- cross-posted to:
- 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
And it only got worse.
(This was posted before Musk bought Twitter and before the full-on invasion of Ukraine)
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I hate this doomerism. Generally speaking, things have gotten waaaay better in most parts of the world. Life expectancy is increasing, tech is getting better, gaming is getting more fun, many medical conditions that meant certain death don’t mean that anymore, cities (at least around me) are moving away from car centric planning and so on.
We have Jarvis now (sorta kinda). Looking at the future, we’re seeing potential treatments that could cure most cancers if not all. We’re seeing tech that could lead to labor post scarcity (sure, maybe not the timelines that the capitalists are proclaiming, but still).
On the progressive front, being queer is getting much easier than in the past. YES, THERE’S A LOT OF IMPROVEMENT NECESSARY HERE. But, there’s progress, not regression which this post claims.
Are there many things to work on? Yes. Can be do better? Yes. But I’m still very optimistic about the future and frankly, excited for it.
It’s okay dear, we’ll be dead by then anyway. – This person’s parents.
But yes, I agree with the pedants here unfortunately. I know, I need a shower. This is obvious hyperbole.
Having said that, it’s also true that a lot of people are in a position where they would not be shocked at all if things continue to decline over time. Today may be a shitty day, but you’ll come to realize that it’s one of the best days you’ll ever have from here on out. A time when you didn’t have to worry about which InterZone you got assigned to today or whether you were going to get bazopped in your Volundo today. You can just enjoy the fresh air outside without having to worry if there’s more than 80 PPM Solanaceous compounds in it or if you’ve got enough glonks to go smocking in the boonzoon. Just sitting with a glowing screen in front of your eyes oblivious to it all is a luxury that in time few will be able to accomplish.
I don’t know what these “good things” are. What were they before?
There is good in every day. There is bad in every day. Seek to experience both.
Yep, the world is in a downward spiral of heat and economies are built on unsustainable debt. I do not envie the world we are leaving future generations(I have chosen to not reproduce). But good things continue to happen daily, and you can do good things on the regular.
We will not be fine. We can work to make things better.
Depends on the country. Some places are in decline and others are not. It’s up to the people of each country to manage themselves and their country.
I disagree. Had a great day out today with some friends and ate the largest halloumi burger I have ever seen.
if it’s the end of the world as you know it, then you better start learning new things fast.
Good things will still happen. There is good beer, my cat, hanging with my brother, re-watching Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, the music of Holland Oats, and you know sunsets and that kind of shit.
All of those things can still be loved and enjoyed as we ceaselessly continue to be hurled through this burning hellscape of inescapable doom and decay careening with no way of stopping until it reaches its catastrophic and explosive end guided by its own blind angry hands.
Holland Oats is such an underrated musician, worth staying on this mortal coil for
The man knew what he was doing with a song, god rest his soul.
I actually think that the world has and will continue to get better for the vast majority of people. I would say it’s pretty difficult to create a world where there is a 0% chance of anything at all getting worse, but fewer people are dying of malaria, we’re close to eradicating polio, way fewer people die in wars than used to etc. And even if most people are waay off on how to make the world a better place, at least they usually want it to be. Many humans working together on a task has historically been a great recipe for success. The better the world becomes, the more of us can spend time helping each other.
In b4 food chains collapse because the ocean is boiling and land is on fire, and everyone you claim has a ‘better’ life starves to death
This is the messaging they use to keep you from ever trying to improve the future.
Look, every generation thinks the world is going to shit and will end in apocalypse during their lifetime. For the boomers, it was Cold War nukes - for us, it’s technonazis and climate change. Before that it was WWII and then WWI and so on and so on back through the ages.
And thus far, every generation has been wrong.
Because within in every generation is a core group of people who get sick of expecting good things to happen, and start making them happen.
The real question is what kind of person are you?
I’m finally getting woke to this. Doomsday is always on the horizon — inevitable, implacable. Like a dark end of history where all our good works are crushed to nothing. We may as well have not tried.
But it never totally arrives. There’s dark times for sure, but short of a gamma ray burst, we keep limping along. As long as there are people still in the game there are ways things could be better or worse depending on what we do today.
14000 people died due to heat related issues this year in my country alone. How many is it gonna be in 20 years? 500,000 every year? We are completely fucked. If you can’t see that you must be blind or willfully ignorant.
The nuclear threat never went away.
The climate change problem is also unique in human history, as it takes so long to accumulate that it can “boil us slowly” and take so long to get to the sick-of-it phase that we hit tipping points. Some scientifically minded skeptics (like my Dad) dismiss that with “future geoengineering will fix it,” but I’ve read quite a few papers on that, and they are all horrific.
The technonazis are also eliminating the human chain needed to maintain psycological control. That human chain was the foil of every past regime in history.
I agree with your sentiment. Defeatism is harmful, and irrational.
…But we need to look at these problems with clear eyes, too. There are plausible technical reasons this could actually be different.
For Boomers it was climate change too.
um. no I’m pretty sure the WWII ones were right
also the difference between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the one now is that there were countries on earth that were not succumbing to it, and combined, those countries had an army that was at least theoretically capable of going toe to toe with the combined armies of the fascists
if the way to stop fascism is WWIII, where are the fucking allies?
No, they weren’t, or you wouldn’t be here to make that statement. Simple as that. The world violently changed, but it didn’t end.
Oh thank goodness we won’t all die, only a huge chunk of us! I was almost worried there for a second.
It did end for 10s of millions of people.
It didn’t end yet.
Still time to debtmaxx and fill your closets with guns
drone survival tactics. my local police have them. but they aren’t very stealthy. lights and buzzy noise. wanted to jam their signal. where to start.
“I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.”
U Thant, former secretary-general of the UN, in 1969
i mean, we did do that back then. everybody got social safety nets, the berlin wall fell as certainly one way to end an arms race, the nations united against the ozone hole. but now we’re past another 1969 with gaza as our new vietnam
Well, we have managed to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons since their height. So while its not solved, arguably the risks are lower.
what a beautiful year at least
Another dose of hopium, please
Even where its illegal, weed is generally cheaper, purer and stronger.
I think the most important thing would be for people to finally realize what and who is primarily responsible, namely, unbridled, unregulated U.S.-style predatory capitalism, which has been completely out of control since the 1980s and has thus produced this new ruling class of excessively greedy, utterly unscrupulous multi-billionaires who have now become so powerful that they can give free rein to their antisocial behavior without any consequences.
These people are the enemies of humanity, and almost everywhere in the world their ploy is the same: mindless pseudo-nationalism that, with its false enemy stereotypes and wretched reactionary ideology, distracts attention from who the real culprits are. It is always these political factions that rail against foreigners and/or other minorities to hide who the real enemies are—the ones for whom they are actually making policy. The prime example of this is MAGA.
Unfortunately, these far-right extremist movements are by no means popular only among older people. In Germany, for example, the AfD—essentially a carbon copy of MAGA—has had a great deal of success among young people, especially young men. This is, of course, also linked to the fact that they are supported by the same billionaires who control the major U.S. social media platforms, such as Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and their ilk.
It’s a mystery to me how anyone can fail to see that the idiotic hatred they spread serves, first and foremost, to mask the fact that these political movements exclusively pursue policies that benefit the super-rich. Nevertheless, these movements—which are often characterized by fascist and authoritarian tendencies—are, unfortunately, extremely successful. As long as they remain so, I have little hope that anything will change.
You forgot to mention that the wealthy are fucking stupid in modern times. Maybe I’m giving the past too much credit, but it felt like the wealthy from the past at least had this idea that they should be building Great things for the future civilization. Not trying to hoard everything in attempt to live forever through uploading their minds, which is exactly what their goals are.
I’m not so sure whether the super-rich and powerful were really that different in the past. I just think that, at least in the West, they were much more tightly regulated back in the 1980s and even the 90s: It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that the rollback of government regulation coincides with the steady growth in the wealth of the richest one percent.
So I think these people have always been degenerate and antisocial; it’s just that they—or rather, those who profit from their wealth—have managed to infiltrate the political system to such an extent that nothing can stand in their way today.
To me, the best example of this development is, again, the U.S.: I find it inconceivable that a government as blatantly criminal as the current one would have been possible even in the 1990s. I mean, it’s very obvious that this is nothing but organized crime. The Epstein case, for example, leaves no doubt in my mind—and this is just one absurd scandal among many that, even twenty years ago, would have forced the government to resign, even in the U.S. Compared to these people, Nixon looks like an innocent schoolboy.
I think this is possible only in a failed state—and the reason for its failure lies quite obviously in the actions of the richest one percent, because they have the greatest stake in it and now even openly advocate this goal, for example, with pseudo-intellectual concepts like “Dark Enlightenment,” which forms the “theoretical” basis of their politics —the goal is the abolition of democracy and a return to, or rather a pseudo-modernized interpretation of, the class-based society of the Dark Ages.
So in short: I think there can be no doubt that the billionaires are completely degenerate, but I believe their kind has always existed in this way. Today, however, they have so much power that they believe they can get away with anything—which unfortunately is indeed the case—and that is why they no longer even bother to keep up appearances.
The wealthy now outsource all of their brains. This used to happen too, but at least the powerful usually had to at least have a brain for numbers or organization. Now we have entire machines that are designed to keep any idiot propped up like weekend at Bernie’s. Running solely on the will of hundreds of people who just don’t want to lose their paycheck.
Honestly the time this is most reminiscent of is medieval kings and rulers who were the 4th in a lineage and were so inbred and not educated that they couldn’t string a sentence together.
I’ve got very little evidence/knowledge, just “common sense” guesses, but i think there’ll be a lot of survivor bias in that. We hear about the titans of industry who shaped mankind with revolutionary techniques/inventions, and we see the statues of people who made massive impacts on the world, but we don’t hear so much about the “made shitloads by reallocating resources creatively, spent it all on child sex-slaves, what a bastard”
kinda, none of that seems to matter. sure, there is no future. i have spent years of my life detailing these things, talking to people, trying to get any kind of response.
my conclusion is, as far as i could find out, other people seem to be fucking dumb, in the sense of: completely oblivious to the fact that what makes humans humans is being actively dismantled. people are zombies, dead inside, brainwashed individuals.
i don’t think it’s like all these zombie movies on TV, i think the zombies are not gonna be violent mobsters who are gonna bite you and such and you defend yourself with a gun. the actual zombies are your neighbours, your coworkers, your family. people who are dead inside, just mind-controlled organisms who try to manipulate you to follow the hive mind. in that way they are “eating your brain”. they’re all around us. that’s the actual death of society.
Always were.
But the day is full of beauty. You can cook a great meal. Make music. Write poems. Dance. Love. You can feel and experience. Pet a dog or a goat. Walk a new road or notice a new rock on an old road. Breathe, in and out. There is always good available, even in the worst of times.
One time when I was working retail, I had an elderly man tell me about how sad he was that the ocean is warming and the corals and dolphins are dying. Then he took a bottle of peach flavored weed gummies out of his pocket and told me how happy he was that it finally got legalized. That guy was cool. I wish more old people were like him.
