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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#501

Post by zackmorris »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #317

Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to challenge God. It was hubris. It sounds like we have many Nimrod's running around lately (Bezos, Musk, Buffet). Where do you get your happiness? Amazon or your tribe? You know that this partisanship we are experiences, sounds like people are talking another language sometimes, yes? For completeness: --- Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He wa…

Thank you, out of all of the comments, I think yours is the best model for what is happening. The anti-woke sentiment coming from the rich is about keeping the members of the working class from discovering their own divinity. Specifically, that the miracle of creation and their own consciousness dwarfs any material value.

That misalignment in perception is what lets people be ok with profiting from another's labor, or hurting people for material gain, or having more wealth than a thousand/million/billion people. Pure free will, intelligence without wisdom or empathy for oneself on another timeline, is the stuff of nightmares.

The relevance of this is that we're doomed to keep reliving these timelines over and over, stuff like JKF's assassination, 9/11, pandemic, etc, until we wake up and realize that feeding our ego feeds these systems of control. Which separate us further from the divinity of the universe/creation/aliens/god or whatever name we want to assign to the source of meaning (love).

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#502

Post by UncleOxidant »

newbamboo wrote: post #471
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a real danger in just arguing basically "things have always been a shit show, empires collapse, pandemics rage, etc. etc." for a couple reasons: 1. While true, lets not ignore the fact that things get really, really, really bad during those periods where empires do collapse, or environmental damage causes ecosystem collapse, etc. etc. I mean, yes, you could argue "Hey, the Black Death killed a 3rd of…

Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?

They still have them. Even more than pretty much anyone else.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#503

Post by throwaway15908 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #392
throwaway15908 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you agree with me, that left and woke is not the same thing. Whats odd thou is, (1) there is no clear definition of wokeism, like its an arbitrary stereotype used by demagogues and (2), that woke is often displayed on the other side of right/conservative. This makes it a strong indicator of propaganda. A surface, people can project their negative emotions to, which is another red flag in terms of populism. Even yo…

On one level, sure, I'm definitely with you. The term "woke" is vague, subject to toxic stereotyping, and it'd be nice if people didn't use it. But I don't think we can overlook the pressures that push people towards it. The problem is that a lot of movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated. If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're go…

I was about to write "The Problem we both have is mislabeling" but then i realized that we dont have the same problem.

From my perspective, conservatives/rights often stand out with blatant and harmful falsehoods. Even in your last post is a central self contradiction.

>movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated

>If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're going to think I mean "racism is good"

Looks like your "anti-racism is bad" statement is not meant to be negated. I think, what you meant is "racism is bad but what you are doing is too", which, from my perspective, is not equivalent to "anti-racism is bad". Your mistake here is, that you use their "racism"-label and invert it, to make it suit you. By doing so, you reduce the conversation to labels and discard similarities between you (which is actually the most harmful part).

A slight difference in phrasing is deciding if i agree or disagree with you. Is it my fault or yours?

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#504

Post by treis »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #495
boh wrote: post #243

Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality. Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War e…

> Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century And it wasn't just journalism. After WWII many veterans took advantage of the free education offered by the GI Bill. That gave us a lot of highly educated people (with no student loan debt to worry about!) who then went on to use that education to improve things. Couple thi…

I always wonder about people that post things so divorced from reality. We have five times as many college grads today as we did in 1960:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#505

Post by somenameforme »

dv_dt wrote: post #418
basisword wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing. >> Multiple major issues with scientific and economic root causes are simply being ignored as stability and promises of improved prosperity provided by civilization is going backwards. How much of this can be explained by the fact that one third of adults in the US are obese as opposed to major scientific and economic issues?

IMHO, falling life expectancy is a macro measure of multiple failing institutions, not a singular cause. Obesity is driven by systemic commercialization and sugaring of our food supply, combined with inequality of too low a pay, too many hours, to little vacation. Even funding of highway and road infrastructure over other areas is a contributor here. Another large part of it is because we elect to keep both private h…

Let us imagine that starting tomorrow every single American is granted infinite endless and free access to anything available at any restaurant or grocery store or other food service. Do you think that in 10 years the obesity epidemic would be: better, same, worse?

I have trouble imagining that it would be better. Look at people who come into access with large sums of money for reasons outside primarily mental achievement - athletes after leaving pro sports, musicians after they stop performing, actors after they stop acting, lottery winners, and so on. Some quick searching turned up articles like this [1]:

"The researchers found that the athletes' weight held steady for over 100 years, with the majority of them weighing in at what is considered "normal," -- i.e., with a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9. However, around 1991 the average player's BMI began to rise, and over the last 25 years nearly 80 percent of players fall into the overweight or obese category with a BMI above 25. "

There's a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity, but that doesn't mean it's causal. Obesity is primarily driven by a lack of impulse control. If you force yourself not to over-eat, you could live off of even McDonalds without becoming obese.

[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160930085937.h...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#506

Post by cma »

SubuSS wrote: post #268
macintux wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d just be happy if we could agree on basic facts. I don’t expect everyone to agree on the right way to solve a problem, but it seems increasingly difficult to even come to a common understanding of what’s true and what’s not.

What if the facts or basic-ness of them are disputed? You can see this clearly in pro-choice/life debate for example. One side is saying it is murder and the other side is saying everything from it is not a murder to society doesn’t support the born kids, so this should be allowed. What are the ‘basic facts’ here?

The side that believes it is murder also trusts the bible, just point them to the ordeal of the bitter water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water

Though hopefully they won't get ideas to make it involuntary again.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#507

Post by asdff »

trey-jones wrote: post #37

I feel generally that everything is falling apart. I also have an article still pulled up from earlier this week titled Why Pessimism Sounds Smart . It seems pessimists are sometimes wrong! But sometimes they are right too - especially in the last couple of years I have observed incompetence seemingly everywhere I go. But is this the changing world, or my changing perspective? It's really difficult to pin down. At th…

Maintenance worker can't just pull over on a lark with a screwdriver and fix a wobbly thing anymore. someone needs to submit a ticket. we've processified everything to the point where it stops making sense.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#508

Post by ItsMonkk »

TimPC wrote: post #481
ItsMonkk wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge fan of instantaneous change, as it instantly sets the incentives, but am willing to have a large transition period. If we were to do an instant change, the best way to do that is to give everyone a tax credit equal to the value of their existing land, with retirees and others who need public support having a few more options to convert those tax credits to cash.

Instantaneous change with compensation is extremely expensive. I noted in another thread that it's quite possible for the costs of compensating affected parties to reach $30.5 trillion, the current size of the US national debt. This assumed compensation had a needs component to it and only half of the US property market was compensated. The basic issue is the current US property market is estimated at $33.6 trillion.…

Right, so you could see that 30 trillion + commercial number as a loan that the federal government is taking out that they only need to pay the interest on as it accrues(as people spend their land tax credits). This is something the federal government can handle, as the system will more than pay for itself over the lifetime of the tax credits.

A tax credit that gets subtracted when the homeowner defaults equal to the value of the default would resolve the walk-away problem.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#509

Post by BlargMcLarg »

elefanten wrote: post #426
groby_b wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, frankly, would be a small price to pay to stop hearing arguments about specialness of that generation.

I’ve never heard an argument about the “specialness” of that generation? I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point. Which always came as a surprise to me… If we’re going to generalize about people based on generation (bad idea, but…)— I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent, in aggregate, than the…

>I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point.

Counterreaction, a lot of voices claiming to speak for boomers, or boomers themselves, have done plenty to claim "it's just young people messing up". Despite the obvious that they have been the majority voter base for decades, have more wealth as a collective, and because of their age and wealth, tend to have different incentives and opinions than the younger generations having problems to do something as simple as getting a foothold in adult life.

NB: the obvious problem isn't "boomer / old", but the nature of the social game as it is (relatively or perceived zero-sum) and the haves voting against the have nots.

>I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent

Weaker and less competent how? I assure you, for every argument you'll find, you can find another argument which would flip the script.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#510

Post by rank0 »

goodpoint wrote: post #117
rank0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t understand what you’re trying to convey. The terms fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning nowadays…at least to the far left.

On the contrary, historic fascism was obsessed with masculinity, strength, nationalism and created an environment of narcissism and cynicism. It's well documented by historians. TheOtherHobbes is using the term correctly. To the naysayers: I recommend you travel and visit museums.

Really? Did you read the thread?

Original comment says:

> "Strong men" make fascism, not good times.

You’ve brainwashed yourself if you believe “Strong man” = Fascist.

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