Standing Against the Tide of Progress

[Comrade Anklebiter]

Hee hee!

Oh yeah, now I remember...

[LazarX]

Fleshgrinder wrote:

A lot of that is the minutia and noise of looking at the micro.

When you look at the micro, you see our dependence on fossil fuels, the problems with nuclear, you see genocide and mass killings, you see loss of freedoms, reduction of GDP etc.

But when you pull back and look at the macro and look at trends over 100 and 200 year periods, you see that all that bad stuff is just noise.

The trend is ALWAYS upward.

We're on track to have no person on earth living on less than 1 dollar a day by 2025. Sure, 1.01 per day isn't exactly great, but that's a milestone. Poverty is shrinking.

The AIDS epidemic in Africa has peaked, they are having less new cases every year so we're seeing the decline and the eventual end of that epidemic.

The world is getting better every day.

I'm pretty sure the Easter Islanders thought they were doing just great because of the incredible statues they were building while they were eradicating the support structures of their ecosphere. We're still on the edge of various forms of resource crisis in terms of energy, the continuing loss of forests and arable land, and an expanding population.

Also look to the fact that if the Earth is hit with a Corona Mass Ejection on the scale of the one that hit us in the 19th century, every transformer on the planet is going to explode. And that kiddies, means curtains for the mechanised civilisation we depend on.

BTW the Earth just missed getting hit by one last month. It hit a quarter of our our orbit away, but the next one could be dead on.

History is a list of dead civilizations that thought there was no end in sight.

[Comrade Anklebiter]

meatrace wrote:

And you like bad hippie music.

Wrong again, stooge!

I love bad hippie music.

[Gark the Goblin]

This is a great thread.

Other species are in fact valuable for their very DNA. We're surrounded by a repository of genetic diversity that constantly generates awesome new stuff. If we're going to continue using this s+@+ for medicine, power, food, and of course genetic engineering itself, it'd probably be a good idea to keep it around.

I understand the drive for Progress, but it's really f%@%ing stupid to assume that we can easily overcome the consequences of that Progress. If you do that, you just keep running in circles trying to fix problems created by previous fixes to problems. Stuff goes wrong, and you gotta have a backup plan. You really don't want civilisation to be decimated or centimated or millimated or whatever by something ostensibly for Progress, because that'll f@@+ over all the progress you made before that.
Basically, switch to wind, but don't blow up your oil network.

Also, nihilism is awesome I will totally not do my jobs now. f%!! society all'yall peace