I think I do (but I can be talked out of it). But then I believe you can be barred from places. Like if your kids aren’t vaxxed then they can’t attend this school, etc.
barred from society maybe. Like go live in a cabin in the woods and live off the land 100%.
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I’m fine with that. People have a right to make stupid choices and the rest of us have a choice not to put up with them
Have no problem with it when it comes to vaccines either. Anything that is truly deadly people will take their vaccines and for the rest just ban unvaccinated people from childcare, schools, sports, elective surgery and international travel.
Big part of why millennials aren’t feeling Bidenomics. This dynamic is present in every big city in the country.
https://x.com/monicacklein/status/1764995352988402094?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
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The New Yorker article is fantastic, albeit deeply depressing. Hard to avoid the conclusion that democracy is fundamentally unsustainable. If you have the best president in living memory running for reelection against the worst president in living memory, also running for reelection, and the outcome is not just close, but is favoring the guy who did a shitty job, it seems like a game over moment. It was a nice idea, but turns out that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can’t actually endure that long after all. Too damn bad.
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You are aware there are all kinds of people that can’t take vaccines and rely on herd immunity to function in society?
Primary are immune compromised people (HIV, cancer patients).
I concur with no vax due to choice-just stay home but that ain’t gonna happen.
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It is pretty jarring that the whole thing only works because of norms and social pressure. You can write as many rules as you want but eventually you get someone who just doesn’t give a fuck about those things and it’s game over.
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You mean to say that collapse is triggered when a rule-breaker shows up on the scene who doesn’t give a fuck, but that’s wrong. Donald Trump is not the first brazen, amoral manipulator to show up on the scene. Not even the scariest or cleverest. The failure mode is that the world at large gets so irony-poisoned and cynicism-poisoned that they stop giving a fuck about the norms. People get so mad about immigration or climate change or house prices or Palestine or the decline of coal that they let themselves just stop caring about boring abstract principles.
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Biden giving people so much money, they are buying their homes in cash!
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It does seem that democracy is fundamentally unstable right now, which is obviously the period of time with which we are most concerned. But I do think that our sample size of life in a developed world is small enough that issues that seem enormous in the micro will be tiny in the macro. If, of course, humanity survives long enough.
I don’t think I’m following your point. Over hundreds of thousands of years of searching, we only ever found one system of human society that wasn’t an endless nightmare of suffering and brutality, and it’s the one that’s falling apart around us. We’re sitting in a crummy, leaky lifeboat in the middle of a vast empty sea, and no one onboard is bailing, because they’re all secretly thinking “I can’t wait til this shitty lifeboat sinks and we can get started on the real work of building a boat that’s actually worth a rat’s ass.”
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It’s capitalism that is the problem. Not democracy. I can elaborate if need be but i think it’s obvious. One easy example is the media covering this entire situation in a way to maximize profits rather than for the greater good.
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I think most people aren’t even aware they are in the lifeboat. As for me I just think bailing the water is futile at this point so I’m just going to enjoy the show and what is left of my life.
It’s one reason I have spent almost a decade railing against the Dems as the real problem now. They were our only path out of this mess and they have refused to do anything meaningful about it. They aren’t even doing a good job raising awareness there is a major problem on the horizon. Only thing left to debate is whether its negligence or intentional.
I think a lot of people don’t think it’s possible to reach the depths of the Civil War or WW1/2 or any of the other atrocities lived through in the recent past because they were shot(photo or video) in black and white and are therefore ancient history.
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Yeah, that’s my point, it’s not hundreds of thousands of years. The Enlightenment was like 500 years ago. The industrial revolution ~300 years ago. French revolution 250.
I mean, maybe this isn’t a blip, maybe this really is the descent and disintegration of humanity. And we should probably treat it like it is just in case, and what’s happening now is what we should focus on. But it probably isn’t.
What were the golden years for US democracy?
2008-2009
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What do you think people were doing before the Enlightenment? There were plenty of people looking around and noticing “Hey, life sure does seem like an endless nightmare of suffering and brutality, I wonder if there’s a better way to do things?” It’s not like everyone before the Renaissance was an NPC with no agency. They tried like hell to get out of their nightmare. They tried every fucking thing from the stone handaxe to obsessing over grass until it turned yo wheat to sacrificing people en masse to the sun gods. Even democracy is not a new idea. It was tried so frequently that ancient political thinkers proposed various cycles to explain how democracy would arise from the deposition of an aristocratic clique, only to be gradually subverted by demagoguery, which descended into tyranny, which was then overthrown by an aristocracy to start the cycle anew.
Enlightenment thinkers weren’t any smarter than anyone else. We just had the obscene good fortune to live at a time when technology started to outpace Malthusian gravitation and the mode of production switched to one where empowering individuals was more powerful than the old style of extraction and oppression. Maybe those things will continue to be the case for long enough that some new experiment will pick up the torch from us. But I think we caught a lot of lucky breaks to make it as far as we did, and it wasn’t even enough.
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Maybe it’s entropy. Or math. Or whatever it was that Einstein kept Gödel from blabbing about to the immigration judge. Who knows. Einstein thought he saw something in the US that amounted to more than just run-good but maybe he was wrong. Maybe our time is up. It sure as shit doesn’t look good.
I don’t even necessary disagree, I just think that what we’re seeing is a snapshot. Especially given the rapid development of technology I think the ultimate outcome is completely unpredictable. Yes, what we’re seeing now is a total shit sandwich, and the immediate future doesn’t look great, I just don’t believe that it’s a lock that what we’re seeing is the beginning of an inevitable and never-ending slide down.
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