Agreed, No, it’s got worse, especially in America. God you people terrify me. How do you stand it?
What got worse? How do we terrify you? How do we stand what?
We’re just the latest joke. You’d think we invented authoritarianism or something. We do have a lot of bombs, so I’d be worried too, although, being the bully kind of makes you a target, so, plenty of worries to go around.
We are an outlier when it comes to the ratio of religious belief to our level of modernization, or however they measure how much of an industrialized democracy we are. That is kinda weird, but I don’t think it “got worse”, it has something to do with how we started out as the place people came when they wanted to get away from religious persecution. That resulted in a lot of religious offshoots coming this way.
@lausten’s got it.
And yeah, empires always overextend, rot from the top, the head, like fish, never address inequality, always make it worse and achieve what they achieve, bread and circuses, for their own deceived masses at the expense of all others.
For 300 years my very own little country ruined the world starting with Ireland and then taking over The Middle Passage. The rest is history. Enslaving China to heroin. Little things like that that we forget. Happy days.
Sort of on topic. Someone linked this in facebook today. The Capitalist plan is to keep on going, right through to the inevitable collapse, calculating GDP the whole way. The author says the solution is to collapse “it” before the world goes down, but I think that is equally short-sighted thinking. I’m with the (possibly apocryphal) method used by the Macedonians who fled Athens with the writings of Plato and Aristotle and hid them in caves.
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You’re not kidding.
The problem is that these fools do not understand the exponential function.
They look at the current consumption rate and think they still have some 40 -50 years worth of oil, so hey, why stop now when we still have so much left.
They get their information from this data on “Worldometer”, the real time data collector;
1,456,413,350,710 Oil left (barrels)
15,188 Days to the end of oil (~42 years)
What they do not see is that this estimate is completely false.
This little aside is hidden :
**Countdown to the end of Oil:
**Assumption:
IF CONSUMED AT CURRENT RATES
But current rates is for today only , by the end of year the world will have gained some
70,217,246 Net population growth this year
“net population growth” = births minus deaths
That means, in 4 years the world will have gained the equivalent of the US population and consume "current rates + additional rates ", which means that will most likely cut the remaining time to “end of oil” in half if not sooner.
It’s not just the math that’s wrong. I think it’s thinking. Trouble is, I can’t read minds. But I see what people and how they act. They act like all those “starving” people, all the ones making $2 a day, they could just be eliminated, and somehow that would reduce the impact of humans on the earth. It would, but not the way they think. There wouldn’t be anyone to assemble smartphones, to mine the precious metals, to clean the big shiny buildings, to pick the strawberries. Consumption wouldn’t change much, because the consumers would still be around, but it wouldn’t take long for it drop off a cliff.
According to Hitchens, we are made of “stardust” or its equivalence of “nuclear waste”.
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Some babysitting and 3 pies later.
I had some specific people in mind when I posted this. Some that I have dealt with in person and some trolls here. So, I really don’t care what the Greeks did, or how that science was put on hold for a thousand years, however we got here, we’re at a point where we have the technology to feed everyone, end homelessness, create clean energy, and basically eliminate reasons to kill each other, but we don’t.
We don’t because too many people don’t want to put aside the instinct to believe something without evidence. It’s not a paradox to say that “ontological naturalism” does not come naturally. Fear is natural, and people with power can play on that. A false sense of security is natural, and people know how to create it. Those account for a lot of the manipulation of world leaders.
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I fail to see how the spandrel of religion is the cause of class division, of inequality. As they say in Yorkshire, what’s yours is mine, what’s mine’s me own, a parody of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Sin is abuse of power. Is excusing unfairness with authority. Far more fundamental than religion. Authority with no basis but violence, not even belief, let alone evidence. We are remarkably subservient to it in our group think.
Hmmm, then I think about the history of the Catholic Church and they put the lie into your words.
The impulse maybe more fundamental than religion - so what - religion has simply formalized our reptilian impulses.
No free pass for religion, and they should pay their dang taxes, and they should do better than basic animal instincts.
Where have you looked? Have you heard of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed? He puts the clergy just below the powerful elite in his hierarchy, with the mass of people doing the work below. As it relates to naturalism, the clergy is there to interrupt anyone who simply looks at the real world and makes a claim about how it works using publicly available data, demonstrable evidence. The clergy says, no, that doesn’t matter, gods are on our the side of your leaders and they have special access to supernatural powers that you can’t see. In the modern world, divine intervention has been replaced by “faith in the founders”, “business acumen”, and just plain old wealth as if it is proof of intelligence.
In your case Martin, you believe that people didn’t understand that it’s better to love than enslave until Jesus told us. At least, it seems that’s what you are trying to tell me.
There is no lie in my words.
Not so as I already acknowledged in your single surviving wonderful Akkadian reference. And yes, religion, church comes a close second to state, which nearly always wins; the Beast turns on the Whore. Henry VIII used to murder Protestants and Catholics on alternate weeks. Respect for authority - violence - is more easily socially invoked than the exploitation of the sense of the numinous. Both of which are evolutionarily hard wired for experience. Genetics comes with a free pass. It will out.
I’m catching up late on the literature of the progressive left - 1/16th of the West - as I’ve only just got there without caveat.
Well, that’s one of the quickest turnarounds on the internet. Excuse me if I wait for further evidence.
Whoever is head of state is kind of the “winner” of the moment, isn’t it? But, there is this other, underlying current of culture, the one that carries the memes of goodwill and peace with it, sometimes with the
support of the state, sometimes not.
My statement is, authorities exploit that sense, they have the ability to tap into that innate desire to be part of something bigger, to have a pathway to the highest ideals and some magic power that sent them to us.
I don’t think we have the answer to the nature/nurture question. Or the question of, are we naturally good with the ability to do evil, or are we naturally evil with the ability to do good?
you presented one of the highest possible, primus inter pares expressions of morality, dating from four millennia ago, how could I not? It’s remarkable. And oh aye, I’ll still push for something more remarkable happening in C1st Palestine, on the shoulders of those giants.
And as for the undercurrent, yes, as Theodore Parker said, ‘… the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ This is the first and greatest commandment in our genes. Be fair. And the second is like it. Do no harm. They only dominate in 20% of us.
And yes, unfortunately, in 80% of us, there is strong obedience, submission wiring. All very vertebrate and higher invertebrate. Entwined with our sense of the sacred that becomes a synergistically oppressive combination.
I’m convinced that we are pre-wired for experience to express morality in these constrained ways, that nurture does not yet know how transcend social conservativism.
One idea: empathy is not a skill, it is a way of being. children acquire it by receiving it.
but, on the other side, racism is taught.
One does not come into the world good or bad but with potential for both.
Look to a school or pre-school playing ground !
I avoid putting numbers on this, but I watch Steven Pinker discuss Jonathan Haidt, sometimes I feel like I am in 80%. There’s the 80/20 rule in workplaces, 20% of the people do 80% of the work, and I’ve noticed that is generally true. But that’s different from caring and just, although it crosses over.
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Oooh! Must track down Pinker on Haidt. Yeahhh. I’m more 80 than I’d like. Even though I now know it’s all… nonsense. Distraction. Needs to be utterly subordinated to the 20.
Kinda made up that Pinker scenario. But he probably has referenced him somewhere