The poor will lose everything and wander toward Minnesota. — frank

That's why we plan to blow up the bridges over the Mississippi, tear up the freeways in Wisconsin, and start installing minefields and electrified barbed wire fences along the border between Iowa and Missouri. We're breeding wolves, aggressive wild turkeys, belligerent buffalo, and other natural riff-raff repellents. Wisconsin plans on using stampeding dairy cattle as a deterrent. Several hundred holsteins can be quite intimidating. Iowa will turn itself into one giant corn maze.

Society could unravel in the next 10 years leading to mass starvation, true enough. One of the factors that keeps food on the table is a minimum level of stability. War, disease, climate change, some unprecedented natural disaster, mass hysteria... all could trigger social collapse. Thanks to habit, inertia, politics, economics, crying children, etc. people tend to get up and do what needs to be done, and society doesn't unravel.

Climate change experts generally mark out some future time -- 2050 or 2100 -- as a time by which some environmental change will have occurred that will be destabilizing. There is no comfort to be taken in disaster striking in 2029, 2050, or 2100 because expected future disasters are foreshadowed in the present, just not very efficiently.

Southern Florida, for instance, is expected to first turn into a bog, then a swamp, and finally just be covered up with sea water altogether -- maybe by 2100. How is this registering among Floridians? Denial, for one. People who now live in Florida, or who want to move there for the sunshine, warm weather, and the lively society, all have a similar interest in not facing facts. Especially if you have a house you want to sell, it's a good idea to discourage gloomy thoughts about salt water intrusion. Real estate agents aren't anxious to tell buyers about salt water pooling in their back yard, even though they are miles from the ocean.

So it is that buying and selling houses continues in Florida.

No body in the midwestern US is abandoning farmland, even though climate change is altering agricultural equations. A 10 year investment seems to be safe; a 20 year investment is probably OK; a 30 year investment is risky, and planning for 2100 is out of the question. Farmers know that several minor changes in frost dates, heavy rain fall, storms (hail, wind), or disease vectors can wipe out a year's EDIT: profit production.

What will cause agricultural collapse is likely to be a few bad years followed by a few more bad years that prevents financial recovery. A few bad years is all that is required to shift from large crop surpluses to large crop shortages. Global crop shortages affect poorer, less developed countries much more severely than it does richer developed countries. But destabilized poor countries can be highly inconvenient for the better off--remember the turmoil that Syrian war refugees caused as they surged towards Europe. Consider it a dress rehearsal.

Don't tell me what I know, you £$%^*. — unenlightened

Well, this discussion about climate change and the future has been about as successful as most of them.

Well, Jesus... the thing is, we probably can't rely on Jesus or Socrates or Buddha to answer all of our contemporary questions. Our relationship to animals isn't the same as the ancient world's relationship. Animals were absolutely essential for food, clothing, transportation, work, and so forth. Animals are not absolutely essential to us. We can afford to be much more sentimental (I mean the word in a good way) than the ancients could.

21st century Christians can look to the Bible, the church fathers, the saints, to science, to common social practice, and so forth for guidance. We can decide to be carnivores, vegetarians, or vegans. We can decide to spray Roundup on weeds, pull them up by hand, or let them be. We can hunt or not hunt as we see fit. We don't have to justify everything by what Jesus would have done, because Jesus wasn't a vegetarian, he had never heard of Roundup, he fished but he didn't hunt (as far as we know) and so on.

Jesus supposedly predicted that the Temple would be destroyed fairly soon. That's probably a prediction that was put into his mouth years after the Temple was desecrated by the Romans, who turned it over for pagan purposes. So, a couple of decades after Jesus died, animal sacrifice ended with the end of the Temple. There was always only one Temple for the Jews, and then there was zero temples. Henceforth their worship changed to liturgical worship of the spoken word.

Jesus was a good guy, but he wasn't a defender of everything claimed in his name. You have heard of burnt offerings? When Jesus was alive, animals were sacrificed -- slaughtered -- on the Temple altar all day long-- this was the central act of priestly Jewish worship in the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus said nothing against this central practice.

Which animals were sacrificed? Doves, lambs, calves, and other animals--gentle creatures all; weak, defenseless, innocent, etc. God didn't become incarnate in order to save bunny rabbits.

Lion lying with the lamb — NKBJ

The lion may lie down with the lamb, but the lion will sleep a lot better than the lamb will.

Thank you for succinctly summarizing the great pile of academic horse shit. Kudos, kiddo.

vapors are the primary cause of swooning and of female hysteria — Arkady

The uterus was believed to wander around the body like an animal, hungry for semen. If it wandered in the wrong direction and made its way to the throat there would be choking, coughing or loss of voice, if it got stuck in the the rib cage, there would be chest pain or shortness of breath, and so on. Most any symptom that belonged to a female body could be attributed to that wandering uterus. — Terri Kapsalis: HYSTERIA, WITCHES, AND THE WANDERING UTERUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OR, WHY I TEACH THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

STOP THE HYSTERIA!

This woman's uterus has managed to find its way into her hair -- you can see what disastrous consequences a wondering uterus can have.

I know you were not suggesting that.

I was taught in school that the ancient European people (never mind everybody else) were pretty much ignorant and incapable of scientific thinking. It seemed to me then, it still seems to me, that this was not the case, and could not be the case. Hunter gatherers, and then agriculturalists, later metal workers, then builders and so on, all had to be good observers and had to apply analytical thinking to survive, first, and then improve their operations.

Grafting of trees started in China t least 4000 years ago. Grafting one variety of apple or pear onto a related but different variety is a non-obvious procedure, which requires skill and patience -- several seasons may be required before the grafted tree delivers the intended fruit. The 'primitive' arborist also has to understand something about the physiology of the tree. What he knows may not sound like "physiology" but the right kind of plant tissues have to be in contact with each other for a graft to be successful.

What seems like backwardness was usually a lack of the right material. Western Hemispheric and Australian aboriginal people didn't develop the wheel because they didn't have suitable draft animals. (this is out of Guns, Germs, & Steel). Hitching kangaroos to a wagon would have been an unhappy experience for everybody concerned. Buffalo were big and strong enough to pull loads, but they are not inclined to cooperate. It was the misfortune of horses and oxen to be cooperative enough to end up hitched to wagons until the internal combustion engine came along.

Farmers did without plows for millennia; it wasn't that they were too stupid to use plows -- they used what they could make. A good plow (like The Plow That Broke The Plains) required steel, which happened to be in short supply until the Industrial Revolution. A craftsman could make a steel sword, but actually beating one's swords into sod-turning plows proved to be impractical.

There ARE instances of raw stupidity. The miasma theory of disease, for instance, remained stuck in the brains of medical doctors for decades after it was obvious that something other than vapors caused disease. Our contemporary anti-vaxxers are another example of raw stupidity.

The kind of thinking you are concerned about in science infested the humanities tower first, then the social sciences building. Now they have begun attacking the science and math quad. Fumigate your quarters before they get any farther.

So what they'd like is more inclusive teaching practices along ethnic lines, a greater emphasis on practical demonstration, and an introduction of 'Indigenous knowledge' as a cluster of practical methodologies for doing... stuff. — fdrake

Take for example two food crops on which much of the world depends: corn (maize) and potatoes. The indigenous hunter-gatherer populations of North America did not find these plants in a form anywhere close to their modern presentation. The plants had to be bred up to their much larger, modern (as of 1492) size and form.

Tomatoes are another western hemisphere food crop that had to be improved to be useful. And then there is chocolate which maybe required plant breeding, but also required the discovery of non-obvious methods of processing to become delicious.

Every culture on the planet did pretty much the same thing--all without "Science" as the contemporary world knows it.

I agree with you, but I was just joking about URLs becoming persons.

It was bought by this guy: https://angel.co/innovate — Michael

And a fine job of innovation the angel did. Maybe he was working for Trump.

yes, the education doesn't want the stuff it teaches challenged...for obvious reasons. It leads to science too often being about micro-advances; micro-challenges....which as I said is more akin to research and development, than science. — wax

We will all agree that the education system sucks in ever so many ways. But I don't know how we conduct education to foster intuitional thinking in science (or anything else). One possibility is to minimize immediate goal oriented thinking.

Left to their own devices, people are more likely to think intuitively than when they are being rigidly directed by bosses. That's my theory, anyway. Of course, people left to their own devices sometimes fail to not get much done.

Take for example Bell Laboratories. It was a think tank operated by the Bell Telephone System (back in the day when Bell Telephone was a monopoly). Their job was to do basic electronic research. Among other things, Bell labs is where the transistor came from; they discovered background microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, and so on. They weren't oriented toward specific goals like how to make the rotary dial telephone spin faster. They were doing open ended research that might or might not pay off, and the pay off didn't have to be a product -- nobody made money off the background microwave radiation field (as far as I know).

Until relatively recently, a lot of innovations in technology were brought about by amateurs and people who were not scientists by training and title. One of the reasons why progress was not faster at times was that many of the people who were interested in projects didn't know what they were doing. For instance, the "technical advisor" to Cyrus Field (who laid the trans-Atlantic telegraph cables in 1858) did not know much about electricity and made several significant contributions to the failure of the first cable. Better advice was obtained for the second attempt from William Thomson, who we know as Lord Kelvin, famous scientist.

Who has the big new ideas? — wax

Are there, in fact, big new ideas? As a non-scientist but interested science observer what I see is a lot of incremental progress where the increments are quite small. Scientists ought not feel ashamed to maintain slow and steady progress.

Science and technology make big advances at fairly widely and irregularly spaced intervals, with decades of followup to fully exploit the big new ideas. Take steam power, made practical by Watt in 1775. A century of development followed, and steam still turns generator turbines, even if the water is heated with a nuclear reaction. Electricity became a practical form of propulsive energy in the 1885 (to pick an arbitrary date). Radio waves were used for trans-Atlantic communication in 1901. Radio is alive and well in radio, television, cell phones, and photographic transmission from Ultima Thule by the New Horizon space ship 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. All of that represents a lot of increment cooked up by very bright minds.

I don't know if we can sort out the influence of intuition and logic. It isn't like ideas come tagged with their content source -- like, "this theory is 55% intuition and 45% logic". Logic and intuition are partners, not distant competitors.

The gods can be our creation along with the absurd rituals, and still be useful to us. Most people engage in rituals, even atheists. Shared rituals, shared beliefs, shared space and time, etc. all have a unifying effect. Private rituals are personally reassuring.

We created some nice religious narratives, and those are shared and also have a unifying effect in culture.

Religion, the gods, their assigned rituals and prayers, songs, dances, and so on exist because life is difficult, there is no obvious over-riding meaning to our existence, and without a framework of meaning, life is fairly grim.

So, what has philosophy taught you? — Wallows

Perhaps "philosophy" is no more instructive or therapeutic than collecting and classifying beetles as a hobby (or a job). I mean, any concerted effort to understand the world is beneficial. The effort, in itself--whether one tracks down the last beetle or not--leads to more organized, wider-aperture thinking.

Some colleges offer classes in "critical thinking", which seems odd to me. Shouldn't "critical thinking" be the modus operandi of the entire operation, from Art to Zoology? Analyzing periods of painting, or classifying plants both involve similar kinds of thinking (well, up to a point: contemplating the difference between two related species of plants won't be quite the same as comparing two paintings).

You, Wallows, are a good philosophic example. You actively ENGAGE with philosophical material - ideas. Students' engagement is what a good teacher wishes for. (Sometimes I engaged; quite often I treated the content of a class as garbage to be gotten rid of at the end of the term. Bad student!)

So is there a way to just always simplify one's cognition of causal reality? — Josh Alfred

One way of simplifying one's thinking about causation is to stop thinking about it. WHEN we can only trace a series of causal events back a few steps, then there may be (practically) nothing to think about. Take "your" arrival in the world: You were born because your gestation was successful. A particular "You" was conceived because your father had sex with your mother when she was fertile at a particular time.

Your parents may have attempted to conceive a child many times before they were successful. The failures to conceive are part of your causation, because if they had succeeded in conceiving at an earlier time, a different child would have been conceived, fulfilling their desire to have just one child. That child would not have been 'you'.

Is there any reason to continuing to muddle over the causation of your birth? No, because as soon as we start thinking about it, too many causal elements arise, and we haven't asked anything about the cause of both of your parents coming into the world, or their 4 parents, their 8 grandparents, and so on back in time. The causal factors aren't infinite, but they might as well be.

Almost everything that happens is the result of uncountable causal interactions. It isn't just the big numbers that are the difficulty of identifying causes, it's their complexity. Take the butterfly beating its wings while it sits on a plant on the NE coast of Africa. The perturbations of air caused by the butterfly could (ultimately) cause a hurricane that will wreak havoc in Florida. It might -- if all the air in the world were still, and all other weather and climate factors were in perfect equilibrium. And maybe if the planet weren't spinning, and maybe if the sun wasn't shining, and so on. And we have to assume that there is only ONE butterfly, because if there were two, one butterfly's wing beating perturbations might cancel out the other butterfly's valiant efforts to destroy Miami.

Asking what caused you is like asking what were the 1918 causes that led to the hurricanes of 2018.

So, looking for a nice clean cut cause for a discrete effect is only going to work in certain nice clean cut situations. On Friday 11 March 2011 a 9.0-9.1 magnitude earthquake occurred off the shore of northern Japan. The earthquake caused a very large tidal wave that was very destructive (wrecking the Fukushima nuclear power plant, among other things). That cause/effect relationship is clean, clear, and definite. It would be quite difficult for us to trace a chain of causation leading to the big earthquake because the fault that slipped is 18 miles below the ocean floor, which makes it rather inconvenient to look at the details. But at least we can say the quake caused the wave, and everything was pretty much downhill from there.

what I take it to mean is that humans have formed various models and theories of a god. But that has little bearing on whether there is or is not a god — wax

Yes. The existence of God (or gods) will be beyond proof until such time as God (or gods) decide to manifest himself (or themselves) in an unambiguous way. But I like the way you put it.

Therefore there can be no objective definition of ''evil'. — wax

I don't see why there can be no objective definition of evil because we are not objective all the time.

God is our creation, not the other way around. In making that declaration, I guess I am devaluing god quite a bit, demoting him from the eternal, all powerful all knowing all present being that some people think he is. God and I are on good terms, though, especially if we don't talk to each other too often.

Evil is also our creation -- and something we can be remarkably good at (evil, that is). We are the source of evil.

We live in a world where a handful of people (somewhere between 8 and 25, depending on who is counting) have more wealth than 1/2 of the world's population. So, god-like power... maybe not imaginary.

I'm not sure what you are looking for. Don't know what you already know. Don't know how much time you have. But... maybe the philosopher Nietzsche...

These two books deal with power over people in the ancient world. I haven't read them; one of them is on my shelf waiting to be read (the second one).

The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx 1st Edition
by Jerry Toner (Author), Mary Beard (Foreword) (it is what it is about, but Marcus Faix is a fake name)

Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control 1st Edition
by K. R. Bradley (Author)

Two contemporary books which discuss the power structure... They are both good discussions of the real world; whether they will tell you much about comic book super heroes, hmmm, maybe not.

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills - deals with the military, corporate, and political elite of the US in the 1950s

The Higher Circles : The Governing Class in America: G. William Domhoff

More to the point might be these, I found on Amazon

Review of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why by Geoff Klock -- on Goodreads, one review said "This book has a number of very interesting things to say about superhero comics. However, in this work, Klock had his head stuck significantly up Harold Bloom's arse, and fails to stray far from Bloom's theoretical framework." So... maybe yes, maybe no.

Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes Paperback – November 1, 2007
by Chris Knowles (Author), Joseph Michael Linsner (Illustrator) (This one at least sounds interesting)

Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal Paperback – December 21, 2015 by Jeffrey J. Kripal (Author)

Kingdom Come Paperback – September 30, 2008
by Mark Waid (Author), Alex Ross (Illustrator) The Amazon blurb says... "Set in the not so distant future, the DC Universe is spinning inexorably out of control. The new generation of heroes has lost their moral compass, becoming just as reckless and violent as the villains they fight. With Batman retired, Superman in a self-imposed exile and the rest of the Justice League nowhere to be found, it seems that all hope is lost."

Good luck. This should be an interesting project.

Because I always insist that there is an other to every identity, and every identification is an othering. — unenlightened

On whom does the benefit of this brave insistence devolve?

If some people in Great Britain identify as Scot, Irish, Indian, Kenyan, or Polish, how does that "othering" affect you? If you identify as a Welsh man, you have othered that much larger part of the world that isn't Welsh, which makes what difference to whom? In what way are you affected by the identity of people in Arizona, Peru, Bali, Timbuktu, or the semi-detached house next door?

The group identity of people in Peru is a matter for Peruvians. Ditto for those of Arizona, Bali, or Timbuktu. It doesn't concern you or me, and visa versa.

As a New England wasp of a certain age — tim wood

Tim Wood speaks only to the Lowells, the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.

↪Bitter Crank ...and who was this untrustworthy buyer pray tell? — Minyun

I don't know. The sale was private -- the old forum site was owned by an individual (Paul); somebody bought the site for unknown reasons and then let it languish. This one is owned by Jamalrob. "Somebody" has to own the site -- as far as I know, there is no such thing as a sovereign URL. Corporations are persons, but URLs haven't reached that status yet.

This is what white privilege is - not to have a racial identity, and this is why it is a hateful humiliation to have it pointed out that white is a racial identity, and this is what talk about whiteness does; it call into question and creates a vulnerability — unenlightened

There is something screwy and knotted up about the way you process the topic of race. I just don't see how "white" is not a racial identity, how identifying as white is a hateful humiliation, how having a racial identity and talking about whiteness as an identity creates a vulnerability and so on.

The "privilege of being white" (if one gets any of those privileges) derives from economic factors, political power, and social control. If whites are running things, there is a white privilege. I would imagine that there is a Han Chinese privilege in China.

I didn't take your thread title, "Humiliation" to be about personal psychohistory. I could go into the details of my personal "someone who has been much humiliated". I am not going to do that, but I do know a thing or two about being humiliated. Who doesn't? And yes, one grows a thicker skin in response. A thicker skin is adaptive. One could do worse.

Bluff, genial, self-deprecating, man-of the world, BC is the sock puppet who can afford to be honest because he is unreal and therefore invulnerable. — unenlightened

Not only do we write under pseudonyms here, we project edited, constructed public selves which may or may not be much like our in-the-flesh public self. This isn't a nude beach where we expose all as the price of admission. You can like my sock puppet or not, fuck you very much.

He is a suit of armour of many components marvelously articulated and probably worn even in bed. He is a mechanical man made of components and cannot be hurt. Of the real vulnerable person beneath the armour, not much can be said beyond hurting, frightened, lonely. — unenlightened

This is just your hostility bubbling up to the surface.

We are not stupid. We are quite bright. But... What we are not is sufficiently forward looking. This is one of our Achilles Heels (when it comes to heels, we have lots of legs). We have never been very good at predicting the the outcome of inventions. This was true when we domesticated cattle. We didn't know that anthrax, brucellosis, cryptosporidiosis, dermatophilosis, Escherichia coli, giardiasis, leptospirosis, listeriosis, pseudocowpox, Q fever, rabies, ringworm, salmonellosis, tuberculosis, and vesicular stomatitis would become some of our worst diseases. OK, so we had the excuse of ignorance 10,000 years ago, but we carry on as oblivious now as we were then.

The environment is falling apart right before our very eyes, but we can not add 2 + 2 together to see that our life styles have to change drastically -- yesterday. Not just yesterday, more like 20 years ago.

In addition to not being forward thinking, we are pretty much concerned with our own lives. We might have some grasp of the environmental catastrophe now in progress, but we really like lovely looking perfect grass, so we fertilize and poison our plot of land, and it looks great. Unfortunately 100 million other people do the same thing and the results are a catastrophe for the water table and for insect populations. But hey, our lawn looks great. It's just this one lawn after all...

We are smart enough to feel intense guilt and regret when the whole thing collapses around us and we lay dying, unable to breathe, knowing that we brought it on ourselves.

This is what identity means to me and I think identity is a good and normal thing to have.

One's identity is the core "who I am" which we start building early in life. Large parts of it remain stable throughout life, and some parts may change, but it remains the core self which lasts a lifetime. Who we are is a compound of genetics, experience, family, and community. A secure identity is a component of a healthy personality.

Maybe a dozen components, give or take a few, make up one's identity. Sex, sexual orientation, and Christian are three major parts of my identity. I grew up in a rural community and longed to leave it. When I landed in Boston at 22, I knew that "urban dweller" had been a missing part of my identity. "gay" and "male" became much more important without displacing other parts of my identity.

I identify as a midwestern American. I have given myself several different political party names over the years, but what I really believe is that politics are possible, important, and matter.

I identify as a descendent of Europeans. They were the people that populated my family, my town, my county, 90% of my state, and at least 90% of the region of the country I grew up in. They were the people who were by far the most prominent in media, education, government, business, religion, and culture of my first 22 years.

I have, most of my life, been involved with media, education, government, business, religion, culture, and personal social life where descendants of Europeans are most prominent. Some of my best friends have not been black, Asian, South American, or aboriginal North Americans. They have all been descendants of Europeans. Most of them, further more, have been gay men. (Some of my worst enemies have also been gay men -- crass homosexuals, in fact.)

Some people here will take this as the confession of a white racist. It isn't, and I am not. I am white and I like who I am. That's all. I hope blacks, asians, hispanics, American Indians, et all like who they are, as well. There is nothing wrong with racial pride, any more than there is something wrong with personal pride in being a great cabinet maker or a barber.

Have you considered (apparently not because you haven't done it) arguing for antinatalism on the basis of global warming?

Fact is, human beings are wrecking the ecosystem on which we depend. It's probably too late to do anything about it, except if people stopped reproducing altogether. The population would fall, there would be less demand on resources, less CO production, less methane, less chlorofluorocarbon gas. Little, less, least -- eventually.

Plus, many people are assholes. The KGB, the US Census Bureau, Pew Research, and Cambridge Analytica all agree that a minimum of 40% of human beings are permanent assholes. They will always be assholes. 4 out of 10 people you meet on the street will be assholes. 4 out of 10 relatives will be assholes. 4 out of 10 school children in third grade will be assholes. Because some of the 40% of the population who are assholes comprise 99% of Republicans, the prospect of having Republicans in power is a very good reason to never have children.

One double benefit reason for not having children is that non-existent children would neither be assholes nor would they have to put up with assholes. And bear in mind, 40% is a minimum; it's a floor, not a ceiling.

I'm not an antinatalist, but I can see a certain logic to it. — Bitter Crank

Life is suffering.
Being born entitles one to life's suffering.
therefore
not being born is good and being born is bad.

One could say

Life is adventure.
Being born entitles one to life's adventure.
therefore
being born is good and not being born is bad.

Life is good enough.
Being born entitles one to life's reasonable goodness.
therefore
being born is fairly good and not being born is fairly bad.

Life is full of shit.
Being a scarab beetle makes a heaven out of the shit pile.
therefore
be a scarab beetle.
Enjoy.

we should all die. — TogetherTurtle

And in the fullness of time we will. All of us. Drop dead.

But Schop's plea is to not have children. None of us. Not one.

Is Schop depressed? I don't know -- could be. But quite a few people have decided to not have children who are not explicitly antinatalist and who are no more depressed than the average person (that is, slightly depressed from time to time). They view the world as too screwed up to be a fit place for a child. The big problem used to be the threat of nuclear war (which actually hasn't disappeared). The new threat is ecological collapse. The various harbingers of ecological collapse are already coming home to roost, so... just a matter of time. If the left one doesn't get you, the right one will.

I'm not an antinatalist, but I can see a certain logic to it.

On the other hand, i know men who were in hospice in 1996, waiting to die in very painful ways from terminal AIDS. About that time the trifecta cocktail of anti-HIV drugs arrived and quite a few of these men regained their health. They all seemed pretty happy to be alive once they started to regain their health and vitality--though they still had AIDS, it was under control. They certainly knew a thing or two about suffering, as do many people who have had other severe illnesses and accidents. Or just grown very old.

The fact is that life does involve suffering, and many people (probably most people) consider the pleasures of being alive worth the suffering that goes with it.

that is to simply not have future people. — schopenhauer1

Right. You are preaching to the already doomed. As global warming escapes our control, climates become unsuitable and too erratic to support the necessary agricultural output, as insect populations crash and further shrink the food supply (exit the pollinators), as plants find it difficult to adapt, as we wipe out the megafauna (of which we are one), as ocean life dies, we will eventually slip the bonds of mortal existence and pass into the thick layer of geologically preserved plastic.

And then there will be no more humans whinging about the misery of existence. Life will go on in one form or another. Perhaps slime molds will become sentient, and eventually they too will be bitching and carping abut the bad deal of existence -- but that is a ways off and you won't be around to say "I told you so".

Who’s going to take care of us when we’re 90 if people stop procreating? Bet you didn’t think of that. — Noah Te Stroete

Apparently you haven't heard that we will all be looked after by machines of loving grace.

We must complete our mission. — Judaka

We are working hard to do a good job of it. Our homeland planet is heating up; insect populations are crashing; big mammals are going extinct. Soon for us the way of the dodo bird.

How did you come to be obsessed with that? — frank

It started with the early days of AIDS. I was involved in producing educational material for high risk gay populations and straight youth, some of whom were quite literate, and some of whom were not at all. At the time, Public Health information tended to be pitched in a more literate, formal language. The readability levels were too high for poorer target populations more at risk.

So, it occurred to me that what health education writers (and others) needed was a readability measure which could offer easier words to use. I put together the easy-to-read-word-list and the program which would sort a text into two lists: the easy-to-read words and the more-difficult words. Then writers could peruse the word lists for alternatives.

Testing various texts showed that the more words that composed a text derived from Anglo-Saxon and common words (based on word-frequency studies) which entered the language from French around 1066 to 1400, the easier it was to read. (Why? Well, Anglo-Saxon and early French borrowings (forming Middle English) compose the core of the language and most people who speak English use these words a lot.

Educated people decorate their language with more difficult terminology derived from early-modern and modern language, in which many words were coined from Latin and Greek roots. the 16th and 17th centuries were a hot-bed of more difficult abstract-word creation.

The upshot was that I learned a lot about how to write easy to read text. The people I targeted for writing improvement persisted in their feeling that their intelligence had been insulted by the whole discussion and that I could go to hell.

The other thing (some of us) wanted to do was create sex-positive educational texts. Public health professionals aren't necessarily enthusiastic about the details of sex-positive educational material -- because it is... you know, enthusiastic about sexual activity as such. They found sex-positive material to be too scandalous for government funding. (Some of our stuff was pornographic--by design.)

Stuff handed out in bars might be dropped on the sidewalk (it happens) and the next day some child might pick it up (it happens) and show this piece of shocking unwholesome safer sex material to her mother (it happens) who would then call a local elected government official to complain (it happened).

So not only was it nicely illustrated, but the terminology was easy to read, all of which added up to SMUT and FILTH in the mind of the mother and elected official. We would hear about it a few days later.

That's how it happened.

Things work out that way quite often.

I’m not sure you actually believe all this socialist stuff. — Noah Te Stroete

That's a good observation. Sometimes I'm not sure either. What I do believe is that Justice has an economic basis (as do most forms of Oppression). We can not achieve justice without altering the economic determinants of lives. Capitalism is a satisfactory system for some (maybe many) people and Socialism would be a satisfactory system too. The main problem is, "How do we get from capitalism to socialism?"

Then there is the social / political system. There are freer and more open social / political systems, and there are more authoritarian and closed systems. One can have either system with either economic system, and we have had, at various times and places.

At the very least, a freer and more open social / political system requires a redistribution of wealth--not all wealth, but certainly the big and really big piles. There are civil mechanisms for doing this, but if the ultra-wealthy have a tight grip on the political systems...

Socialism has some attractive features, but it is the destruction of the capitalist system that is the problem. How do we do that without veering into the Soviet experience?

Do you think consciousness can be fluid enough that a person can get a sense of what it's like to be autistic? — frank

As far as I know I am not autistic, but one winter I became obsessed with readability and how to engineer it. I developed a plan which required compiling a list of basic, simple English words. I went through the dictionary 3 times, writing down lists of words that fit the scheme -- maybe 20,000 (including 8,000 words with Anglo-Saxon origin) in all, then typed them up to plug into a computer program which I later wrote. (I was using a Mac Plus; the external hard drive had a whopping 20 meg of memory.)

The point is that this project required a narrow focus like someone on the far side of the autistic spectrum for several months. I've needed that kind of focus since that project but haven't been able to build up a suitably autistic head of steam again.

It looks like you think that collective memories (therefore, contemporary temporalities) are the main reason as well as the explanatory model, explaining the phenomenon of Yellow vests movement. I am not sure that it is an entirely Marxist approach. — Number2018

No, no. I wasn't thinking about collective memories, contemporary temporalities (whatever that is) and so on. I only meant that people haven't recently seen a strike or a demonstration that was effective in changing things. The big strikes at GM in the 1930s actually changed things materially.. So did various other strikes at the time. The civil rights marches in the 1950s-60s resulted in some change. What people have mostly seen since the late 1960s is NO CHANGE. Take the urban black riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated, or the huge antiwar marches: Large swaths of burnt out blocks stayed empty for 30 years. or longer. The huge protests against the war were not able to achieve long-term changes in foreign policy or domestic militarism. "Gee, we've hardly fired a bullet since Vietnam!" he said sarcastically.

Blacks rioted, whites demonstrated because they were fed up. They weren't "performing". The Gilets jaunes are fed up. Whether their protests will be as effective as they hope remains to be seen. I don't think they merely repeating things they've seen on TV.

Demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and so on owe their failures less to the earnestness of the people, and much more the tough resistance and power of the establishment. It has always been difficult to get a firm testicular grip on the balls of the establishment. The auto workers at GM in the 1930s succeeded in getting ahold of GM's balls by seizing control of the assembly plant--the sit-down strike. In that case, the GM and the other majors eventually caved. The same thing happened during WWII. The urgency of war production (and wartime profits -- the corporations weren't making guns and planes for free) gave unions a lot of leverage and they used it.

All this is true as well in struggles between labor and management in small organizations, or between a neighborhood and a developer. If you can't get ahold of the boss's or developer's balls, you'll lose (and in this case, it doesn't matter whether the boss is a man or a woman). If you can, you have a chance of succeeding.

Macron's balls? I'm not close enough to the situation.

Or, why not the Greeks?

My off-the-cuff guess is that most well developed cultures (and the Greeks were not the only one) experience episodes of literary and philosophical high achievement. What makes these episodes enduring is that they get transmitted to succeeding cultures. Greek heritage passed to the Roman Empire. Had the Greeks been swamped by some horse-riding horde indifferent to Greek culture, we probably wouldn't be talking about Aristotle.

On the other hand, it seems to take felicitous combinations of conditions to produce high culture: literacy and numeracy; a minimum of stability over enough time; sufficient prosperity to afford speculative thought; a tolerant state; a sufficiently large and interested public to support and sustain cultural achievement, and so on.

The Greeks were high achievers. They were special. They were at 'the head of the class'. Other cultures could have been contenders but were less fortunate.