Yeah, life is a bitch and then you die.

Oh, sorry. You were perhaps looking for something more uplifting, upbeat, and positive sounding?

Actually, I don't think life is all suffering. Some of it is suffering--more for some people, less for others--but life is also joy and festivity--not all the time for anybody, but once in a while for most people. Life is mostly the reasonably pleasant area mid-stroke of the pendulum's sweep between simply marvelous and fucking awful.

That's as cheery as I can manage. So spend as much time as you can living in the moderately pleasant middle zone.

n the present model, no economy is sustainable, not even if waste were reduced (on the present model, it cannot be eliminated), not even if assets were redistributed — Vera Mont

I agree.

Some people used to think that the potential for universally beneficial economic growth was unlimited. Some very optimistic socialists used to think that.

If a no-growth, steady-state economy is possible, it will have to be conducted at a considerably reduced level. Fewer people, less energy use, less extraction. Strict requirements for sustainable manufacturing and agriculture. Very strong states to enforce the limits, and assure equitable distribution would be required too. Etc.

Ecological / economic / environmental collapse might pave the way to a no-growth economy, but that is not something to hope for. Recovering from the devastation will be immensely difficult, if even possible.

So, it's all just fate or happenstance; we have no control? — Vera Mont

I may have hit the bleak anvil of dark fate too hard. It certainly is the case that millions of ordinary humans do see the long-term positive and negative consequences of past and current practices. Maybe the number is even in the billions. Unfortunately, nobody lives in a democracy of the wise, or even fairly sensible. The world is run by people with great ambition for power and wealth, and they are calling the shots.

An axiom of some UN relief programs is that "famine is a political problem". Many, if not most, famines are caused by very incompetent, corrupt governments. The climate crisis is also a political problem of incompetent and corrupt governments--which includes some of the best ones. The governments of the G6 economies have not been able to meet their own targets for reducing CO2 emissions,

Balance, though, balance... Texas, a state up to its knees in oil and grease, is more enlightened than it looks:

In 2022, Texas produced the equivalent of 31% of the electricity it consumes from solar, wind and geothermal power, compared with just 10% in 2013. Texas ranks 13th for the percentage of power coming from renewables. The first ranked state, Iowa, got 83% of its power from wind and solar last year.

Iowa, the corny state, may be producing 83% of its power from the wind, but it grows a lot of corn that goes into alcohol production as an automobile fuel supplement. Next door, Minnesota is producing about 33% of its power from wind, solar, and hydro (some of which comes from Canada). MN is also growing corn for automotive alcohol. Running cars on a corn/petroleum blend is just stupid, stupid, stupid.

So, mixed bag.

If we wanted badly enough to survive, we'd make a conscious commitment to establish balance. — Vera Mont

When we decided to leave the trees and walk on two legs, we didn't know where that would lead us. When hunter-gatherers started collecting wheat kernels, and using the biggest ones for seed, they didn't know where that would lead them. They didn't know where their first settlements of huts would lead them. They didn't know where devising writing would lead them. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn't know where taking over the island of Britannia would lead them (it led to the British Empire).

Our great-great-grandparents didn't know where digging up fossils and turning them into plastic would lead. The next generation didn't know where electricity would lead them. Or the automobile, or television, or computers, or the tens of thousands of unique plastic materials would lead them.

We just aren't 'built' to find something nice and new (polystyrene coffee cups, delicious spring water in plastic bottles, plastic siding for our house, cell phones--you name it) and set it aside for 10 years while we research it's long-term impact on society, the economy, the environment, and older products. No, we seize it and rush it into production--the same way we would do if we came across a delicious fruit in the forest --we'd stand there and eat it till it was all gone.

It isn't that we are stupid or evil; we just are what we are -- smart opportunists who seize the main chance without looking back [edit: or that far forward].

When it comes to the ant and the grasshopper fable, we play the part of the grasshopper. We are less like squirrels which store up food for the winter, and more like rabbits that make no long-term plans when the leaves turn in the fall.

We can't want badly enough to be what we are not. Yes, we are smart enough to see trouble down the line; we just can't hardly avoid it. That's our tragic condition.

What's true of non-entities like myself is also true of the presidents, generals, captains of industry, the super rich, et al. They can't help but be what they are.

most other organisms live in balance with their ecosystem — Vera Mont

Is this because they are committed to live in balance with their ecosystem, or is it that other organisms prevent them from getting the upper hand? That is, the condition of the 'natural balance' is just a stalemate between predator and prey.

And then we may face the problem of insufficient workforce to sustain the population. — Janus

Japan is approaching that situation; China (maybe surprisingly) will also. Quite a few countries have birth rates below replacement level.

Exponential population growth has been made possible by the exponential growth in technologies, notably medical technology. — Janus

Yes and no. Two areas of technology have (imho) have contributed the most to population growth: The Haber Bosch process of converting nitrogen and hydrogen gas to ammonia (for fertilizer) enabled huge increases in food production, (The same process is also used in making explosives; the # of people blown up is less than the # of people fed well.). The other area of technology is civil engineering: Clean water and sewer systems which take sewage away, ideally never to be seen again. Better civil engineering cut the number of people who died young from infectious diseases. Joseph Bazalgette built the big interceptor sewers in London in the 1860s. Norman Borlaug's 'Green Revolution' in plant breeding is another contributor to food production.

Medicine is an important technology, absolutely. Better understanding of disease and better treatments have significantly increased the age at which people die of heart disease and cancer. That's not a small accomplishment. Infectious disease has not disappeared, but the list of biggest killers is different now than it was in 1920, say. Polio has never been a leading cause of death, but it is now quite rare. TB was the leading cause of death from infectious disease in 1900. It hasn't disappeared, but in many parts of the world it is quite rare. More people died in the US from Covid 19 (1,000,000+) than died in the 1918 Influenza epidemic (around 650,000). The next big change could be epidemics of antibiotic resistant infections. Various diseases have developed strains which are no longer treatable. Gonorrhea for instance has untreatable strains. Staphylococcus aureus (a 'hospital infection') has become much more difficult to cure.

it seems impossible to see how more technological innovation, however brilliant, will be able to halt the damage being done to ecosystems, the degradation of which is proceeding apace and not, overall slowing down, but rather accelerating. — Janus

I'm pessimistic about the future of the next few generations. Life is going to be very difficult for them. Whether human life will even be possible say in 2150 or 2200 is open to question,

The thing about human beings is that "we are what we are" just like every other species. Scarab beetles roll shit into balls. Sharks are voracious feeders. Woodpeckers drill holes wherever. Wasps often sting and ask questions later. The kind of world we have ended up with is a result of us being "what we are".

Experience is our best guide to what is good. We can spin theories about what is good forever, but until we act, and experience consequences, we have no solid data to go on.

Very good questions about growth/no growth.

If consumption were even distributed, there would be some dramatic changes. The wealthiest people consume a lot of air travel (first class, business class, frequent flyers, and private planes). Their contribution to CO2 is highly disproportionate to their population size. Most people don't fly at all, or rarely.

The consumption of salad might not change much -- I don't think that anyone is eating a vastly disproportion share of green leafy vegetables. But some people in affluent societies do not have access to fresh salad without making a major effort in travel (food deserts).

Private automobiles, a major polluter (even electric ones--manufacturing, etc.) and economic driver are already pretty evenly distributed. What isn't evenly distributed is good quality public transit. Most people don't use it or don't have access to it. Public transit has to be manufactured as well, but 1 bus or 1 train car will carry far more people than 1 car, over their lifetimes. A switch to mass transit would require a significant redistribution of manufacturing.

Quality housing is evenly distributed within economic classes, but is not evenly distributed between better-off and worse-off classes. A small percentage of the population are living on the street, in shelters, or in very substandard housing.

IF (GIANT 'IF') we produced for need and not for profit or for artificially stimulated wants (too many to shake a stick at) consumption and production could be lowered significantly.

For an analogy to at least a less growth economy: The average American family uses about 30 kWh of electricity per day. The average family could reduce its electricity usage to say 24 kWh (picking a figure out of thin air) without living in the Stone Age. They would need to be more careful about lighting; hot water use; refrigeration and cooking; heating and cooling (a bit cooler in the winter, a bit warmer in the summer); and other changes, depending on what they owned. This family would need less income to maintain themselves. Their energy supplier would still be in business, with a lower level of production (assuming everybody reduced energy consumption).

It's easy to fall into the debate trap of always summerizing anything against companies as having pure capitalist interests, but trying to solve AI tools is kinda the worst attempt if all intentions are just profit. — Christoffer

This is obviously a topic dearer to your heart than mine. Not criticizing your lengthy reply, just observing the depth of your response.

No, it isn't the case that corporations are merely greedy thieves who think of nothing but making money. However, corporations do have a fiduciary requirement to generate profit for their shareholders. So, making money is the name of the game. The people who make up corporations, especially when engaged in new, cutting edge projects, clearly have lots of intellectual interests aside from the fiduciary requirement. I'm sure developing AI is an engrossing career for many people, requiring all the ingenuity and creativity they can muster.

The Manhattan Project was also an engrossing, intellectually stimulating, technologically high-end project which some of the participants greatly regretted being involved in once their product was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I'm not claiming that CHAT-GPT, for example, is the same thing as a big city-destroying bomb, but the final uses to which this technology will be applied are not at all clear, and I don't trust corporations -- or their engineers -- to just do the right thing,

The motto of 3M, one of our local corporate heroes, is "Innovative technology for a changing world". Sounds nice. They have made a lot of fine products more complex and important than Post-it Notes™. Many of their products contain PFAS. At one time PFAS was thought to be biologically inactive. Turns out it is not biologically inactive, and everything from polar bears to penguins now carry a load of the stuff. Plus, 3M dumped a lot of waste products from its production into landfills from which it promptly leaked out. They are paying out billions of dollars in fines and very expensive clean-up costs.

Just an example. True enough, it's not quite the same as AI. But corporations regularly do things that turn out to be harmful--sometimes knowing damn well that it was harmful--and later try to avoid responsibility.

Thanks. I'll need a bit of time to watch and chew it over.

That makes it more of a question of trading off lower (perhaps at times negative) growth versus longer term benefits. Unfortunately, our institutions are not well geared for this sort of thing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Institutions--legislatures, schools, corporations--are indeed ill-equipped to make enlightened trade-offs. Being generous here, it isn't always a matter of cupidity or stupidity. Partly it is a problem of having sufficiently far-sighted and wide-angle vision to appreciate the whole problem and possible solutions. Executives in corporations and legislators always have time pressures which prevent necessarily time-consuming contemplation of possibility. Our species isn't good at large-scale long-range planning. Our brains and emotions just aren't equipped for it.

A steady-state economy requires thinking within a different framework than within a steady growth model.

Around 25 years ago I was traveling in rural Uganda. We often came upon stacks of bricks. What were these for? The stacks were accumulated as cash became available to make more bricks. When enough bricks were accumulated, a small brick house would be built. It might take them 10 years (rough estimate). The resulting house would consist of maybe two rooms and a tin roof -- perfectly adequate for a house located on the equator. Over time amenities could be added.

Americans could live frugally for 10 years and save cash to make a large down-payment on a house, and avoid credit costs. The prospective house might not be very big, but be perfectly adequate for places with cold winters and hot summers. Amenities could be added over time. The same thing applies to automobiles. Buy conservatively and save for the cars replacement maybe 8 or 10 years down the line.

Saving for future consumption, rather than buying credit for immediate consumption slows down one's budgetary merry-go-round a lot. It does require budgetary discipline (so does paying for credit) but it is generally less stressful. Aren't middle class people supposed to be good at delayed gratification?

Maybe not so much.

Economic growth doesn't just come from population growth or increased resources consumption. Increased human capital (e.g., education), new technologies, improved efficiency, etc. can all lead to GDP growth even when the population and the total amount of natural resources is decreasing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A local example of good growth is the share of Minnesota's electricity generated by wind and solar -- 33%! The other 66% comes from nuclear power plants, coal plants, and hydropower. Coal, however, is on the way out and the largest plant is expect to close in about 6 years. Nuclear power has radioactive waste problems, of course. Natural gas sounds clean but its production and distribution leaks a lot of methane.

Transportation and agriculture have moved into first place as Minnesota's largest CO2 emitters.

28% of Texas electricity production is wind. The rest is natural gas, nuclear power, and coal in that order.

Wind and solar production are not consumption-free, obviously. It takes a lot materiél to build wind and solar replacements for coal and natural gas.

Bronze age cultures were no-growth. They remained stagnant for centuries. One assumes new ideas appeared from time to time, but died, possibly because life was precarious and holding to tradition was viewed as a matter of survival. Our own high-growth is made possible by technology, which was made possible by high-growth, so it's a cycle. — frank

And before the Bronze Age? Very slow change, except for development of agriculture and settled towns. The dispersion of bronze (tin and copper alloy) was a significant change. Bronze was possible because of the relatively low melting temperature, and the earlier development of kilns to fire pottery which were hot enough to melt tin and copper.

More recently, the European economy was pretty much static between the collapse of the Roman Empire and 1500 -- a period of a thousand years. Large swaths of civilizations around the globe have experienced no-growth conditions for thousands of years.

The technologies that made the current growth regime possible at first took decades to have an effect (like the consequence of global exploration launched in the 15th century). New technologies spur growth seemingly in minutes.

then there was something odious for me to just get a degree and start working somewhere — Shawn

That's basically what I did. I didn't have a 5-year plan when I started college. I finished school and took a job with VISTA (now called Americorps). VISTA was a great follow-on to college.

Degrees help one get jobs, or did back in the late 60s, early 70s. The degrees launched me. Once you get the job there is a period (sometimes) of unofficial on-the-job training. If you are reasonably clever, you find a job you can actually do.

Was college worth anything beside getting a job? Absolutely.

I have a learned a lot more since leaving college than I learned while there, but college served as an orientation to what to learn and how to learn. I'm 77 now and still learning.

This is a quite different topic, but related: Who, in a given society, tends to revolt first: the lumpen proles at the very bottom of society, or the dissatisfied skilled workers who participate in a system where they have something substantial to lose?

I don't see welfare recipients, the homeless, the long-term unemployed who are not looking for work and not collecting benefits of any kind--the lumpen proles at the bottom--revolting. It seems to me more likely that workers who are several rungs up the economic ladder (identifying as working class) are the group likely to revolt. Some of these people think of themselves as "middle class" because of their material acquisitions, but a lot of the so-called middle class are just comfortable working class people.

Real middle class people are very much part of the administrative system and are not likely to revolt (because they would be one of the main targets of revolution).

SO, I don't think UBI is intended to prevent a revolt of the masses, it's to keep them minimally contented. It's a nuisance to manage their discontent and unhappiness, not a major threat. Groups that are any sort of real threat to the establishment are not bought off with a basic income. They are confronted and attacked by the police.

In any volatile situation, where revolt could grow out of riot, the police shoot to kill. lumpen proles (like George Floyd) have been treated pretty harshly by the police when they get out of line. It's not an aberration, it's policy.

Interesting information, thanks.

I have a distant memory of swathing wheat. Back in horse-drawn and hand harvested wheat days, the swaths of wheat (oats, rye, barley...) were 'shocked' -- gathered up in loose bundles (shocks) and stacked against each other for drying before being collected and thrashed.

Roundup results in weeds drying up. So I understand how it would help wheat harvests, causing the wheat to dry up. One of the articles mentioned the difficulty of applying Roundup close to harvest -- the machinery knocking down too many plants.

In wide open flatland production, American grain fields are very large and spraying them before harvest would probably not be cost effective. That's probably true in Ukraine and Russia, too. It's one thing spraying corn months before harvest; it's quite unappetizing to spray an herbicide on wheat a week before harvest, contaminating the grain kernels.

A number of cities have tried UBI programs and the results have been quite positive. The amount recipients are paid is nothing close to a living wage, it's a supplement, maybe $500 a month, no strings attached. Recipients report considerably improved psychological health, in that the supplement lifts them out of the "not enough to live on, but a little too much to die" level. They can budget more effectively because the extra money gives them more financial agency.

The amount of UBI would have to be higher if the amount were individuals only income, and not a supplement.

Thrift-minded employed people who have not suffered a financial disaster are able to save enough money to provide an operating financial cushion--a savings account. It feels good to know that things like a tire replacement, dental care. new shoes, and the like are not going to result in a crisis. UBI accomplishes the same thing.

I don't believe that a UBI distributed within a capitalist economy is the same thing as socialism, not even close. It would be a good thing, but socialism requires much, much broader and deeper changes in the operation of society.

Looks like satire to me. and effective at that.

to spray a field of wheat with Roundup, prior to harvest, because this procedure increases the efficiency of the harvest — Metaphysician Undercover

Roundup--glyphosate--isn't used on wheat. It's used on corn and soybeans, mostly. It's applied when corn is about 2 feet high, and when weeds are well-leafed out. It's a systemic herbicide, absorbed by the leaves.

In America, we're piling on debt just trying to provide social security and medicare to old people. — RogueAI

You may be very familiar with the points I am making here. Not everybody is.

The problem with entitlement spending is that Congress has not seen fit to keep these programs fully funded over time.

Federal entitlement program (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and others) comprise the biggest share of mandatory spending which is considerably larger than discretionary spending (too many programs to list). I was surprised that the pie charts displaying government income and expenses didn't include interest on the national debt. The interest is $658 billion per year, on a debt of $34 trillion.

US GDP is around $25 trillion, so the debt is larger than GDP. Not the end of the world, but not desirable either.

We have a national debt because the US Government has spent more money, year after year, than it collected in taxes. Could it have cut spending? Some of it could have been cut (discretionary spending). More taxes could have been collected. Moderated spending and a progressive tax schedule, especially for the corporations and wealthy individuals, would -- over time -- reduce the national debt. We have paid off the national debt before: We accumulated a very large debt during WWII, which (if memory serves) was paid off sometime in the 1970s. The post-war economy was booming and the tax rates were far more progressive -- that is, wealthy people paid a lot more taxes than they do now.

We are stuck on a treadmill at this point. We can dismount, but it will require some big changes.

a rising tide lifts all boats — Shawn

A rising tide lifts all boats and drowns all those without a boat.

Just saying...

Nice! I like that. Here's another in like vein:

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

..................Richard Brautigan, Poet in Residence, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California 1967

"The American Dream" is a phrase coined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 bestseller The Epic of America.

According to an article in JSTOR, the publisher didn't think "the American Dream" was a sellable title with a severe depression underway. J. T. Adams is not related to the presidential Adams family.

He put it more succinctly elsewhere in the book: a “dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” This contemporary review of Epic notes that Adams alluded to the idea in fifty or more passages in the book. The unnamed reviewer thought Adams believed the dream to be “our greatest contribution to the thought of the world.”

According to Google Ngram, peak American Dream (at least the phrase's appearance in print) was during the Clinton Administration in 1994.

And those extensive intentions are what, in your perspective? And in what context of copyright do those intentions exist? — Christoffer

#1. Make money.

I do not know what percent of the vast bulk of material sucked up for AI training is copyrighted, but thousands of individual and corporate entities own the rights to a lot of the AI training material. I don't know whether the most valuable part was copyrighted currently, or had been copyrighted in the past, nor how much was just indifferent printed matter. Given the bulk of material required, it seems likely that no distinction was made.

Perhaps using the English speaking world's copyrighted material to train AI is covered by "Fair Use", but perhaps not. IF an AI company sells information containing content from the New York Times or National Enquirer without paying royalties, that would not be fair use. If an AI produces a novel which has a remarkable similarity to a novel by a known published author, that may not be fair use, either.

Social media makes money out of the communication between people. It isn't copyrighted and people voluntarily provide it, whether it be slop of pearls. The many people who produce copyrighted material haven't volunteered to give up their ideas.

AI is breaking new ground here, and legislation and courts have not had time to sort out the various ownership issues.

There is a matter of trust here. There is no reason we should trust AI technology and its corporate owners.

The system itself lacks the central human component that is the intention of its use. — Christoffer

The processors in AI facilities lack intention, but AI facilities are owned and operated by human individuals and corporations who have extensive intentions.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

The Matrix film has been cited many times here in support of the "unreality of reality". It's a work of fiction; it's entertainment; it isn't philosophy lecture. Still, the idea that the world is an illusion goes back to Plato (the cave). Well, sure enough, not everything is as it seems. That's life. It doesn't add up to one big computer simulation.

I

What if solipsism is true and I am the only being that actually exists — Truth Seeker

Then you have bigger things to worry about than objectivity vs. subjectivity.

Solipsism isn't the issue here. What is at issue is a) a sweeping generalization (these get made about a million times a day around the world); b) why are you excluding objectivity? 2 + 2 = 4. Objectively true. Pigeons can fly, camels are mammals; objectively true. We know it's objectively true because we organized the animals on a chart. Maybe separating pigeons and camels was a subjective act when it was first done, but it's objectively true now, because we say so. You can read the chart and see what it says. Objective!

You look at a snake and quite objectively observe, "That snake isn't going to fly anywhere." If you hand the checkout at Target a $20 bill for the total purchase of $30, the checkout will objectively observe that $20 isn't enough. Either you will objectively find $10 more in your wallet, or the checkout will call security over, and they are quite objective, as well. They'll take you into the back room and shake you down for the missing $10.

We don't know anything objectively. We may believe that we do but this is a delusion. Everything we know is subjective. There are two kinds of subjective truths: — Truth Seeker

You open by claiming that believing objective knowledge is a delusion. If all knowledge is subjective, how can you assert that objectivity is delusional? Maybe that's just your particular problem, not shared by other people.

As a rule of thumb, sweeping generalities ("we don't know anything objectively") should be viewed with suspicion.

It might be. but I'm sure you Australians, even you, have your own parochial views you will want to air.

In the 1950s we were expected to memorize some things like the multiplication table. It remains a useful bit of rote learning, I before E except after C" is a useful rule, but is neither weird nor foreign nor the height of forfeiture--something to explain to a caffeine-addled heifer on codeine at one's leisure while one seizes the day.

But yes, information presented without a cohesive narrative, or historical contextualization ends up being only potentially useful. Learning how big a frog's genome is, by itself is a big SO WHAT? Learning the names of each gyrus and sulcus in a brain is not very useful unless one learns what they do and how these various parts relate to an animal's actual life.

Juvenile students generally can not supply a narrative or context themselves, at least one that is appropriate. An educated middle-aged adult can receive new information and devise a mental structure which makes sense of it. High school students have long complained about having to study literature. "What is the point of reading this stuff? What is the point of learning history? I don't care what happened 200 years ago or what a poem really means."

I'm not sure to what extent English Lit and History teachers themselves have a solid narrative in the heads which enable them to deliver facts in a meaningful (and interesting) context. College literature and history classes are offered as big chunks which may be studied completely out of sequence. The students are assigned big blocks of material to read (or skim) through; the lecturer will add information about say, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). How much understanding about depression, or melancholy, a student will depart with is doubtful -- because in several days the class will move on to another big chunk of text. Who influenced Burton and who did Burton influence? Who claimed to have benefitted from reading the Anatomy of Melancholy, back in 1621?

What is the over-arching story of the American Experience, 1620 to 2024? at 77 I feel like I have some idea, and it isn't what I was taught in high school. It isn't that what was taught was just a pack of lies. Rather, a lot of topics were left out. The Erie Canal opened in 1825. What were the political, social, and economic consequences? What was traveling on early railroads (or even ones in the early 1900s) like? How did the more sparsely settled South become so politically powerful, and stay that way into the mid-20th century?

In any case that reaction requires that your mind invariable acknowledges or absorbs the ideas and thoughts presented to you. Otherwise how can you reject them? — Benj96

I don't know whether the 'viral meme' behaves like a virus invading the body -- where the immune system has to register the agent of invasion before it can create antibodies. A novel rhino virus variety triggers a cascade of immune responses which produce the cold we suffer from. Next time, the same virus will not get very far.

I've imbibed a lot of Nazi propaganda by reading about the history of National Socialism in Germany. Reading about the history of race riots and racial discrimination in the United States has resulted in my exposure to a lot of racist ideas. Reading about the 19th century expansion of the United States across the continent has inoculated me with many ideas about the success of settler colonialism. If one reads the history of the British Empire, one will get exposed to a host of ideas about how the world can be run that give short shrift to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A trip through the history of the Romanovs in Russia will provide one with the inside story of despotism, enlightened and otherwise.

Rather than making me MORE susceptible to Nazi, racist, imperialist, settler colonial thinking, reading about the appalling behavior has strengthened bias (antibodies) against these ideas.

I've read these various histories as a mature (old) adult which is a good thing. Perhaps I would not have developed resistance to these kinds of ideas had I encountered them in 1936 Germany, 1920 Oklahoma, or 1880 London. I did encounter the ideas of settler colonialism as a child in 1950s Minnesota (and later) and the way we conducted westward expansion seems like gold plated history. Perfectly sensible. (Yes, I am now quite aware of the genocidal nature of the expansion).

But the Nazis, the white racists, the British colonialists, and the American establishment wasn't inoculating people with bits of viral thoughts. They were all indoctrinating the populations with train loads of propaganda, education, printed and media information backed up with material force.

One can break down a global system of propaganda (to which Germans were subjected) into little darts of data. For instance, a gross drawing of a Jew in Völkischer Beobachter, or a detail about how a Jew defiled an aryan woman. Or, how a Chicago newspaper describes a black slum in 1957, describing the blacks as causative agents in their deteriorated housing.

Minnesota school children learn about the federal government hanging 38 members of the Dakota tribe in Minnesota in the largest mass execution in United States history, on December 26, 1862, following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It was presented as a victory for white settlers against the murderous Dakota people. One hopes this presentation has changed by 2024 in all Minnesota History classes.

Take the millions of Trump loyalists (MAGA). They are skeptical of the electoral system, the government, the science establishment, and so on. Their conservative political beliefs are strongly correlated with conservative religious belief. They didn't get this way on the basis of viral media posts or years of sustained Trump actions, speeches, and appearances. It takes a long time to achieve their state of mind.

The same thing is true of Bernie Boys, or any number of recognizable political, social, religious, or economic class groupings.

OK. I will acknowledge, affirm, and attest to the potential virality of images, words, slogans, phrases, and ideas. Social media is set up to facilitate this kind of rapid dispersion. Rapid dispersion isn't new, of course. It's just faster now with electronic media than it was before radio, television, and lately the internet.

Well... "distraction" has maintained a stable status as an effective way to disarm people. Especially if you have an underlying dogma or agenda you wish to incept slowly and gradually into the target audience. — Benj96

Absolutely, but incepting large, heavy, complicated ideas into an audience is time consuming and requires a lot of varied repetition.

The pro-palestinian campus demonstrations look like a sudden eruption. The anti-Vietnam war demonstrations also seemed to erupt out of nowhere. In both cases, there was a fairly long period of fermentation before eruption. The pulverization of Gaza (as wars go) is in the present moment, but the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is many decades long. The decision to set up tents on campus or occupy buildings in the past couple of weeks might be sort of viral. Spring is a popular time to raise a ruckus. Likely there were some actual coordinating efforts.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was viral in nature. I live in "fly over" land, so east/west coast events arrive here late. When it did arrive, it was clearly a re-enactment of televised events in New York City, The local Occupy Minneapolis City Hall Plaza was a refreshing piece of political theater, but not substantive.

"Went viral" is an annoying viral phrase. The Oxford Dictionary people add a few new words every year which went viral and got used a lot. I'm out of the loop, so I haven't often not heard these expressions often, or at all.

Did you intend to omit a negative vote?

Why do you think that the ordinary people who compose any government would be better than parents at designing and operating the schools that you are proposing?

refusing to learn would be a punishable crime — Scarecow

How can you tell whether someone is REFUSING to learn, or merely does not understand the lesson?

Schools don't do a good enough job at forcing kids to learn. — Scarecow

Schools are definitely not doing a good enough job, but FORCING people to learn something is difficult. You can lock up scholars in the little red school, but you can't make them learn grammar, spelling, reading, arithmetic, social skills, or trigonometry (which, by the way, is not a general life skill).

It's brainwashing made easy. — Scarecow

No need for your regime. Mass media has already figured out how to make brainwashing easy.

With no outside connections, kids in these institutions would be incredibly susceptible to propaganda. — Scarecow

On the other hand, a lot of propaganda comes from outside connections.

My proposal would prevent messy family dynamics. — Scarecow

It would not! Human dynamics are, by nature, messy.

Hey, I'm all in favor of education reform, and when I look at the chaotic conditions of some communities and the dismal results from some schools, a draconian regime like yours has a certain appeal.

Back in the late 1960s I worked at a Job Corps for 18-21 year old boys. We were located in a rural area. The 100 or so corpsmen lived on the "base" and spent half their time in education and half in the work-skills program. Leaving the place was difficult because we were kind of isolated and the corpsmen didn't have much (if any) money. We fed, housed, educated, and trained them. The successful ones moved from functional or absolute literacy to 6th or 7th grade reading levels in a year. The time limit on being in the corps was about 18 months.

Having control over these adolescent education-system failures enabled us to accomplish some educational goals. But the motivation to learn much of anything was missing from some corpsmen. Why? These were not children of privilege. They were children of deprivation and disadvantage. Academic (or any other kind of) success story wasn't part of their life-experience.

If it's that simple, that hearing a phrase infects my brain with a meme or idea, then I can stop this discussion in its tracks by saying, "Don't think that viral ideas are bullshit."

Still think that ideas are viral?

It seems to me social media algorithms are tailored to these principles of highly personalised, highly relatable and outrage or community invoking sentiments. — Benj96

Social media algorithms are designed for an audience whose mental lives are spent on the surface of a shallow pond. That put-down applies to a lot of people. Their shallow depth isn't the creation of social media -- people have been shallow for a very long time. People are not stupid, but depth takes sustained effort, which is difficult for many people. Killing saber toothed tigers, domesticating wolves, figuring out how to get agriculture started, milking cows, mining coal, greeting every "guest" who walks into a Walmart... it all keeps us busy. No time for Plato and Aristotle.

As for instant outrage, yes. Social media is very good at masturbating the masses.

You may have gotten the impression that I do not like social media (like Facebook, twitter, shitter, x, et al. Quite right. I don't.

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning. — Tom Storm

Perhaps 'nihilism' [the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless; extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence; the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order] is a contradiction in terms.

To declare that life is meaningless is to take a position on the meaning of life. It's unavoidable. A very generously defined "normal person" can not exist without some sort of self-guidance that will amount to a moral system; he can not exist without some sort of 'meaning' developing.

Perhaps the Russian-style nihilist is possible: "I do not approve of the established social order." There is a lot for even non-nihilists to disapprove of.

Maybe you mean, "There is no external source of meaning in the world." No imagined deity, no disembodied mind, no cosmic force provides meaning. Human minds are the sole source of meaning".

As for nihilists "jumping out of bed glad to be alive" I think it is difficult to maintain the joy. I used to associate with a particular group of socialists who were something like the Russian nihilists. They had reached the point where they approved of NOTHING in capitalist society. They were not good socialists, they were bitter old men.

A problem with the term nihilist is that it is absolute and without nuance. It's like "anarchist" in that way -- when used by adolescents it has an extreme, unmodified meaning.

Whether nihilism is a good term or not, carry on with your program of joy.

I know what depression feels like. How do nihilists feel? Are there happy, productive nihilists who bounce out of bed in the morning, glad to be alive, despite the absence of meaning?

We have murdered a lot of people over the last five thousand years over religions and politics and we are still at it. — Truth Seeker

Now you have stated an opinion I don't agree with, and we were getting along so well! :smile:

There surely is a lot of disagreement over religion and politics, but when it comes to war, I think the stakes are almost always material: Who is going to have control over resources (land, water, minerals, labor, etc.)

Take, for instance, the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire by the armies of Islam. There clearly was a religious overlay: Islam vs. Christian. There had been earlier religious overlays to the Roman expansion throughout the Mediterranean Basin, and then to the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. Power politics too. But under the religious and political overlay was the on-the-ground reality of land, and who controlled it. Land is a very material concern: Who gets to concentrate the wealth that farmers, miners, urban centers, traders, etc. create?

Some wars are murky: What was at stake in WWI? The years of stalemate in the trenches, the appalling number of dead, the static lines of battle... it's hard to see what the Central Powers vs. the Triple Entente were after. It seems like the balance of German land and population was one problem. German industry was very successful, but a lot of German soil was not great for agriculture (too much clay, too wet, to chilly...

France was in much better shape agriculturally, and was on a par with German industry. Great Britain didn't have to depend on its small island for food and markets: it had the Empire and it ruled the seas. Control of the seas enabled GB to blockade Germany, which helped starve the Germans into submission.

WWII is much clearer: The politics were crystal clear, and the material aspirations of the Nazi regime were front and center.

The rich need to downgrade their high-ecological-impact lifestyle — Truth Seeker

Absolutely. The rich -- the wealthiest people -- consume a very disproportionate share of goods. It isn't the they eat so much -- the rich are more likely to be svelte than obese. It's their consumption of materials that matter -- the 30,000 to 50,000 square foot mansions lavishly furnished, the landscaping, the cars, the planes, the yachts, the chrome, the plastic, and the petroleum it all takes.

Obviously their assets should be liquidated as soon as possible -- like, today.

We don't want to leave out the impact of military activities, or exploiting space with thousands of rocket launches burning fuel in the upper levels of the atmosphere.

Then there is the dominance of the automobile and the absence of effective public transit (especially in the US).

I like meat, but you are right -- I / we should switch to vegetarian / vegan diets.

In a study published this week in Environmental Research Letters, researchers found that the food system was responsible for as much as 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

This makes sense. One of our appalling practices is growing corn for alcohol to add to gasoline. That aside, animals (including ourselves) are not all that great at converting plant matter to animal protein:

Feed conversion
(feed/edible weight)
4.5 for chicken
9.4 for pork
25 for beef