Boomers: The Evil Generation!

[inthesomeday]

The observer matters too. Someone on this forum criticized big scale space expansion as "polluting other worlds". An absurd complaint absent other life. Pollution, as real as the material we label it, is a social construct that is bad because an observer deems it bad. Otherwise what's the difference between pollution and any other chemical phenomenon?

Pollution is perhaps the wrong word but I think there’s a lot of truth to the sentiment that human expansion into other planets is an imposition of some sort. Whether that’s inherently bad is a wholly different question. I kind of think it is.

More people are dying every day, right now, than ever before in human history!!!! Woe is us!!!

Oh.

Wait.

Yeah, that is the inevitable corollary to having grown a truly staggering population. However, the flip side, that there will be more humans who lay their heads down to sleep tonight after spending the day not dying is also true. The sheer volume of living and life is "the most obvious metric" to use.

Then surely south and east Asia are objectively the best places to live? So many people live there! What progress.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I didn’t steer us towards nihilism. I recognized the reality that human “progress” has destroyed the planet. Ignoring that in favor of some impossibly isolated analysis of the vague and elusive “human lot” isn’t even nihilism, just stupidity.

Destroy the planet? Seriously???

I found this "asteroid impact calculator" and had to hit the planet with something the size of mars to even knock it a bit off kilter. It ain't getting 'destroyed.'

Your valid concern is that it can be made inhospitable to human life, which brings that 'vague and elusive' human lot back into prominence. But when you drop out of the wild hyperbole of "destroying the planet and the end of the world," you once again run into those 'silly numbers.'

 

[Peuri]

And this is the flaw in the narrative of progress. It’s so extensively cherry-picked and relies on so many fallacies that it collapses on any critical analysis [...]

If I've learned anything, it's that everything collapses under critical analysis. Especially definitions.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

And the human being, apparently. Always has been. The biological imperative to reproduce wouldn't have it any other way.

 

[inthesomeday]

Destroy the planet? Seriously???

I found this "asteroid impact calculator" and had to hit the planet with something the size of mars to even knock it a bit off kilter. It ain't getting 'destroyed.'

Your valid concern is that it can be made inhospitable to human life, which brings that 'vague and elusive' human lot back into prominence. But when you drop out of the wild hyperbole of "destroying the planet and the end of the world," you once again run into those 'silly numbers.'

Not just human life but any life other than extremophiles that could survive in space. I used to be quite optimistic and believe that we’d destroy only ourselves but that is simply not the case.

And the human being, apparently. Always has been. The biological imperative to reproduce wouldn't have it any other way.

A great argument in favor of an anti-humanistic worldview.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, if there's enough to go around but nobody sees it because it's been kept from them by their own mass-austerity then they will witness scarcity and then believe the scarcity to be real limits rather than policy-inflicted limits.

Ok. Do you have some examples of principle goods you believe we've been underconsuming?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

"Grown-ups like to tell you where they were when President Kennedy was shot,
which they all know to the exact second.
It makes me allmost jealous,
like i should have something important enough to know where i was when it happened.
But i don't, yet.
The fact that it was a better time then, when people knew what they were supposed to do and how to make the world better.
Now nobody knows anything."

Don't most modern generations have some big event they can point to and say "that's where I was when I found out that _____ happened"?

I was 5 months old when Kennedy was shot. I might have been napping or having a diaper change or whatever else might have been going on. It's not like I'm ever going to know, since the only people who could ever have told me are all dead (I'm still getting used to that fact).

Another thing people tend to remember is where/how they found out about Reagan being shot (I was in school and heard it being passed around the library; by the end of the day everyone knew).

Oh, and Elvis? A friend was visiting and she was mopping the floor with me over a game of Monopoly, when her sister ran over to tell her that Elvis died. She was so upset that she went home immediately.

The death of Diana is another milestone a lot of people remember. My dad came into the house to tell me he'd heard it on the news.

There are a few threads here about 9/11. For most of us old enough to remember, that will be the milestone where everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they found out.

Yeah I think so. Look at the history of man, no technological innovation really for thousands of years, then bam! pyramids and aquaducts and stuff. Why? Cus they organized into some sort of ordered society and had property. And then look at the progress from then up to the 20th century and beyond. I heard one stat that there has been more tech progress in the last 50 years than the rest of man's history combined. Not sure if I believe all that, but it's astounding. And it exists within these systems. Not saying the systems are perfect or anything.

No technological innovation? Baloney. The progression from basic rocks to scrapers, cutters, hand axes, arrows, spears, etc. is huge. I saw a video once showing an anthropologist actually making some stone tools. It's not easy, and when it's done the result is a very precisely-crafted tool that (depending on what it is) is either highly specialized or can be used for a variety of tasks.

You know what invention made a huge difference during the Middle Ages? Stirrups. And how about the printing press? We're all arguing on this forum partly because somebody invented movable type that led to an explosion of literacy and the expectation that people in general should be able to read.

Back in 1999, I was watching a 2-part documentary on A&E about the 100 most influential people of the past 1000 years. The individual who took the #1 spot was Johann Gutenberg, for the invention of the printing press. Widespread literacy is why this technological explosion of the 20th and 21st centuries was possible.

Huge progress was made in the living conditions in much of where the western world touched.

Can you go out to any river or lake and drink the water from it without boiling it or treating it in some way? I'd guess not. You sure can't do that in Alberta anymore. One of the legacies of the oil and gas industries here is that the fish from the Athabasca river have cancer. The Conservative politicians prattle about "remediation" but of course we know they never intended to bother with that. It took a huge fight just to get them to pay attention to the huge number of birds dying in the tailings ponds before they'd do something about it.

There's an abundance of food and medicines all around us, and plenty of water that we don't dare touch because due to "progress" it's been poisoned.

Pretty much. We are a violent species and nature treats us with indifference, but even with relative peace in the world, 53 million or so die every year anyway. Pain is local, death is universal; the best people can do is to reduce what pain we can where we can.

Far too many treat nature with indifference. They don't seem to understand that we, as a species, are also part of nature. The universe isn't "out there." It's here as well, and we are part of it.

If you want to wax philosophical about the value of life and meaningless death, that would be fun. Start a thread; I'm all in.

Didn't somebody already do that?

The world a better place? “The world” has been steadily becoming a worse place since at least 1750 CE but more like ~8000 BCE. The experience of a limited few privileged humans? Sure, improving since the latter date. Very incrementally and more often than not at the expense of the experience of other humans.

Each person has to consult their own conscience, I guess. Yes, the water is undrinkable now, but medical advances over the past century mean that I'm alive now, as opposed to dead and what once would have meant that I'd go blind has become a case of having surgery, getting zapped with lasers (not a painless procedure, btw, or at least I found it quite painful), taking eyedrops several times a day for the next month, and taking whatever other steps the doctors recommend. One of those was that for the first week after surgery I wasn't allowed to let Maddy sleep with me.

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This is apparently how the world will likely look, by scientific extrapolation, in 2.25 billion years REGARDLESS of what humanity does with it.

Yep. Depressing, and this is why it's critical for humans to get off this planet. It's going to be uninhabitable long before those billions of years run out and the Sun expands. The last article I read estimates that we have about 600 million years left. Given the age of our solar system, that's not much time.

If that is your perspective, then again you are wrong. As an entity, the world is neutral to life and its existence. The world is, what, 2 billion years old? And you want to look at a pretty random 8000 year period and say OMG! things are terrible. The things you complain about are only important to us. The Permian extinction wiped out 95% of all life. That was pretty bad for life, but the earth shook it off and moved on. And guess what, 250 million years later, life is thriving. You need to better define what you are talking about and how you are measuring things.

Your math is off by 2.5 billion years.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Not just human life but any life other than extremophiles that could survive in space. I used to be quite optimistic and believe that we’d destroy only ourselves but that is simply not the case.

A great argument in favor of an anti-humanistic worldview.

Funny thing is that cancer cells, human beings, and everything in between carries that exact same biological imperative. If it wasn't Homo Sapiens that had become the peak life form and threatened to overwhelm the planetary biosphere it would have been some other contender. If we screw the pooch so badly that nothing but some poison eating bacteria remain...that just starts the next round.

 

[Patine]

While they did not perform their own colonizing, in the 19th century the Republic of San Marino dealt with their population pressures the same way every other European nation did...by exporting the citizenry into the "unused" parts of the world.

Then again, so did the Chinese, Japanese, Tamils, Polynesians, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Swahili, going back centuries, and they were often VERY nasty, too those already living where they arrived. But's that's NEVER mentioned, because Colonialism, and all the evil possibly associated with it, is, and ONLY CAN BE, a purely European sin and activity, by the popular narrative.

 

[Birdjaguar]

And this is the flaw in the narrative of progress. It’s so extensively cherry-picked and relies on so many fallacies that it collapses on any critical analysis.

What you’re saying is “things have gotten better for people over x arbitrary timeline.” This is demonstrably false, if we use the most obvious metric, which is the sheer volume of fatality and destruction of life wrought by colonialism and imperialism. How many indigenous people really saw a meaningful improvement to their lives as a result of colonialism? How long did that take? Today native Americans in the US lead the country, and quite possibly the world, in obesity rates, alcoholism, suicide, victimization by state and corporate forces, and plenty of other “important metrics”. I guess they have TVs though, and some of them have been saved by medicine. How many? More than the hundreds of millions whose lives were taken or irreparably damaged by the progress machine? I doubt it.

And beyond that it relies on a deranged separation between humanity and nature. You say, well we don’t have to think about the environmental effects of “progress” because progress is a solely human concept. But in doing so you implicitly— or really quite explicitly— ignore the obviously inseparable relationship between the natural world and human life and wellbeing!!! Industrialism produced a great deal of wealth for a slim minority of people at the expense of the lives of billions of others, for a very short period of time. And you call this a positive? Then you are nothing but a fool.

Interesting. First you have to decide whether to use percentages or absolute numbers for your measuring.
You seem to be focusing on imperialism and colonialism as time frames. Is that to make a case against western civ and for indigenous peoples? Are they categorically better? Are white people worse by default?
Indigenous peoples suffered under colonialism. The history of conquest everywhere in the world is full of painful suffering. So are indigenous peoples better off now than they were 500 years ago? 250 years ago? How do we measure that? You can choose. in the first couple of centuries of opening up the New World to Europeans, 80% of Native Americans may have died from disease. At whose feet do you want to lay that statistic?

Indian tribes are in interesting group to focus on. Yes, their statistics are pretty terrible today, but there is much more to that story than health statistics. Are you supportive of the "noble Savage" image often projected for them? The reality is something quite different. I live in a state with 20% Native population and spent 12 years working closely with tribes. You should choose a different example.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Then again, so did the Chinese, Japanese, Tamils, Polynesians, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Swahili, going back centuries, and they were often VERY nasty, too those already living where they arrived. But's that's NEVER mentioned, because Colonialism, and all the evil possibly associated with it, is, and ONLY CAN BE, a purely European sin and activity, by the popular narrative.

Hmmmm. The Chinese have a whole lot more history of absorbing invaders into their own brand of civilization than they have of invading or exporting. I live in "Europe, west," better known as the US. We have plenty of posters who live in "Europe, southeast," better known as Australia. We don't have any posters that I know of from "Europe, far south," better known as South Africa. I mean, I like visiting Chinatown as much as the next resident of Los Angeles, but I hardly feel "colonized" about it.

 

[Peuri]

Hmmmm. The Chinese have a whole lot more history of absorbing invaders into their own brand of civilization than they have of invading or exporting. I live in "Europe, west," better known as the US. We have plenty of posters who live in "Europe, southeast," better known as Australia. We don't have any posters that I know of from "Europe, far south," better known as South Africa. I mean, I like visiting Chinatown as much as the next resident of Los Angeles, but I hardly feel "colonized" about it.

The fact that there even is a China in it's modern extent is due to expansion and assimilation of northern Han Chinese towards the south for thousands of years. I'm also sure that the Tibetans are perfectly fine with the current state of things. Same with Japan. The Japanese are invaders that took the islands from the Ainu and Ryukuans.

 

[Patine]

Hmmmm. The Chinese have a whole lot more history of absorbing invaders into their own brand of civilization than they have of invading or exporting. I live in "Europe, west," better known as the US. We have plenty of posters who live in "Europe, southeast," better known as Australia. We don't have any posters that I know of from "Europe, far south," better known as South Africa. I mean, I like visiting Chinatown as much as the next resident of Los Angeles, but I hardly feel "colonized" about it.

In the Shang Dynasty (3rd Millennium BC) or even the Qin Dynasty (founded 221 BC), "China was a small region on the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Shandong Peninsula, the Hubei and Beijing Highlands and some surrounding areas. They were surrounded, according to records, by "barbarian people in all directions who spoke non-Chinese languages, had non-Chinese cultures and religions, and strange ways of dressing and cuisine." They occupied the vast majority of the rest of China proper, especially in the South. They were NOT the 32 recognized minority in the Modern PRC, or the close to extinct ethnic Manchus. They were large in number of distinct ethnicities, and were never recorded as successful invaders. What happened to them if the Chinese only really absorb invaders and don't invade and assimilate others? Please tell me? Where did these people go?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

In the Shang Dynasty (3rd Millennium BC) or even the Qin Dynasty (founded 221 BC), "China was a small region on the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Shandong Peninsula, the Hubei and Beijing Highlands and some surrounding areas. They were surrounded, according to records, by "barbarian people in all directions who spoke non-Chinese languages, had non-Chinese cultures and religions, and strange ways of dressing and cuisine." They occupied the vast majority of the rest of China proper, especially in the South. They were NOT the 32 recognized minority in the Modern PRC, or the close to extinct ethnic Manchus. They were large in number of distinct ethnicities, and were never recorded as successful invaders. What happened to them if the Chinese only really absorb invaders and don't invade and assimilate others? Please tell me? Where did these people go?

You do realize that trying to compare expanding borders over thousands of years of organic growth to the European nations racing to exploit dominion over the entire planet as their "manifest destiny" is pretty funny, right?

 

[Peuri]

You do realize that trying to compare expanding borders over thousands of years of organic growth to the European nations racing to exploit dominion over the entire planet as their "manifest destiny" is pretty funny, right?

I literally see no moral difference in those things. The only thing that separates them is the ability to project power.

 

[Hygro]

Ok. Do you have some examples of principle goods you believe we've been underconsuming?

Great question and nope. But perhaps the answer lies not in consuming but producing for a demand-depressed economy, compounding over the years.

 

[Patine]

You do realize that trying to compare expanding borders over thousands of years of organic growth to the European nations racing to exploit dominion over the entire planet as their "manifest destiny" is pretty funny, right?

You do realize that contriving to prove that human nature is NOT just a matter of chance or opportunity, taken or not, and not just being on an advantageous side of a given balance of power at any given time, but that certain races or cultures are just inherently worse or better in such regards, is the same kind of thing both White Supremacist and Black Power groups, and other such groups who advocate similarly for other races, besides, like to push as big pillars of their doctrine.

 

[Hygro]

Pollution is perhaps the wrong word but I think there’s a lot of truth to the sentiment that human expansion into other planets is an imposition of some sort. Whether that’s inherently bad is a wholly different question. I kind of think it is.

An imposition on the planet, as judged by the planet?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I literally see no moral difference in those things. The only thing that separates them is the ability to project power.

I think of it more as the inability to project power. Populations expand; nature of the beast. In expanding they displace their neighbors; also nature of the beast. The European nations in their malignancy decided that rather than grow naturally against the pressure imposed by their neighbors that they had a right of dominion based in their self proclaimed superiority over all the distant 'savages.' Had they not been stymied in their natural expansion maybe such a grotesque arrogance wouldn't have gotten control of them.

 

[Patine]

I think of it more as the inability to project power. Populations expand; nature of the beast. In expanding they displace their neighbors; also nature of the beast. The European nations in their malignancy decided that rather than grow naturally against the pressure imposed by their neighbors that they had a right of dominion based in their self proclaimed superiority over all the distant 'savages.' Had they not been stymied in their natural expansion maybe such a grotesque arrogance wouldn't have gotten control of them.

You still seem to believe, or at least profess, that such "malignancy" is uniquely European, and not part of other cultures, or just denied opportunity to be pursued by them in such cases. This thinking is delusional, at the most flattering.