I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.
It does, but it’s accomplished that over the past century by prioritizing short term growth, long term consequences be damned.
As those debts are starting to come due to collect, while it is still accurate to say that there’s been an unprecedented good run, that doesn’t mean the fast approaching wall ahead that has everyone else worried is a mirage either.
Both can be true.
Overshoots a bitch. Soon the land will be unable to feed the people and our artificial fertilizer will no longer work. It was fun while it lasted!
We’ve had market corrections. We’re coming up on some global population correction for sure in the next century or so. I guess we’ll all find out if that’s the Great Filter, or if it’s something else we haven’t found yet.
The “Great Filter” premise assumes that there are no other “advanced” civilizations in the galaxy. Seems like that might not be the case, if the UAP news is not some massive psy-op lol
Aliens probably exist somewhere, but space is unfathomably large. They have never been here. UAPs generally fall into two categories: faked or oddities not understood at their time of capture.
Listen to Cmdr. Fravor and the three other pilots that witnessed the Nimitz UAP in the early 2000s. A tic tac shaped object, darting back and forth like a ping pong ball, that travelled from ~80,000 ft to ~20,000 ft in seconds on radar, and went to their cap point, “60 miles away in one minute”. If it isn’t NHI it is almost certainly some zero gravity tech completely unknown to the average person and is very unlikely to have not leaked at some point.
Or, much more likely, something was going on that they didn’t understand, such as this: https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?si=_wPWoNuzIRa2CrGw&t=548
Right, cause the leaked, top secret, and confirmed real video is a fake? i don’t trust the images, but i do trust the stories and people behind the videos. I know its hard to believe, but the truth truly is out there
In the past we could say that humanity is still doing terrible things but becoming better in the larger picture.
Back then it was hopeful to think like this because the things we did were terrible but not long lasting.
The problem now is that the terrible things we are capable of are now world changing and can affect us globally … climate change, nuclear war, AI technology, biological experimention (or even biological warfare)
50 years ago we had the capability of making decisions or choices that could cost the lives of millions … now our decisions and choices are capable of affecting the survival of our species on this planet.
and while things might be getting worse in the smaller scale, the general trend is improvement
ex. A lot of the current issues are related to a little global pandemic we had recently
The pandemic is still on. It isn’t over yet.
Hasn’t the WHO officially declared it over?
Well, insofar that the pandemic “won”, the infection is now endemic and part of everyday life, like herpes or the common cold.
Yes, that is correct. Therefore, it is no longer considered a pandemic. Doesn’t mean that the disease doesn’t exist anymore.
I wouldn’t believe in anything WHO says.
Why not?
You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I’m not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.
I also rejoice that the largest generation of terrible people will all be dying off in the next 20 years, and the millennials will be taking over control.
Every generation has its psychopaths and psychopaths tend to pursue power. I wouldn’t put my hopes in millennials any more than in boomers. I’m happy to be wrong on this though.
Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.
There have already been studies showing that this gradual swing to the right no longer holds for millennials.
The original premise that psychopathy affects a proportion of any population is true though.
That is just not true. They do get more protective of their possessions and the status quo as they get richer and hold positions with more influence in society. Currently millennials and younger generations do not get richer in the same way that boomers did though.
…and then went on to betray everything their parent’s generation fought for (some with their lives) in terms of workers rights in the US because some dumb ass actor President convinced them to throw it all in the trash in exchange for nothing…
The “hippie” thing was a flash in the pan beyond changes in superficial cultural habits when you are talking in broad terms of US society and it mostly sticks in the popular US consciousness because it is a reliable punching bag for conservatives rather than a genuine generational force for good.
Fast forward a thousand years from now and when a child sees pictures of all the animals and habitats that used to exist on earth in kids books and they ask “what happened?” the answer will have to be the boomer generation. Yes it was just the rich ones in power, but zoom out and I am not sure how much that shit matters on the scale of civilizations. Boomers like every other generation of humans inherited the earth to steward it for future generations and they literally did such a bad job of it that it is impossible for future generations to do worse or else we will just all outright go extinct.
Boomers failed catastrophically to steward the earth for future generations and honestly I hope future generations never forget that. I hope they are remembered in stories that retell and retell what happened. They deserve nothing less, especially because half of them are always lecturing young people about how climate change isn’t real, about how the devastation their generation wrought that is bloodily unfolding in front of our very eyes, is just nonsense.
Fewer millennials ate lead paint chips as kids, I know that much.
Boomers are a problem because they took power early and refuse to let go
That’s the thing with self-organizing systems like democracy or capitalism… You need constant churn, because if it stagnates, the worst kind of people entrench themselves.
So you lie to yourself, got it.