Yes. Like, if you have two feet, use them whenever possible. I realize that many people live in pedestrian no-man lands, where travel on foot is just not safe, and biking is probably even unsafer. Then too, a lot of people do not live near a bus or rapid transit line of any sort. But, many people do. A lot of people dislike riding on buses. I don't drive, I have to use buses, and I find them to be loathsome some times. So I get that. But if we want mass transit, we have to use it when feasible (else demand won't exist).

There are days when an isolated yurt sounds like just the thing.

When I am out biking around the city on weekends, I find that there are few people on the street. Few people walking, except for dog walkers, a few runners, a few other bicyclists. No adults, no children. It's just not the sign of a healthy society -- people should be more active, be able to walk a mile to the store and back. Like, actually walk 3 blocks to the drug store. Instead, they drive.

One of the consequences of past-the-peak-oil and the need to reduce CO2 emissions, is that people in cities will have to use their own internal bio-drives to do stuff. Then they won't have to drive to the gym to exercise.

Some analysts have said that the opportunity to avoid the present crisis of global warming passed sometime around 1990--30 years ago. How so?

Evidence that accumulating greenhouse gases could lead to global warming began to converge in the 1970s. Various streams of data, from satellites to cores extracted from the ocean floors and glaciers formed the basis of more specific predictions and the development of better climate models. The decade of the 1980s was THE TIME when climate change should have been taken seriously and should have been acted upon.

THEY missed the boat. By 2006 when Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was published, 26 years had passed. Since 2006, another 13 years have passed. Had THEY acted on the basis of early creditable information, we would have had 40 years in which to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

So, who are THEY? Energy corporations like Exxon, Shell, BP, etc.; auto makers; elected officials; oil and coal producers, et cetera. THEY are the people who own, manufacture, process, and sell energy, transportation, plastics, chemicals, and so forth. They, and governments, were the critical institutions that acted to continue business as usual, or failed to act to prevent ecological damage.

We the people are relevant as part of the solution, but in times of crisis (such as World War II or climate change) it is the major industrial giants that have to be mobilized first. This wasn't done; it isn't being done.

Some US states are undertaking some of the policy changes now that should have been undertaken 40 years ago. An example is "30% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030". "30% in 2030" projects are good (if they are achieved or exceeded), but they don't address transportation and heating exhaust which are huge sources of CO2 emissions.

The best role for The People is to keep the political and corporate feet to the fire -- as the expression goes. In the meantime, The People should start walking, bicycling, and using mass transit.

Educate women — frank

Yes. That has been demonstrated many times that educated women bear fewer children.

Yes; affluent people reproduce less than poor people. Why, exactly, isn't clear. Maybe affluent people are too busy earning affluent incomes to raise children. Maybe affluent people would rather be affluent than spending hundreds of thousands of euros on children. Maybe child survival rates are so high that 1 child is enough. Maybe sophisticated European metrosexuals just can't be bothered. Europe's population rate is below replacement levels which is a good thing in terms of ZPG, but is very bad for the economy. After all, somebody has to work in the factories, distribution centers, transportation, hospitals, nursing homes, farms, etc. Therefore, immigrant labor is necessary. Fortunately for affluent people in Europe, North America and parts of Asia there are plenty of inexpensive laborers available.

I'm not knocking immigration here (I do that elsewhere). I'm just pointing out that the virtue of low birth rates here and there is limited, because the population of laborers is still needed by affluent people to maintain affluence.

Projections of population growth may not be realized. Global warming is likely to have significant effects on food production, disease rates, available water for drinking and agriculture (and industry), reproduction, and so on. Worse for everyone concerned, 2070 will be another 50 years past peak oil. The whole world will be very hungry for that dense energy source. The greening of the Sahara, never mind stopping the progression of desertification on the southern edge of the Sahara, is not something we will be able to engineer.

Are you familiar with the "wet bulb" measurement? It references how fast moisture evaporates at given temperatures and humidity. Human beings can not survive outside when the wet bulb temperature is above 98. [>98º + high humidity] Why? Because our sweat doesn't evaporate, we can't cool off, and our internal temperature starts to rise, and we go into heat shock and die. A high wet bulb temperature means that much less time outdoors is available for agricultural work, hence less food production. Who will be affected? Everyone in tropical and sub-tropical areas, including the southern US.

Don't worry about population. Mother Nature has the requisite ways and means to lower the population to sustainable levels. Just hope you're not around when she does it.

Where the question of a "right to die" comes to the fore is when someone wishes to end their own life, but is not physically able to do so independently. Is it permissible to help someone die?

If one is ambulatory and isn't overly fussy about how one might die, it would seem like the "right to die" is inherent--not relying on the action of a state. If I decide to jump off a bridge, or wade into deep water, or fill the garage with carbon monoxide, or blow my brains to smithereens, what does the state have to do with it?

That said, I am in favor of discouraging people from committing suicide, rather than enthusiastically encouraging the suicidal.

I read a lot, and I can fairly report that there are many fine examples of pure, unadulterated slop out there. Awful stuff. Just wretched. And some of it sells well and receives appreciative reviews. There is also a lot of excellent work, too.

I pay little attention to literary prizes, whether it's from the Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, or What Have You Committee. When one goes back and reads prize-winning novels from 60 or 80 years ago, many of them do not seem very interesting. Music doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.

The best bet for identifying what kind of writing is really good is to take a look at what people are actually reading, looking at, watching, and listening to.

400 years later, people still read or watch Shakespeare, and still listen to Monteverdi. There are a lot of people still reading Jane Austen and George Elliot 140 years later.

How many of these best selling authors from 1933 do you recognize?

Hervey Allen, Hasty Carroll, Sinclair Lewis, Lloyd C. Douglas, John Galsworthy, Lloyd C. Douglas, Mazo e la Roche, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Louis Bromfield, Hans Fallada? Zero? One? Two?

How about these 21st Century Nobel winners?

Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day was clearly recognizable as a novel.

Bob Dylan Dylan's poetry (at least from his early years) deserves some sort of prize; Nobel? Well, it's their money; they can give it to whoever they want, I suppose. They didn't give him a prize for singing, you'll notice.

Svetlana Alexievich

Patrick Modiano Started a recent novel by Modiano and dropped it. Tedious.

Alice Munro I've liked some of her writing,

Mo Yan
Tomas Tranströmer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Doris Lessing
Orhan Pamuk
Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
John Maxwell Coetzee
Imre Kertész

Its impact on intellectual pursuits and on innovation is especially hindering. — whollyrolling

I don't know whether adhesive elites sticking together has hindered intellectual pursuit or not. I don't know how one could tell. It seems more likely that elites have not hindered practical innovation because the nuts and bolts of agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, etc. have never been of much interest to the elites.

"Engineering" wasn't respectable until relatively recently. The savants in the universities were not aware of Marx's insight that changes in the means of production (in its broadest sense) determines what is possible intellectually. That's related to Plato's concern that the wrong kind of music would disturb society's peace and progress.

War and finance, and sometimes art, have at least been dependent on "common people". — whollyrolling

Quite a lot has been dependent on us proles, when you get right down to it. The pampered elites wouldn't have been pampered if they hadn't been able to hire cheap help to make their lives comfortable.

Workers of the world, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to gain. Karl Marx

Marx was hardly a member of the elite.

I propose that all "philosophy" has hitherto been an evolution of specialized language predicated on fortifying a master-slave relationship between the educated and the uneducated. — whollyrolling

Dear me! Whollyrolling. Sweeping up all "philosophy" into one master/slave pile calls for an extended defense. Your OP should have been much, much longer, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Try putting this into a broader context. Don't all power elites (academic, financial, military, artistic, etc.) all tend to separate themselves out from the lumpen mass, associate among themselves, and promote their particular interests?

They were all born into affluent families and received "higher education" that was expensive and unavailable to a vast majority of people at the time. — whollyrolling

You are right -- the education which famous philosophers received was a luxury service. It still is. Roughly a third of the US population has a college degree, but these are not elite degrees by any stretch of the imagination, and two thirds of the US population lacks even a pedestrian degree.

Elite fields -- literature and philosophy are similar -- are the domain of small coteries of people. Being a member of a 'coterie' usually involves being at least financially comfortable. It involves traveling in rather small circles of specialists. Some elite thinkers have managed to remain comfortable. Marx was a downward-mobility disgrace to his bourgeois forebears. He ended up on private welfare sponsored by Fred Engels. But even that is usually the luck of elites. Most people, however bright and needy they are, don't get underwriting.

Like me, for instance. Had I been underwritten by some rich fan, I might have been somewhat more intellectually productive. Or, maybe I would have spent more time drinking, screwing, and other forms of decadence. Marx seems to have done a fair amount of that sort of thing. Of course, he also managed to turn out Das Kapital and a few other items.

True enough.

Fortunately for us, none of this matters all that much.

Few, however, would seriously maintain that the universe actually revolves around them in the way that the earth revolves around the sun. — NKBJ

My guess (and hope) is that people mean "the universe seems to revolve around them", from their slightly skewed perspective.

That humans are self-centred has been demonstrated for thousands of years and i we have yet to demonstrate otherwise. — whollyrolling

It seems to me to be the case that human are self-centered. Of course, that isn't all we are all the time. But creatures with egos like their reflections. In a way, most creatures are self-centered. Their various lives are composed of efforts to survive and propagate. Survival and propagation require a narrow focus.

Philosophy, as I see it, is a bunch of brains thinking about their brains. — YuZhonglu

Maybe a bunch of brains thinking about other brains?

That is one of the basic questions: What can I know? Like... Am I real? Are you real? Are our perceptions of what we call 'reality' consistent with what 'reality' actually is? (It often is, but sometimes it is not.) How would we know, one way or the other?

Socialism requires a high degree of micromanaging of the people by a government system. Usually, this results in starvation, corruption, and brutal violence as seen throughout the world in nations that embraced actual socialism. Removing the property from the "rich" essentially takes away from the working class. — Waya

And what do you think corporations are doing if not micromanaging people in a corporate system?

Believe me, I know this. I have a jerk for a boss who is sexist against women and pays me well below the living wage for my area. — Waya

So your boss is a jerk, he doesn't pay you enough, and this is the government's fault?

Why don't you keep the blame where you laid it: on your boss's doorstep? He's the one deciding to underpay you and maybe harass you to boot.

For some odd reason unknown to me you would prefer to blame non-existent socialism for your problems instead of a harsh, capitalist system which doesn't give a shit about you.

Hey, I'm dirt poor almost to the point where I wonder if I will get another meal and still dead set against socialism and Karl Marx. He speaks for an elite class that takes from the poor and manipulates them into slaves for such a class. — Waya

You accidentally confused capitalism with socialism. It's the capitalists who are the elite class that takes from the poor.

Socialist position: No need for slaves; no room for masters.

straw men — Wallows

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts."

Is "There Are No Facts. Only Opinions." a fact or an opinion?

A "fact" is information that is verified by experience; not just one person's informed experience, but everyone's informed experience. Opinions are judgements about facts.

The opinion that there are no facts, only opinions, is an invitation to chase rabbits (Alice In Wonderland) where there are no facts.

I'm glad to see this forum's owner is more balanced than that. — Judaka

The TPF owner is on a lithium drip, so he's very balanced.

Stop pretending to be a rebel. If you really were, you would have left long ago. — Baden

I'm kind of quasi I guess. On the one hand, fanning the flames of discontent; on the other hand, not blowing up the fire department.

So what part of

many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire — Maw

is antisemitic? That Jews are part of the intelligentsia, or that they form a network? That they are in Budapest? That they are associated with the "Soros Empire"? Can't Soros have an empire?

Would we say that "many of the Budapest intelligentsia are [GAY], [ENGLISH], [CHINESE], and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire" is homophobic, anglophobic, or sinophobic?

An up-vote for your post!

I've done nothing different than most here habitually do — sunknight

Sunknight: Best Practice is to proceed forward cautiously until you have established what you can get away with and what the moderators will stomp on. Like all members here, the moderators have uniquely sensitive corns on their toes which, when stepped on just so, send them into tizzies. As far as I know, the idiosyncrasies of the moderators' sensitive toes have not been mapped.

Generally 'slash and burn' approaches will get bad feedback. Try to avoid.

It is the case that if you want to disparage Islam, transgenders, gays, (anybody, basically, to whom the suffix "phobia" is regularly attached) you should do so in an unusually elegant fashion.

Calories in the form of sugars and fats have never been cheaper, and as a result obesity is a global problem. Welcome toThe Fat Earth Society.

The solution is simple. Stop eating, fast until the weight is normal. — Jonmel

Sorry, that is simply not true.

Some people get fat as an act of self harm, but this is a small minority. Most people get fat, and become obese because their calorie intake exceeds their calories expended. Age, lifestyle changes, living situations, and various other factors can affect this.

I was slim and fit till I was about 45. Then I changed from a fairly active job to a sedentary one, and started gaining weight--slowly. By the time I was 60 I was beginning to approach obesity, and since then I haven't been able to lower my weight by more than 3% to 6%. At 72, the chances of losing a significant amount of weight are about nil. What I can do, and do work towards, is a reasonable level of activity to stay reasonably flexible and strong.

Much worse than fat 50 year olds are fat 10 or 15 year olds who are clinically obese. I wouldn't blame them for being obese; I'd blame low quality food and a repellent outdoor physical and social environments.

Religious activity is strong and growing in some places, and shrinking in others. Christianity, for instance, is quite strong in China, Africa, and South America. In Europe it is quite diminished. North America is somewhere between active and shrinking; here it depends on whether one is counting mainline protestants, catholics, or evangelicals.

I would guess some kind of similar pattern prevails for Islam.

It is waaaay too early to announce the death of religion. 6 billion out of 7 billion people participate in some kind of religious activity/organization. 1 billion, at least, do not.

I am of a mixed mind as to whether or not we would be better off with a good deal less religion. If strong, positive, secular and civil values replaced religion, that would be fine. If religion is going to be replaced by fascism, or blind faith, or aggressive dehumanizing conversions, then no.

Yes, but it was people in the past like Duchamp in 1917 who made it possible for people in the internet age to call their crap "art". As William Faulkner said (in a novel I never read, and almost certainly never will) "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Now this is something that I call the critical reviewer's disease. — ssu

Yes, there are definitely people who spend a lot of time consuming voluminous quantities of cultural product, and in so doing they enter a twilight zone of hypersensitivity to stuff that actually doesn't matter much--this first novel, that rap group's greatest hit, this book of poetry, that journaling project, the latest recording of Beethoven's 9th, blah blah blah. I flee when they begin pontificating about this or that art form, art group, art event, artistic clusterfuck, etc.

Nothing new here, of course. Coteries of sophisticates have been doing this for a long time -- probably there were cultural critics who had tedious opinions about the latest cave art before the paint had dried.

Culture hasn't gotten better, I don't think -- just more of it, more specialized, more diverse, shorter shelf life -- all that -- but the media of radio, television, internet, recording devices, etc have enlarged the hose, and one can drown in the flood instead of just getting a drink (see "drinking from a fire hose").

Print isn't immune. There is more and more print available too -- not just new print, but old print served up by archival projects. I read too much which leads to too much information that other people do not want to hear about. Sigh.

People have not changed. They like to be entertained. There are more people now (three times as many in the world as when rock and roll began (1950s), and there is much more cultural activity now than 70 years ago. There is also more economic activity: more mining and manufacturing, more sex being had, more crooked deals getting done, and more rubbish -- much more.

Today ANYONE can produce art and put it into the public sphere whereas merely decades ago this wasn’t the case — I like sushi

1917 - Too far back?



Duchamp announced that if you say it is art, then it is art.

I suppose buckets of "warm slop" could be construed as sexual innuendo, though -- just personally -- it wouldn't do much to turn me on. But tastes vary. The intentionality would matter a great deal.

Mostly though, I associate "slop" with hogs wallowing. Nothing sexual, just wallowing, snorting, grunting. What hogs do in wallowing holes.

Have you observed hogs doing their wallowing thing? They take it very seriously. Usually in the summer.

"Slop" is also a verb. "To slop the hogs" is to feed them their daily ration of ground corn mixed with other feeds and water or milk and dumped into troughs, where the hogs act like the pigs swine are.

Sexual innuendos aside — Wallows

Sexual innuendos? Where! Where!

They can't be standards.
In my opinion, there are no standards for poetry. — Tarun

There are, of course, standards. One standard is how well the construction of the poem fits the topic. Another would be originality of expression. A third is how well the techniques of using language are deployed. and so on.

Another standard, the toughest one, is whether anybody remembers and re-reads or recites the poem. Most of the poetry that has been written has been buried because nobody found it particularly memorable. That has been the case for millennia.

If you don't believe there are standards, you probably need a large dose of Onomatopoeia.

To use the technical term for it, thinking that poetry can't be measured, guiding the creativity, gives a shape to creativity, etc. is bullshit.

Look, poetry isn't mystic mastication. It's a form of composition which requires sticking to rules and regulations--even in free verse.

Haiku, for instance, involves 3 lines of five syllables, 7syllables, and 5 again. They could rhyme or not. What haiku is like in Japanese, I don't know. But those are the simple rules in English haiku. If you don't follow those rules, then it isn't haiku.

If you are writing a poem in heroic couplets, it must be in iambic pentamer, and the couplets have to rhyme. Those are the rules for that style.

Of course you don't have to write that way. You could write like Bob Dylan -- I certainly would if I were very, very talented.

Subterranean Homesick Blues
Bob Dylan

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off

and so on. There is a meter and a rhyme scheme. The grammar is pretty straightforward.

My guess is that Dylan didn't just dash those lines off, stand up, and sing them. The stuff of his that I am familiar with look polished--meaning, worked on a lot.

If you want to write poetry, start with straightforward grammar. Learn how to maintain a beat of emphasized syllables, and how to rhyme. Try, at least. Go on from there. Learn something about the basic forms.

I don't know whether you have a creative bone in your body or not. There is nothing about poetry (or anything else) that makes one creative. Creativity is mostly the result of striving to achieve beauty, and is mostly hard work.

Here's a sample of heroic couplet verse by Alexander Pope:

Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;
But vindicate the ways of God to man.

The impression I had of Sapientia (AKA "S") was that he was a prodigious producer of proper and prudent prose. So... what happened?

I don't know, Ilya; do you some screws loose?

Look: About those criminals who founded Australia: "Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain to various penal colonies in Australia. The British Government began transporting convicts overseas to American colonies in the early 17th century."

The 17th-19th century British were not averse to using capitol punishment for crimes (like stealing) which they thought deserved death. If one could get hanged for stealing bread, then there probably weren't a lot of violent felons left to deport to Australia. So, who were they deporting to America and Australia?

They were mostly deporting poor people, whom they classified as white trash, deplorables (term from Hilary Clinton's campaign), riff raff, useless, and so forth. The ruling-class Brits hated the poor. Poverty was criminalized. Criminals were deported.

Why is this so? Most likely because the first white people in Australia were violent criminals, and violent criminals aren't known for being gentlemen. And what Australian men need to be told is this: — Ilya B Shambat

Most likely you are out in left field on the topic. Are you supposing that in the intervening centuries, the poor people who were used to stock the future working class of Australia did not change at all from their uncouth ancestors? Or maybe you don't like the Working Class either?

there are any number of Australian men howling for my blood and that of the Australian woman who married me. — Ilya B Shambat

This sounds more like an exaggerated self-aggrandizing persecution complex than anything else. How close on your trail is the mob that wants to lynch you?

In Australia, where I presently live, the biggest problem is how men treat women. There are many good things about Australia, but this is a national disgrace. The Australian men have an international reputation for abusive treatment of women; and that makes Australian men look like creeps. — Ilya B Shambat

I always thought Australian guys looked hot, rather than looking like creeps, but that was probably a small sample I was looking at. Is it really the case that male-female interaction is the worst problem Australia faces?

Are Australian men worse really worse than African men, North American men, European men, South American men, Asian men, Arab men, Pakistani men, etc.?

When my former wife left me to be with another man, I did not threaten to kill her — Ilya B Shambat

That's good. It's a positive sign.

which country, in other respects, is one of the best places in the world — Ilya B Shambat

If it is one of the best places in the world, in other respects, then I would have to assume that women are receiving less than than the usual and customary level of abuse.

Disclaimer: The following is written with the intent of making vague, positive-sounding non-inferential remarks about a topic of which 9/10ths is floating on the surface as foam. I wish to figuratively dump a couple bucketloads of warm slop on you, in the event that your wallowing hole is cooling off. I don't want you to get a chill.

Communication between people (don't know about other species) has always been difficult because...

Sometimes people have mixed motives. Sometimes people are not clear about their own intent. Other people can be difficult to interpret. The signs and signals of language are not always clear -- even face to face. Sometimes we are not clear receivers of messages. We sometimes harbor suspicions, hopes, fears, doubts, erroneous thinking, and so on, which can make it difficult for us to gauge the intent of an innocuous "Good morning."

Certainly, some people in internet chat or lengthier discussion formats intend to irritate others, write abusive, dismissive, crude comments, and so forth. Stupid people are able to use the internet, their stupidity notwithstanding. Some people are short-fused and explode with little provocation.

Despite all that, most of the time people in a Internet format like TPF manage to communicate in two directions successfully, with a minimum of friction. [The minimum of friction still involves at least some friction.] One of the ways we achieve this smooth, low-friction mode of interaction is through the good offices of our own little gestapito which liquidates offenders swiftly, if sometimes arbitrarily. We have to assume that our gain is other fora's loss. Those expelled from Paradise no doubt migrate to other sites of philosophical interaction where they spray their hot bile all over unsuspecting (but perhaps deserving) subjects.

My question is this: Should such a large part of the economy really rely on military technology production and maintenance. — christian2017

No.

The military doesn't submit bids for products from reluctant manufacturers. Companies are anxious to participate in military production because it has traditionally been quite profitable. And the manufacturers are not silent partners. Building the technological capacity for modern war is a very cooperative effort between the military and industry.

The logic of having weapons, and getting paid to make more weapons, is a strong inducement to eventually use those weapons on an old or new enemy. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were / are our new-enemy wars. Other countries have done the same thing elsewhere. A tremendous amount of product was used in these three wars, to no particular good effect. In a way, results don't matter. The important thing is to drop the bombs, launch the missiles, fire the bullets, etc.

There is a revolving door relationship among corporations, the military, and lobbyists. The result is more spending on arms.

I'm not claiming that our military is useless or harmful to the US (that's another argument altogether). What are harmful are the vested interests of arms manufacturing corporations steering national policy. This is largely (but not entirely) a post WW-II phenomena.

everyone else should be taken out back and shot — S

As the saying goes, "spare the bullet and then you have to put up with dipshits that much longer."

By the Power Invested in me by the Supreme Being, I hereby grant you the authority to speculate and expound, declaim, state, write about, or otherwise express you views and opinions about what you think constitutes human nature.

If I like the drift of somebody's psychologizing, then it is OK. If I don't like what I'm hearing, they'll have to be taken out back and be given a good beating.

Maureen: the truth of the matter is that life sucks. It is for a very large number of people one damned thing after another. Billions feel like they are stuck on a treadmill of demands they can not satisfy. That's just life.

Do you have a job? Jobs are like an 8 hour appointment that you are required to make 5 times a week.

You feel like your life is overwhelming, but it probably isn't all that bad.

Make a list of the things you have to do in tomorrow. Now, organize them in a list from VERY IMPORTANT on down to DON'T MATTER (because you don't really have to worry about them).

Cross out the things that don't matter. How many things do you have left to do?

Going to an appointment 6 times a month leaves 24 days free of appointments. Resenting the 6 appointments is not something you have to do. Looking for a job is a problem. Worrying about looking for a job is not a problem.

Simplify, simplify.

Hey good luck, and welcome to the club of the overwhelmed.

Americans aren't morally superior, obviously. They are morally equivalent to a lot of other people. Our elites seem kind of depraved. They should probably br rounded up and stored in gulags somewhere -- maybe the Aleutian Islands? Alaska? North Dakota?

— praxis

• The other nations do not have people electing an overweight sociopathic narcissist man-child with orange skin and strange hair as their leader.
• The other nations do not have such poor freely chosen lifestyles that life expectancy is decreasing.
• The other nations do not have the highest incarceration rate. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.

I loathe Trump, but he's no more of a sociopath than many of the political elite in Washington. (I realize this is damnation by faint praise.) Strange hair? He's clearly too old for such nonsense. I hear he uses spray on tan. It tends to turn a body orange.

Life expectancy is not dropping across the board. It's an average, and the group that is dragging it down the most are disadvantaged middle aged white folk who for various reasons have been left in the economic lurch by the elites. They are killing themselves (deliberately and accidentally). Now, many of our health indicators are below a number of other countries--and we can and should do better. But again, this is somewhat localized. People who live in what's called the "fried fish belt" of the se United States, have a number of dietary habits (lots of fried fish, barbecue, sweet tea, side pork, and such) that contribute to an earlier demise than might otherwise be the case. Make them eat kale.

We have the highest incarceration rate because it's elite policy to have a high incarceration rate. It isn't just any old random person that tends to be arrested and convicted. It tends to be black males who get arrested. I don't know whether they are disproportionately more criminally inclined than your average white guy, but the elites prefer to stock prisons with black men.