throwaway94857

This is true, but it's a matter of abstract ideals vs concrete benefits. Who are we to tell people in a poor community that certain economic development cannot take place because it will harm certain animals or plants?

This is a very real problem for communities in Africa and the Amazon basin; they are unable to build the infrastructure necessary for further development because privileged Western animal rights activists are more concerned with protecting animals than other humans.

It's perfectly reasonable to consider cost - which is what this move entails - when deciding whether or not to protect a species. We already employ this calculus, in that we are not spending our entire national budget on protecting some endangered subspecies of river fish in Arkansas. Anyone suggesting we do such a thing would be laughed at, because it's not worth it to spend all that money protecting fish.

The protection of obscure species concerns a small portion of activists very much, and they are very loud in their activism, but there are other large portions of the population that don't care nearly as much and would prioritize economic growth over protecting endangered species. The activists' personal convictions are not more important or more valuable than those of people who don't care as much for endangered species. They're just different, and the activists tend to be louder and more passionate in voicing them.

Some try, fewer truly succeed. It's one thing to reject your nature, it's quite another to not live in some lingering dissonance as a result.

What? We're far wealthier in the US than the vast majority of the world. It's not propaganda, it's data and fact.

Healthcare and education are generally more expensive here than in Europe, but people also get paid more here and keep more of their salaries than in the rest of the developed world. Goods are much cheaper in the US than in Europe and we generally enjoy more material wealth than the Europeans.

You are deluding yourself with your bigotry against the US.

Competition is as innate to animal life as is breathing. It's naive to think we can simply ignore our drive to compete with one another, as naive as thinking we can ignore hunger thirst or sexual desire.

But violent revolutionaries almost never have credible or effective alternatives to the current system. That's why they have to resort to violence, their arguments for why things have to change usually aren't good and they're more motivated by anger than anything else.

It's not just the journalists who tend to be anti-male. The psychological and sociological establishments have been subtly anti-male for a long time.

An example of how this anti-male bias manifests is in the very language used in academic work on men. So often there is talk about "toxic masculinity" when discussing boys and men, and discussions of how male traits are problematic - described as 'aggressive' and 'uncooperative' - while female traits are almost universally described in more positive terms.

Of course both genders exhibit destructive behavior, but women do not have to suffer the same harsh treatment in the academic literature as men.

We could speculate on the reasons for this bias, but I believe it can be tied to the overall anti-male climate, which in itself is an overreaction by the rest of society - but the intellectuals in particular - to the unequal treatment of women for most of history.

More speculatively, I believe the high numbers of women and effeminate men in academia, especially the social sciences, have biased the field.

We'll be fine. We already have the tool to save the climate (nuclear), just need to actually use it.

>"that's really weird"

Not really, given that our use of pesticides allows us to feed billions of people worldwide at low cost. Rates of hunger in the developed world are almost non-existent and globally hunger rates are as low as they've ever been and continue to plummet.

Pesticide treated food is safe and healthy too, so we're feeding the world with safe and healthy food. This is a great thing.

It's not surprising at all that people would say all good. There would need to be some catastrophic side effects of pesticide use for people to even think about questioning it.

So far all problems related to pesticides have been far, far outweighed by them giving us the ability to feed billions.

It may be true that Russia is trying to orchestrate disinformation campaigns around the world, but it is simply preying on feelings that are already quite strong in the West. It is not creating these feelings.

Can they be explained by feelings other than "hate" as the Left often likes to clumsily portray? Of course they can. It is reasonable to have a problem with huge waves of people entering countries in unchecked masses, often people who have very little skills and come from cultures very different from the ones they are flooding into. That would be a problem in any country.

Additionally, the far Left believes in "salad bowls" instead of "melting pots", that one's native culture is valuable and that it should be preserved. The combination of mass immigration with these regressive ideals leads to division and distrust within nations.

It is the entire Leftist ideology of identity politics combined with mass immigration that causes so much frustration and anger among people, who get even angrier when their reasonable views are labeled "far right".

Immigration must be legal and controlled and steady so that assimilation happens naturally without coercion, which would certainly backfire.

China is not Communist or Socialist though. They are basically fascist, or if you want to be strict about the definition of fascism they represent an entirely new form altogether.

I agree completely. I'm saying if we remove anonymity we won't need top down censorship.

I'd like to elaborate on the unity of the different elements of Chinese society you mention.

Chinese institutions are all unified under a single structure, and that structure is the Communist (in name only) Party. Party members are embedded in every single important facet of society. Education, the military, the government, the private sector, it's all linked and unified by the party.

Now, we can compare this structure to the mammalian neocortex. The neocortex incorporates inputs from lower layers of the brain to form high level abstractions and integrations.

The West is basically functioning without a neocortex. Our institutions are not unified. There is no integrating layer above the corporate sector and government. In fact they are often at odds.

What I am saying is that China represents an existential threat to the entire project of the West. If China is able to outcompete us with their more advanced (?) organization, we will be forced to copy them or become irrelevant. This would mean doing away with free democracies and instituting a ruling party - a neocortex - to oversee the entire society.

I am not sure this would even be possible in diverse societies like those of the Western democracies. There is too much infighting and tribalism, at least right now.

That does not bode well for us.

But it's possible that cultural unity within our democracies may be sufficient to align the different parts of society to allow us to compete with China, without the formal superstructure of an all powerful Party.

I believe the age of the anonymous internet is over. It's time for real world identity linked accounts for participating in online conversations.

This is necessary for 2 reasons. First, it gives us confidence the people we are speaking to are (probably) not bots.

Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law. So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.