My favourite part of the article was their musings on how to creatively “disrupt” the seemingly intractable post-apocalypse problem of a Randian billionaire’s thugs-for-hire turning on him the moment the evil ol’ government and its nanny-state rule of law ceases to exist.
Feudalism and manorialism are the strategies of last resort and, in the end, BS power fantasies and monuments to extreme failure.
History’s “solutions” in such situations are always of the sort that ensure that, wealthy or poor, country or city, there is no “away”.
right. except we’ve seen the deliberate disenfranchisement of minorities, the election of two presidents without the popular vote, extreme partisan gerrymandering, electronic voting machine results which don’t remotely match exit polls, and a flood of unregulated money into campaign coffers.
by and large, we have democracy. at the edges we don’t. and the minority party keeps winning by that very edge.
the same forces that cause inequality are managing to hold power despite the popular will.
The first thing which comes to my mind after reading this article is Avengers: Infinity War, how Thanos was coping with a social problem in the whole Galaxy.
When I was young, life was cheap, and you could get money back on the corpse. There were American bombers with nukes flying 24/7 over the Atlantic, and the Russian bombers regularly probed UK airspace to see how far they could get before being intercepted by the RAF. Petrol was leaded, and brakes were made of asbestos. Raw sewage went into the sea next to bathing beaches. Spray cans were gong to destroy the ozone layer, and no-one was doing anytime about it. The birth rate was rising. Biological warfare was a possibility. All four horsemen were saddled up, and ready to ride.
Things have got better. Total war is unlikely rather than inevitable. They don’t make famines like they used to. We can see the birth rate being checked. We still have global warming, but those who don’t have their heads in buckets know it is happening. Many countries are talking of shifting to a 4-day working week, and a standard minimum income whether you work or not.
The countries that aren’t have elites trying to create artificial shortages to keep the mob cowed and under control. That’s what no-deal Brexit is all about, I am sure. The elites can’t keep that up forever. But one of their strategies is to promote the belief that if the free market is interfered with, then all the other things listed in the title will inevitably happen.
Not so. If the elites don’t give ground, that’s what could happen. But there are always other ways.
Inequality tends to have a sawtooth pattern. It grows and and grows and then it gets all nonlinear and wonky, falling much more quickly than it rose. Then the pattern repeats.
I agree with the general thrust of your post - things are generally better but…
Make it fighters in the air and subs in the water and that still applies.
This still happens. Granted not as a routine thing but there’s still a far too high chance of encountering a floater in the water off too many British beaches.
ditto.
Ditto. Plus bio-terrorism - yay! And instead of stabbing people with poisoned umbrellas, people now poison their enemies with radioactive materials or chemical weapons.
Fighters in the air and subs in the water? Not exactly Cuban Missile Crisis stuff, though. Russia invading Europe in the eighties might have made no sense, but the CCCP had 65 tank divisions to NATOs 8, 2 million soldiers in forward positions and another 2.5 within a day’s travel. If they moved though Germany and Greece, the border they had to defend actually got shorter. All the models said they would only be stopped by NATO going nuclear within 24 hours because they were losing so fast.
Raw sewage - I remember all the lugworms dying one year, and all the jellyfish after that. Thanks to Europe, things got much better.
Spray cans banned. Ozone hole healing up. Not a done job yet, but one of the better stories.
Bio-terrorism? That was a fifties and sixties thing. It is surprising what you can make with a pond, some bleach, and some insecticide. Kill off the regular stuff in pond muck or even soil, and there are some real surprises that practically make themselves. There were US handbooks on biological warfare that, as usual, got out.
Maybe you have to be over 60 to see the progress, but there were no Good Old Days, and anyone who claims they can take you back to them are Up To No Good.
Just FTR: without the US and Canada, acting on public pressure (because CANCER is a frigging personal nightmare everyone in the US and Canada is afraid of), nothing would have happend. International politics are full of decade-long negotiations and [square brackets] are a speciality of the US delegates. European negotiators have been strong in several environment issues, but as far as I know, getting rid of flourcarbohydrates in spray cans and refrigerators is at least a joint success. (I mean, it’s multilateralism anyways, but besides that, the US were actually helping there, I recall…).
Hey, you can’t say they’re doing nothing I mean, they signed a deal with the devil just last year to abuse gay people and women’s uteruses more than ever. God’s gonna notice soon, then you’ll ALL be sorry!
Ah. I see what happened.here. I was writing one reply per paragraph of the previous post. So ‘Thanks to Europe’ was attached to cleaning up the beaches, which Europe took many years poking Britain to adhere to even their lowest standards.
Next paragraph: CFC spray cans banned, CFC recycling from fridges followed. This was an international effort.
I agree with your post, and that that have gotten and in absolute terms continue to improve in many ways. It is, unfortunately, unclear to me whether “not forever” is short enough to imply “soon enough to avoid terminal collapse or global annihilation.” My probability estimates on such things are mostly an untrustworthy reflection of my current mood, but I can’t deny the possibilities.
