whearyou
I wonder if the Arabs got nearly as much milage out of Nazi scientists as the Americans or Soviets got.
Will be interesting to see how strong the controlling forces can be - enough to make you miss things in direct perception like in the book, or only softer effects further up the cognition layer stack
The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing
This has felt like a super postmodern interaction
I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
This was the plot to a recent South Park episode: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27035146/
Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.
Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.
Everything is trade offs I guess.
That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.
Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power
It corresponds with the qualitative observation that violent revolutions are usually led by the “middle class”. This itself corresponds with versions quantitative theories like Turchin’s Structural Demographic Theory.
I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.
In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.
It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.
I’m embarrassed to admit how many hours I dumped into it.
At this point is it the orthodoxy, suffusing pretty much everything in intellectual public discourse, is no less oppressive than that which it replaced, and, subjectively, feels trite and reductive.
Those get little air time in hard progressive or far right spaces since these anti liberal influence operations mostly promote hard progressive and far right perspectives.
Totally not antisemitic /s
You’re leaning into the antisemitic conspiracy thinking a little hard.
That sort of approach undermines creating real consensus to root out kleptocracy.
I understand those a-hole’s objectives and can emotionally write them off as a-holes, but the way people in the West play along as useful idiots does get under my skin
Other external actors (in particular the Soviets) and internal actors played mayor roles as well.
Castigating only the US paints an inaccurate picture of the realities, leading the public and future policy makers to learn partial lessons which when applied will perform less than optimally for preventing the next incident of large scale sufferings