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Yeah, I've come across that Pollyanna line before.
Yes, that's what people call me here. The relentlessly positive, cheery optimist who just wants everybody to be happy. Checks notes hang on, even the people who like me don't say that. Nor is this website full of such; most of the current affairs debate is grimly cynical, but...
I thought maybe one or two folks might figure there's a better way forward than trying to enjoy the band under half a dozen swords of Damocles.
Delusional millenarianism it is, then. Good luck with that. But then, as the messiah surrounded by fools, you're already in your happy space.
itsbruce-
Delusional millenarianism it is, then.
O rly. So the fact we've only avoided a nuclear exchange so far through dumb luck counts for nothing, I guess.
Or that absolutely fuck-all reason exists to believe we'll meet our woefully insufficient (yet somehow hopelessly ambitious) CO2 reduction targets, while every time climatologists' models improve, it turns out they underestimated the rate of change, and consistently understate their concerns anyway... Not like the precautionary principle should apply here, huh.
Or that something like half to two thirds of the world's population depends on fertilisers we use fossil fuels to create, and AFAIK there's no plan to address that situation if we were to phase out their use - oh wait, that's because there's no plan to phase out their use.
Or that we're one large solar storm away from widespread failure of power grids, with a hopelessly inadequate supply of replacement transformers, meaning many areas would be dark for years. But hey, just keep those fingers crossed. We dodged the bullet in 2012 by nine days, right? Surely our luck will just keep on holding up.
Also, the vast drop in numbers of critters at the bottom of the food chain is actually a good thing; we don't have to clean our windscreens and headlights nearly so much anymore. I'm sure old mate Elon will come to the rescue any minute with self-replicating robot bees.
And of course, covid was a complete aberration, right? That epidemiologists warned us over and over for decades that industrial livestock farming brought such risks was just like the bleating of tree-hugging hippies running out of trees to hug. Stupid scientists, what do they know. Big pharma sorted out all out in only a couple of years - nothing to see here, least of all the precarious fragility of our supply chains it revealed, and the near-total lack of substantive action to reduce the length of those supply chains.
Why do we hate Tories? Is it just a tribal thing, or is it because they're clueless toffs who couldn't give a fuck about the common good? Gee, it sure was a relief to see the back of those cunts, huh. Totally different story under Starmer and Albo. Phew. We can continue abrogating our collective responsibility to the rest of the life on the planet and all future generations to the fiction of representative democracy.
It ain't broke. It ain't. The adults in charge will clean up all the shit.
Fucken Polly. Anna.
This 'system' where most of us have zero agency regarding our collective situation, utterly regardless of what we may have to contribute, while a few insular sociopaths determine the fate of everything? Pretty sub-optimal, if you ask me. I bet it wouldn't be too hard to come up with something better, if we could only learn to disregard all the propaganda of the ruling class which utterly saturates our society...
All those old chestnuts about how this is the least terrible setup predate the communications revolution, but somehow still have currency. Hang on... communications revolution... currency... Hmm
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Delusional millenarianism
I feel like this viewpoint could use further debunking.
Anyone who's interested enough in science and psychology will have come across the notion that evolution has failed to equip us with much in the way of intuition for exponential phenomena; a large part of the scientific mindset is an abiding scepticism towards common-sense intuition, given how riddled our reasoning machine is with glucose-saving hacks developed to suit a largely pre-agricultural context.
If your intuition is to be worth a damn, you need to literally steep yourself in counterintuitive facts, and second-guessing your first thought should be second nature. A simplistic reasoning process whereby you assume doomsaying has to be mistaken because it's self-evidently always been mistaken in the past, displays motivated reasoning to my eye; it's cherry-picking.
On one hand, as snotty put it, a stopped Nostradamus is right twice a... millennium? Ie, sooner or later the end will come, without respect to the perspicacity of any contemporary doomsayers.
On the other though, is the fact we're sitting on the near-vertical slope of so many exponential curves. So many ecosystems wiped out in my lifetime. So many crucial parameters, drastically plummeting into a state of alarming decay. But hey, there's a cognitive bias or six helping me imagine that life will just continue on as before, despite the reality that we're living through the most dramatic era of compressed change the planet has ever seen, and that I have actually witnessed vast changes in our way of life, and only recently saw the house of cards given a serious poke by covid. Hard to ignore the fashion for ever more sheer emperor's clothing, though...
But never mind, she'll be right
Kimmo
Yeah, I've come across that Pollyanna line before.
I actually have a bunch of ideas regarding a way out of the mess, but they require discussion with folks on the same page to advance one iota...
'Cycling website' is perhaps a tad disingenuous; bike forums.net, for instance, locked their politics sub forum, probably because it's mostly yanks and you know how a lot of them roll. There's a pretty solid lefty slant here, so I thought maybe one or two folks might figure there's a better way forward than trying to enjoy the band under half a dozen swords of Damocles.
I never intended to become a dad, but here I am at fifty trying to kindle some hope from a bit of fluff I found in my pocket.