On February 24 2025 09:21 Nebuchad wrote:
I perceive the complexity of the systems as largely manufactured. I do not believe that the important thing that changed between, say, 1960 and today is that humans changed. Systems changed, they became worse, and that reflects on what humans believe. Humans in a society will naturally perceive the options that are directly available to them as acceptable and practical, and the options that require a lot of work to achieve as idealistic and offputting. I firmly believe that if you had a two-party system of socialists and social democrats, the humans of 2024 would be having political discussions between socialism and social democrats. Of course I can't prove that but it seems to fit the evolution of society better.
Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of this type of discourse in general could be improved by considering human nature, and the very strong effects of history. A lot of it is also extremely insular, and for discussion in English, extremely American-centric.
I think the flipside of it is that things being so entrenched and in almost mystic ways makes it very difficult to change. It's like economists who pretend that markets immediately correct, without friction or inertia, anything unbalanced about them.
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Northern Ireland23745 Posts
On February 24 2025 09:48 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2025 08:55 WombaT wrote:On February 24 2025 07:05 Nebuchad wrote:On February 24 2025 06:44 WombaT wrote:On February 24 2025 06:12 Nebuchad wrote:On February 24 2025 04:47 Excludos wrote:On February 23 2025 05:08 Biff The Understudy wrote:On February 22 2025 17:29 KT_Elwood wrote:Climate  change  Has completely vanished from german pre-election talking points. GOOD! The activists started fading into "real world" about a year ago, and the stance of the most likely "chancelor to be" Friedrich meRz (whom I don't like) is: "  Yeah, people realized that germany is putting out 2% of the worlds GHG emissions and only represent 1% of the world's population.. but How does it heLp to bring that down to 1% if we lose all our wealth and set a Bad example? Germany needs to invent a better model of harvesting energy, doing transportation etc. . Technology and a Way that other countries WanT and NEED to copy because it's more viable than BurNing through finite ressources." And I agree 101%. If you don't WanT to send troops to saudi arabia and norway, to blow up oilrigs, you need to present people an alternative. Otherwise every country you talk out of oil, will have 5 other countries taking the production because it's cheaper now. Yeah let’s not mention an existential crisis we have totally ignored for the last forty years. Let’s not change our lifestyle, let’s not rethink our model. Let’s keep pumping CO2 and keep asphyxiating our world, acidifying our oceans and make large portions of the earth, that just happened to be the most populated ones, uninhabitable in a couple of decades. And since we are being really that stupid, let’s in the same breath complain about migrants, because there won’t be any migrants when hundreds of millions don’t have a place to live once their countries are reduced to deserts. I think we are too dumb to make it as a species. That’s my conclusion from the last ten years and the last six months in particular. We are not gonna make it, and frankly, that’s fine. Might as well forget about it. We humans are completely and wholly incapable og being "slightly uncomfortable" to fix future problems. Just look at every current politician losing their elections because prices have gone up a little bit. Americans were willing to elect a leader who's sole purpose is to destroy their society for the gain of the already rich, all because of prices of eggs. It has to get much much worse before it can get better. And then pray it's not too late That's one way to look at it, the other is that the elite and their politicians were willing to risk destabilizing their entire society just so they wouldn't have to improve in any way the conditions for people who are impacted by the price of eggs. I think at some point the elite have to stop taking all the blame for our collective woes. Like, they don’t even really need to try anymore. Second there’s some slight bump in the road of almost any kind and big chunks of society gravitate to throwing others, or the resolution of tricky problems, under the bus. I don’t think people are giant assholes by and large either, I just wonder if there’s too many degrees of abstraction in this modern world. I also can’t blame folks for a degree of skepticism. They’d be more willing to suck up some privation if they had confidence that it would be for some future good. Whereas if the social contract has been ripped in half, set on fire and then the ashes pissed on, why would this time, or next time be any different? They currently aren't taking any of the blame so I think we're not at risk of them taking all of it  On an individual level obviously voting to make things worse is a bad decision and they're going to deserve blame for it. It's not very interesting though, we're just seeing that when people don't like the current state of things in a two party system, at the next opportunity given the guy from the other side gets elected, that just tends to happen. I don't think there's a lot of value to drawing big conclusions from something that has always happened happening again. I do agree that the situation is fucked up though, and I think I'm offering a better framing for getting mad at it. Taking the blame, and actually having consequences attached to that are two very different things. My framing is that one is dealing with extremely large, extremely complicated systems and some ascribe too much value to specific parts of those complex systems. I’d argue for example that Brexit, and both, or at least definitely 2016 were outcomes the elite as it were very much didn’t desire, but happened nonetheless. It’s a barrier that can be punched through. Or more widely we’ve tended to see some rejection of previous orthodoxy, but the right thru far right have generally been the beneficiaries in recent times across quite a few different places. Be they de facto 2 party systems, or multi-party ones that operate with proportional representation or whatever. Anyway my central contention isn’t to fire blame all over the shop, merely that Joe and Jane public bear plenty of responsibility as well as Joe and Jane CEO big party donor. Things have been actively moving in a direction that’s broadly for the worst for a fair chunk of time now, even in places where there are realistic alternatives. Brexit was very much desired by the elite, just not the British elite.
What elite though?
Europe didn’t by and large want us to fuck off, the US establishment of the time either. Obama made that abundantly clear when he shot down ideas of a bilateral trade agreement and saying we’d be at the ‘back of the queue’ if we exited.
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EPT
