Boomers: The Evil Generation!

[metalhead]

What do we need Special Olympics for?
Or the 'regular' one, really?

We don't need the regular one, as far as I can tell it exists mainly as a vehicle for graft.

However the Special Olympics are a wonderful thing, which provide purpose and self-esteem to people who are typically ignored at best and abused at worse by broader society. When you see firsthand how even just a club athletic activity provides people with special needs and/or disabilities an opportunity to socialize and be active, and the positive impact it has on their lives, you can only describe someone wanting to take that away as heartless and cruel.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Things have gotten better for some humans. “Humanity” hasn’t necessarily gotten better, that doesn’t make much sense. Precisely what do you mean by this?

Yes, for some humans, things are better. "Some" meaning most here. So, things have gotten better for humans in average, or for humanity/humankind as a whole. Are you really discussing that?

 

[Lexicus]

I don't know much about the political economy of the Special Olympics.

Are you really discussing that?

Idk man I mean I have computer games and LEGOs and stuff but I sit in an office for like half my waking time. I'm not convinced that it's better than just being a hunter-gatherer and not even knowing about offices.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Not sure if am experimenting a Déjà vu or we have already discussed this some time ago.

While I agree with you at some degree, specially when i am at office too, I think we should look at some more objective data as average life expectancy and such.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Idk man I mean I have computer games and LEGOs and stuff but I sit in an office for like half my waking time. I'm not convinced that it's better than just being a hunter-gatherer and not even knowing about offices.

A hunter gatherer, pretty much by definition, is worried 24/7 about having enough to eat. While we debate about "food as a basic human right" and there are a shocking number of people in the world who are malnourished, we can debate about food as a right because for the vast majority the specter of actual starvation is about as real as the Easter Bunny. Your office may suck, but it probably has a vending machine.

 

[Peuri]

A hunter gatherer, pretty much by definition, is worried 24/7 about having enough to eat. While we debate about "food as a basic human right" and there are a shocking number of people in the world who are malnourished, we can debate about food as a right because for the vast majority the specter of actual starvation is about as real as the Easter Bunny. Your office may suck, but it probably has a vending machine.

The amount of time a hunter-gatherer would worry about finding food would vary from region to region. But from what I've read hunter-gatherers would spend less time "working", that is finding food per day, than we do. I'm not sure starvation was a huge problem for hunter-gatherers, because the populations were so small. Starvation is more a problem of our agriculturally entrapped cultures.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

What do the 20-30 year olds do about it though? Apart from go travelling all over the place and have 15 electronic devices on them at all times that they charge daily. All stuff that really helps I'm sure.

Millennials travel abroad less, spend less on travel, and move less than any previous generation going back to WW2. They spend more travel days in general but travel days can include driving to a music fest 4 hours away for 4 days.

All of this is mostly pointless though since public policy would be a lot more aggressive if it weren't for tens of millions of people not wanting it to be.

 

[Synobun]

A hunter gatherer, pretty much by definition, is worried 24/7 about having enough to eat. While we debate about "food as a basic human right" and there are a shocking number of people in the world who are malnourished, we can debate about food as a right because for the vast majority the specter of actual starvation is about as real as the Easter Bunny. Your office may suck, but it probably has a vending machine.

Yeah, but he doesn't have spare change for his preferred snack.

And it was probably made on the backs of slave labour or something, I dunno.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The amount of time a hunter-gatherer would worry about finding food would vary from region to region. But from what I've read hunter-gatherers would spend less time "working", that is finding food per day, than we do. I'm not sure starvation was a huge problem for hunter-gatherers, because the populations were so small. Starvation is more a problem of our agriculturally entrapped cultures.

Try it.

 

[Hrothbern]

A hunter gatherer, pretty much by definition, is worried 24/7 about having enough to eat.

But will he worry when his belly is full ?
Living from one moment in the other, less expectations

Once on the plains, waiting for the big herd of bisons, or whatever to come, the yearly fear whether it will indeed happen

With agriculture long term thinking, expectations, starts really to bite
Will the rain fall in time, will there not be a storm, will some animals not eat the crops, etc

An expectation like a possession not yet in your hands
and losing possessions makes unhappy...
=>fearing not to realise your expectations as well

Many people I know, knew struggling with burn-outs, depressions, etc drastically screwing down expectations about everything to get some peace

Our society has, encourages lots of expectations

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I think going from hunter-gathering to agriculture and modern society is unavoidable and part of natural evolution for humans. A good documentary on the topic. I strongly recommend going to 44:12 and listen to the old guy.

 

[Lexicus]

A hunter gatherer, pretty much by definition, is worried 24/7 about having enough to eat.

I mean, not really. In virtually any hunter-gatherer society individual scarcity of food simply does not exist, and people typically perform fewer hours of labor per day in order to eat than many people alive now!
Hunter-gatherer society is also resilient to environmental change in a way that our civilization is not. Our civilization has no method whatever of coping with the fact that global sea levels will be meters higher at the end of the century than they are now. Hunter-gatherers just walk inland. You could multiply examples of this type fairly easily.

Your office may suck, but it probably has a vending machine.

It actually doesn't.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I mean, not really. In virtually any hunter-gatherer society individual scarcity of food simply does not exist, and people typically perform fewer hours of labor per day in order to eat than many people alive now!
Hunter-gatherer society is also resilient to environmental change in a way that our civilization is not. Our civilization has no method whatever of coping with the fact that global sea levels will be meters higher at the end of the century than they are now. Hunter-gatherers just walk inland. You could multiply examples of this type fairly easily.

It's almost like... if you have more stuff, it takes more time and effort to make it and look after it. You're selling it as if it's the society of the hunter gatherers that made that possible, whereas really it's their complete lack of posessions and dwellings.

 

[metalhead]

Isn't pining for the good old days of hunting and gathering rather reactionary? I expect winters are brutal on hunter-gatherers that live in temperate climates.

 

[Patine]

There's a fundamental difference between voluntary charity and government enforced socialism.

The Early Church members lived completely communalist lives of shared resources, eschewing materialism, and providing for each others' needs through communal distribution of their earnings and production until Constantine I become Roman Emperor and converted to Christianity and politicized the Church in 316 AD.

 

[Patine]

Well I'm not going to lie, I can't stand the virtue signalers on Facebook and Youtube who do virtuous deeds usually for someone who is homeless and then filming it and uploading it to social media, but then I realize who cares of their motives, someone benefited from it and usually the video inspires others to do likewise.

"Faith without good works is dead," Jesus Christ.

Edited.

 

[Lexicus]

It's almost like... if you have more stuff, it takes more time and effort to make it and look after it. You're selling it as if it's the society of the hunter gatherers that made that possible, whereas really it's their complete lack of posessions and dwellings.

True, a complete lack of possessions in the sense that no objects were "possessed" by individuals in the way that we would understand property today. But it is certainly not true that hunter-gatherers had no material culture, and rather than having no dwellings their dwellings were most often simply temporary.
I'm not sure why you imagine that a relatively simple material culture and lack of attachment to particular patches of land is somehow separate from "the society of the hunter gatherers."

Isn't pining for the good old days of hunting and gathering rather reactionary? I expect winters are brutal on hunter-gatherers that live in temperate climates.

Pining for the good old days of hunting and gathering may be reactionary, but it's not necessarily reactionary to say that we might be able to draw on those days to think about alternatives to the capitalist order.

Debating the merits of those days is really beside the point. It's not an issue amenable to debate, because to conclude that hunter-gatherer societies are in some sense superior to modern society one would need to evolve a set of values in which all the things we now have "more of" are less valuable than the things we've lost.

That value-system will, imo, necessarily be different from, and incompatible with, the value-systems of those arguing the contrary position.

That's why I'm really more interested in the first thing - drawing inspiration and perhaps knowledge and social technologies from prestate societies to think about alternatives to capitalism now - than in the necessarily high-theoretical exercise of deciding which historical period is "the best".

 

[Patine]

Things have gotten better for some humans. “Humanity” hasn’t necessarily gotten better, that doesn’t make much sense. Precisely what do you mean by this?

But has humanity really gotten WORSE, though? Have you read about people 500 years ago? Not just how they lived, but how they acted, and what they believed, and how they treated each other, in ways generally considered monstrous and heinous today that were done much more cavalierly and as a matter of course. I mean the majority of cultures 500 years go, not just European ones to be clear here.

 

[inthesomeday]

I think going from hunter-gathering to agriculture and modern society is unavoidable and part of natural evolution for humans. A good documentary on the topic. I strongly recommend going to 44:12 and listen to the old guy.

What makes you think it’s part of natural evolution? How absurd. Can you offer some evidence of that? People weren’t even majority agrarian for millennia after the development of agriculture, and have only just become majority urban. All as a result of much violent imposition of this quite barbaric lifestyle over time.

But has humanity really gotten WORSE, though? Have you read about people 500 years ago? Not just how they lived, but how they acted, and what they believed, and how they treated each other, in ways generally considered monstrous and heinous today that were done much more cavalierly and as a matter of course. I mean the majority of cultures 500 years go, not just European ones to be clear here.

No, but the world certainly has. We’ve been over this, I resent the reframing of “has the world gotten better over time?” as “has the life experience of some people gotten better over time?”. If you want to ask that question, ask that question. But don’t ask a completely different question and then answer it like you mean something else. The world is not privileged people.

 

[Patine]

No, but the world certainly has. We’ve been over this, I resent the reframing of “has the world gotten better over time?” as “has the life experience of some people gotten better over time?”. If you want to ask that question, ask that question. But don’t ask a completely different question and then answer it like you mean something else. The world is not privileged people.

500 years ago, when executions in the most horrible ways happened arbitrarily, order by autocratic monarchs, massacres and butcheries of civilians occurred in war, torture, rape, and even human sacrifice were going on on mass scales, no one batted an eyebrow, unless someone near and dear to them was the victim (which could lead to a vendetta). The change in public reaction and viewpoint, the feeling of shock and horror and the demand for justice by many today, even if unfulfilled, is a HUGE move forward of human nature and viewpoint on these kinds of things. People can be moved to activism, or at least, sympathy, with a good speaker and presentation, about the suffering of faraway strangers. This phenomenon did not exist meaningfully 500 years ago.