Politics

[tigeraid]

I think you guys underestimate the arc of capitalism. A large portion of society may be looking past capitalism now, but the machine is in full swing with no short-term signs of slowing down. There are still plenty of resources to plunder and plenty of people to buy finished products. I think 10 or 20 years ago people started disengaging from traditional capitalistic values, but at the same time the systems started moving out of view. The result could be people who think they're living post-capitalism but are just stuck in a system they can't see and don't understand. Capitalism is moving past its relationship with society and cementing its relationship with government. People like Trump are just starting to appear. It's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

But I do think it will get better. We have a lot of big problems to solve, but I think we're starting to grasp what those problems are and we may have the bulk of the tools we need to address them. What gets me down on the daily is actually exactly that. We have tools to solve a lot of problems we've exhaustively identified, but we don't act. I don't think we can solve all the problems Right Now, it's ambitious and ridiculous, but we can certainly stop throwing trash on the ground and stop leaving the lights on. Cancer is a pain and world hunger a challenge - how about we just do the things we can do?

Bah.

In any case, eventually society will evolve to escape the corpocracy we're forming or society will revolt. We still outnumber them and they can only push so far. I do believe that, 100%. Resource distribution is in increasingly good shape, and we're better and better at making more from less. So many of the conflicts that have traditionally plagued mankind are just irrelevant now. That's a good deal - freeing the collective we up from fighting for survival to fighting for comfort, rights, and knowledge is a transition we could reasonably start seeing in our lifetimes. I'm pretty down on humanity in general, but this gives me hope.

It's moving past its relationship with society and cementing its relationship with government--and roughly half the US Population, and maybe 1/3 the population of Canada, Britain, Australia, etc WANT it to. You can approach a friend or even a random stranger in one of our countries, and say "we need to fix this climate change shit, start building sustainable energy, look after the planet, end wars, focus on the hunger and poverty issues, etc etc" and roughly half of the time, the answer will be "fuck that, I don't care/I have my own problems/I just want more material wealth" or "that is LITERALLY a lie, false, fake news, scaremongering, you're part of the problem."

(Or, they're part of the vastly wealthy and don't want to hear it because it gets in the way of making money.)

To me the problem isn't capitalism, it's unchecked free-market capitalism combined with complete freedom--in this case, the freedom to not give a shit. So you take that and ADD unchecked capitalism causing the wealth inequality, and now people are either rich and ONLY want to protect their own interests, OR they're too poor to care about the big picture. That's the big fucking mountain that needs to be climbed: how do you make people care about the big pictures of society and environment when the system they live in actively works to prevent that?

Don't get me wrong, this situation is "better" than many poorer or developing countries, where people are not only too poor to care, but are too uneducated to understand. Or, they're under the heel of a monarch or dictator, and have no freedom regardless.

As Fogelhund points out, our best answer at the moment is a slow advancement of socialism within capitalism. That way you retain (in theory) personal freedoms, while fighting to increase them without destroying an economy. But that's SLOW. GLACIAL, even. Will it be too little too late?

(Not to mention half the population of the world's most powerful country literally thinks you are satan and should be hung if you mention anything involving socialism. Making that march even slower.)

It's maddening to see the fantastic advances in renewable energy and sustainable food going on right now, and then laying that over top of world society and realizing it is an absolute speck of fucking dust to the governments of the world at large. These scientific and social advancements should be carefully and efficiently scrutinized, and then railroaded into place and praised for their brilliance as fast as possible. Instead they're not scrutinized but SHIT on and immediately assumed to be a liberal conspiracy, tree-hugging nonsense, against the "word of God" or "fake news." How can anyone with a brain not be hopelessly depressed by it all....

[FaultyMario]

The thing with the liberal (as in the 18c philosophy) modern world is that individuals don't have freedoms, society allows a number of institutions the right to model and legitimate the conducts of individuals and the relations between them. Freedom is a relative concept.

[tigeraid]

The thing with the liberal (as in the 18c philosophy) modern world is that individuals don't have freedoms, society allows a number of institutions the right to model and legitimate the conducts of individuals and the relations between them. Freedom is a relative concept.

Sorry I kinda rambled a bit. I think the point I was trying to get at, is that we have such freedom that we cannot be FORCED to, say, immediately stop doing anything that harms the environment (even on our personal property), or give away equally portioned wealth so we can all share with the poor, or whatever else would IMMEDIATELY begin to solve the problems we face. I don't mean that's a BAD thing, freedom (as relative as it may be) is crucial and needs to remain. I'm saying it's a Catch-22, where that freedom allows everyone's opinions (educated or uneducated) to drastically affect our big-picture-problem solving.

[thesameguy]

It is, for sure.

And it is depressing, but certainly not hopelessly depressing. Small societies are slow to move, large societies are glacial. Being a part of the modern world requires patience. I suck at patience - I have none, but I do recognize it's required. It's easy to get lost amidst all the problems the modern world has, but I think it's important to remember two things: 1) We have amazing control over our circumstances. We don't have angry gods ruining crops or mysterious ailments suddenly wiping out entire countries. We have recognized if not solved a huge number of problems that affected mankind for eons. That's progress. Sure, some of our solutions come with problems of their own, absolutely we're not done. But we're in the solving phase, not the victim phase. That's big. 2) We have amazing access to information. Some of it is great - widespread education for example, some of it is shitty - widespread advertising for example, and some of it is supremely depressing - awareness of all sorts of problems that aren't immediately obvious but catastrophic nonetheless, like melting ice caps.

We are millennia away from winning. Humanity is not even close to reaching equilibrium with much less victory over the universe. It's not something anyone we know has even the possibility of seeing. It's not worth the time or mental energy to try to win. You can't. What humanity c2017 has to do is keep the wheels turning and act responsibly. Leave it better than you found it is a fine way to live. Not everyone will, and not everyone can. But those who can, should. Hell, they must. It's very easy for me to write that, personally as a fixer I find it much harder to live it, but I do believe it and that helps. Going to bed every night believing I did the best I could to improve my own footprint and remediate some others' is ok. I know I could do more. Lots of things I could give up, lots of things I could take on. But from a practical standpoint I think we'd be better off if more people tried a little hard rather than a few people tried really hard, so it's a bigger return on investment to inspire people to pick up their own trash than to pick up someone else's. That's what I'm working with.

The bulk of humanity is still in survival mode and probably will be for decades to come. Nobody is going to get those people to suddenly realize that their ez chair and flatscreen are not actually the totality of their concern. I'm not saying we shouldn't remind them, but there are so many things to do beating your head against people who haven't quite got with the program isn't useful. It will come with time - it always does. Energy is better spent doing some good in your area and engaging with people who are already waking up and getting an idea of what will be important tomorrow.

I think in any era the people who recognize these shifts are small in number, but they're out there. Small numbers fought some of the biggest battles humanity has ever faced. You just gotta find those people and band together. Have the conversations, refine the goals. I suspect that the "information age" makes this harder than it may have been in the past - you don't really get to lock yourself in your church, your curia, your shed, or your lab and get to work. You're going to be inundated with distracting messages at all turns. But you can remember what's important, where you're going, and the key points along the way. We don't have to change minds. We have to change the world.

[MR2 Fan]

the bad news: population is going to grow to 10 billion people

the good news: due to demographics changes, it won't go past that

I'm pretty sure I've posted Hans Rosling's (RIP) videos before, but check out his TED talks if you want some great charts about the world...it paints a better picture of how things are changing.

[mk]

Peak phosphorus.

[thesameguy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...paganda-video/

Wouldn't it be interesting if North Korea told its people they'd gone to war without ever actually doing it?

[Tom Servo]

Tom Price has resigned as head of HHS after people got kinda upset that he spent something like half a million dollars on chartered fights everywhere he went. Including to the corner grocery store.

[novicius]

[Cam]

Wow, that NK propaganda video is comically bad.