Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my view, the primary reason we are edging toward a new civil war is that politicians have decided to wield the law as a weapon in the growing urban/rural cultural divide. Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal ch…
> traditional pronouns Nobody is banning traditional pronouns.
Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
171–180 of 250 posts
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea that's not a conspiracy theory at all. CCP/Russia most definitely have heavily targeted campaigns to sow disunity via the whole "USA is a dumpster fire" and "we're so divided" nonsense all over social media sites like FB/Twitter and Reddit. Of course Reddit being Reddit and so forth you get regular Americans gobbling it up and amplifying. Even worse when late-night hosts with big audiences do it. The strength of…
But you are pretty divided from an outside perspective. You still haven't universally grasped very simple things the rest of the world nailed almost a century ago. Little things like "vaccines are good", "Nazis are bad" or "Universal healthcare is a basic human right" I get its a pretty young country all things considered but these are fundamental basics.
Granted you're very correct that American health care got way too profit driven which is causing accessibility and standard of care to suffer, but EU healthcare is not without its issues, just different issues.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever les…
In my view, the primary reason we are edging toward a new civil war is that politicians have decided to wield the law as a weapon in the growing urban/rural cultural divide. Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal ch…
The technology we have today is such an overwhelming advantage and every tyrant's wet dream.
At this point, we can only hope for an illuminated and benevolent tyrant, something like a emotionally mature Elon Musk.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do really like that video and the book Factfulness. However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted. Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is…
Is income inequality even good measure in the forst place? More and more people of this world are rising out of poverty, and getting education, why specifically does uphieval would occur?
Income is a proxy for a lot of tings.
While completely understandable and rational, people racing to get out of poverty at the same time as the great climate change catastrophe, feminism (sexes "wars"), all sorts of minority/ perpetual victims/ alternative motivation groups/attention wars -- I don't see how we'll navigate these centrifugal forces and chaos in a wise and beneficial way for the planet and for us on the long term.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear this line of reasoning constantly from people who have had the system work for them. What they don't realize is that there is a huge portion of this country where the system is not working and thats where this discontent is coming from. Their misinformation campaigns wouldn't work if there weren't real core issues with the society. The internet has empowered a generation the sees whats behind the curtain. AOC…
>Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced. This exaggerated view is unfortunately quite common. It completely ignores the crises that previous generations had to go through, from WWII and the Korean War, to Vietnam, to depopulation of rural areas, to the Oil Crisis, to massive pollution in modern cities, to…
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#176I'm an amateur historian at best, but I'm not aware of any era that has not expected the world to end soon. The Christians have done it for 20 centuries now, as one example. During my life, it has always been a common expectation, though the expected cause has shifted a few times. My hunch is that maybe we're hard wired to expect the world to end, for some undiscovered reason. Again, I remind you of my amateur status…
The expectation that civilization will collapse nowadays comes from scientific knowledge based on verifiable data. We are witnessing:
- a massive decline in biodiversity
- a massive decline in biomass
- fragmentation of ecosystems
- collapse of ecosystems
These are already observable and documented facts. These by themselves present a real and urgent danger to our global human civilization. Then there are the probable consequences from the climate crisis:
- massive population migrations
- destabilization of countries and federations
- civil wars
- actual wars between countries in order to fight for resources (i.e. water).
We are headed for calamity. Let's not be delusional about that.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. ... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc). E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapid…
> in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.
Additionally the metrics being called out are things like the World Bank's poverty statistics, which applies fairly arbitrary definitions of income-based poverty that in many cases would identify people otherwise labelled "food insecure" as "not in poverty". The definitions are also applied globally and by their nature adjusted over time, which can skew the results. And even if all of these limitations are ignored most of the "improvements" are localized in China.
I'm not going to defend primitivism because I think the problem today is mostly a matter of distribution and resource inefficiency but for a metric that has gotten worse over time (though again not in the 100 year view for obvious reasons) consider leisure time. Hunter-gatherer societies spent considerably less time on sustaining themselves than the 40+ hours per week the average modern human spends working a job, doing household chores and shopping.
The problem is that a lot of the ills don't neatly fit into metrics and even when you try to do so, you have to rely on self-reporting for a lot of them. For example for most workers industrialization massively increased alienation from their work, remote work (but also on the opposite end the need to relocate for career advancement) has drastically increased social isolation, enclosure and the increasing commodification of leisure activity also have take their toll, and social media has increased the spread of disinformation, replaced social interaction with public performance and has been a massive cause of social anxieties.
And of course the thing is that a lot of the problems we have can't just be fixed by a clever improvement because their causes are intrinsic to the system. You can try to reduce overproduction and improve recycling but the best consumer action to help the environment is not to consume and the best industrial action to help the environment is not to produce. But considering how much of our economy hinges on demands people didn't know they had for things they didn't know they need (not just production but also sales, advertising, financing, sales and advertising for the financing, debt collection, sales and advertising for the debt collection to the companies doing the financing, insurance for the companies doing the financing, sales and advertising for the companies doing the insurance, and so on) that just translates into "killing jobs" and "ruining the economy".
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you are pretty divided from an outside perspective. You still haven't universally grasped very simple things the rest of the world nailed almost a century ago. Little things like "vaccines are good", "Nazis are bad" or "Universal healthcare is a basic human right" I get its a pretty young country all things considered but these are fundamental basics.
Oh please. There are plenty of anti-vaxers, political extremists, and ignorant citizens in the EU. I know quite a few of them personally. The US is a hundred times more unified than the EU, which has been teetering for a decade now. I think the situation is not nearly as bad as the American press says it is, but the EU is absolutely chock full of problems, just like everywhere else. Granted you're very correct that A…
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#179I think people are a) hard-wired to expect the tomorrow to be the same as the today and b) socially trained to just keep our heads down and not stir the pot, even in face of calamity.
Because of a) and b) we're still - as a society - acting as if everything was fine and so we continue to ignore the real and present danger of a total systemic collapse.
Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
#180Its not a civilization crisis its a governance crisis (which is an important but small fraction of what constitutes a "civilization"). The adage "we have the politicians that we deserve" is true in the long term average but it may well not be true at each time-step. The political system that produces governance is in itself a piece of social technology (set of laws, procedures, morals, behaviors etc) and it can easil…
Wasting resources and human talent is not a problem in itself. It's suboptimal, that's it. You can interpret it simply as taming the whirlwind so that it doesn't disintegrate the structure and law, putting us back to pre-industrial times.
While that aspect of paralysis is mild, the paralysis in response to the environmental changes, to a next pandemic, to virtually any possible physical danger (whether it's an asteroid or an AGI...) is the problem to solve now. Our system needs to be much much quicker when handling dangers on a global scale.
I mean, it would be so embarrassing as a civilization to fall over some trivial bump.