for 1200 years (because they're all called Germany).
I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.' That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are op…
That may be a problem that can be addressed though. Neglecting resilience to over-optimize for efficiency seems like it's symptom of stability. People, as a whole, seem to lack the wisdom to not fool themselves that they can ignore long term risks while the short term is good, especially when we're talking about spans greater than generation.
However, a lot of that stability is getting disrupted right now: the pandemic, a big land war in Europe, supply chains are fucked, etc. The war especially has blown up a lot of naive assumptions that had been taken for granted until a couple months ago. I think here's a decent chance that for the next few decades, Western civilization will value resilience far more than it has over the last few.
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You are missing bias. Elons "graph" only shows the left moving away, like they were running away from the globalists lovin satanist-migrants. Or maybe just climate scientists? This entire "blaming wokeism" is just identity tribalism form the other side. How come you fail to realize ...
Well, the big reason I'm skeptical is that the group of people who don't like "wokeism" seem to have pretty diverse identities. It's hard for me to see many similarities between irreligious business magnate Elon Musk, vaguely Catholic political blogger Andrew Sullivan, and my full time Baptist preacher cousin-in-law - I'm not sure I could identify any other policy question they all agree on.
Or how easy can you fit in that image "moderate" leftists like bernie sanders or noam chomsky?
What is the difference between woke and left?
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> Nations rise. ... Sometimes there's peace. In short: sometimes things aren't falling apart. For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
It's an endless cycle. As the saying goes... Hard times make strong men Strong men make good times Good times make weak men And weak men make hard times.
We don't need strong men during good times and we don't need weak men during bad times.
Although now we are in neither a good nor bad time. What kind of men do we need?
Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…
No it’s because it caters to the employees and owners of traditional journalism who have been dethroned by Silicon Valley.
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Unless you lived in the parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity… it’s important to remember peace and prosperity are regional phenomena that are not shared around the globe equally.
Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread. Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes. Most of the "developing world" developed. Marginalized groups gained new civil rights. China and India rose to become great powers even as their former colonial masters, though declining, still enjoyed peace and prosperity. Recognizing that there is s…
> Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes.
While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters. Many of the world’s most conflict-stricken areas today are ex-colonies still in the process of stabilization.
The dirty secret of peace is that it is often imposed by a dominant power. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. These were peaceful times because of intense power asymmetry.
Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…
My grandfather spent the last 30 years of his life in retirement collecting a pay check that he thought might be his last.